Coloring Books, Clouds & Crumbs

Creativity and Play & An Exclusive Offer!

This weekend I read an opinion piece in The New York Times by Tamar Adler, a food writer, called “My Antidote to Early Evening Despair.” In the story, which is adapted from her forthcoming book, Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day, Adler relates that she has struggled with clinical depression all her life and that, as winter sets in, she is “desperate to not be made desperate by dark days.” Respite lies in her kitchen in “close observation of commonplace food, in commonplace meals,” and—the part I found most intriguing—in the hidden vista under her kitchen table.

“Random Acrylic,” Lisa Marr, 2025

Adler suggests we, “[f]ind a time when the sun is low and, without self-censure, take an inquisitive inventory of the flotsam beneath [our] kitchen table.” Her flotsam is “an elaborate collage” consisting of one huge bean and one dried bean, the latter “used by a three-year-old two weeks ago as a plaything,” a “hunk of sourdough bread,” an apple core, white thread. This tableau, she writes, “is a topographic model of my family’s life, painted in golden light.”

This is a piece as much about one of the greatest tools at the disposal of the writer—observation—as it is about mindfulness and finding “a strange peace” in dark times. But there is another tool essential to creativity—how to find it, how to harness it—that is related and possibly more elusive. Adler’s three-year-old had it right but those of us grown out of childhood often overlook the power of play.

Years ago, I took coloring books into the jail. I’m not really sure why. It could have been my addiction to the Dollar Store, or a realization early in my tenure teaching that there was a gaping absence of childhood in these female prisoners’ lives (women who were really just girls themselves) or maybe it was a day that I had in mind the connection between play and creativity. Most likely all of the above. In any event, I passed around pages of coloring books depicting fairy tales, characters from merchandized movies, cartoons, whatever I had found for a dollar each, and crayons which, thankfully, were permissible behind bars (I checked). I asked the women to start coloring, then speak aloud whatever came to their minds. “When I was a little girl,” Tamara offered, without looking up from her drawing. And that became our prompt of the day.

More recently, I did a similar exercise at OffCenter Arts, bringing pictures of clouds (New Mexico has amazing clouds: just ask Georgia O’Keeffe) then challenged writers to trace images they saw in the billows and puffs: God’s shaving cream; a hair cut talking to a ballerina. These images soon found their way seamlessly into the writing from that day’s prompt, which happened to be to write the life story of a doll. I called the exercise “cloud tripping” and I doubt I am the first one to use it.

Phyllis Kornfeld, who taught art in prisons for more than 40 years, says that doodling (and I put coloring and cloud tripping in that domain), especially while listening to the radio or watching TV, can open that unselfconscious state where painting, writing, drama or any kind of art writes itself, draws itself, performs itself. One of the men in our writing group demonstrated that last week, writing while doodling on large orange paper a constellation of robots, clouds, planes, dragons with bird faces, a constellation of images he called “Helpful Delusions.” Or maybe he was doodling while writing

My friend, Lisa, a gifted visual artist, lays out pieces of paper about 6 x 8 side by side on a large table then randomly applies acrylic paint (see image above). She has about 50 of these and a day or months later, she pulls one out, regards it from different angles, and finds an image. “Maybe that’s a dancer. That one might be an elephant,” she says. “Then I’ll pull out the images with pastels. An educator and print maker in Santa Fe, Ron Pokrasso, has a similar philosophy: Do something to a piece of paper then come back the next day and do what it tells you.

“It’s so easy,” Lisa says. “The piece is already started so you’re not looking at a white piece of paper. You no longer have a blank page,” Lisa says. “I’ve done jungle scenes with weird creatures. I saw a bear once and made a weird forest with big green frogs. It makes no sense but it’s fun.”

Fun being the operative word.

The Prompt

Doodle with no direction while listening to a podcast or watching Netflix. Find images in clouds or random crumbs on the street or under your table. Write about when you were a child. Some women in jail predictably wrote about growing up “really fast,” but not always. This is what Tamara created:

I used to think the days would never end when I was a little girl. I loved sleeping with all my dolls at night. I remember praying for summer nights to come, all the kids on my street would play kickball or hide-n-go-seek and eat watermelon until the sun set. Then we’d go home, take baths and sleep like babies. I had dreams that I could fly when I was a little girl. I’d take a hop, a skip, then a jump and I would be flying all over my neighborhood. Oh, to be a little girl just one more time.

Exclusive Offer!!

OffCenter is publishing its very first coloring book with designs from OffCenter artists. I’m not sure of the price yet but the books will be available this Friday. Message or post a comment if you would like one.