Happy Friday, everyone!

I'm Liz, and I'm thoroughly excited to be here.

I've been trying to think what to post for my first blog entry for some days now, and have considered and discarded the following:

1) How to Walk in Baltimore, or An Introduction to Invisible Automotive Turn Signals
2) What's Up With Those "BELIEVE" Stickers, Anyway?
3) Arcane Secrets of the Trash Removal Schedule Revealed

...but on the whole I think most of the tips and tricks for living in Baltimore are the kind of thing you pick up on your own.

Let me introduce myself. I'm not quite 30 yet, hold a green card rather than American citizenship, drive a car who is almost old enough to legally purchase tobacco products, own a lot of Transformers toys, used to live with a python, and have been in and around Baltimore since we moved here from England in the mid-eighties.

I've just started my MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts at UB, and I am loving it. I've been a writer and an illustrator since I was very small, and have always wanted to have the opportunity to improve and sharpen and expand my skills, and I honestly could not imagine a program more perfectly suited to me than this one. In just the few weeks I've been attending classes I've felt parts of my mind come alive that have been more or less dormant since I graduated from college in 2002. One of the core classes I'm taking is called Creativity: Ways of Seeing, and it's absolutely accurate. Try this at home:

Obtain a camera, preferably a digital camera. It doesn't have to be a complicated expensive SLR with a mad selection of lenses, a simple point-and-shoot will do just fine. Spend an hour walking around a particular location (for our project we were wandering around the UB campus, but this could work anywhere) and taking pictures of what you see--not pictures that show the place as a whole, but pictures of the small things that make up that whole. Details of buildings, cars, sidewalks, trees, clouds, anything you see that's interesting and makes you think. Don't try to edit the photos in your mind, or make them deliberately artsy or posed, just shoot what is there.

Look through your pictures on the computer, and think about what you like and don't like, what's there in a photo that you didn't notice while you were taking it, what themes appear in the pictures. And then go out again without the camera and check out how you're perceiving the world. You'll be looking at patterns rather than seeing familiar objects, noticing colors and shapes and compositional elements in things that you wouldn't have thought twice about before the photo project. It's wonderful and slightly alarming.

I'm enjoying reading all the other entries on this blog, and I look forward to learning more about all of you, what you do, what you like, and where you want to go.

--Liz