Welcome back, thread-heads and story spinners. Last week, we tugged at the loose threads in our lives—literal, symbolic, and possibly still attached to a shirt you can’t let go. Did you tie yourself into knots around something worth remembering? Map a wandering thought on pure cotton fibers? Find meaning by connecting two or more seemingly unrelated objects and declare their relationship status as “complicated?” However you forged a path forward, I hope it pulled you into a few minutes of creative play while paying attention to the difference between love worn and worn out.
This week, we move from thread counts to places that count. Our creative nudge this week is a postcard; those intermittent missives that tell a story with one picture and less than fifty words, including the destination address!
Postcards are a niche form of communication. When you send a message with one, anyone along the way can read it. The upside is those messages don’t get fed into your digital algorithmic footprint…yet. Postcards don’t favor the long winded and you can’t use emojis to bridge the metaphorical gap between giver and receiver. These are all reasons why I value postcards.
I love new ones from museum gift shops and old ones from thrift stores. I love the strange ones most of all: abandoned towns, baffling tourist attractions, and pictures of sunrises that outshine the real thing. City slogans big on hope. A motel swimming pool photographed like a beckoning oasis.
A postcard is brief on purpose. It gives me enough space to say hello, report on the weather, make a wry, succinct observation, perhaps about the passage of time and its brevity. It is the antithesis of making someone scroll through your uncurated glut of vacation photos. The post card as a medium forces me to be succinct, specific, and interesting. I consider those pretty good creative constraints.
My wife and I have another couple we send postcards to when we travel, or sometimes just on a whim. It is not an elaborate tradition. It’s not a grand literary correspondence. It’s more like sending a smile via snail mail. There’s no “read notification”; these messages can and do stand alone.
I like imagining the card moving through the world - dropped in a box, machine sorted, touched by strangers, carried across harrowing terrain, then hand delivered to a hand we know. Of course, buying postcards and mailing postcards are two very different hobbies. I buy them with great intention.
Still, I keep buying them. I keep saving them. It is hard to throw away a postcard, even if I know I probably will not send it. A blank postcard feels like unfinished business.
Now it is time to find a postcard. Any postcard. Then use it to send your imagination somewhere for several minutes with one or more of these postage paid prompts:
View Finder: Study the image on the front. What was cropped out? What happened five minutes before the picture was taken? What business, animal, argument, or weather event is just outside the frame? Write a short scene, draw the missing edges, or create a fake historical plaque for the place shown. Let the postcard become the first panel in a much stranger comic strip.
Postcardiac Message: Turn the postcard over and take the postcard challenge: write or draw something brief, celebratory, and a little strange. Write to a friend, your future self, a former version of you, or a celebrity. What feeling can fit into three lines and still arrive intact?
Greetings from Nowhere: Gather several postcards you are willing to sacrifice in the name of art. Cut out pieces of sky, mountains, motels, oceans, palm trees, and happy strangers. Reassemble the fragments into a new postcard from a made-up place. Add a short message and deliver it to someone who will appreciate receiving proof that a place does not need to exist to be worth seeing.
Good Eats: What might a multi-sensory postcard do in our mailboxes? Move beyond the two dimensions of a postcard. Write a three-item menu for the place on the card. Bonus points if you make yourself a snack inspired by the postcard and eat it while pretending you are on vacation.
Stackable: Take a stack of postcards and by using simple materials like glue or binder clips, create a three dimensional sculpture that can be expanded like a house of cards. Do you want to try and build something that will last, or something that you can knock down and reshape over and over?
Your creative self is always just below the surface. Sometimes a little blank space and an imagined audience is all we need to set it loose. This week, let a postcard interrupt your day in the best way. Keep one. Make one. Send one. Invent a place worthy of one.
This column was written with the help of ChatGPT, helping me make use of all the cardinal directions.
