Kim Dellow's Show Your Face on Friday - An Owl Lady!

Hello Followers and Friends and welcome to Magpiehaven. This Friday I'm linking to Kim Dellow's inspiring blog 'Show Your Face on Friday' here with a fantasy face. I'm sharing a journal page which is part of my preparation for a class I'm taking with Robin Laws called 'The Storyteller's Art' that begins on March 4th. Robin recommended a book to us called 'Wild Mind' by Natalie Goldberg. It contains lots of exercises designed to encourage the reader to write. It's a very stimulating read and especially liberating if you're new to writing; if you're suffering from writer's block, or if you simply want to bring back a freshness and spontaneity to your work. A few years ago I wrote short stories, some of which found their way into publication and some of which did not. One of Natalie's exercises is to write with the prompt 'I remember...' and this memory took the form of a journal page for me and a memory of a story that was short-listed but didn't actually make it into print!

My story was about a woman, a jewellery maker, who lived in a remote cottage. Her children who were once her life had all flown the nest; her husband lived in his own world and seemed to have forgotten her existence and her mother-in-law was a frequent visitor, critical and cranky! Then, one morning, while plucking her eyebrows in front of the bathroom mirror, the woman discovered a tiny, snowy feather growing just above her right eye. She plucked it out and forgot about it!

It was winter and the trees were bare, but she was warm and content in her studio. Day by day the woman worked on a beautiful necklace, a commission for a mysterious client, and day by day the feathers appeared - everywhere on her body. Her husband complained about them tickling his nose in bed. Her mother-in-law criticised her appalling house-keeping skills! Feathers under the rugs!

She tried to pluck them from her eyebrows, her chin - everywhere; but they always returned, growing ever more vigorously. All the time the necklace was almost creating itself. She knew it was going to be the most beautiful thing she would ever create: she was discovering that she knew far more than she had ever realized.

As the Spring took hold of the woods around her home and the necklace was nearing completion there was no longer any fighting it - she was morphing into an owl! She knew that her husband and her mother-in-law were plotting against her, planning to convert her studio into an apartment for her mother-in-law; but that no longer seemed important to her. She added the last turquoise nugget to the necklace, left it in the silvery beams of the new moon as her client had instructed her and took flight into the moonlight...

a wise owl, queen of the wood!

I used PaperArtsy Frescos, Sara Nauman stamps, Inktense blocks and Micron pens with the addition of some tea-bag papers to create this page. It was fun to re-visit the story and to express it visually after all these years! Thank You so much for stopping by today. I do hope you will link to KIm's blog with a face that you have created. Have a happy and creative weekend, wherever you are!