Junk Collecting as Storytelling
There’s always the question: Do we find our stories or do our stories find us?
I’ve always thought my true calling was to be a junk collector, perhaps even more than being a writer. I was either a rag picker in a past life or I will be in my next. I love patinas of rust. I love ragged, torn clothing. I love finding abandoned items on the street. I save old plastic jewelry, torn-apart wrapping paper, and random shiny objects in a big box called my “collage box.”
Similarly, I keep a doc I call “stray phrases,” which is its own type of junk shop, a collection of odd sentences — stiff, voluptuous, rapturous, restrained, or just plain kooky, all of them special for a reason I likely can’t articulate. I just like them.
W. H. Auden described a poem as being written by connecting the best lines from his notebook, which mirrors the way I tend to write. Somewhere in the mix of having kids (and not having much time) and living in a state of perpetual transition — on buses and subways, standing around on playgrounds — I started carrying a notebook in my back pocket, which was a type of net to capture stray thoughts, overheard conversations, lines from a book I was reading.
My random jottings formed themselves into my creative process. The beauty of my jottings is that they don’t demand anything. In fact, they’re likely not…
