Mod Purse Recognized!

Last weekend I attended the Columbus State Community College's 7th annual Writers Conference. It was a great day (even with navigating in unfamiliar territory around the 10,000 Capital City marathon participants on this particular Saturday). There were about 110 people at the conference and talks on everything from Self-Promotion (thank you Diane Mechem Kinser, Lucky Press's author of the forthcoming "Dappled Glory") to What Is Fantasy? (Jim Barnes) to a packed room on Humor writing taught by the keynote speaker David Rakoff.

My day was filled with navigation snafus: first the blocked downtown roads due to the marathon, then, due to that, having to park very far from the venue and not being able to easily find my car when I went to move it closer during the lunch break. (To all the strangers who tried to point me in the direction of Spring Street as we stood in the rain and I gave thanks for my rose-print umbrella, thank you!) To not being able to easily go "East" on Rt 33 to get home because the road was completely closed and everyone had to leave the highway....

Okay, where was I?

Hearing David Rakoff made it all worthwhile. So did meeting other writers, meeting Diane face-to-face, shaking hands with the president of the board of the Ohioanna Library, meeting a prof. from OU, and seeing the great interest CSCC (I think that is it) has in encouraging writers.

AND, when David Rakoff was signing the copies of his book I bought he complimented me on my Incredible Plus Mod Handbag! The one I dreamed up and crocheted. The one that looks so odd I thought only I could love it (we all have loves like that, right...be they art projects, children, little dogs or the odd feather-plucked parrot here or there).


I gushed and blabbered and made no sense faced with this easy affirmation from An Educated Artistic Writer Who Lives In New York. I mean, if he likes the bag, well. It must be good! How easily I am pushed over the edge from gratified to ecstatic.

I am working on "freeform" crochet now... a new handbag that may or may not resemble an eruption of yarn that makes no sense. Sort of like those modern poems that not only don't rhyme in any way but are also indecipherable and make me feel stupid because I don't get them. Why oh why didn't my high school offer advanced placement literature!


In any cases, I ask all people and poets and small dogs on my couch, to appreciate my yarn tornado for what it is: a physical expression of creativity that is not afraid to try things that may not amount to anything. You'd be surprised how many writers do that as well! Be brave!