Stories & Soliloquies

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    • The Forgotten Tales of the Sand Faeries

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on June 30, 2016

      Beach sand has a way of making sculptors of everyone. That’s because the beach is home to the sand faeries, the kind of faeries most concerned with telling stories. They’re some of the most prolific muses of the faerie world, comparable only to the ocean faeries who are known for inspiring shanties and tales of sea-faring adventures. The sand faeries are their wordless kin, who tell the stories of those who kept no written record of their lives, or for whom no written record survives. They inspire us to make sculptures in the sand as an ode those who have been washed away by the sea, whispering their stories in our ear.

      Most of the time, these stories catch on the wind and leave us as we complete our task, so we do not remember them in great detail. And always, because these are the stories of those who have washed away to sea, so too must our creations wash away, not just to keep the secrets of the sand faeries, but to complete the story.

      Sometimes they tell the tales of animals.

      IMG_3597

      This sea turtle was less washed to sea than welcomed by it, but the sand faeries see little difference.

      They see rather a lot of these, and sometimes they get a little carried away with exaggeration and invention, or mix stories about people with animals, but it’s all in good fun. The thing about sand is that it moves around with the tides, and when grains of sand are displaced and regrouped with new grains of sand, they recombine their memories endlessly. Sometimes they get a little confused about what’s real and what’s not after beach readers leave their books on the sand.

      IMG_3602

      Some one at this beach was reading Return of the King recently, else I’d never have inadvertently crafted Minas Tirith.

      And sometimes they even learn a few things from sculptors who come to the sand with their own designs in mind and their ears shut to inspiration. The sand faeries never mind this, as creativity and the visual expression of stories are really what they feed on most.

      But more often than not, they’re telling the story of a lost people, a forgotten fortress, or an unrecorded history. That is why so many of us, especially those of us who play in the sand without an agenda or design, end up building dwellings, and of those dwellings, most are castles and fortresses. And most of them creep upon us as we mold the sand, telling us what to do next with every new pile of sand.

      On my most recent trip to the beach, I let the sand faeries speak to me, and I learned of a rustic kingdom by the sea that was constantly under siege from a neighboring fortress.

      IMG_3696

      I began with the inner wall of the city. I had intended to dig only a trench, but before I knew it, I was molding a wall. At first I thought to do something more sculpted, but I ended up with a softly rounded wall instead. Before I knew it I was building an inner castle and digging an outer trench. I felt that this castle belonged to a rustic, isolated people. I imagined that all of their homes would be within the trench, but I couldn’t figure out what they should look like, so I left the land in a state of ruin.

      IMG_3709
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      I imagined the people who lived here to be mainly agrarian, but filled with a strong sense of community pride, mixing some softer, more hobbit-like round earthen walls with a few sturdier and more stalwart forts and towers. Nothing too elaborately built, however, and nothing too high.

      IMG_3720

      At this point, the sand faeries began to whisper into my husband’s ear, prompting him to ask me what they were so afraid of – why did they need a protective trench and lookout towers at every corner? And so he was inspired to build a neighboring city which was far more militarily driven.

      IMG_3717
      The result was craggy city on a hill, with rough fortresses built into the walls of a small mountain, their main road headed straight for my little rustic civilization.

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      Whatever happened between these two cities, in the end the same fate took them both. After most of the inhabitants moved to urban centers and towns further from the ocean, the sea levels rose and washed away the old ruins they left behind.

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      Leaving nothing but fragments of their story to be recalled by the sand faeries the next time they came along someone playing the sand, ready to listen to them.

      Posted in Stories | 2 Comments | Tagged beach, creativity, faeries, fairy-tales, sandcastles, stories
    • Anniversary Makers Faire

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on August 3, 2014

      A year ago, I got to marry the most intelligent, patient, kind, and inquisitive person I’ve ever met. On the surface, we seem like intellectual opposites – he’s STEM and I’m Liberal Arts – but we share a lot in common, and our interests often overlap in surprising ways. When I wanted to write about derivatives, he helped me clearly express what I wanted to say with the right amount of math. When he wanted to write about idioms, I talked him through the various ways that idioms function and why they’re useful. And we both love New Orleans Jazz, cooking, hiking, BBC’s In Our Time, and Norse mythology.

      To celebrate our first anniversary, we’re having a week-long mini makers fair (of sorts).

      Our Agenda:

      1) It’s time to finish Meduseld:

      IMG_3893

      We got this amazing 3D puzzle of Meduseld, the Gold Hall of Rohan, for Christmas one year, and got through everything but the roof. Since then, we’ve gotten married and moved into a new apartment, and it still has no roof. We’ll have to do some repairs first, and then we plan to see it to the end. I’m not sure what we’ll do with it once it’s finished – shellack it? Glue it together somehow?

      2) We’re going to make a huge pot of gumbo.

      3) Then we’re going to build this replica of Da Vinci’s Catapult:

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      This caught our eye one day as we walked by a Marbles: The Brain Store at the mall. It was the perfect impulse buy, and we’re both super excited about it.

      4) We’re going to do some painting:

      photo

      I’d been keeping my paint supplies in a large plastic tub for as long as I can remember, and as my gift, the husband got me this amazing wooden case and some fresh new supplies.

      5) And finally, for our biggest feat, we’re going to assemble this wooden orrery:

      IMG_3903

      An orrery is a device for demonstrating the motion of the planets in the solar system, typically made with gears and brass and all sorts of cool looking bits and bobs. Orreries first came onto our collective radar a couple of years ago after we saw the incredible, absolutely monstrous, ones on a tour of a Gilded Age mansion. We saw them again at a science museum, and I thought then to get one for my husband for Christmas. My first search yielded only options that were unspeakably expensive or way too large to be practical, and when it came time to do more research, I got busy and forgot what I was looking for.

      Then, one of his projects for his self-designed challenge 30 Days of Python (which is awesome from start to finish) was to program a simulation of an orrery. Its easily my favorite day of his series. What I love about it is that it’s adaptable – he has the traditional heliocentric model, of course, but his program also lets you define any point of reference as the “center”, allowing you to get a clear visualization of what planetary motion looks like from earth, giving a glimpse of Greek epicycles. His screen capture is pretty awesome (and there’s video, if you follow the link!).

      I went back into research mode, and found this beauty – a small, wooden kit we can build together, with visible gears.

      http://www.planetaria.com.au/product/the-mini3-original-desktop-orrery-kit/

      It’s going to be awesome.

      Posted in Stories | 0 Comments | Tagged anniversary, catapult, da vinci, edoras, makers faire, meduseld, orrery
    • Pictoral Patriotism

      Posted at 11:30 am by Michelle Joelle, on July 7, 2014

      Last week, photo-printing company Artifact Uprising held an instagram contest seeking shots of nostalgic Americana. There were surprisingly few guidelines – contestants could submit one photo per calendar day over four days by simply tagging their photos #AUamericana. Then anyone could browse the hashtag to see what people came up with, and then the powers that be would select three shots to display through the Independence Day weekend. Winners would get a $150 gift certificate to shop at Artifact Uprising. Since I used the company to make my honeymoon photo book and loved loved loved the results (really, it’s a truly fantastic company), I had to enter (in spite of the odds – I’m no photographer).

      But besides the prize money, there was a lot to love about this contest.

      They left the theme open to interpretation. They even asked to be surprised. This made browsing the hashtag really fun, both because of the incredible variety in what “Americana” means to different people, but also because of the surprising overlap. Even across very distinct images and subjects there was an emergent aesthetic that was difficult to quantity – and maybe I was projecting, but that’s interesting in and of itself.

      There were a lot of classic images – old cars, burgers, landscapes, flags, etc – but there were also some surprises that really stood out. One of my favorites was a dusty pair of old work boots in front of a wheat field. They seemed at once both abandoned and at the ready, as if even in their neglect they kept hoping that someone would step into them and get to work at any moment. It felt very dustbowl, and showed a less glossy vision of the Americana aesthetic. And yet it fit perfectly.

      The general idea is that an aesthetic is a story, and it can be as cohesive and dynamic as a narrative, while also speaking more directly to your emotions. It’s a broader and less precise in its effect, but because of its dissipated approach, it has a greater chance of touching on some kind of internal truth.

      I didn’t win, but I had a lot of fun playing with the idea. Here are some of my submissions, and also some of my rejected attempts.

      2014-06-20 12.41.56

      2014-06-20 17.17.05-2

      2014-06-28 12.33.35-2

      2014-06-29 12.34.37

      2014-06-21 11.19.48

      2010-05-27 09.02.00-2

      2014-06-21 16.14.56-2

      20140702-082202-30122660.jpg

      I hope you had a great holiday weekend! If you have instagram, I highly recommend browsing #AUamericana to see what people came up with.

      Posted in Stories | 0 Comments | Tagged americana, artifact uprising, photography
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