First Light
and early illuminations
Here’s Your Creative Burst for Today!
Set a timer for 10 minutes and write: Describe the light from where you grew up. What did it look like in the morning, in winter, on holidays? When was it fluorescent, electric, or organic? Filtered or sun-soaked? What did the light do while you were at school or a practice? When was it eerie or absent? When did light energize you and when did it make you queasy? What was your favorite kind of light as a child?
The Source
On a recent summer road trip, I listened to a conversation between filmmaker Luca Guadagnino and the Belgian painter Michaël Borremans on this episode of the Dialogues podcast.
Borremans talks about his “almost religious relationship” with natural light in the studio. And, Guadagnino says the stories he tells belong to the places they are set in, describing the “extreme softness and sweetness” of the Italian countryside in Call Me by Your Name and the “boring vastness” of the Midwestern planes in Bones and All.
Personally, my favorite of Guadagnino’s work is the HBO series We Are Who We Are, a teenage coming of age story set on a U.S. military base in an Italian coastal town, where you get flickerings of the Adriatic sea amid the squat, bland military housing. So perfect for teen angst, crushes, and self discovery!
Anyways, that all got me thinking about our relationship to light as writers and artists and how light is its own shapeshifting character from our childhood. I hope this Creative Bursts helps you explore and define that kind of light, too!
Join the Epic Read-A-Thon!
In other news, you are invited to participate in DISCO’s virtual Epic Read-A-Thon on Friday, September 5th! From midnight to midnight, readers from all over the world will participate in our 24-hour, non-stop, out-loud virtual reading to support DISCO's writing programs in Birmingham schools.
For this year's theme, we're reading classic picture books. Sign up here to read for a 10-minute shift. Click the "Become a Reader" button, answer a few questions to set up your reader page, then share the link to your page with family and friends to ask them to support DISCO with a tax-deductible donation. That's it! We'll then be in touch to nail down a time for you to read on September 5th.
And please drop in to watch the reading at discobham.com/epic anytime that day or night, as well! Thank you!
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