We are only as close as parallel lines.
Art makes our own skin a suit others can slip into.
Find your way to the letter you need to write yourself,
Print the photographs to slide into the envelope,
Send it out to the world.

All writing is memoir, some wrapped in imagination.
In every photograph you will find the photographer.
Memory is alive in pictures in our heads.
Pictures in our heads only make it out alive in the blood of words we wrestle out.

We are the architects of our stories.
We are the meaning makers.
It is up to us to find the parentheses that the flow of real life leaves out.

Say it new.
Make it yours.
Use truth as noun, verb, and adjective.
Make poetry a prompt for image.
Make images an inspiration for narrative.

Let it mix together, ask the questions, answer them.
Tell us what happens when we reach the edge of the frame.
Give us the story of what came before it, and what comes after.
Show it with something we can see clearly, hold in our hungry hands.
Lace the visceral with truth, rim it with the glitter and glow and clarity of hindsight.
Say the risky things you knew and couldn’t the first time around.

By learning to pay attention to intersections in art and life,
We focus on the space in which more than one medium or concept come together.
Making bridges to our own histories
Telling stories with pictures.
Making pictures with words.

Everything starts with paying attention, in this wildly imperfect, fighting-through-it life right now, all of us living it in our own way. Love is art for me, and all art comes from the same place - our most pure and stripped away truth.

This class is about diving into that truth with every pore open, every tool sharpened.