I finished reading James Joyce’s “Dubliners” for the Feb/March Motley Read early this week, and am sending out what I’ve told myself is the last postcard this morning, to an overseas stranger.
I’ve enjoyed the Motley Read, and owe much to Chris for organizing it. The extended pace was a little stretched, but my winter has been busy enough that it has allowed me to actually kept pace, and over the weeks I’ve returned to more than one story to review, reflect, or even re-read entirely.
My own productive/creative activity has been limited blog posts and a total of ten roughly-illustrated postcards sent through out mailing list. Though I haven’t drawn anything seriously in over a decade, this practice has been liberating and enjoyable, as it’s freed me from the intellectual pressure of trying to write cogently on these muti-layered stories while allowing me to focus on key scenes as I visualized them, and even interpret or infer nuances from the story through my compositions.
I’ve been delighted with responses from the handful of fellow Motley Readers who have taken the time to digitize and publish these postcards on their blogs. Unfortunately, at least half of the postcards have been either lost or neglected, and I’ll probably never see those again except in my memory. If I had been more ambitious I would have made prints; maybe for some other work in some lesser season!
I never intended to produce one postcard per story, but now that I’m just 5 shy of a “set”, so to speak, I’m now considering illustrating “An Encounter”, “Araby”, “Eveline”, “Clay”, and “The Dead”, if only to keep or mail to myself.
