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. I was having trouble with that, so I tried thinking of other ways people had described creativity.

The poet Ruth Stone once described writing a poem like catching something by the tail as it fled. So maybe, I thought, the “Great Creator” was just a giant container of 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 animal tails. This image made me think of eels, I guess because tails, unattached from their 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.