The line drawing me closer and closer to the works of French Canadian artist Alexandra Levasseur is first and foremost the color. Her works don’t necessarily overwhelm the senses with bright colors and patterns, but rather nudge a viewer into noticing all the small details. Paintings I otherwise would have labeled too busy and over-stimulating become interesting to look at in their entirety. My eyes first notice the color palette, and secondly, the facial expressions of her human subjects, often colorful themselves to match their environments.  

Temps Transfiguré

Levasseur’s works incorporate elements I enjoy in Januz’s Miralles’ work—a combination of hyperrealism and surrealism that doesn’t translate into fantasy but rather very real emotions pulled out into a physical realm.

Réincarnation Secrète

Allow yourself to look over these selected Levasseur works before free writing. The colors all create a different mood—the lack of expression, of body, and the surplus or repetition of the body, all do different things. This can be done in poetry as well. 

Body of Land

Add color to your writing—whether that mean literal names of colors, or colorful language you aren’t familiar with, or a description of a color without naming it. 

Summer Heat

Imagine if you were larger than your landscape. 

All images courtesy of Alexandra Levasseur

After merely skimming the title of Joan Didion’s “Marrying Absurd,” not knowing it was an essay about shotgun weddings, I thought to myself, I want to marry absurd. 

Because I want to marry Shia LaBeouf. 

Okay, so this is a very outdated meme. But there’s something artistic about absurdity. The production value combined with the composure of all those involved in this work of art is something to be called into question. Many talented people got together and choreographed the dancing and acrobatics, learned the routine, composed music, arranged music, wrote lyrics, sang like angels, crafted each paper mache Shia LaBeouf heads… the list goes on. The production value alone is enough to make you question is it really a giant joke? Not to say that you shouldn’t go far, way too far, and be way too serious about your humor.

The whole concept reminds me of my dog, mustache tousled, beady eyes ablaze, digging furiously into his plastic crate. He isn’t going to move any dirt. There’s no dirt to move and the plastic isn’t going to budge. But through his poignancies, his determination, he makes me laugh. Imagine my dog is Schnauzer LaBeouf.

The more seriously you take your humor, the more relentlessly you imagine it, the more likely you are to crack yourself up. And maybe others too. Or they’ll just think you’re ridiculous. But doesn’t the very idea of other people thinking you ridiculous, of looking on in disbelief funny itself? 

Imagine this. You are sitting at your desk job and someone slams a 20-pound malted milk ball next to you and begins to gnaw on it. At first, you hear the squelch of melting chocolate; feel the coolness of previously refrigerated shavings flying onto your arm from the point of chewing. Then, as your co-worker reaches the wafer level, and sound becomes airy on his teeth, and crumbs hot, spittle more frantic. Your workstation is ruined. There is saliva and chocolate permeating your keyboard. Your productivity is ruined. Imagine this co-worker is Snack-sinner LaBeouf. 

Source

Write manic.

The more vivid and impassioned the humor, the more absurd, the more attracted I am to it. Hence, I want to marry Shia LaBeouf. My mom doesn’t like that.

Banner image source

It doesn’t make a lick of sense. Why is prioritizing what we love so difficult to do? Normal people don’t seem to have a problem with it: if they love cooking, they’ll go to the grocery store; if they love working out, they’ve got a gym membership (and they actually use it). So why is it that any vein of artist will struggle in such an incomprehensible way? I’m not talking about the “I’ll settle for a Lean Cuisine tonight” or a “I had to skip leg-day this week”. I mean the months-long hiatus we’ll take from engaging in an activity that makes us more human. 

It’s the mechanical nature of routine, I suppose. The “block out a chunk of time for yourself to write” doesn’t come as naturally as hitting the gym after work from 6-8pm. Creating your art into a routine seems to strip the humanity away from it – routines are for getting homework done, remembering to eat, doing taxes, picking up the hypothetical kids that you do not have from soccer practice. It’s the act of prioritizing those routines above what you so frivolously care about – something that makes you happy.

My last trimester of college earlier this year included two art classes. The vague prompts and chunks of class time were what made me produce art that I otherwise wouldn’t have on my own. It made painting and drawing routines, but I don’t consider those works any less of artwork just because someone else expected me to make them.

I think, at least for me, it has to do with knowing that someone else expects me to be creative. I have this paradoxical confidence in my art and my abilities, so that when people compliment my art with a “This is gorgeous” I’ll respond with “I know, right?” I’m already very aware that I’m an artist… it’s just that “I know, right?” is easier and nicer to say than, “Finally, you noticed.”

It seems so utterly selfish to create a routine around doing something you love especially when that something is only enjoyed by you. People don’t notice my years of dedication to novels I write… which is probably why I can’t remember the last time I sat down and worked on one. I feels like feeding a black hole – the nag of “What do you have to show for it?” answered by a timid “I like it.” 

What I have to show for it is that writing saved my fucking life, and it continues to every day I turn to it for comfort. I have stronger loyalty to the people in my head whom I met when I was twelve than to most real, living people. These ghosts are always there for me, and I have the luxury of abandoning them, of abandoning myself.

And maybe it’s because that, like long-term friendships, we don’t have to touch base every day to know that we care about one another. It’s not writing for six months, then jumping back into a novel for the sake of NaNoWriMo and picking up just where you left off. For me, it’s the getting started that’s the hardest, and that’s likely the depression gripping its jaws around everything I love. And then the second hardest is the leaving. It’s losing track of time every single time I start clanking away on my keyboard, or sketching then erasing then sketching, or sweeping a canvas and breathing in those definitely-not-good-for-you fumes of oil paints. Then, it’s the ctrl s, the closed Word Document, the blowing off of eraser dust, the faucet running and caking of soap in bristles. It’s like taking a detox program. The thing is, art is a drug I cannot quit. I’ll enjoy the high and stock up when I’ve got the cash, then itch until my next fix.

  Welcome back.

Read the more from Cam Best on Floodmark

Illustration courtesy of Arthropunk

At a reading a few months ago, one of my professors was introducing the visiting writer, Bhanu Kapil. I was distracted by a flash of pink from Bhanu's chair. She was ripping the petals off a pale pink rose and cramming them into her mouth, chewing, then spitting them out. She then sank off the chair, crawled towards the podium and rose up from behind it like a sea monster breaching the waves. There were some giggles, but I thought back to the Q&A we'd had with her a few hours ago.


Bhanu Kapil researches through the body. She went through a phase where she did performance art to feed into her writing. She once lay on a table in a red silk sack, while her audience stood outside, the sound of a knife being sharpened echoing from a hidden speaker system. If my memory is correct, that research helped her write about women's bodies often being viewed as pieces of meat.


Researching (and writing) through the body is different from writing about the body (equally valuable; here's a prompt I wrote). When you write about the body, the act of writing is still centered. When you write through the body, writing springs from the body, centering the body instead. Now, this doesn't exactly jive with Descartes' philosophy of "I think, therefore I am," and one that's implicitly gaining increasing popularity as we move from an economy and lifestyle geared around physical labor to one that's geared around mental and intellectual labor, but it can be a source of tremendous creative energy. Given the right topic, in fact, writing through the body can be much more productive than plain old writing.


So, since we here at Floodmark are all about inspiration and endless surprise, give this a try and you might find yourself, well, surprised.

1. Find the right topic. It would be difficult (though not impossible) to write about, say, the color blue through the body. But it's easier to start with a topic that has something to do with the body–sport, sex, race, gender, illness, even gardening.
2. On your own, and without the necessary equipment or partners for your topic, perform an action (or actions) associated with or representative of your topic. Take note of how your body moves and feels, your reactions, your embarrassment, the relation of your body to others while doing this activity. Do this as often or as much as you need to, until you have a store of bodily knowledge.
3. Now, write. But don't forget about what you just did. Make your writing mimic the movement or rhythm or size or shape of your body. Use what you just learned about embarrassment, hitches in movement, sweat, effort. Make the body central in your work.

Read more of Rukmini's work on Floodmark.

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(source)

As my family began packing away Christmas decorations in light of the New Year, I entered my living room to find an old American girl doll box. Peeking through the plastic was not the red headed Felicity as the box label read, but rather the molded clay head of Santa Claus.

(source)

As we locked eyes in a staring contest in which I would always lose and perhaps become cursed from, I remembered something from my distant past. 

From my birth to my childhood days, my maternal grandparents didn’t live near me, as they do now, but in a large house in Raleigh, North Carolina. Every summer my family would drive two days down towards the coast, spending a few nights with Grandma and Grandpa before heading towards Atlantic Beach. Grandma and Grandpa’s house was fun, for many reasons. The house had a grand staircase that my brother and I would drop beanie babies off of (once this resulted in shattering the humble abode of an innocent potted plant). The house had long hallways and multiple spare rooms where we ran, laughed, and tossed more beanie babies. There were beanie babies everywhere. Wait, I’m getting sidetracked. The memory that gripped me as I locked eyes with the sunken Santa head was a specific spare room in the house.

Now, I never once remember thinking this was creepy as a child. But if my memory of the room serves me right, it looked like this:

In the middle of the room, just carpet. The sides of the room contained desk after shelf after desk after shelf. Many of these surfaces contained spool thread racks. Some of these racks contained thread. However, on most of them, mounted in rows of empty, glassy eyes: clay head after clay head, each in a different stage of production. 

(source)

The most horrific detail of this memory is that the only reason I have these 360 degree recollection of the room is I used to go in there, leave the lights off, and just lay in the empty center of the room, meeting all the pairs of eyes, or eye sockets, around me…

My grandma is still a fan of those molded elves or reindeer that plug into the wall and sway back and forth.

(source)

…it gives me the chills.

My prompt for you today is the following…

Write a poem titled “The Room of Dolls.” It doesn’t have to include any details from the room I described; what do you see when you picture a room of dolls? What are you memories surrounding dolls? Sweet, comforting? Something inanimate you swear saw blinking?

Ugh. Merry Belated Krampus to all. And to all a night with no melting doll face nightmares. 

Read more of Alyssa's mostly non-creepy-doll-related work on Floodmark.

There’s a story inside of you crying to get out… but you don’t know how it wants to speak. Does it want the fragmented barking of poetry? The snapping back-and-forth of a play or a screenplay? The roar of prose? The snack of flash-fiction? 

You’ve bitten off more than you can chew - you’re sure of it this time.

When you become a writer of various platforms, part of the labor is deciding which way to share a story. I’ve dabbled with all of the previously mentioned genres, and no doubt there are more to try. But how do you know which fits best?

Well, it entirely depends on what you have to say.

The simplest route is to write, of course. Write without pausing to paragraph break or indent a line… maybe without even punctuation. Christen yourself Faulkner and run like The Sound and the Fury that you are. [Run Ons, Faulkner, Run Ons!] 

Photoshop courtesy of Cam Best.

Sometimes, the writing will find its voice: it will shout “Poetry!” or “Prose!” or the like, and you’ll be able to start revising.

Other times might not be so lucky…

Should that be the case, what I’ll do is let the words stew. Write until the words fail you, then put your laptop or notebook on the stove burner and cover it with a lid … 

Please don’t actually do that.

When you’ve left it alone for long enough, reread it. If no format jumps out to you, now is the time to brandish your axes.

Hack off the legs of dialogue. Sever the toes of dialogue tags. Cut up the character description, the scenic description, the character actions, the environmental actions! Dismember the bastard!

Now what do you see?

If your story’s instinct is to drive forward with dialogue, you’ve likely got a play or screenplay on your hands. I find that both formats allow me to create more “raw” dialogue that doesn’t need to be cushioned and supported with the bra of character and scenic descriptions. It is all natural. The story speaks for itself [get it?] 

Telling the two apart is tricky. WIth my screenplay experience, I feel much more protective over the characters. I want to describe their backstories, I’m already specifically visualizing the story…  I allow myself to be much more creative in my scene directions in screenplays because I often direct my own film projects and laugh at my own jokes.  As for plays, to me, those scene directions manifest as instructions for movement. 

My screenplays also have much shorter, episodic scenes; my plays are typically one setting, one scene. Of course, my style for plays isn’t the same as yours, so take a look at your own writing to identify those distinguishing features.

If your story’s instinct is on character description and evolution, it might focus more towards prose. 

Dialogue might trip you up in this -- it might be necessary to first distinguish between spoken dialogue and internal dialogue. A paragraph heavy with spoken dialogue could suggest a play… a paragraph heavy with internal dialogue suggests prose. Prose tends to boast character more than the others, whereas characters in plays tend to… play nicely with others [my puns are on fire today. Or, as the kids say, lit. Imagine: lit literature… Lit lit!]

Prose allows for layers to unfold over and over for the reader, whereas plays are filtered through the director’s lens and displayed to the spectator. With your audience in mind, prose encourages frequent revisiting, tasting the various spices in a dish. But no platform encourages reinterpretation more frequently than poetry.

Poetry is more than eager to roast the other platforms. It certainly would never stoop so low as to dialogue! And character development? Why, only if your childhood memorabilia of a music box in the deceptive shape of a trombone is a character… 

My own poetry likes to boast its way into epic stories, blending spoken word poetry with traditional. So when I’m trying to decide if I want a poem to read for three minutes into a microphone versus thirty seconds into an ezine, I have to decide how complete my story will be. Traditional poetry will focus on snapshot moments and contain more blank space than blank verse. Spoken word will tell a story in a manner far different from prose, varying in various components. My spoken word poetry focuses greatly on sound: alliteration, assonance, consonance, you name it. It must be heard out loud. But it has a greater spectrum of emotions in those five hundred or so words, more than a short story or piece of flash fiction would reasonably have. Believe it or not, spoken poetry’s voice isn’t just a scream into a microphone.

There are many elements of writing to consider when selecting a genre: character presence, environmental presence, emotional variation, brevity of the moment of the story, dialogue… Experiment with different formats until you find your piece’s voice, for it will speak.

Flow chart courtesy of Cam Best.

Read more of Cam's work on Floodmark.

Do you think that you can't have the full experience of a poem unless you hear it out loud? You may be right.


Do you read your own poetry out loud? You should.

I'm sure you've heard this many times before, but, since a poem is (usually) relatively short, every little thing about it matters. What words you choose, the way they look on the page, the way they work together and the way they sound.


Different poems emphasize different things–some are about the meaning (or lack of meaning) in the words, some are all about the line breaks, some really draw their meaning from the way they look on the page (a great example of the last is Vivek Shraya's "even this page is white" from her poetry collection of the same name). But fewer poems place a really strong emphasis on the way a poem sounds. Sure, some formal poetry (by which I mean poetry in a metrical form, not poetry in a tuxedo) is written in a certain meter. Sure, there are repetition and hard sounds and soft sounds. But have you ever heard anything like this?

As you might have guessed, it's in French. But it probably didn't take a great deal of French knowledge for you to hear how often the words "père" (father) and "mère" (mother) repeat throughout this poem. Of course, the poet, Grand Corps Malade, spends a great deal of time talking about mothers and fathers in general, but this poem is filled with puns and layers of meaning expressed purely through sound. Here's an example:

At one point, Grand Corps Malade mentions "les ex-pères du divorce" (the former fathers of divorce). That's an excellent and really unique way of discussing the effects of divorce on all members of a family. BUT, there's a whole extra layer of meaning, because that same phrase could also be "les experts du divorce" (which is pronounced exactly the same and means "experts on divorce" ie people who've been divorced multiple times). Which one is it "really?" Here's the thing... we'll never know. If you Google the lyrics, you'll be able to find many different versions of this poem online. None of them are officially sanctioned. Because Grand Corps Malade believes that his poetry should be heard, which allows all those layers of meaning to exist at once.

This kind of thing is much easier to do in French than English, simply because of the way the language works. There are a lot more words which end with the same sounds than there are in English, in which there are more exceptions than rules. Admittedly, I don't have the widest knowledge of poetry, but I've been unable to find anything that plays with sound as explicitly as "Pères et Mères" does. Not Dadaist sound poetry, which focuses on sound, but lacks the meaning and wordplay of Grand Corps Malade. Not anything else. The closest thing I saw was "Lost Voices", which relies on the voices saying the words as much as the words themselves to make meaning.

But if it hasn't been done, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it (if it has been done and I just don't know about it, please let me know)!

So, here's your assignment: write out a list (or several) of words which rhyme. See if any patterns emerge. Then write a poem (or a few lines) in which you try to make puns and layer meaning through sound. This is a pretty difficult one, so please share if you succeed!

Read more of Rukmini's work on Floodmark.

Write here. 

I wrote my first ever post for Floodmark on a Metra train from the northwest suburbs to Chicago. I took that train back and forth six days a week for much of my first semester of graduate school. And, consequently, I did a lot of reading and writing in transit. My laptop was too heavy to be lugging around six days a week. I had no choice but to start writing by hand.


I started writing on a computer, in Microsoft Word. And now, after years and years of papers, there's something comforting about Times New Roman, 12-point, double-spaced. But, once I started carrying a notebook with me on the train, never-before-seen writing vistas opened up for me. Suddenly, I could write on park benches. At bus stops. By the lake. Everywhere! And I could finally use the notebooks and journals and diaries that people started giving me once I became known as one of the family writers.


Exploring new places allowed my writing to change. Recently, I was working on a piece about gardens and inspiration. I rode my bicycle along the Lakefront Trail, found a suitable spot, opened up a black diary and began to write. And, my goodness, that piece just streamed out of my pen in a way it hadn't the last several times I'd tried to write it. There was something about being able to see the horizon, the vastness of the lake and space itself that fit the expansiveness of the piece.


If you're struggling with a piece, or even if you aren't, write in new places. Write on buses and trains. Write by a water body if you have one close to you. Write in your bathroom and kitchen. Write at the grocery store. You'll see your writing change. And when you see that, hey, why not share it with us?

Read more from Rukmini on Floodmark!

Sometimes, you just don't want to read. One of my friends is reading a copy of Aristotle's Poetics, which isn't easy reading for anyone. But, Poetics is one of the best resources for anyone who's interested in storytelling and my friend is a screenwriter. He's just plowing through the book, but his case of "reader's block" got me thinking about another way to combat writer's block (although these are a great starting place).


It's a good idea, in general, to have more interests than writing poetry. Branch out across genres. Even better, explore another form of storytelling entirely. TV writing is very different from film writing, which is very different from play writing. Draw. Paint. Act. Play an instrument. Follow a sport. There are a million things out there. Having other interests will help you find things to write about. It will also help you when you get stuck.




So, if you're having trouble continuing a piece you've already begun, here's what you do:

1. Pick one of your other interests (preferably something that's relatively far away from the genre of the piece).
2. Conceptualize your piece in terms of that interest. Maybe it's a basketball play with the last action missing, maybe it's a painting that needs a few more strokes of color, maybe it's a choral arrangement missing one part.
3. Fill in what's missing. Design the last action, add the last few strokes of paint, write that last part of music.
4. Now translate it back to your piece. Maybe you decided your painting needed more red. What does that mean for your piece? Anger? Brightness? Sunsets?
5. Start writing.

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A poetry reading I attended back in the winter of 2015 was kicked off with a reading of Laura Kasischke’s “For the Young Woman I Saw Hit by a Car While Riding Her Bike.”

I sat with a piece of loose leaf notebook paper and a pen, doodling, or more like scribbling, while listening. 

“Laughter.

Shit happens.

To be young.

To shrug it off:

But, ah, sweet

thing, take

pity. One

day you too may be

an accumulation

of regrets, catastrophes.

A clay animation

of Psalm 73. (But

as for me, my feet. . .) No. It will be

Psalm 45: They

saw it,

and so they marveled; they

were troubled, and hasted away.”

At the end of the reading, I’d written down one thing on my piece of paper that was legible: Psalm 48. Not even one of the Psalms mentioned in the poem. 

I believe I meant to write down Psalm 73, to look it up and gain a clearer image of what Kasischke wanted me to see as a clay animation, but for whatever reason, I wrote down 48. When I looked it up when I went home, my face scrunched up in confusion as it made no context with the poem whatsoever (I found out why later). But despite my bewilderment, I felt inspired by attending the reading, so I copied and pasted Psalm 48 into a word document and stared at it for a minute or two. Before tearing it open with filthy hands and gutting it. 

Psalm 48 reads as follows,

Great is the Lord, and most worthy of praise,

    in the city of our God, his holy mountain.

2 

Beautiful in its loftiness,

    the joy of the whole earth,

like the heights of Zaphon[b] is Mount Zion,

    the city of the Great King.

3 

God is in her citadels;

    he has shown himself to be her fortress.

4 

When the kings joined forces,

    when they advanced together,

5 

they saw her and were astounded;

    they fled in terror.

6 

Trembling seized them there,

    pain like that of a woman in labor.

7 

You destroyed them like ships of Tarshish

    shattered by an east wind.

8 

As we have heard,

    so we have seen

in the city of the Lord Almighty,

    in the city of our God:

God makes her secure

    forever.[c]

9 

Within your temple, O God,

    we meditate on your unfailing love.

10 

Like your name, O God,

    your praise reaches to the ends of the earth;

    your right hand is filled with righteousness.

11 

Mount Zion rejoices,

    the villages of Judah are glad

    because of your judgments.

12 

Walk about Zion, go around her,

    count her towers,

13 

consider well her ramparts,

    view her citadels,

that you may tell of them

    to the next generation.

14 

For this God is our God for ever and ever;

    he will be our guide even to the end.

However, my Psalm 48, which I alternately titled body blasphemy, is a little more discouraged, I suppose:

Poem featured courtesy of Alyssa Froehling. 

Oh. I guess my frustration concerning the treatment of gender within the church is showing. Sometimes we find poetry in forbidden places. Accidents, sacred things…are accidents sacred things?

You can try this out yourself, poet. You don’t have to be as blasphemous as I: just find someone else’s poem, song lyrics, etc., splice them up and see where it goes. Hopefully not hell. 

Read thoughts, prompts, and more from the mind of Alyssa Froehling.

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