What is a bucket of eels?
Good question. I wrote about it here. If you don’t want to click on that link here’s the tl;dr version: I read a book about art making that asked me to imagine my creativity as some kind of spiritual and divine force, a “Great Creator.” I was having trouble with that. I tried thinking of other things, other ways people had described creativity, and vaguely remembered a story about a poet describing writing like “catching a tiger by the tail.” So maybe, I thought, the “Great Creator” was just a giant container of tiger tails. This image was delightful to me — a snooty old-timey banker standing in front of a vault that, when opened, is fully of writhing tiger tails. This image made me think of eels, I guess because tiger tails, unattached from their feline bodies, are quite eel like. And because I am never one to shy away from an extended metaphor, I ran with it. Now, when I’m struggling with the idea of creativity, I try to imagine reaching into a bucket of magical eels, and pulling one out.
That is what this newsletter will be like. Some of the eels in here will be tiny babies, some will be old and tired, some will be well trained and others stubborn and slimy and possibly slightly zappy. You never know what might come out until you reach into the bucket.