One artifact

by rosedeniz December 8, 2010 design
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Tweet It survived a tumble in a suitcase across the ocean. It managed to escape breaking at the grabby hands of my 4-year old. It also teetered on the edge of the bed one morning thanks to my 2-year-old daughter, but never fell. The hand-painted statuette my mom made when she was a little girl, […]

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Hello, Creative Block!

by rosedeniz December 1, 2010 creativity
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Tweet It started off innocently enough. A day or two of procrastination. Then stuff came up. And then more stuff. And then someone asked me about my book, and all of a sudden, I felt like a writer-impersonator. It happens that fast, I marveled. While the writer world tapped to the NaNoWriMo beat this past […]

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Grateful

by rosedeniz November 28, 2010 Art is Dialogue
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Tweet Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. A quick Skype phone call home on the big day to listen to the familiar cheer of my family setting out to eat and then walk, or nap off, my favorite meal of the year. The cliche pops up before I can stop it: There are no words to describe…. […]

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The Girl Effect

by rosedeniz November 16, 2010 personal growth
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Tweet At 12 years old, I was writing stories and poetry, illustrating my notebooks with doodles. I was thinking about my first crush and spending hours alone daydreaming. I never had to think about birthing a baby once I hit menstruation, raising a child through my teen years, nor not being able to attend school. […]

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Essential words & Quiet drawings

by rosedeniz November 12, 2010 art
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Tweet Paintings take up wall and storage space. Image files, as I discovered this week haunting my backup files, take up vast amounts of virtual space. Years of making paintings, illustrations, and drawings, and I have thousands of images stored.  Originals. Duplicates. Different scales and formats. I’m aware of the outpouring of images I have to share vs. […]

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Learning curve

by rosedeniz November 5, 2010 creativity
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Tweet Several times a year I take on projects that are more than I can handle. I make sure that they are outside of my area of expertise, and keep me up late at night problem solving. Like writing a book in August and revising it while redoing my website and this blog at the same time. My […]

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The taste of initiation

by rosedeniz October 27, 2010 expat
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Tweet At my women-only gym, the middle-aged Turkish women I do crunches with talk about pastries. It reminds me of my first summer in Turkey, where instead of crunches, my neighbors would knit or crochet in our garden while talking about baked goods. Is there no bad time or place to talk about pastries? My vocabulary […]

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Which language says ‘Mother’ best?

by rosedeniz October 21, 2010 expat

Tweet At school, my son gives me a hurried, “Bye, Rose!” Not mommy, not ‘Anne‘, the Turkish word for mother, but Rose. My two-year-old called everyone ‘Baba‘, father or daddy in Turkish, until recently, and now she’s learned Anne.  I hear ‘mommy’ when I ask my son to say, “Can I please have x-y-x, Mommy?” and […]

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Good guilt

by rosedeniz October 13, 2010 creativity
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Tweet “I’m doing research,” I say, and huddle in the corner cloaked in my Uzbek suzani to watch Pretty Little Liars. In September it was Glee. I had just finished a first draft of a young adult novel, and I celebrated with three days of impassioned singing and crying (every time I’d sing along, the […]

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