It's not in the orderly world where the magic of creativity lives... it lives in the chaotic world where rainforests catch fire, imaginary boys die, and birds feast on frogs in the center of the road.
This was my second time to attend; last year, I went during wonderfully snowy weather. An anomalous “atmospheric river” passed through this year, so I definitely heard whispers of “Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise” coming on like a brainworm.
I stayed at one of the resort suites this time, which were a pace away from the retreat’s main gathering space. And yes, there was a creek, and yes, it did rise (as did the lake, by several feet).
And then Alfonse drowned…
One highlight from the retreat: Maureen McHugh’s POV workshop. She gave us some scenario basics, then let us explore the stories we came up with through applied changes in narrative perspective.
During this time, Alfonse was born.
Who’s Alfonse? He’s now the main character in my new poetry film (more below; see “Snowmelt”). Through my workshop freewrite, I met him while still processing images of cold, rushing water channeling the snowmelt and runoff under the footbridges along my trek to the workshop.
The chaos of those images—matched with Maureen’s very basic prompts—clicked, and his story unfolded. And yes, he drowned, but that is not really the story.
(For the real story, you’ll need to watch the poetry film I’m still making…)
Exploring unknowns
After that session, I took a hike up in the woods and shot a solid two hours of footage (potentially for a poetry film based on Maureen’s workshop prompts) using my new GoPro and my smartphone.
I’m a newbie with camerawork, but a little side-chat with Maureen—who has an impressive media and cinema background—boosted my confidence to go out and “make some mistakes” in a medium I’ll probably never quite figure out (at least not like a film student will).
The day after that, I decided to take a road trip to capture more of the environs (relevant to my story) and to run some filming and recording experiments.
That took me to the lake’s north shore, toward the Quinault River, on a road that split past the ranger station—one way forking to the washed-out bridge, the other to primitive campgrounds to the north, such as North Fork, a place I camped at some 50 years ago as a kid.
Side note: I remember it being primeval then, and it remains so today.
I’m still a bit circumspect about heading off to the hills without a good cell connection and only a couple of bottles of water, but my tank was full, and I listened to my gut, and it said:
Just go.
I have a Jeep Compass now, after my Kia Sportage (RIP) was double-tapped in a rear-end accident last fall.
It’s only a year old and has all the groovy bells and whistles on the dash, but what I really appreciated this time were the options for low 4WD, for negotiating rough terrain like rock and thick, unsettled gravel on steep grade, which is where the road took me.
That was a different and unexpected chaos that employed some pretty creative problem solving… and made me ask myself again, should I be doing this? Is it getting too dark out now? Shouldn’t I be more sensible?…
…Just go.
Chaos brings the unexpected
I shot a lot of film that I may or may not use in my movie and, on my return, I ran out the battery filming from my dashboard. Which was the plan. Except now I wish I’d had that power for what I drove into on the way back.
Ahead of me, unreal green and blue flashing lights lit up the dusky sky. I was following a truck; they slowed, then pulled over to the left. I pulled over to the right when I saw what had just happened:
About fifty yards of power lines had fallen into thickets of wild rhodies in the ditch and instantly started a long, skinny fire at road’s edge.
Huh, I thought. So weird that in the wettest place in the coterminous US, a wildfire could start that quickly... literally in seconds. No sign of fallen debris or disturbed poles; it’s like the power lines just decided to give up.
The flames were at least a foot high, and tons of smoke billowed from the long thin line blazing in a neat line where the wires scorched the greenery—kind of a reverse chaos, in a way… since when do power lines fall neatly to the ground? More of a surrealistic orderliness.
I spoke briefly to the guys in the truck; they were just as awestruck as I was to have come upon something so chaotic happening in a flash like it did.
They called the fire department, and a neighbor bellowed from across the street that she was coming out with a fire extinguisher (which was not going to do a bit of good, truth be told).
Because there’s no other way to get back to the resort except to keep going straight, I skedaddled before things got worse. When I passed through the little town of Amanda Park, it was obvious the power was out; meanwhile, the local firetrucks were spilling out of the station.
I was glad to find our power at the resort was still on when I got back, though the gully washer rain had begun in earnest. All I really wanted to do then was upload my footage, take a hot bath, and count the ways I got lucky that day.
Order is ordinary
I thought a lot—during that drive into the forest primeval, during the retreat, during those late nights in the suites—how creative magic almost requires chaos.
Just as stories require tension, drama, conflict, resistance to be interesting, writers need to experience moments in real life where order has dissolved into disorder to recognize that, in between the crashes and flashes of chaos, there are little moments of gold to witness, mine, and find meaning inside.
It’s why you have to show up in your life to be creative, because you never know what will happen that will spark a story or a poem or a decision to make something. Photographers, of course, know this: you can’t get the shot if you don’t show up.
At the same time, you can’t go into these moments of showing up expecting you’ll be in control, know what will happen, and find gold. If you only focus your attention on the order of the ordinary world, you’ll just be mining quarter-inch gravel.
Strange synchronicities
The last day, as I packed up the Jeep to leave, I had to really watch where I stepped for pools of standing water. At one point, I looked down and saw the remains of a Pacific giant salamander that had been run over by a car earlier (RIP).
I have a fondness for these amphibians (one has a small role in my novel, and their cousins, the newts, are friends of mine here in my yard).
Okay, that’s sad… and weird. How random, right?
Then I got home and learned from my daughter that she had taken her dog for a walk and found the street littered with dead frogs and newts.
Not just sad, weird, or random… but bizarre.
Her going theory was that, in the break after a weekend of hard rain, the birds had come out in droves and found all the amphibians and dropped them into the road like it was a long feasting hall where they could more easily pick the poor critters clean. (She does have a gallows sense of humor.)
I really don’t know what happened.
I mean, it’s not like we live on a busy street; we get an occasional delivery van, but ours is a loop in the woods, not a main drag.
Nor do large colonies of slippery beasts regularly cross our county road en masse. They mostly live in the dirt, my raised beds and flower pots, or down at the retention pond.
But what an interesting writerly rabbit hole to explore, am I right?
And now I have an idea—maybe not enough to command an entire story, but enough for a scene or a plot point, or a piece of narrative history, or the essence of a magical realist thread—and it was borne out of chaos.
You know what else is borne out of chaos? All of nature and the whole of human creativity.
Coda
As if the chaos of the atmospheric river wasn’t enough, I had one day to catch up on real life before we were hit with a significant windstorm in the west sound… it knocked out our power for 27 hours and made for some crummy sleep for me (I use CPAP and my battery backup was not working).
Crummy sleep derails my waking life, and this time was no different. I had made plans to review all that footage from my trip, prepare for a critique group session, and get going on some “yardening” projects.
Instead, I ended up throwing on my Halloween onesie, turning on the propane fireplace, and calling it a day, too grumpy from the disruption of the power outage on my best laid plans to wrangle anything productive.
Side note: Historically, I’m famous for disliking the month of February, especially late February. It’s too cold and dark to be outside just when my SAD really kicks in and I need to be, well, outside to elevate my mood.
Eventually we got the generator running, and I napped to catch up on six hours of lost sleep. Later, we watched Interstellar and made Indian food, basically pretending that Tuesday was Saturday.
Bizarrely, the next full day after the power returned, the weather put on its Easter finery; it was as if there had never been any storms just a couple of days before.
I saw daffodil and tulip greens almost a foot tall, the chorus frogs were loud enough to hear through closed windows, the rabbits were out in the yard eating the weeds, and we didn’t have to turn on the heat in the morning for the first time in months.
Since then, I’ve filmed footage for a second film, started a yin yoga practice, and planted my first round of seeds in the indoor “cultivation station.”
I don’t know about you, but I call that creativity borne of chaos.
Chaos magic.
Thanks for reading my essay, “Chaos Magic.” If it resonates for you, please feel free to share it.
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Film projects
“Snowmelt”
This gothic, folksy horror poem about a drowned child is currently in a syllabic, free verse format, but I’m going to draft some formal versions (elegy, sonnet, villanelle) to see where order imposed upon chaos takes me, and then I’m turning it into a short film.
“Lunatic”
I’ve shot a quartet of dark images to match with a quartet of poems exploring the seasons of the moon (new, waxing, full, waning). Together they will become a dark meditation inspired by both ancient dark goddess mythology and the hidden mysteries of the lunar cycles.
“Look Up”
No news to report on my baby still making rounds on the film festival circuit (see below where it’s already appeared). I have at least five submissions still out and will keep you posted!
We are officially in hiatus until 2026, but you can listen to the whole season 1 of the podcast to see what we conjured over the last year in anticipation of our upcoming collection, Rain Shadows. (Note: there’s a hiccup, so our last “postmortem” episode hasn’t uploaded yet… stay tuned).
Question: “Do you have a project you dropped but wished you kept going with?”
Answer: Yes!
Almost forty years ago I started an epic fantasy that was—no surprise—inspired by multiple readings of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
It was, now that I think about it, more of a social justice warrior version of that universe.
There were different kinds of fantastical creatures and a puzzle to be solved through the delivery of an object to its owner. That required a big quest, with several side quests featuring myriad POVs, but the thread that held them all together was something I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate back then: ecofeminism.
After so many years of writing, I can now see how the mashup of environmentalism and divine feminine rage is a recurring motif in just about everything I create. Landscapes have voices and powers; women are equally emboldened with their own sets of voices and powers. If my work isn’t clearly feminist, it’s still going to address social justice in some way, whether I plan for it or not. And often, the effort involves concerns surrounding the health and well-being of the planet.
The novel (still unnamed) began with a number of high fantasy markers.
In it, I:
created fantastical creatures (elementals: air, fire, stone, water) to mix with more classic ones (human mages and golems)
mined ecocentric metaphors (i.e., human blood as rivers; rivers as the planet’s blood)
generated ideological subtext through worldbuilding (i.e., magic and science as two complementary systems)
wrote a spiral-shaped quest that wound vertically from the underworld all the way to the top of a mountain (i.e., journey as spiritual awakening)
WHY DID I ABANDON THIS NOVEL?
I recognized then that I didn’t yet have the chops to pull it off. This is not a confidence issue; it’s simply being self aware. A repeated lesson for me over the decades has been this: my writing is better when it’s informed by real life. Lived experience is a goldmine, no matter what genre you dabble in.
I didn’t want to write yet another rip off of Tolkien. At that time (late 1980s), I read a lot of other high fantasy, and it seemed like every book I read was nothing more than LOTR derivative (yes, again, I did just say that out loud). I didn’t want to just add more to the pile of what seemed more like fan fiction that original writing.
Katherine Dunn and Geek Love sent me on a one-way trip to alternative genres. We’re talking dark urban fantasy, apocalypse fiction, the paranormal, surrealism, the gothic, and magical realism. Those shiny objects still capture much of my attention these days.
I went to college, started using a computer, worked in publishing, had children, moved across the country… Somewhere along the way, all my notes and files, outlines and maps did not survive real life. I think that maybe I thought I had “moved on” from fantasy, without appreciating its value as a genre.
BUT DID I ABANDON THIS NOVEL, REALLY?
It might be more honest to say that it, and other projects I’ve started and starved, haven’t been abandoned as much as deferred.
For example, the subject of my current novel-in-progress, Eminent Domain, was inspired by a dream I had in 2005.
The dream was about a pregnant single woman living in the country alone near a river. She’d planned to birth her child there, then put it up for adoption. She befriended the wildlife (very Snow White-ishly) while living there. On the fated day when she finally goes into labor, a huge storm washes out the bridge (her only way to town). The local wildlife community steps up and rebuild the bridge to help save her and her baby from tragedy.
I’d always wanted to write that story, but I didn’t start putting it down on the page until 2021 (and I’m still working on it). That dream narrative is not the current novel plot anymore, though I definitely apply the ecofeminist motifs that were part of the original story. Eminent Domain has since spilled over into something far more complex and layered, inspired by such real-world topics as the pandemic, natural resource exploitation, PTSD, landowners’ rights, feminist self-determination, and sustainable agriculture.
Why did I wait so long to write it? I’m someone who writes a lot of different things all the time, and there just wasn’t headspace for it when the dream first happened.
But the story kept coming back to me, tugging at my attention, and I finally relented. Thanks to all the bounty of real life over nearly two decades, I have been able to take what starts out as a fairy tale and turn it into a modern fable for our times.
AT THE CORE OF IT ALL: EMOTIONAL RESONANCE
I also know of myself, as I stare down age 60 this year, that I often “put off” work that holds deep emotional truth for me. I don’t do this out of fear, but out of self-respect. It seems that certain stories demand the best of me as both writer and human being, or they’re not worth writing.
I was raised to never do things “half-assed.” This doesn’t mean I think my work is perfect, but rather that I will always strive to make sure it’s as good as I am capable of making it.
Writing a novel is such a huge undertaking; for me to commit to it, the theme must carry a deep resonance that keeps me devoted to its telling. The emotional resonance is really the secret sauce that keeps me going.
I also see what I publish as a legacy, a permanent mark… if I’m going to leave a record after I die, I want to do so writing stories I’m proud of.
So, I deferred my high fantasy, then. Or maybe it’s abandoned? Whatever the case, that spiral-shaped quest of sylves and mages and golems remains, patiently, for me to be ready for it.
I don’t see an open slot in my writing calendar for anything new for several years, much less for a high fantasy epic (or series). But I’m not dead yet, and you just never know what flood gates will open and when.
LOCAL AUTHOR FOCUS FOR 2025
I’m behind on my shelf updates this month and will resume in the next Substack. But there are dozens of titles already there to check out at The Sellman Shelf in BookShop and I’m still adding new authors with direct ties to Kitsap county. I’m telling you, we are legion out here in the foothills of the Olympics! More coming next month!
Might you have already read and enjoyed these books? Why not give their authors a nice review in BookShop? It really helps them to be found and appreciated by readers.
The Sellman Shelf bookstore categories
PNW in pictures
Here’s a bit of untouched footage I shot for “Snowmelt” while at the Rainforest Writers Village Retreat that was, in part, one of the inspirations for the poem I wrote while there.
MARCH: WHAT’S HAPPENING
Mar 6: Spirits & Stories with the Seattle chapter of the HWA at Til Dawn; I’m going to check it out for myself! [link]
Mar 13: Guest appearance at Clay Vermulm’s “Writing Modern Horror” class, Peninsula College, Port Angeles (for students only)
Mar 23: Evan J Peterson reads from his novel, Better Living Through Alchemy at Friday Afternoon Tea in Wallingford… and I’m joining him, along with Brianna Malotke! [link]
Apr 1: I’m back at the Rhymes With Camera blog with regular content! Check it out here and sign up to get notifications when new posts drop!
Apr 2: My next Rhymes With Camera Substack drops
Apr 10-13: SquatchCon with the HWA! I’ll be commuting in from the 10th through the 12th. [link]
Apr 13: “Writing for Performance” panel and workshop. More info and link forthcoming
Apr 17-20: Norwescon! I’ll be commuting this year rather than staying, but I should be there every day! [link]
Recipe is mine, but photo is “Cottage cheese in spinach gravy (palak paneer)” by Radhikamprabhu82/Wikimedia Commons, CC-SA-4.0.
Hands down, this is my favorite Indian dish. I’ve made it plenty of times and find that homemade is just so far superior to the premade sauces and packages you can get at the grocery store.
Palak Paneer is also sometimes called Saag Paneer, with palak and saag referring to the spinach sauce and paneer referring to the homemade “cottage cheese” you find in many Indian stewed dishes. I’ve made paneer from scratch but it’s easy to find at supermarkets anymore, so you can save yourself the trouble.
This is a great way to use up garden spinach. I parboil and drain fresh spinach, then chop and store it in 1.5-pound batches (each equaling about 10 ounces frozen) in freezer bags, pressing out the extra air. Lay these flat in the freezer, they’ll keep a long time. This recipe also uses my homegrown garlic and chilis; I’ve used jalapeño, poblano, Hatch, serrano, and shishito in the past.
A word about clarified butter. It’s called ghee in Indian recipes. You may have also heard of brown butter, which is simply a darker version of clarified butter. I make my own (an Instant Pot product that never fails)… so much cheaper than what you get at the store. Maybe in the future I’ll post my recipe (I definitely will if you ask me!). It’s not hard to do and if you make more than you need, remember that it’s shelf stable and you will be able to use it for weeks without worry.
As I write this, the sun is out and I’m starting seeds both indoors and out… so hard to believe how quickly things change around here in the spring.
Just a week ago, I had to use a headlamp (below) to navigate standing water in the dark on my way to the Rainforest Writers Retreat cabin every night.
Now the birds are singing, the sun is shining, and people are mowing their lawns. I got in a 5.10-mi hike last week, which was sorely needed. And I had the first happy dream in a reallllly long time last night, so I got that goin’ for me! Just in the nick of time, if you ask me.
I hope where you’re at, the signs of hope and rebirth are also winking at you. Have a great March! ~ Tamara
CNT: Tamara Kaye Sellman 321 High School Road NE Ste. D-3. PMB 204 Bainbridge Island, WA 98110 www.rhymeswithcamera.com (homepage and blog)
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