• About
  • Biography
  • Black – From the Book: Colors
  • Children’s Fiction
  • Clean Slate a Very Short Story by Jay Magidson
  • Excerpt from the book – “Threshold of the Mind”
  • Fiction
  • Gauze – Excerpt from “Colors”
  • Nonfiction
  • Poetry
  • Videos

Jay Magidson – Author

~ Books by Jay Magidson

Jay Magidson – Author

Category Archives: ideas

Through the Blackness of Fear – Origins of a Short Story

17 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by Jay Magidson in colors, fiction, Horror, ideas, writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

black thoughts, colors by jay magidson, dreams, fears, ideas, inspiration

Colors by Jay Magidson is now available in print

Colors by Jay Magidson

Sometimes an idea builds inside like a kind of spiritual pressure, threatening to overwhelm the holder, even consume him. This happened to me about ten years ago. I had been writing short stories over the past year. There was no thought to what they might be used for or why I was writing them, just when they came up, I would commit them to paper. It was only recently that I even understood their purpose, and their power in my life.

Each story had a single color as its title. The first was Gray, the Kafkaesque tale of a man lost in a featureless city. Another was Yellow, about an antique’s dealer consumed slowly each night by a dead cat representing his contradictory life.

The story that began to overwhelm me, I later called Black. It started as only a seed of a feeling, a bit of undefined anxiety. I would wake at night with a deep, unexplainable fear. Everything was going well in my life and I had no reason to feel this way. I pushed it aside, ignoring it as just general anxiety about life. But it grew stronger until it began to consume me, holding a kind of opaque fabric in front of my vision.

I lost quite a bit of sleep, lying there, desperately trying to push the horrible feelings away, running from this undefinable dark fog. Out of desperation on the third night, I got up, my stomach in a deeply clenched knot and sat in front of my computer and began to write. Without thinking about it, the words began to pour out of my fingers and instead of feeling relief and peace, the way I usually do when I sit down to write, the fear grew worse. I realized there was no way around this feeling, that the only way out, was through the blackness. I was terrified.

With a deep breath, I dove into the bleak feeling and for the first time, touched it. The best I can describe it, was like a kind of river flowing beneath the surface of my life, a river of unexplored pain. I dipped my hand into that river, touching its icy thickness. The fear and anxiety only grew worse, and I knew what I must do in that moment. I had to jump in.

The story began to flow like nothing else I had ever written before, nothing related to my life, as if I were a completely different person releasing this horrible and dark crime that had been eating at me, consuming me with guilt until I couldn’t bear it anymore.

The entire story came out that night, in one marathon sitting. And when I laid done the final period I was free. The fear had left me, replaced with a deep sense of gratitude and wonder at life. I had dove through that river of pain and had been cleansed by its fire, rising up on the other side a different, better person.

I’ve put the short story online here, if you would like to read it. It is surreal and personal, without any reference in my life. I read it now, still wondering where it can from, or why I wrote it, not really sure what it means. I only know that I had to write it, had to release it, or would have been consumed by it.

I think we misunderstand fear, shying away from it, avoiding the pain it represents. And when that suggests bodily injury, that’s probably wise, a mechanism for keeping us safe, built into our DNA. But there is another kind of fear, that which we need to embrace. It holds a deep kind of meaning on the other side of its invisible veil; we must leap the chasm with only our faith to keep us aloft. And on the other side is peace, growth, understanding, and maybe if we are lucky, a bit of wisdom.

 

Share this:

  • Email
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Philosophy of 600 Grit Sandpaper

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by Jay Magidson in art, ideas, sandpaper

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

art, ingrid magidson, sandpaper

The orbital sander buzzes, sawdust flying everywhere, making me wonder how my odd journey brought me to this moment. I’m a middle-aged bald guy with two teenagers, living in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, a former art gallery owner and art dealer, wearing a respirator and headphones sanding a lowly piece of poplar, not cherry or walnut or even maple – poplar, the weed of the tree kingdom – and loving every second of it.

_MG_2091My wife is a very successful artist. Her works have been exhibited in Aspen, Vail, New York, Houston, Geneva, Gstaad, Singapore, Mexico City, Toronto, Laguna Beach, San Francisco, Miami and many more fancy cities. Am I bragging about her? Of course, what kind of husband would I be if I didn’t. The thing is, her works are complex, really complex. They are essentially layers of antique objects, butterflies, doll furniture, clocks, toys, silverware, wasp nests, eggs, bones, shells, sand, beetles, and whatever else she thinks of, sandwiched between sheets of acrylic. I tell you all this, because I am the one who gets to make the boxes and frames that hold them all together. And I do mean “gets to,” because even though I can’t tell anyone, I secretly love it.

Since I was a kid, I loved to build things—and ahem—take things apart. I took lots of things apart, things you aren’t supposed to take apart. I grew up in a time when TVs were giant polished wooden boxes that took two strong men to lift, full of burning-hot tubes, leaky capacitors, heavy transformers, and scary warnings on the back that said, “Danger High Voltage, Do Not Open.” Yep, I opened the TV, took all the tubes out without any clue how they were supposed to go back. Dad loved that when he got home to sit on the couch in front of the TV. I took apart the clock radio, the mechanical curtain rods, the door locks, the iron, the car door, the coffee percolator, my bicycle, the lawn mower, the electrical outlets (zap!), and anything else with screws or bolts. Most of it I got back together before mom found out, except for some things that went over my head, like the TV.

Have you ever seen those books “How Things Work?” I never read those books. Instead I reverse engineered everything to learn how it worked, I guess I still do. I have a curiosity about mechanical objects, especially broken ones. I am sure everything can be fixed with enough patience and superglue. But I grew up and taking apart the toaster is not much of a profession. Instead, I joined my father in his gallery in New York, then went on my own,for over 30 years now, showing and selling fine art. Don’t get me wrong, I get a charge out of that too. I really love great art, fall in love, heart pounding passionate love with it. How do you mix these two opposites together? Lots of patience apparently.

Cherished-Memories-of-Cornells-Lost-Muse54x34llg

My wife wasn’t an artist when I met her. She worked for me at my art gallery in Aspen, where we fell in love at first sight. Yes it happens, and it happened to us. Her parents are artists and so it was logical for her to work in the arts, sell it if you can’t make it. She did this with me until her 39th birthday when she woke up one morning and said, “I have to create something or I’ll explode.” I didn’t want her to explode, so I cleared out the garage and told her to go for it. Next thing I know, she’s selling masterpieces and I’m sanding poplar.Now here’s the secret part (well not anymore, I guess), that juvenile-delinquent mechanical engineer was still living inside me. And he was anxious to start taking stuff apart again. Oh sure, I got to fix the vacuum cleaner once in a while, but that’s pretty pedestrian, pull out the dog hair and they call you a genius. My wife’s art is way, way more satisfying than that, like when she decided to put a music box in the middle of one of her pieces. Which has to work, you know, wind up and play. It’s buried inside a work of art, two feet away from the edge of the frame and has to be wound up! I grumbled out loud about the misery and tedium of making something so preposterous work, but inside, I rubbed my hands together in pure mad-scientist glee, carefully containing the sound of my insane laughter.

Tis-but-a-breif-moment28x23One of my favorite pieces, called “Cherished Memories of Cornell’s Lost Muse” has a whole set of doll furniture along the inside bottom edge of the frame. How do you get toothpick thin table legs to stay on a piece wood that has to be turned upside down, shipped, handled, and horror of horrors, possibly dropped? “This is madness!” I say out loud. But inside the crazy nerd declares, “No, this is Sparta!” and makes it work.

Cherished-Memories-of-Cornells-Lost-Muse54x34detail3So here I am enjoying my life so much, I feel guilty most of my waking hours. It’s called work isn’t it, drudgery, miserable, horrible 9 to 5 torture. So I fake it, complain that it’s hard or tedious. That’s what you say so no one knows how friggin awesome your job really is and tries to take it.

Oh, and 600 grit sandpaper makes wood way smoother than a baby’s butt, even if it is only poplar.

Share this:

  • Email
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Where Do Ideas Come From?

17 Sunday May 2015

Posted by Jay Magidson in ideas, writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

dreams, goya, ideas, Writer's block, Writing

Granted, this is not new territory, but the question continues to get raised, by readers, and by writers looking for new story ideas. I can’t speak (write) for anyone else, so I’ll tell you how ideas sometimes come to me.

One place I go for ideas is that sweet spot between waking and sleeping. When I go to bed at night, I kind of play with that twilight zone before sleep, not quite awake, not quite asleep, seeing how wide I can stretch it. It is kind of like daydreaming, but much richer, crazier, none of the rules of reality get in the way. It’s like a kid asking, what if I could fly, or be invisible or jump inside of other people’s dreams? And I just let the ideas come, the wilder the better. Some I grab and tell myself. “I’m going to remember you.” Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, but it doesn’t matter. It is far more important to keep the ideas flowing then destroy the process by getting up and writing something down. How pedestrian can you get?

Other ideas come from daydreaming. I daydream all the time. I doubt my family has any idea how much. Except maybe my daughter, she is a master daydreamer too. It is likely most writers and artists are great daydreamers. A cloud floats by and it reminds you of a clown, which makes you think of the circus, which makes you think of all of mankind locked in a freak show without knowing it. And on it goes.

Maybe you’re sitting at a restaurant and you overhear two people talking. “What a great baritone voice that man has.” You think he could be a radio personality with that voice, but maybe that is just a cover and you create some spy scenario in your head. OK, I know, most of life is not all that interesting, but add just a drop of untamed imagination and it is never boring. I have no idea what it’s like not to have an overactive imagination, telling oneself stories all the time, inventing characters and scenarios. People without wild imaginations probably get a lot more stuff done.

Ideas come from nowhere too, and those are the best ones of all. I get up early, before anyone else, when the house is quite and I can write, not feel guilty that I should be helping with the millions of things that need to get done when you have a family. Many times, I have a blank page and no starting place. I know I need a new chapter, but have absolutely no idea what is supposed to come next. I don’t agonize over it, I just write. It starts out as pure shit, but I don’t stop, because I know what’s going to happen if I just trust the process. And pretty soon, my fingers kind of disconnect from my brain, and out comes…stuff. Pretty good stuff, sometimes even great stuff. Then I hear a soft peep out of the critical part of my mind, “hey what’s that, where did that come from, that’s not you, you can’t write like that.” But I give him a good gagging and let the process continue. Maybe it lasts a few minutes, maybe a few hours. And damn if it isn’t pretty good.

Where did it come from? I have no idea. Call it the muses, call it intuition, the subconscious, long buried memories, call it God. What difference does it make, but by all means don’t stop it. That is the most creative a human being can be. And it is way cool!

Share this:

  • Email
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Recent Posts

  • Yellow Raft – a Poem
  • A Dark Poem for Saturday
  • Art is Not Elitist
  • Inspiration’s Muse
  • Sleep Well My Dear Friend

Archives

  • December 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • March 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • November 2014
  • July 2014
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • August 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • August 2012
  • July 2012

Categories

  • art
  • Aspen Art
  • audio books
  • audiobooks
  • book reviews
  • books
  • colors
  • criticism
  • death
  • discovery
  • distopia
  • drowning
  • ebook
  • Explore Booksellers
  • fear
  • fiction
  • Gauze
  • Haleakala
  • Hawaii
  • Horror
  • humor
  • ideas
  • In the Image of God
  • ipad
  • Jeff Clarke
  • kindle
  • Madness of the Muses
  • Maui
  • mensa
  • N. A. Noel Gallery
  • Nancy Noel
  • Nausea
  • new release
  • poetry
  • Rabinow
  • Reviews
  • sandpaper
  • Sartre
  • Science Fiction
  • self-publishing
  • stratumentis
  • Threshold of the Mind
  • Time Machine
  • Virtual Reality
  • writing

Blogroll

  • Get Inspired
  • The Enigmatic Art of Ingrid Dee Magidson

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Jay Magidson - Author
    • Join 56 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Jay Magidson - Author
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: