Stepping off the cliff
Celebrating the day we didn’t fall — but flew
Sometimes things come together in a beautiful converging of layers. The birth of Sapling #8 (For the wind to pass through) is an example of just such a story.
In December 2014, I had been working on an ambitious psychological novel called The Book of Seth for more than a decade. The book draws heavily on both Christian and Egyptian imagery and mythology. I had a paper copy of the manuscript with me at an author’s conference, in the vague hope of offering it to one of the publishers there. The conference was also an occasion to see Jurgen Walschot again, the illustrator whom I had met four years earlier and who had voiced an interest in working with me. So far, we hadn’t yet found a mutual theme that struck a spark.
Browsing through his sketchbook he showed me the pencil drawings of Egyptian sculptures he had made in a Brussels museum the previous week, and they were so exquisite that in a flash of recognition I took out my 130 page manuscript and said: “You might want to read this.”
In hindsight the text was unfinished and, in the opinion of some test readers, utterly unreadable. (I had cut up my storylines into too many little fragments, trying to create a resonating mosaïc; later I learned to allow the stories to flow in their own right for longer stretches and trust the resonance to come about spontaneously in the reader’s mind.)
Fortunately a few people did manage to read through the whole thing, cut up storylines or no, carried along by the flow of the language and the atmosphere it evoked. Jurgen told me: I think you have written something brilliant. I can see whole scenes of it in my mind, images I would like to draw…
Great! There it was, our spark!
Only… were we actually going to embark upon a two-hundred page illustrated literary novel? How many years would it take to complete such a project? And what publisher would be crazy enough to publish it if we did?
Another year and a half went by, in which we e-mailed, stalled and hesitated.
Then I read a magazine interview with Jurgen as it passed on my Facebook timeline. Noticing the accompanying portret photographs, I jokingly wrote to him that we might consider picking up the thread again, since with those long red curls of his he was actually starting to look like Seth…
We decided we would have a serious conversation about it.
We met up in Brussels, where we both work, on the square in front of the Brussels-North train station. It was a sunny and windy day, clouds whipping past, sunshine coming and going. We sat outside and I felt it was a moment of great vulnerability and great honesty.
Jurgen asked me straight to my face: did my text need his artwork?
I had to be honest: no, it didn’t. A good novel shouldn’t require images.
But I did feel we could accomplish something special together. Basically, I asked him to trust that tenacious spark we somehow shared, and embark on a creative adventure we couldn’t possibly see the end of.
That was when he showed me the artwork he had had in mind from the start.
Drunk with the wind, the light and all the creative potential suddenly tangible, we found a place to have a proper drink, and finally took the decision: we were going to bring this book into the world. If no one was willing to publish it, in either English or Dutch, we would. Between the two of us, we had all the necessary skills.
No more hesitating, second-guessing or back-pedaling. Like the Fool in the Tarot, we stepped off the cliff that day, trusting that whatever was down there would catch us. Or we would fly.
It’s been quite a trip since then, with several more stunning images for the book, plot conversations and decisions that have me rewriting several chapters, and another shared project, this one already completed (an illustrated short story that will feature in school books around the country and might evolve into a real book over time). Working together, we became real creative traveling companions and friends.
In the early months of 2017 I felt a minor itch that required scratching. We had been working in the shadows, in what almost felt like secrecy, for months. I wanted to honor Jurgen’s habit not to disclose any unfinished material, but that meant there was nothing at all to show or share, and there wouldn’t be for many months, perhaps even years, to come. Somehow it felt important that the world was in the know about the fact that we were collaborating.
Last February, seeing my friend Lynn’s painting that features the Brussels-North environment, I wrote Gold Leaf to go with her artwork. It was my first attempt to write to an existing image.
A week later over supper Jurgen offered to send me a single image of his for me to write to, as a means of getting some of the visibility I felt we needed. It sounded like nothing more than ‘a nice idea’, but the creative flow turned out to be so gratifying and the result was so beautiful that it had us both pretty excited, and before long the Sapling series was born.
We quickly established a system, ‘sowing’ a Sapling every full and new moon. Over the last four months we have published eight, but we actually produce more than that and we have several extras sitting on our digital shelf already — a liberating thought in times of stress or personal hiccups that divert attention from the creative process.
I write to an image he provides, he uses a text of mine to create an image. In some cases, a real dialogue ensues, with several versions of text and image influencing each other back and forth, until the final product is truly synergetic.
There’s plans for a Stream booklet, and a series of bird+ text postcards.
This has probably been the most enriching experience of my life, creatively.
So — back to Sapling #8.
Last week, I had a very powerful encounter with a buzzard. I wrote about it, here on Medium, and Jurgen texted: nice blog, but couldn’t this be a Sapling?
Sure, why not?
Coincidentally, last week was also the anniversary of our Brussels-North moment, exactly one year to the day… My ‘happy birthday’ message was met with disbelief (‘I thought you were mistaken, but turns out it’s true…Only a year?’), but an hour later I got a ‘birthday present’:
The reference to the buzzard is clear, obviously. But the image inside its silhouette is a fragment of the very first Seth image, the one I saw for the first time that day we trusted each other enough to step off a cliff, the moment that for me will for ever mark the beginning of our flight into unknown territory.
I cherish this ‘birthday’ Sapling above most we’ve made so far.
And I hope for many, many more birthdays.
