A friend has invited me to be part of a local exhibit this summer.

The theme: alleyways.

I’ll be contributing written work, of course, (a zine is likely), but I’d also like to incorporate some visual elements as well, both into the texts of the pieces themselves but also as supplement: and also with the text as support at times, I hope. This is all very much in the incubation stage at the moment.

I’m thinking I need to start collecting shoe boxes & other boxes, to start.

I’ve long been in love with Cornell boxes (who isn’t?), but am also thinking back to those middle school dioramas I used to make for different projects; I remember one with Paul Revere and another for Roald Dahl’s The Twits.

[I sort of like this diorama Ryan Gosling created for his Esquire interview in September.]

***

When I went to Colorado senior year of high school, I brought my friend Sam back a box of artifacts from my trip: matchbooks & some twigs & things (airport security was much more lax, then), specifically curios from Boulder, where Sam had long longed to visit. I like the intentionality of a collection; it makes one feel so put-together.

I also think about this sort of politics of grouping a lot when I’m shopping: how intimate everything looks stretched out on the checkout belt. I wonder what a stranger would make of me just from looking at my purchases. I like to imagine the entire life of a person just from peeking at their 25 items or less. An entire life in 25 items. (Oh, wait; I think that was a prompt I use in creative writing, too.)

Anyway –– alleyways, where life is gritty & fecund. I suppose I will need to start collecting/cataloguing the fragments that can be found there; start visiting more alleys. (Want to come along?)

I am living above an alleyway right now; convenient, no? Is this a metaphor? A good omen? I’d like to think so.