Member-only story
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 to turn into anything (even those that are written with passionate ambition). But I type them up and either place them in my “stray phrases” doc or any number of other docs where I have works in various stages of dress and undress.
I like walking through my inner junk shop to look for odds and ends. That’s the perfect metaphor for the way I like to write, the way I like to think and live. The more forlorn and blemished the object, the more I want to burnish it by putting it in a story. I’d be perfectly happy living on the Island of Misfit Toys. I want to write a rhapsody of rags. Which is why I find a kinship with artists who open the possibilities of what can be found and turned into art, whether it’s visual art or a story.
I like walking through my inner junk shop to look for odds and ends.
