muscle memory

Today I picked up the final pages of my transcribed interview with Carl Bower. If you recall, Carl is the photographer who graciously offered to come to Detroit to help me work on the text of my self portrait book, Falling Into Place. He had seen my Blurb book and heard me speak in Eugene Richards' workshop during Look 3 Photo Festival in Charlottesville, Virginia in June. Carl became deeply committed to seeing that Falling Into Place be published and get out into the world. His way of offering tangible help was to come to my home for an overnight stay and during those two days and one night to ask me probing questions that I answered and recorded digitally. We ended up with four hours of recorded material. I took these files to Victoria of Top Notch Transcription Service, a local business I found online, and have now received the entire transcription--170 pages in hard copy and as a MS Word document. Victoria did a magnificent job and took a very personal interest in my project.

So now my task is to tease out a small percentage of my verbiage to use as text in my book. In two weeks I'll be attending a 4-day writers retreat with two wonderful writers I've worked with in years past: Anya Achtenberg and Demetria Martinez. Their retreat is called "Writing From the Eye of the Storm" which feels appropriate to what I'm now feeling in relation to this project. I'll be working on my text before and during the retreat and look forward to receiving feedback from Anya, Demetria and the other writers--many of whom I know--who will be part of the circle. The timing could not be more perfect.

Today's self portrait was inspired by reading two questions Carl asked me in the final minutes of our two days together: What is the aching of muscle memory? When muscles remember, what do they think about?