THE INTERNATIONAL PULPWOOD QUEEN AND TIMBER GUY BOOK CLUB
How Tiny Art Saved Me by T.K. Thorne During the pandemic, the muse deserted me. I could not put pen to paper except to edit. Fortunately, I had a lot of material to edit, but the more days that have turned into weeks and months, the drier the well of creativity seemed. I had finished my police-witch trilogy (House of Rose, House of Stone, and House of Iron) and an eight-year nonfiction project (Behind the Magic Curtain: Secrets, Spies, and Unsung White Allies of Birmingham’s Civil Rights Days). I finished a rewrite of an old manuscript and had no idea where to go next. I felt aimless, adrift. Everything had a surreal quality. A good friend introduced me to a form of art called Zentangle. It is done on little 3×3-inch pieces of stock paper—tiny art. I played with it and decided to add colors. Because it is so small, it was not intimidating like a big canvas would have been. I’ve never done any “art thing” beyond doodling, but I’ve always wanted to. They may not be great masterpieces, but the world fades away when I am working on one. But still fresh words eluded me. No stories pushing to be born. Then a fellow-panelist I almost met at a writer’s conference that was canceled at the beginning of the pandemic emailed me and asked if I were interested in submitting a short story to an editor in Australia who was 66 AUGUST 2021
