My Cardboard Balcony

Just Gray by Belinda Roddie She doesn't take kindly to shadows crawling on all fours across her canvas. Nor does she prefer the light to grace the oils she lets drip across the white. The absolutes she detests in art - no high moral ground, no golden pedestal to perch an easel on (or even a silver one, for that matter). Her once vanilla smock is drizzled with impromptu designs that lead to nothing and mean nothing. For all her attempts to be in the middle - for all of her valiant efforts to expose things for their detail and complexity - the gradient she has stained across the cloth is too dull to catch the sun, too plain to impress the moon. She has perfected the gray area in that she has scribbled out the substance, bleached the sentiments, left nothing but odor-less smoke behind.

I taught my very first creative writing workshop in the basement of a small and nondescript pottery store, which closed around 5 PM and had an owner who was more than happy to let me use his space provided that he got twenty dollars out of it. The handful of students who had agreed to tis arrangement would file into the basement one by one, sitting on the motley array of cushions and old wooden chairs that squeaked so loudly that it almost sounded like we were strangling cats every time we shifted our weight.