Author: Chrys Buckley

Chrys Buckley was born with albinism, which means she has no pigment and she’s legally blind. Chrys has bachelor’s degrees in Arts & Letters, Micro/Molecular Biology, and Biochemistry. She endured approximately ¾ of medical school before breaking free to focus on writing and disability advocacy. She’s currently in the Book Publishing graduate program at Portland State University, pursuing concentrations in Book Editing and Book Design. Chrys is the manager of the Digital and Audio departments at Ooligan Press. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Sun, Shark Reef, and Aerial. She was a finalist (twice) in MTV’s “I’m from Rolling Stone” writing contest. She has won the R.L. Gilette Scholarship and the Sophie Kerr Gift in English Literature. Her debut collection Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays is forthcoming from Wandering Aengus Press. Chrys lives, works, walks, and writes in Portland.
Music, Writing

The Artist’s Way Reflections – Week One: Recovering a Sense of Safety

Chrys Buckley

MPs coverSo here we are (again, for me, so many times over), Week One.

I’ve had a lot of false starts with The Artist’s Way, AW for shorthand as it’s known around my journals, so this chapter is well-trodden ground. So much so that some parts I know so well that I could give a good gist without reading it anew. Like knowing almost all the lines and all the music cues in a favorite pilot episode.

Technically, Week One in The Artist’s Way book will span two weeks here, since next week’s focus is on the Time Travel tasks from Week One (for the full schedule, check out the bottom of this post). So we’re easing in a little here.

Since this is the first post based on a Week chapter, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to structure the posts. I’m thinking I’ll go section by section through the chapter, giving a bit of commentary on each. I’ll pull out a favorite of the quotes scattered throughout the chapter, and then discuss or post excerpts of the tasks. I’ll pepper questions into each section. If you’re joining in, now or in the future, feel free to answer as much or as little as you’d like.

The picture on the right is a picture of my current Morning Pages journal, which is almost all used up.

Week One: Recovering a Sense of Safety

Shadow Artists

In this section, there are several examples given of how a blocked creative person can be a shadow artist. Sponsoring a creative person but not allowing your own creativity (there was an amazing story about a blocked billionaire who gifted an artist with a year’s living expenses so they could focus on their art, so I’m just saying that if there are any benevolent billionaires out there looking for creative people to sponsor, I’m right here). Investing in supporting a loved one’s creative career while never igniting your own. Representing artists, working as a critic, becoming an art therapist or a marketing exec instead of an artist, going to law school or med school instead of writing (ummm ooops?), all these ways of being on the periphery.

Continue reading “The Artist’s Way Reflections – Week One: Recovering a Sense of Safety” →

Metaphysics

The Artist’s Way Reflections – Preview Digression on Spirituality

Chrys Buckley

Orkila winter 2This post is off-schedule, a day before launching the first post focusing on a chapter of The Artist’s Way. It wasn’t planned, but I went on such a digression about the Introduction part of AW that I decided to pull it out and make it its own post so it wouldn’t distract from the post about the week.

So, some thoughts on the introduction, and reflection on spirituality in my life:

Continue reading “The Artist’s Way Reflections – Preview Digression on Spirituality” →

Blindness and Disability, Writing

(Overdue) Writing Update: Second Place in Kay Snow

Chrys Buckley

KaySnowContestLast month, I posted a much-overdue writing update about being published in Aerial. In continuing that trend, here’s another update that is also long overdue.

Last year, I placed second in the Kay Snow Writing Contest in the category for graduate-level students. I’d previously placed third in Kay Snow nonfiction back in 2013 for an essay. This was the first time I entered since. You do have to wait a couple years to be eligible again (I think two or three) and I gave it six.

The piece I entered was a memoir chapter called “Eclipses of Jupiter” (previously called “Constant Eclipse” on here) a flashback chapter in Moonchild, the memoir project I’m working on (which you can read about in this sketch, and on my Memoir page, and see lots of posts about here).

It was also the chapter I read, so long ago, at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC as part of The Best Memoirists’ Pageant Ever in 2007, which I apparently never posted about back in the day, though I was sure I had (couldn’t find anything in my drafts either). The picture on my bio page comes from that event.

One of these days, I’d love to get published AND paid for a piece of writing. It’s always been one or the other, never both. This was a cash prize, of $100. Plus a free day at the Willamette Writers conference.

I had plans for that. The timing was perfect for the conference last summer. It fell towards the end of an Enrichment Week at medical school, meaning we had to sign up for activities but most of the week was totally open. Meaning that I could go. Meaning that my writing life and my medical student life were brilliantly coalescing for the second time that year. Back in March, the yearly AWP conference had been here, in Portland, on my bus line, perfectly overlapped with my Spring Break. It was all so charmed.

Continue reading “(Overdue) Writing Update: Second Place in Kay Snow” →

Music, Pop Culture, TV, Writing

Creativity Goals Check-In August 23, 2020

Chrys Buckley

Goals from Last Week – How Did it Go?

Writing

goals5

  • journal about Moonchild (writing project) at least once – oops, I completely forgot. I usually journal about it on Sunday mornings and today I just got up and went to my regular Moonchild work.
  • collect all relevant old notebooks from storage and bring them up into my apartment – still on here, gotta do it – DONE today!
  • work on Moonchild all seven days – and to get more specific with what I’m working on with this book project, my goal convert all reeeeeally old Moonchild files that are locked in old ClarisWorks and AppleWorks files (.cwk) into files I can read and search – DONE – there were two files that were too corrupted to be salvaged, but all the rest are salvaged, converted, and saved.
  • work on blog at least five days – DONE.
  • journal about blog at least once – DONE.
  • bank two Better Call Saul recaps for this site – DONE – recaps for “Uno” and “Mijo” are written and scheduled.

Music

  • seven guitar practice sessions – did six, will do one extra this coming week
  • get up through song 90 of book one of my Hal Leonard Guitar Method Complete Edition book – instead of a new lesson this week, it’ll be a lot of practice integrating from the last several lessons – DONE.
  • seven keyboard practice sessions – DONE.
  • get up through page 55 in my Keyboard Musician for the Adult Beginner book – yes, this is the same page as last week; it’s a loaded page – and get through the G major/minor scale building and exercises – DONE.

Lifestyle

  • sleep without the phone (a struggle you can read about here) – this will put me at 153 nights (five months) in a row – DONE, except my math last week was bad, 147 + 7 = I’m up to 154.
  • read through page 477 in All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which I’m reading for the NOAH (National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation)’s PWA Book Club – DONE. I’m LOVING this book, sad I’ll soon be done with the whole thing!
  • write Morning Pages every day – six out of seven.

Reflections on the Week

Continue reading “Creativity Goals Check-In August 23, 2020” →

Metaphysics, Music, Writing

The Artist’s Way Reflections – Re-Starting the Journey

Chrys Buckley

complete awIn previous posts in this Artist’s Way Reflections column, I’ve written about having a two-decade relationship with this landmark book on creativity and its basic tools (Morning Pages and the Artist Date) and its essays and exercises and tasks, all aimed and at opening, or re-opening a connection to creativity. Discovering and recovering your artistic self.

And now that the Basic Tools have been covered, next week I’ll move on to the main text of the book.

I’m hoping that some of you will join me on this Artist’s Way journey. Later in the post, I’m going to give a sketch of my plans for doing the book and this column, and different ways to join in. To find that, you can skip ahead to the section titled The Plan.

First though, I wanted to give a little history on my latest re-launch of the journey.

Continue reading “The Artist’s Way Reflections – Re-Starting the Journey” →

Metaphysics

Playing with a Thoth Deck

Chrys Buckley

thothA week or so ago, I was on the phone with my friend Scott, talking about life updates–my big life updates, his last year of internal medicine residency, how covid is in our regions, his recent engagement and plans to have a wedding at an EDM festival next summer if such gatherings can happen then, he and his fiance watching Breaking Bad (him for the first time), my plans to start recapping Better Call Saul for this site–and somewhere in there, he mentioned that he’d recently gotten into tarot.

Ooooh, I thought. I love tarot, and I love talking tarot with people, and it’s always a jolt when someone in the science or medical world is also into tarot, because I don’t think there are many of us. I got a similar jolt when a classmate posted that they were doing an astrology workshop for an enrichment week activity, and some of the ensuing comments, and not just mine, were about tarot.

It’s a weird tension for me to contain inside myself, the hardcore science and rational side and the metaphysical side. That’s a topic I could write a lot about but for the sake of not going off on too many tangents, I’m going to shelve that idea for another day. Suffice to say, it’s a tension that’s at the core of who I am and I’m a little obsessed with science, with wanting to protect people from bad science or pseudoscience scams, and also with tarot and other such mystical systems, and maybe most of all with the concept of belief itself. But let’s set all that aside for now.

With all that aside, whenever someone first mentions tarot to me, the first thing I want to talk about is decks. There are so, so, so many. Different artwork, different books of interpretations, different aesthetics to both.

Continue reading “Playing with a Thoth Deck” →

Music, Writing

Creativity Goals Check-In August 16, 2020

Chrys Buckley

goals4Goals from Last Week – How Did it Go?

Writing

  • journal about Moonchild (writing project) at least once – DONE this morning.
  • collect all relevant old notebooks from storage and bring them up into my apartment – still haven’t done this, so it’ll remain on the list.
  • work on Moonchild all seven days – currently working on Nick timeline (the timeline for a relationship that figures prominently in my memoir project, explained in the reflections section of this previous check-in) – DONE.
  • work on blog at least five days – DONE.
  • journal about blog at least once – DONE.

Music

  • seven guitar practice sessions – yeah, I actually did ten! I wanted to make up for the lost sessions last week.
  • get up through song 86 of book one of my Hal Leonard Guitar Method Complete Edition book and introduction of the D chord – DONE.
  • seven keyboard practice sessions – eleven! Also making up for lost sessions last week.
  • get up through page 55 in my Keyboard Musician for the Adult Beginner book – DONE.

Lifestyle

Reflections on the Week

Continue reading “Creativity Goals Check-In August 16, 2020” →

Pop Culture

Spotlight On: Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen

Chrys Buckley

liesLies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen was the first nonfiction, non memoir book I ever read of my own free will, in 2003 when I was twenty-two. It was the book that showed me I could enjoy reading a nonfiction book based on facts and research (as opposed to fiction and as opposed to nonfiction that’s story-based), especially when it wasn’t assigned. Many more books of this variety came after, but this book was my first.

Summary

Lies My Teacher Told Me explores the misinformation in American History textbooks by looking at it from several different angles. The most prominent of these is James W. Loewen’s thorough survey of twelve textbooks used in American History high school classes across the country and exploring where they fall short–omissions, some outright lies, reliance on secondary (and tertiary, etc.) sources instead of available primary sources–and how they leave us disconnected from our history. He also goes into the process for textbook approval for school systems, and how censorship can often play a role there.

Continue reading “Spotlight On: Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen” →

Blindness and Disability, Writing

The Artist’s Way Reflections – The Basic Tools: The Artist Date

Chrys Buckley

Artist DateIn The Artist’s Way, the seminal book on creativity, author Julia Cameron introduces two Basic Tools, after the introduction and before the week-by-week chapters. These two Basic Tools, she says, are the cornerstone to connecting with creativity.

The first is Morning Pages, discussed in last week’s Artist’s Way Reflections column, the practice of writing three handwritten pages of whatever comes to mind every morning. I’ve wrestled with these pages, but ultimately find them to be helpful, a way to connect to what I’m actually feeling, which isn’t always easy but is in its own way grounding. They’re also a good source of fresh ideas, a way to puzzle through problems and often a place to dump the mental waste before starting the day.

The second Basic Tool is the Artist Date. You’re supposed to go on a “date” with your artist self once a week. Do something fun for an hour and no one else is allowed to come along. Quality time with your creative side.

And I’m going to be real. I get the theory behind it, it all sounds great when Julia Cameron extols the values of an Artist Date. But in actuality, I hate it.

Continue reading “The Artist’s Way Reflections – The Basic Tools: The Artist Date” →

Writing

Updating a Screenplay to Current-ish Day

Chrys Buckley

screenplayAlmost two months ago, I finished revising a feature-length screenplay. It’s something that’s been on my back burner for a long time (six years) and I finally had the time to look at it again. One of the most interesting and challenging things about revising it was updating it to current day.

For a little background, I’ve been working on a lot of writing projects since early on in quarantine.

Even then, I often still feel like I’m not as consistent as I’d like to be–I don’t work on my writing every day, some weeks have more off than on days, and some have no on days at all–but even so, it’s the most consistent, longest stretch I’ve had of working on my writing in…at least a decade? Maybe more.

Continue reading “Updating a Screenplay to Current-ish Day” →