Dear Reader Column: Guest Post Nina Sadowsky
Dear Reader,
Today's guest author, Nina Sadowsky, has written numerous original screenplays and adaptations for such companies as Walt Disney Company, Working Title Films, and Lifetime Television. She was the executive producer of The Wedding Planner, has produced many other films, and was president of Meg Ryan's Prufrock Pictures. Sadowsky is the program director for NYU Los Angeles, a Global Programs initiative that provides an experiential learning environment for students preparing for careers in the entertainment and media industries. Nina's new novel is The Empty Bed, following Just Fall and The Burial Society.
Please welcome Nina Sadowsky to the book club:
https://www.ninarsadowsky.com/contact
On Why I Make Collages Out of Junk
Making collages has been a hobby of mine for years. I started because I tend to collect things that connect me to good memories, so I'd come back from travels with every receipt, brochure, ticket stub, store bag, business card and map I'd gathered. Stuffed into a bag, these bits and pieces just took up space until I began cutting and shredding the ephemera I'd collected and repurposing it into art.
My inspirations expanded. My daughter's sonogram photograph became the centerpiece of one such work, surrounded by elements culled from the cards I'd received at the baby shower thrown in her honor. A broken paper shredder was scavenged to become an homage to a lost job opportunity. When my mother died, I created a work constructed from the broken odds and ends that resided in her junk drawer (a highlight is an old IBM Selectric typewriter ball).
And I always create a collage in connection with a new piece of writing.
Good writing requires both vertical and lateral thinking. The former involves an understanding of structure, commerciality and the stereotypes that inform our culture, and must be balanced by the former which requires a personal, authentic voice that can wield these tropes in a way that transcends cliches with originality. Collage is my way of jumpstarting my dreamy, speculative dives into ideation, my way of opening up to my lateral mind. The process of cutting and tearing, placing and shaping, reconsidering and repurposing on a piece of canvas or clayboard frees my mind to do the same with the work I'm writing.
I find the urge to create a collage usually strikes in the middle of the writing process when the outline that I so carefully crafted before launching into a draft is screaming to be re-examined. My characters have taken over and the decisions I made with my careful vertical thinking no longer seem applicable to the direction my story is going, whether I like it or not. The next thing I know, I'm surrounded by paper and junk and glue.
Since my books are internationally set, I often have a cache of "supplies" laid away from a research trip. For my latest novel, The Empty Bed, I created one of my largest pieces yet, using materials I had collected on a trip to Hong Kong (featured in the book) and Tokyo (which I'm keeping in reserve for a later novel).
--Nina Sadowsky
Contact Nina at: https://www.ninarsadowsky.com/contact
(Click on each picture to read about Nina's work.)
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
AUTHORBUZZ: Click here to discover new books, "meet" the authors and enter to win.
CARTIER'S HOPE by M.J Rose
Cartier's Hope takes place in New York, 1910: A city of Fifth Avenue mansions and crumbling Lower East Side tenements. A city where the suffrage movement was growing stronger daily, but most women reporters were still delegated to the fashion and lifestyle pages. This is the story of one of those reporters, Vera Garland, a woman set on making her mark in a man's world of serious journalism.
Go to: AUTHORBUZZ click on CARTIER'S HOPE to read more and to email author M.J Rose, you'll get a reply.
This month's Penguin Classics book is THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, by Edith Wharton. I have a copy of the book to share with a lucky reader, so start reading today and enter for your chance to win.