Welcome!

This summer, I will be publishing a series of stories based around the concept of ekphrasis. For those of you don’t know, ekphrasis is defined as “the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device.” The author James Heffernan called it “verbal representation of visual representation.

Ekphrasis is often used in poetry. There are lots of examples that I recommend exploring. Not My Best Side, by U.A. Fanthorpe, is a personal favorite. She gives the dragon in Paolo Cello’s painting a bit of a snarky tone.

Not my best side, I’m afraid.

The artist didn’t give me a chance to

Pose properly, and as you can see,

Poor chap, he had this obsession with

Triangles, so he left off two of my

Feet. I didn’t comment at the time

(What, after all, are two feet

To a monster?) but afterwards

I was sorry for the bad publicity.

I love the idea of ekphrasis and am going to do a project based around it for the next two months. Here are my parameters:

-one painting

I will either choose from art that is available to the public on online (absolutely NO AI generated images for this project) OR I will go to my local art museum and choose a piece there. The latter is my preference.

-one story

As much as I want to be a poet, I lean towards fiction as a form. Each story will not have a word limit and must take place within the setting of the painting, whether it be Monet’s Garden or Munch’s Scream.

-one hour

The thing that excites me the most about this project is that I will only have an hour to do it. I think I will allow some time to choose the painting, but once it’s chosen, I will set a timer so that I only spend exactly 60 minutes on writing and editing it.

A few other fun facts:

-I will be longhand writing these and before putting them up on Substack.

-Posts will be every other Saturday for the months of June and July. Look for one tomorrow!

-If you have a suggestion about artwork to use, feel free to message me here. Just know that if the artwork is linked in the message, I won’t be checking it out until the day I write.

I’m excited to write like this! Let me know what you think of the project in the comments! Any suggestions will be considered.