Tiny Stories

Out on the playground one day, George cried

Jumping off the swing, he thought he could fly.

“This cape should have done better than that!”

Looking down he remembered, “oh yeah, I’m fat.”

Little Jeremy went out to play

All the neighbors were running away.

“What’s the matter?  Am I not a fun guy?”

Then, looking up, saw a meteor in the sky.

One spring morning when Jill woke up

She snuck in the kitchen and stole her mom’s cup.

“Adults drink coffee; I’ll try some today.”

Her mom was Mormon, it was only PowerAde.

Alone on the trail, sunburned Sally did walk,

passed the wolf’s den, where he waited to stalk.

“Some wildlife here, I am sure to find!”

Clutching her gun with a trophy in mind.

On the front pew of Sunbeams Jake sat

All the kids teased, his face painted like a cat.

“This is my territory, don’t mess with me.”

Under his chair dripped a drop of warm pee.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Telling stories is a lot harder than it seems, especially when you can only do so in about 30 words.  As I thought of many others who have accomplished successful short stories of similar length, Shel Silverstein immediately came to mind.  He is a poet that is famous worldwide and his books have been translated into 30 languages and sold 20 million copies.  He gained his popularity from several short, well crafted pieces as well as long ones. 

Poetry seems to be an art of conciseness, of high creativity and passion.  I was a published poet in high school and occasionally write fancy poems to women who catch my eye so I accepted the challenge to write all of my tiny stories in poem.  I wanted these stories to memorable like Shel’s poems and thought of as creative and well crafted, having the same poetic structure each time.  I focused on the theme of humorous, rather unlikely moments kids would find themselves in.  The subject matter is appealing because it is spontaneous and unpredictable, yet it is written in a form that is easy to follow and entertaining for the reader with its rhythm and rhyme.   Like music with lyrics, the more it rhymes, the better others remember it and what good is a story without remembering what you learned during the story.

The images I selected to represent my stories also had a very creative and interesting feel to them.  My hope was to show have a visual representation of the child in each story but then to have a hand draw background to make the photo as a whole to seem uncommon and out of the ordinary because the context of my stories was also on the far-fetched side of reality.  I choose not to have any characters other than the protagonist in the images because they are hard to draw freehand in Photoshop and because I want the viewer to still have an imaginary view of how thy pictures the story to go.  Also, being cute, little, rhyming poems about children, I found the homemade feel to fit very well and to show off the adventurous world as children see it, while as adult we only see what is in real pictures.