Mentoring: Making Something Together

Notes on this project, from Sally:

I believe everyone has a unique voice but daily life doesn’t give us time or space to practise finding it; too often we are encouraged to sound the same. To mouth the same rubric, idioms and ideas.

My mentoring practice is built around the understanding that we would like the opportunity to dig deeper to find a particular mode of expression. Our own voice. Dynamic critical and creative writing arises from a voice we can hear and see; a voice speaking clearly and immediately providing colour, shape, texture, ways of seeing, turns of phrase, idioms, a carefully honed vocabulary or expression, a cadence and a rhythm. A voice speaking with conviction brings shape and order, patterns and structure.

We all need prompts in order to write and so I encourage my mentees to gather their own set of images, sounds, objects, photographs, paintings, scraps of conversation, songs, lyrics, musical compositions, sound effects; or to generate their own prompting materials by drawing or composing, collaging or sculpting or simply collecting objects into a meaningful relationship.

Narration begins with an ordered relationship between parts and voice is the animating force that propels the parts along towards some sort of plot. But plot must always be felt and have some sort of emotional logic; something you commit to as a felt experience you might then divest to your characters or to an aspect of yourself — to your speaking voice.

Mentee, Sabrina Durmaz:

Photo of Sabrina by her dear friend, Hannah Beitchman. 2024.

I’m Sabrina. Currently, I study history at Dartmouth College. I am interested in understanding histories and narratives of health and medicine for mindful wellbeing. You may know me from some of Sally’s blog posts.

Recently, I’ve learned – or accepted – that my writing process begins in visual materials: sketching, drawing, settling a scene with my eyes on a morning walk, or even watching my fingers nervously knot together. I grasp points of tension, friction, and movement through physical composition. I like to collect materials, otherwise recyclables or garbage. I store them under my living room table, in a great hidden heap. I think this collecting is a kind of archiving, from which my stories can be sourced.

Now, I am trying to consider writing – something which my paralyzing perfectionist self has held sacred – as an extension of this visual process: to see the words, the scene, and the story at large, as holding the same kind of space. This is an organic process. I am determined to completely realize my current project, which is a novella or novel (to not stop at a 1/4 or 1/2 – this is not baking, we need full cups only!). And, so I will be building many things: paper, wood, metal. Things galore: which I will reflect upon here. This space is both an experimental ground and an archive, a record of mentorship and progress.

Thank you Sally for giving me this space on your website to show my work, and reach an audience. Sally has taught me since I was sixteen; I am now twenty. Her teachings continue to help me push myself to see my projects through and become a better artist, writer, and person.

Above. Epistolary collages. Materials: paper, glue, wax thread.