Re-starting at ENSAAMA

It's been over three years since I've written a blog post. My momentum didn't stick the first time but I haven't stopped wanting to share my own stories.

Three years ago I was less interested in the straightforward.  I preferred intertwining words and images suggestively, leaving space and mystery. I wanted to share the things I had made and had participated in, by posting pictures. A precursor to that real webpage I never put together. At 26 I feel, technologically, far behind my generation. My 95-year-old unstoppable grandmother knows how to use skpye, facebook and google search. Me too, and that's about it.  I haven't figured out how to take part in the internet with any sophistication or grace.

Nonetheless I'm going to try to add a few of my own clippings to these clogged interwebs. Because after four years of quietly adventuring around, tomorrow I go back to school, and I want to write about it.

I don't know yet if this is the start to a chapter that's more conventional, or less vague. I will be an atypical student at Olivier de Serres: L'Ecole National Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d'Art (ENSAAMA). I'll be spending two years working on a Diplôme de Métiers d'Art to become a maître verrier, a glass master, a maker of stained glass.

I'll be the only full-time, non-french (nearly-non-paying!) student. The only one over the age of maybe 24, 21, 18? There will be only six or seven beginning stained glass makers. I'm still astounded that I've been let in. Fortunately, as the director put it, I come across as tellement jeune, so young indeed, that perhaps I'll fit in after all.

Two years ago when I was first living in Paris, I started learning to make stained glass from Z.A. A Frenchman and a Kurd, a painter by passion, and maker of stained glass by trade. He helped me réalise several small windows and one large one given to my now-belle-mère,  my french mother-in-law.

Back in the U.S. I spent a few months working at Steve's stained glass/metal/carpentry studio of surprises. I learned how little I know about tools and what it's like to roll paint across metal boards in 95 degree Baltimore heat. And how much muscle and energy it takes to continuously make stuff, to be an artist.

The last four+ years since graduation have been full of stories, including a year of biking, writing and making frames in Copenhagen. And meeting my french husband on a ferry to Oslo. And I've continuously wanted to make something of it. But I never know where to begin.

So better now than nowhere. And maybe I'll find a place for the other stories along the way.

Yesterday I talked to my dad, a writer, about wanting to write about lots of things that have happened, and things to come. He was encouraging, as always. And said that he's found his own momentum there or missing based on one key thing: there has to be a you. When I'm writing I can't feel as though I'm simply talking to myself. When he writes his weekly column his deadline is that you, a ribbon behind which a real or imaginary audience is waiting. And when he writes in his journal the notebook itself is the you. A sacred space, or an imaginary friend, which it's been for over 40 years. The one place he never found that you was as a novelist. 

So, I hope this can be a space that helps motivate me to think and tell stories. To be a part of my own generation as I learn a trade of 15th century monks and laborers.