Cheryl Somers Aubin is a writer, instructor, speaker and writing coach. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. Her essays and articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Journal Newspapers, Elan Magazine, Foundation Magazine, and other publications in print and online.

Tony Anthony resides in Northern California, his creative heart. He is currently directing a film called “Stillness.” He is also the director of “Fearless Mountain,” a film about the forest dwelling monks of the Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery in Redwood Valley, California. Tony is the author of several books including Beneath Buddha’s Eyes, a novel set in Vietnam in 1968.

Carlos Beltran Baldiviezo is an associate artist at the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. He is also a resident and instructor at the ceramics department of the Art League, also in Old Town. He teaches a ceramics hand building class and a tile making class. His current body of work uses the figure as a point of departure. In his pieces he hopes for qualities of elegance, compassion, sensuality, humor and unpredictability.

Barbara McLaren Bever currently resides in Fairfax, Virginia, though she’s also called Erie, Pennsylvania, Morocco, Pakistan, Indonesia, India, and Israel home. She’s been a communications director in the field of international development for 20 years and is now pursuing the writing life. She is a lover of books, her black lab, crosswords, Chautauqua, Scrabble, travel, and her fabulous family and friends.

Roberta Branca’s day job is the night shift, as a reference and instruction librarian at Hesser College in Manchester, New Hampshire. Her past writing experience includes journalism and technical copywriting and editing. Writing fiction has been her pleasure, pastime, and pet peeve since childhood. She is currently part of a writing group, 4-C Coasters, in Dover, New Hampshire. She was encouraged to join the project by three-time SPARK participant Jewel Beth Davis. The SPARK project is the first mass publication of Roberta’s fiction, and she is honored to be a part of it.

Jennifer Brewer is an artist living in Arlington, Virginia. She shares a group studio at the Convergence Lab in Alexandria, Virginia. She’s currently working in oils, acrylics, and watercolors. She says of her work: “I am always observing the details around me and looking for new painting subjects. I paint from subjects that inspire feelings of awe in me—flowers, landscapes, figures, dancing—life. Overlapping, curving shapes and bright, vivid color are present in many of my pieces, regardless of subject.” Sources of inspiration include visual artists like Van Gogh, Mondrian, Monet, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keefe; also screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. The Impressionist and Art Nouveau movements also inspire me, for their use of immediacy, texture, and flowing shapes.” Her other artistic leanings include writing, ballroom and belly dancing, cooking, and singing.

Peg Bruhn has lived and traveled in a lot of places, thanks to a dad with IBM and a husband in the Air Force. She has tried to make art a part of her life in different ways—making it, teaching it, using it to help others in art therapy. Painting has been the best fit for her so far. She is lucky to have a place and a time to do just that, in her Torpedo Factory studio in Alexandria, Virginia. Her work is primarily landscape, and her goal is to use it to express her personal vision and experience.

Jayme Cawthern works as a graphic artist for Penn State University. She is also the co-owner (along with her sister Amanda Miska, her partner for this round of SPARK) of Miskabelle, an online business  specializing in vintage and reconstructed vintage clothing. She resides in State College, Pennsylvania, with her husband and her puppy and aspires to one day have a large studio filled with vintage sewing projects, easels with half finished canvases, stacks of sketch pads and a dark room.

Caroline Crawford is director of publications at Saint Michael’s College and has edited the college’s magazine for nine years. When she’s not at work, she reads, writes, cooks, runs, spends some time in downward facing dog, and herds her two young children. Born and raised in Staten Island, New York, she lives in Burlington, Vermont.

Todd Cullop’s primary roles are as husband and father—he has a beautiful wife and three amazing children. Todd is in in his final year as an MDiv student at Leland Seminary. He has been in ministry most of his life, but also worked as a teacher, a sportswriter, a book collector and seller, a pizza delivery guy, a high school baseball umpire, and a security guard. He loves to write and longs to write more. Read Todd’s blog.

Jessica de Soria Dalton was born in Washington, DC; raised in Middleburg, Virginia; received a BFA in communication arts and design in Richmond, Virginia; graduated and bought a $100 car and drove to Denver where she eventually met her future husband. They moved to Minneapolis, got married, and are now expecting their first child back in Virginia. Jessica is currently the owner of Open Space Design, while pursuing her passion as a photographer.

Jewel Beth Davis is a writer and theater artist who lives in Rollinsford, New Hampshire. She has performed, directed, and choreographed professionally throughout the United States and British Isles. She earned an MFA in Writing at Vermont College. She also teaches writing and theater at Great Bay Community College. Her writing has been published in the Compass Rose, SN Review, Moondance Literary Magazine, Cezanne’s Carrot, Bent Pin Quarterly, RE: Ports Magazine, READ THIS: MSU’s Literary and Art Publication, The Sylvan Echo, Poetica Magazine, Midway, Lilith, and American Diversity Report. This is her fourth SPARK.

Jim Doran lives in north Baltimore with his wife, Dawn, and two lovely daughters, and works as a web developer for Johns Hopkins University. Jim loves to draw and founded the junk mail art movement on Flickr.

Kathy Doran founded WORDrunner, Inc., a professional writing business in May 2000. Clients include Burger King, Florida Power & Light, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, PAHO (the Pan American World Health Organization), and other government agencies. She recently went to work full time as an intelligence analyst for one of her clients, a governmental anti-drug entity. Although her day-to-day world has become very Kafka-esque, she continues to write, viewing all of life as fodder.

Lisa Eldridge is a writer/editor who lives in Aptos, California. She has nine cats: Spooky, Eve, Pearl , Daisy, Fiona, Angel, Teddy Bear, Bootsy, and Bitsy. They are her biggest fans.

Susan Feller is an encaustic/mixed media artist living and working in Maryland. She focuses on mixed media and encaustic (wax), because they are textural and dimensional…natural progressions from her art beginnings as a weaver.

Rachel Goldberg is a museum educator and photographer currently residing in Washington, DC. She has a BFA in photography from the University of Colorado, Denver, and an MA in photographic preservation and collections management from Ryerson University and George Eastman House. An avid traveler, Rachel finds inspiration for her work all over the world.

Jen Grow has had her fiction and nonfiction appear in The Writer’s Chronicle, The Sun, Other Voices, Indiana Review, Hunger Mountain, and many others. She has twice been awarded Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and has been nominated for Best New American Voices, 2001 and for a 2005 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Baltimore with her boyfriend, Lee, and their two dogs and two mouthy cats.

Judy Hudgins is a writer/artist and single mother of two teenage daughters, working full time outside the home so she can pay for her writing and art. She has one paranormal romace triology in the process of being written and a memior/cookbook being revised. Judy loves writing, especially on a fresh pad of paper with a great fountain pen. You can follow her life on her blog.

Jane Hulstrunk lives in Williamstown, Vermont, with her husband. She dabbles in photography for creative expression.

Catie Jarvis grew up on a lake in northern New Jersey. She’s always happiest when by the water. She received her undergraduate degree from Ithaca College and MFA from California College of the Arts. She is a gymnastics coach, fiction writer, and poet. Three years ago she dreamed of a man with one leg so long it could reach across the ocean from coast to coast. Since that night she’s been working on a novel about him, enacting the sentiment from the title of a Schwartz short story, a title that she loves and hope always to live by, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.”

Robert Haydon Jones lives with his wife, Alice, in Westport, Connecticut.

Lisa Kendall lives with her husband, John,  and two wonderful daughters in Northern Harford County, Maryland. She works primarily in clay, but also loves to paint and draw.

Paula Lantz is a painter of abstracted figures, a mix of acrylic paints and collage. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with her husband and is a member of the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria and Touchstone Gallery in Washington DC. Paula is also an associate member of the Lorton Workhouse in Lorton, Virginia, and docent at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. She has two grown sons: one four 4 kids, the other has a cute little dog.

Dale Leffler is a writer, poet, lifestyle coach and workshop presenter. He lives and works in New Jersey while his children afford him the opportunity to travel to Denver, Burlington, and Virginia Beach to see and hug his five talented and inspirational grandchildren. Dale escapes to Monterey, Tennessee, every chance he gets.

Teresa Toner Libera has been a fiction writer since she was six years old when she started writing animal adventure stories for her five younger sisters. She lives in Reston, Virginia, works in Washington, DC, and longs to live and work in Austin, Texas, close to those same sisters. She really enjoyed this SPARK inspiration project.

Mary Lucas is a marketing consultant based in Fairfax, Virginia. She studied news and editorial journalism at the University of Illinois then switched to the business side of communications with ad agencies (JWT and DDB Needham Worldwide) and as a Director of Marketing and Sales on the corporate side. She started studying creative nonfiction when her only child left for college in the fall of 2008.

Brian MacDonald is a media communications professional living in Jericho, Vermont. His creative pursuits include writing, photography, drumming, and supplying his muse with chocolates.

Susan Makara has been a Torpedo Factory artist since 1994. Paintings and commissioned work are in many private and public collections, notably Barbara Bush, James Brady, the Buenos Aries School of Art Museum, and the U.S. State Department. Susan also built the leaded stained glass windows for the Garden Court of the Jordanian Royal Palace. She has a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Amanda Miska has an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. While she is still looking for the “perfect” job, she contributes her time and talents to Convergence, A Creative Community of Faith, and is the co-owner (along with her sister and best friend, Jayme Cawthern, her partner for this round of SPARK) of Miskabelle, an online business  specializing in vintage and reconstructed vintage clothing. Besides writing and agonizing about writing, she also enjoys reading, singing, going to shows in DC, and has recently begun doing some songwriting and learning how to play the guitar (badly).

Amy Moffitt is a poet, singer, and blogger who lives in, but is not of, the Washington, DC area. Her day job puts her in continuous contact with young adults from 130 + countries, and her travels have taken her as far as Iceland, Guatemala, and (repeatedly) the UK. A self-identified Presby-Cathlo-Episcopa-Mennonite, Amy is an active participant in the life of Convergence, a community center and church for artists in Alexandria, Virginia, and Common Table, an emergent church in Vienna, Virginia.

JoAnn Moore now lives on the coast in northern California after far too long in wintery Vermont. She teaches high school English for her day job, walks her St. Bernard, Apollo, daily and writes not nearly enough.

Rachel Morton likes getting her hands into things: manuscripts, clay, and dirt.

Allison Nance is an artist (photography/mixed media) and graphic designer living in Del Ray, Alexandria, with her awesome husband, Kevin, and their mischievous, mini-rex bunny, Francesca. She works as the graphic designer for the Torpedo Factory Art Center and the gallery assistant for their national exhibition space, the Target Gallery.

Maria Margarita Panas, born in Munich, Germany, immigrated to the United States, landing in Brooklyn and subsequently became a naturalized citizen. She attended Wayne State University in Michigan where she met her future husband of 40 years. They have two sons and live in McLean, Virginia.

Christine Nicoll Parson was born and raised in Alexandria, Virginia. She studied at the Corcoran Museum, at Carnegie Mellon University, and with individual artists. She works in several media—stained glass, acrylics, collage, and watercolor. Her work can be seen in her studio at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Old Town Alexandria.

Jan Peterson has studied and painted in various mediums since 1980. She currently does mostly abstract acrylics similar to the painting, “Ode to a Quilt,” submitted for this round of SPARK.

Lisa Pimental lives in San Francisco and makes her living as a copy editor and proofreader. Lisa plays with a lot of different types of art — photography, collage, acrylic painting, and more recently, encaustic/wax work — and uses recycled materials whenever she can, out of both a sense of wanting to reuse resources and loving to reinvent things. Lisa likes to camp, hike, garden, cook, and spoil her two cats, and aspires to learn how to play the banjo.

Jan Rosamond was a Student, then a Drop-Out, then a Student again, then a Graphic Designer, then a Marketing Manager, then Unemployed, then a Student again, then a Freelance Writer, then an Adjunct Professor, then an Account Executive, which she still is, although she wants to be a Retiree, but she can’t afford it…so I guess you could say she’s a Dreamer.

Amy Souza is the founder of SPARK and runs the project from her home in Arlington, Virginia.  When she’s not cajoling people to join SPARK, setting up partner pairs, nagging people about deadlines, or working on the website, she writes, edits, paints, and walks dogs. Amy has a master’s degree in radio and television from San Francisco University.

Josephine Spilka is currently traveling in the world with a few firm intentions and very few fixed destinations.  She is living by the ocean in California for the moment, learning Chinese, writing, reading, teaching on occasion, and planning to move to Taiwan in August.  You can read about her adventures (both the literal ones and the ones in her mind-experience) on her blog.

Mary L. Tabor’s short story collection The Woman Who Never Cooked won Mid-List Press’s First Series Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared recently in the anthology Electric Grace, Paycock Press, The Missouri Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Image, the Mid-American Review, River City, Chelsea, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and American Literary Review. She was a visiting writer at University of Missouri-Columbia in 2006-2007 and she teaches at the Smithsonian’s Campus-on-the-Mall, George Washington University, and is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. Mary is writing a memoir “live,”entitled Sex After Sixty in the format of a blog.

Stephanie Voss is a wife, mother, digital artist, photographer, and writer.

Michelle Townsend Wallace is a writer, artist, and musician living in Dallas, Texas. She has a background in counseling and nonprofits, and is always looking for opportunities to integrate her many passions. Michelle has been married for 11 years to her childhood sweetheart, and they have three children.

Chocolate Waters has been writing, publishing, and performing for over four decades. A pioneer in women’s publishing and in the art of performance poetry, she has toured throughout the United States but makes her home in Manhattan. Hailed as the “Poet Laureate of Hell’s Kitchen,” she runs a submission service for poets, conducts poetry workshops, and often participates in the New York poetry circuit.

Works by Carly Anne West have appeared in Watchword, The SoMa Literary Review, and Switchback, and she is currently seeking representation for her first novel, a historically-based supernatural Young Adult story. Carly is a recipient of an MFA in English and Writing from Mills College and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, Matt.

Paula Tarnapol Whitacre lives and writes in Alexandria, Virginia.

Ann Marie Williams is an award-winning fine artist and illustrator residing in Reston, Virginia. She has worked as an art director, graphic designer, publications manager, American University adjunct professor, and a children’s book illustrator. Fine arts and painting are her passions and she embraces the term “abstract expressionism” to describe her work.

Nick Winkworth was beamed by matter transfer from his native England to California’s Silicon Valley in 1989, and has so far found the process to be irreversible. When not marketing computers he makes photographs that owe less to Ansel Adams and more to the modern abstract painters and sculptors he was exposed to from an early age by his parents (both artists).

Or if you’d like to contact a particular contributor, just send me a note and I’ll forward it on.

Amy Souza
Arlington, Virginia

Round 1: May 2008

Round 2: September 2008

Round 3: February 2009

Round 4: May/June 2009 — YOU ARE HERE

I started this project in 2008 to propel me out of a creative slump and was thrilled to find so many willing and enthusiastic participants. As it turns out, I’m lucky enough to know many talented writers and artists. For some of them, writing or art is their profession. Others tuck creative time into the free spaces of a day—ten minutes here, a half hour there. Many of the SPARK participants didn’t know one another, nor did they ever meet in person, but they all share some common traits:  a desire to gain inspiration in a new way, the willingness to try something new, and an openness to receiving the gift their muse delivers.

The project’s rules are simple. Writers send artists a story or poem, and artists send writers an image of their painting, photograph, or sculpture. Working over ten days, each person uses their partner’s piece as a jumping off point for new work of their own. People are allowed to respond to their partner’s work in whatever way they wish (although writers are asked to keep their pieces to 1,5000 words or less).

The goal is simply to give writers and artists a challenge, a new way of looking at the world and their work, and a chance to inspire another creative soul. Thus, some of the resulting work is considered final by its creator; some is not. Again, the goal was not to create a perfect poem or a salable work of art, so as you view the work please do not judge what you see as such. In fact, I’d ask you to suspend judgment as much as possible and simply look at these groupings to consider how each person’s work influenced their partner’s.

The next SPARK project takes place in August 2009. Send us a note if you’d like to join us!

Amy Souza
Arlington, Virginia

The next SPARK project begins in August 2009 and we want you to join us! RSVP today by filling out the form below with your name and your email address.

THE NITTY GRITTY:

So how exactly does this work?

The group is made up of writers and visual artists who trade work and then produce something in their own genre/medium inspired by the other’s work. This could be literal (i.e., a creative nonfiction essay on how a painting made the author feel) or not. The goal, in my mind, is for us to respond to another’s work in whatever way we’d like.

To begin, you tell me you want to take part. I match you with a partner. You then send me and your partner, via email, an inspiration piece. Your inspiration piece will likely be something you have already written or created.

Partner pairs’ resulting work–art and writing–will then get posted on a web site akin to this one.

ARTISTS: Because your work will appear online, it must be reproducible in photographs. This doesn’t mean it can’t be a sculpture or three-dimensional, however, just that you will need to take one or more digital photos and send them to me in JPG form.

WRITERS: Written pieces can be no longer than 1,500 words.

TIMELINE/DEADLINES: The project spans 10 days.

Questions? Let me know! Or RSVP today! (Fill out the form below with your name and your email address, and let me know if you’re  a writer, an artist, or both.)

Amy Souza
Arlington, Virginia