I AM: My JourneyTo A Creative Life

By Linda Joyce Ott

Ever dreamed of quitting your job to pursue a more creative or entrepreneurial life? After surviving 5 cardiac arrests in one night following a minor accident, the author vows to ditch her career and live the rest of her one and only precious life writing fiction, making photographs, and creating art.

Wanting to make sense of her decades-long frustrating quest for an artistic life and to discover how creative work became her salvation form the rationale behind this intimate memoir. Digging deep into her memory cache and sifting through five decades of journals brings to light the author's Sisyphean attempts to break free and follow her bliss.

On this perilous journey of self-discovery, she learns how her relentless pursuit of career success and making money, of doing and achieving, repeatedly eclipsed her cherished creative dreams. Along the way, she explores the source of her ambition, her chronic anxieties, and her habitual coping mechanisms.

In a collage of styles (journal entries, emails, poems, lists, and postcards interspersed with narrative passages), the author takes the reader through the rollercoaster highs and lows, the joys and fears, the successes and failures that represent her life as a passionate, restless, constantly re-evaluating artist. As befitting an artist’s memoir, the narrative is punctuated with images of her art.

Synopsis: After setting out her state of mind and the events leading up to the great catastrophe of her life, Linda begins time travelling.

“My Beginnings 1950-1967” presents disquieting memories about growing up in Hamilton in the 1950s and 1960s. She relates how a culturally deprived child of immigrants, growing up in the north end of Hamilton developed an outsider’s mindset and became a keen observer with a relentless urge to write and make art.

“Filling The Well 1968-1975” sketches out her first experiences at university and at her first job as an advertising copywriter in Toronto.

“Travelling 1976” documents 10 months of travel abroad. The trip begins on a freighter that takes her and her husband to Morocco and ends with selling their car to the Greek government. Highlights include attending the Cannes Film Festival and living in a camper caravan for 2 weeks near Loch Ness without ever spotting the legendary monster.

“Searching 1977-1991” includes details on writing her first novel and short stories, being appointed film columnist for Hamilton magazine and Canadian correspondent for Horizon magazine and becoming a mother. This flurry of creativity ends, and Linda’s dependence on alcohol grows, when she sells out her dream life for a 9-to-5 job.
Two miscarriages and a toxic work environment send Linda spiralling downwards in “Breaking Out 1992-2005”. A dream, inspiring books and teachers coalesce and Linda crawls out of her depressive state to embrace her creativity. Making image transfers becomes her initial passion. She enrolls in Humber College’s Correspondence Course in Creative Writing. Her mentor, Paul Quarrington, praises her short stories. As a 50th birthday present to herself, she registers for an Alternative Media Techniques course at the Ontario College of Art and Design. This leads her to painting workshops with Canadian painter Harold Klunder as her mentor.

“Creativity Coaching 2006” uses Linda’s year-long correspondence with a creativity coach to depict the rollercoaster process of making art.

Attending a 2-week painting residency starts off this creatively fertile period of Linda’s life in “On My Way 2007-2010”. She enjoys several solo exhibitions, moves back to Hamilton after 35 years in Toronto, and gets an Ontario Arts Council grant to attend a month-long creative residency in Vermont. Then as 2010 draws to a close, feeling as if she’s finally living her dream life, she nearly dies.

The “After Notes” section details how making art helps Linda recover from her near-death experience, and how launching

• Language: English
• Publisher: Linda Joyce Ott
• Release date: Mar 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781777733742

Linda Joyce Ott

Linda Joyce Ott is the author of a memoir, "I AM - My Journey To A Creative Life", the dystopian novel "The Naked Law" and a collection of short stories "Open Wounds, Secret Obsessions". She is also an award-winning multi-disciplinary artist working in photography, painting, collage, textile art, assemblage and video. Linda lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.Linda honed her creative writing over the course of a successful career as a writer, editor and communications consultant. She has an Hons BA in English from McMaster University. Mentored by the late Paul Quarrington, she earned a Certificate in Creative Writing from The Humber School for Writers. Linda also took part in a workshop with Isabel Huggan at The Humber School for Writers.Linda has published sixteen photo art portfolios: "A Rainbow of Irises"; "All Dolled Up"; "Auto Parts"; "Flowers of Hope"; "Hard Core: Hornby Island Rocks"; "Hood Ornaments"; "Hood Ornaments 2"; "Magnificent Mums"; "Mexico Obscura"; "Orchidaceous!"; "Outside Art"; "Signs of the Times"; "Strands of Time"; "The Earth Laughs in Flowers"; "Transcending Time" and "Tree Totems". They are available print-on-demand from lindajoyceott.magcloud.comLinda’s art and photos have been exhibited in solo and group shows in Hamilton, Toronto and Alberta, including the Female Eye Film Festival, Artist's Inc, Index G, the Toronto Outdoors Art Exhibition, Hugh’s Room and Visual Arts Ontario. Her photographs have been published in Art Focus, Photo Life, and Camera Canada magazines, and in The Hamilton Spectator.In 2019, four photos from Linda’s Orchidaceous! portfolio, juried into the Royal Botanical Gardens’ Annual Orchid Show Art Exhibit won 1st, 2nd (2x) and 3rd prizes in their categories. In 2018, four photos won 1st and 2nd prizes in their categories. In 2017, the photo White Orchid won Best in Class (Photography) and 1st prize. In 2016, two photos placed 1st and 2nd in their categories at the exhibit.In 2015 Linda was selected to be the Featured Artist at McMaster Innovation Park ‘s18th juried Art in the Workplace exhibition (Aug - Nov 2015) in Hamilton.Linda received Ontario Arts Council exhibition assistance grants for five solo exhibitions at the Hamilton Public Library’s Gallery4: Strands of Time (2017) Orchidaceous! (2016); All Dolled Up (2015); Urban Fresh (2013); The Earth Laughs in Flowers (2012).In 2011 "Auto Parts", her photo portfolio of details from classic cars, was nominated for a Hamilton Literary Award. In 2010 she was nominated for a Hamilton Tourism Award for her chrysanthemum photo calendarIn 2010 Linda received an Ontario Arts Council International Residency Grant for a juried, month-long residency at the Vermont Studio Center. In 2007 she was juried into a two-week creative residency program at the Prairie North Creative Residency, Grand Prairie Regional College, in Alberta.Between 2003 and 2006 Linda participated in eight, week-long intensive painting workshops facilitated by artist Harold Klunder in Ontario and Quebec. Over the years, Linda has completed numerous art and photography workshops at Central Technical School, Ontario College of Art and Design and Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto, and at Mohawk College in Hamilton.More information about Linda's Photography and Art is available on her website: www.lindajoyceott.com and on her blog: www.optimismofcolor.com

Book preview

I AM – My Journey To A Creative Life

Linda Joyce Ott

Copyright 2023 Linda Joyce Ott

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is available at most online retailers.

ISBN 978-1-7777337-4-2 (eBook)

Art, cover and book design

Copyright 2023 Linda Joyce Ott All Rights Reserved

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Part 1 My Beginnings

Part 2 Filling The Well

Part 3 Travelling

Part 4 Searching

Part 5 Breaking Out

Part 6 Creativity Coaching

Part 7 On My Way

After Notes

About the Author

Dedication

To my mother, Leda Gombos, née Burello (1921-2013)

and to Günter, my companion on this journey

My mixed media Self-Portrait (6x4") is on exhibit in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s 2006 In Your Face show of postcard-size portraits celebrating the individuality and diversity of Canadians.

I AM – My Journey To A Creative Life

Gnothe Se – Know Thyself

– Inscribed over the portico at Apollo's Temple at Delphi and the motto of my high school

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you

– Gospel of Thomas

Ruptured Symmetry (36x30" mixed media) comments on the pulsating core of the human condition.

Introduction

Everything changes, nothing is lost – Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Linda Joyce Ott is an author, and a multi-disciplinary artist working in photography, painting, assemblage, textiles, collage, and video.

What the first sentence of my CV states is true, and I spend my days writing, making photographs, and creating art, but my journey towards having a creative life did not follow a traditional path. Rather, it snaked its way slowly through the years, getting tangled in a complex undergrowth of career and family issues, depression, and alcoholism, only occasionally emerging into the light.

Then, on the cusp of finally achieving my dream of having a daily creative practice, my journey almost ended.

December 28, 2010 – So tired of living. So sick of my story. I need to craft a new one focussed on my creative work. And I can because I’m blessed with time now.

Each of us is a shattered urn, grass that must wither, a flower that will fade, a shadow moving on, a cloud passing by, a particle of dust floating on the wind, and a dream soon forgotten.

The words of this Jewish prayer have been on my mind for so long, so I’ll start there. Photos and words? Collage? Painting?

A few days after this journal entry, the choice of collage or painting becomes unnecessary. And the words from the Jewish prayer prophetic.

While arranging my chrysanthemum photographs for an exhibition, I trip over the frames, falling hard and breaking the

lower bones of my left leg.

On the morning of January 6, 2011, I lay, propped up with pillows on the chaise lounge, immobile, wishing I could stop, rewind, go back, undo.

Depressed and worrying about how I would mount my exhibition the coming weekend, I complete my journal musing with the following entry:

SO COLD!!! 2 million fish dead in Chesapeake Bay … 100,000 dead drum fish in the Arkansas River … 40,000 velvet swimming crabs, starfish, lobsters, sponges and anemones on beaches … 10,000 blackbirds dropped from the Arkansas sky on New Year’s Day … 450 dead birds in Louisiana … hundreds of snapper fish dead in New Zealand … 50 dead jackdaw birds in Stockholm.

Death is certainly in the news, and on my mind. With good reason, it turns out.

That afternoon I collapse with a seizure at home. Later, in the ER, death takes me five times.

I’m told that doctors revive me after each cardiac arrest until they can do no more. Two massive blood clots travelled from my broken leg up through the right side of my heart and into my lungs. Stuck there, blocking blood flow to my lungs, I will die.

In a last-ditch effort to save my life, my husband insists doctors infuse massive doses of heparin into my veins, knowing that the experimental treatment could kill me.

Miraculously, I come back to life – with no damage to my organs, or to my brain.

My psyche, however, is a different matter. But the love of my family and friends, along with creative work – writing, photography, and making art – helps me recover.

Weeks later when I move from the ICU into a step-down unit, I ask for my journal. I need to write about what has happened to me, to make sense of it all.

And I need to make a list. My life isn’t finished yet; I still have things to do.

Once home, I learn that I failed to get the training contract that provided most of my income, and most of my stress, for the past eight years. This should be a relief as I’m in no condition to present training sessions, but I’m devastated.

My hasty reaction, typically workaholic, is to roll the wheelchair to my computer, frantically work on writing assignments, and then collapse in bed.

I’m desperate to prove that I can produce high-quality work to deadline, that I’m still in the running.

Sooner rather than later becomes my mantra, and before long, in between physiotherapy appointments, I’m putting together my second photo art portfolio, The Earth Laughs in Flowers. Ironically, this means working on the very same chrysanthemum photos I tripped over when I broke my leg.

By mid-April, my leg still in a cast, I hobble up the stairs into my studio. Discovering that no elves worked on my paintings in my absence, I pick up my brushes and set to work completing paintings left in limbo months earlier.

My holy trinity – writing, photography, and art – continue their healing effect that year and over the dozen years since my catastrophe. And I now enjoy working in one medium or another every day.

Just before the pandemic shuts down the world, wanting to find out how creativity became my salvation, I decide to write a memoir. To do so, I search my memory cache and draw upon the dozens of journals that I kept over five decades. These tomes filled with my rambling thoughts and musings prove to be a bittersweet resource.

While I feel blessed to have this treasure trove of insights into who I am, I don’t foresee the powerful effect my journal jottings will have on me. As I read, I experience, as if for the first time, all the momentous and all the mundane moments of my life. The trauma and the trivia jumbled together generate a cacophony of time past that often overwhelms me.

Many times, rattled by the intense emotions of my struggles, I break off reading the journals and seek calm. Lengthy retreats to work on my art and photos refresh me. Then I pep talk myself into going back in time to relive some more of my past and write about it.

The writing, like my life, meanders with lots of false starts and detours. And all along the way, I question the very idea of writing a memoir. Nevertheless, I persist in trying to make sense of my decades-long quest for an artistic life.

On this journey of self-discovery, I encounter my chronic anxieties and habitual coping mechanisms. I also uncover the underlying echoes that end up defining my life – my need to be successful and financially secure, and the incessant mental gnawing to write and make art.

Close to completing this memoir, I discover to my surprise, the source of my desperate struggle.

My mother’s desire for me to achieve what she hadn’t – to become an independent woman – embedded itself in the core of my being.

Wanting to make my mother proud of me was the driving force of my life. So, my relentless pursuit of career success and making money, of doing and achieving, repeatedly eclipsed my cherished creative dreams.

I AM – My Journey To A Creative Life reveals the root of this ambition and my attempts to break free and follow my bliss. Surviving my near-death experience filled me with joy at having another chance to embrace my destiny.

I hope this memoir inspires you to keep on chasing your creative dreams, despite challenges and setbacks, until you achieve them.

Part 1 - My Beginnings 1950-1967

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically … on their children than the unlived life of the parent – C. G. Jung

I use vintage treasures from my collection, including a broken Spode plate, to create Fractured Dreams (8x8") for the Textile Museum of Canada’s Shadow Box fundraiser.

Snippets

The house is so quiet. Daddy’s at work. Billy and Bobby are at school. Nonno’s having a nap.

Mommy’s at the big table cutting out material for my dress. I’m at my little table cutting out all the things I need.

I’ve got a stove and fridge, and a table and chesterfield. The chairs are really hard to cut out, so I’ve only got four.

I need to be careful with the dishes and the glasses and cups; they’re so tiny.

Once I’ve got enough for the house, I’ll work on a tree for the yard and a kitty. Maybe one with babies. They would be really small. Then I’ll do the people and all their clothes.

Or maybe, I’ll just use my paper dolls. I can change their clothes whenever I want. I’ll lean them on my spiral towers.

I’m so glad the man let me have the ends of the wallpaper. I like twisting them into spirals and lining them all in a row on my table.

Quiet. Absorbed. Joy. Is it play or is it work? I think it’s both. But it’s taken me a lifetime to get back to this idyll.

Now every time I sit with my tiny scissors cutting out bits and pieces from magazines for my collages, I see the little girl in her smocked dress, her blonde hair tied tightly back in a ponytail.

In a corner, nestled behind a dark brown door, she’s sitting at a small table above an ornately carved heating vent, softly humming and snipping, her mommy close by.

Making My Mark

Mommy takes my hand. We step onto the road to go around the workers pouring concrete.

They’ve moved further down the block by the time we’re heading home with the groceries.

As we tiptoe along the edge of the roped off area, my foot slips into the wet concrete.

Mommy yells, yanking me away. She wipes my shoe clean with her hanky, and a worker hurries back to smooth over the imprint of my shoe.

I cry all the way home.

I recall being embarrassed, but it was no slip-up. I wanted to step into that wet concrete before it hardened. Make my mark. Leave behind a permanent trace of my existence.

Still today, whenever I see newly poured concrete, I’ve the urge to step in it. I resist though, knowing it’s not the mark that counts – it’s the journey to make the mark that brings joy.

A Knock On The Door

Mommy’s sweeping the kitchen floor. Someone’s pounding on the front door.

It’s a man shouting about an accident. Mommy thinks that something’s happened to daddy. We run upstairs to the bedroom and get dressed really fast. Mommy tears her nylon stocking but wears it anyway. Clutching my hand, we run-walk the seven blocks to Granny’s apartment.

Granny and Aunt Adie are crying. Grandpa’s yelling. Uncle Julius is dead. Electrocuted at work.

A man’s at Granny’s door. Mommy’s crying. She tells him Uncle Julius is 29 years old. The man wants a picture of him. Mommy hands him the picture on the buffet of Uncle Julius and Aunt Adie on their wedding day.

The night before his brother’s death, my father had urged Julius to keep on gambling and drinking far into the night.

After the accident, he thought that if Julius hadn’t been hungover the next morning, he would have worn his safety boots to work. The rubber soles on the boots would have saved him.

Thus, my father blamed himself for Julius’ death. His guilt fueled his already relentless escape into alcoholic oblivion.

Dress Up, Dress Down

I’m a princess in a pink organza ball gown with the widest, frilliest crinoline skirt you could ever imagine.

My favourite grown-up cousin gave me this gorgeous dress just in time for Hallowe’en.

As I sashay from house-to-house trick or treating with my brothers, cries of delight greet me at every door.

I’m the most beautiful princess they’ve ever seen. I’ve never been so happy.

Later at home still dressed up – I never want to take it off, I hope I don’t get too tall and can still wear it next year – I spread out my loot on the living room floor for trading with my brothers.

Before we start, daddy stomps into the room. Take off that stupid dress; it’s a goddamn fire hazard.

I run to my room crying and no sooner change into my pajamas than daddy grabs the dress off my bed.

Cursing, he staggers outside and stuffs it in the garbage bin. The more I beg to get it back, the more he yells and swears.

Sniffling, I return to the living room where my brothers have divvied up our candy. Feeling sorry for me, they’ve swapped all my candy kisses that nobody likes for the mini chocolate bars we all want.

Although I’m just seven years old, that’s the last time I dress up and go out trick or treating.

The occasion is forever spoiled for me, even decades later when I sew fancy costumes for my sons and take them out for Hallowe’en.

And never again do I feel like a beautiful princess.

Hiding

I’m in the kitchen filling a bowl with sugar when there’s a knock on the front door.

My mother tells me that it’s Ricky, my childhood playmate who moved away a couple of years ago.

Not wanting to see him, I hide in the pantry until he leaves.

I’m not sure why I do this. Perhaps I’m still ashamed of what we did the last time we played together as four-year-old kids. We’d been cramming chunk after chunk of shiny black coal into a drain hole in the basement floor. It takes us a long time but eventually we fill it to the brim.

When Nonno, down to feed the furnace, sees what we did, he damns us both, yelling for Ricky to go, and not come back. Not ever.

The next day, sitting on the cellar stairs, my hands shielding my ears, I watch as Nonno wielding a jackhammer, rips up the basement floor to break through to the clogged sewer pipe.

Seeing a hole and feeling compelled to fill it – I imagine I found the lumps of coal just the right size and handy for the task.

I still like filling things – blank pages with words, white canvases with paint.

And while I no longer hide out in pantries, I’m even now awkward and timid around people.

Crushed

I can’t believe it. Mr. McInerny is laughing as he shows mommy my papier-mâché coat-hanger sculpture. Mommy’s laughing so hard, tears stream down her face.

I don’t think it’s funny at all. I want to crawl into a hole and die.

I tried to make a ballerina, but the paper got too thick. It was a mess, so I made it into a football player instead.

Now he’s telling her that I’ll never be an artist.

I won’t cry, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.

And I don’t. Not until I’m home, up in my room.

I’m not going to school tomorrow. Maybe not ever.

I was in Grade 7 at a new school. It was my first attempt at making anything.

We had moved from my Nonno’s house in a poor neighbourhood to a home of our own in a middle-class area of the city.

Kids at my new school had had art, music, and gym classes since the first grade. My old school had none of that. Writing paper was doled out one sheet at a time and pencils used down to the eraser tips.

This memory of my young, handsome male teacher, who I adored, sniggering at my sculpture, and declaring to my mother that I would never be an artist still rankles.

More so, as years later, whenever I showed my mother my art, she would gleefully regurgitate the story of my misshapen sculpture along with my teacher’s careless proclamation, no matter who was present. Shaming me anew each time.

Now I also wonder about the teacher’s cluelessness. Couldn’t he see the creativity involved in transforming a ballerina into a football player? Didn’t he understand how art changes from one’s first intentions during the process?