Jeffrey Overstreet

The Red Elephant (Part Two)

Jeffrey Overstreet — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:45:39 -0700

What was your Red Elephant?

What first summoned you into concentration, and inspired in you a desire to create, to build, to lose yourself in impassioned work?

Something led you to pursue, say, medical science: the desire to understand a disease; the elaborate name of a virus; the feeling of your hand on the shoulder of an ailing parent. Something summoned you.

What is it about architecture? Editing? Law? Poetry? Beachcombing? Cross-country skiing? Sculpture? Violin repair? Beekeeping?

There is something in this.

Adam sees animals in the garden — look how they crawl, slither, strut, and swagger! — and their wild beauty and variety compels him to make something of the situation. He is driven to name them. He awakens and sees the woman, and he feels an even more particular drive — not merely to observe, but to engage. Jacob has a dream about a ladder that touches heaven. Revelation. Moses walks around a corner on an ordinary mountainside on an ordinary day and suddenly a shrub is blazing without a puff of smoke, and he perceives the presence of God.

Don’t tell me our Maker is not in the words he speaks.

For Van Gogh, it was sunflowers. For Emily Dickinson, it was a slant of light dazzling gradually. For Ben Franklin, it was lightning. For Georgia O’Keeffe, the colors of the New Mexico high plains. For me, in my own humble and fumbling expression, it was this…

* * *

My Uncle Paul, teasing my six-year-old imagination, doodles cartoon figures on a piece of green paper:

Two stick-figure ants. Their bodies, vertical lines segmented by three dark spheres — two for the body, one for the head. Their eyes, tall ovals with dark pupils. Check-mark antennae sprouted from their heads. As he scribbles in the balloons beside their heads, they start telling each other jokes, short riddles and punchlines.

Watching Uncle Paul effortlessly create these characters, give them life, make them funny, I’m enthralled. It seems some kind of miraculous.

I take the paper home. I want to keep these ants alive. My parents, ever eager to see what I might do next, supply me with crayons and a black Royal typewriter.

As I follow these friendly figures into a world I call “Bugland,” the story takes on a familiar shape.

I've been reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit over and over again. Audacious for a seven-year-old, I inow. What was my local library thinking?

Images from Tolkien’s story smolder like embers in my imagination. That Oxford don — though he had died a year earlier — has taken me into a dark wood for frightening, exhilarating adventures. He’s introduced me to the dangers of trolls, goblins, and creepy characters in deep, slimy pits.

Naturally, Tolkien’s fantasies and nightmares inspire my story of two ants on a journey. Illustrating their adventures on the top half of a blank sheet, I then insert that sheet into the typewriter and crank the roller—crrrritch, crrrritch, crrrritch—until the illustrations have come through. Then I cast a net of words across the lower half of the page, spelling out a story in which these unsuspecting bugs pass through their own dark woods on their way to a Christmas party.

Somehow, there must be a woods full of monsters. Somehow, Christmas lies on the other side.

There was something happening here.

* * *

I had no such monsters in my home.

I lived safely and comfortably in Northeast Portland in the care of my loving parents, Larry and Lois, both teachers, both storytellers. They were as faithful to one another then as they are today, and they were similarly devoted to my brother and me. They provided everything we might need — and I see more clearly every day that they did so at great cost to themselves. I had nothing to fear.

But I did fear. I knew monsters were prowling around the borders. I saw trouble on the nightly newscast. I heard rumors of terrors.

A Boeing DC-8 aircraft crashed about three miles from my house, killing the pilots and many passengers. There were hostage crises far away in the world. During the evening sportscast, I watched Portland Trailblazers fan leap out of his arena seat in a panic. A stray cigarette had ignited his clothing, and he was running through the crowd of fans, a human torch, burning and screaming while other fans threw coats over him and tried to wrestle him down and save him.

My fellow churchgoers spoke of “the World” beyond our community of faith, and all of the evils that flourished there, convincing me that people beyond our space were some kind of enemy to be feared and avoided.

Feeling vulnerable to those prowling predators, but overcome with a compulsion to understand, I had to reckon with such threats through my imagination. Taking what few words I knew, I wrapped them around my fears to make sense of them.

Two ants crept through a dark forest. They survived by bravery, by cleverness, by looking out for one another, by carrying weapons that were sharp and ready. They endured battles, fire, flood. And when they escaped the fanged and stinging wasps, they reached Christmas on the other side.

It felt right. I grew in courage and confidence and understanding. Secluded in the safety of my bedroom, shielded from trouble’s claws by family and community, I was engaging the world by recreating it. And so the mysteries there played a part in creating me.

* * *

That’s what I’m still doing today.

I’ve been hurt. Betrayals. Failures. Nightmares. Disappointments. I’ve learned and grown by following characters through their own experiences of these things. But there have been joys and wonders enough that I have no plans for retirement.

I’m naming the animals I’ve encountered, glorious, fearsome, sometimes bizarre as a giraffe, a pilot fish, a duck-billed platypus, or even Christopher Walken.

I am awkwardly engaging great mysteries, and making something new from them — a fumbling beginner’s attempt to catch the questions that have seized my attention with threads of prose that will, if Mystery permits, flare up into poetry, and pass on something worth sharing.

* * *

"What does it mean, this thing you've done?" the book reviewer asks.

"Excuse me?" I reply.

"What's the message behind your book, Auralia's Colors?"

"Behind it?" I ask. "The message?

"Let me tell you something. My friend Anne and I were hiking through a forest near Flathead Lake in Montana. It was so incredibly beautiful, and all the more vivid and fantastic because of the signs that reported recent bear sightings. Risk, if only a trace of it. We were out of bounds.

"Speaking of bears, our conversation brought us to talk about our mutual love of fairy tales. Anne said, 'Wy do you suppose most people reach an age where they decide they're finished with make-believe? Why do most people outgrow fairy tales, as if they're just for kids?'

"Anne's question struck my heart like a bell. I knew she was a kindred spirit. Later on, I'd answer that call, and pop the question.

"But that sunny day, in my mind's eye, I pictured a city, here among the extravagant colors, in which the king and queen made colors illegal, forbidding creative expression. I saw that kingdom drained of color, turning ash-white before my eyes. I also imagined that I was looking over the shoulder of an artist whose heart was broken by the sight. This artist, a young girl, felt the call to remind those people of all they were forgetting, all they were leaving behind. She wove her colors into a revelation. She went in, knowing it might cost her everything."

Sorry, that's the best I can do. There is no message behind the story. If I tried to pull it out, I'd rip the threads. The wild beast would disappear.

There are only the questions sewn through the story, and I cannot reduce them to paraphrase. Like a dark crystal suspended in the air, the story gives me glimpses of revelation in its many shining facets.

For ten years, I wrestled with those questions. They grew from one small fairy tale into a story four volumes long. I can no sooner give you its "answer" than I could tell you what a flying Red Elephant means.

So I answer my curious questioner. "I have no idea how to answer your question. Try wrestling with it yourself for a while. But whatever it gives you is yours. And your prize will be different than mine."

* * *

We learn by imitation. From The Beatles to Bach, Monet to Martin Scorsese, J.K. Rowling to John Milton. Whether we’re watching Jim Henson’s Muppets, or standing dumbstruck before Auguste Rodin’s “The Kiss,” when we proceed to imitate work that inspires us, we bring our unique experiences and questions into the effort. Something new develops.

This is very mysterious.

But this is how we move. I reached for the Red Elephant, and soon, I was out of the crib and crawling after a whole world of wonders. Soon I was walking, but always walking in pursuit of something. Soon I was asking my mother, “But why?” Relentlessly, “Why?” Soon I was drawing bright red mysteries, and writing The Red Strand of The Auralia Thread.

The mysteries… sometimes my nets fall short of them, sometimes I catch one by the heel. They keep me humble, curious, dazzled, and grateful. Sometimes I catch something broken, and I ponder what might be required for repair. Sometimes I catch something wicked, and wrestle it in a fit of fear and fury. Once in a while I catch something beautiful and wild, and I give it a name, and it pecks me in the eye... or the wallet.

Sometimes I’m not sure what I’ll take from the struggle. Sometimes I come away from the half-written page blessed. Sometimes I fill ten pages and stagger away with a limp.

This is how I learn to love the world. The world is full of stuff, and that stuff is a language phrased into questions. When I engage and respond, I become part of the cosmic conversation. This suggests that the Truth is Out There, composing poems for me — trees, blue herons, changing seasons, constellations.

It began with a question, phrased as a Red Elephant, that was meant for me. I answered. The rest is not history, but ongoing. The rest is redemption. A love story.

There’s something happening here. “And now the ears of my ears are awake, and the eyes of my eyes are open.”

The Red Elephant (Part One)

Jeffrey Overstreet — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:09:59 -0700

I don’t remember the other animals. Only the elephant.

Over my mattress and my baby blankets, a mobile slowly revolved, drawing a merry-go-round of animal shapes to a jingling nursery tune. Without a word in my head, without names to call my parents, without any capacity to help myself, I lay there, wide-eyed and drooling, watching for the Red Elephant to float by again. And again.

It was hypnotic, mysterious — this parade of pillowed characters in primary colors, drifting around and and around. And every time the Red Elephant came around, with his jolly smile and his dark shiny eyes, I felt a surge of desire and reached with all of my might to grab for it.

When I was old enough to wrap my fingers around crayons, I went for the reds. I scribbled shapes with jolly smiles and dark, shining eyes. I wanted now to go beyond reaching for and seizing the Idea that had triggered something in me. I wanted to become a part of it. I wanted to ponder it through the vigorous act of imitation. By focusing on particular parts — a body, a nose, an eye — I was familiarizing myself with elements that were Important.

There’s something happening here.

* * *

And it’s still happening. It happens to me almost every day.

What is happening when something drifts into view and inspires that rush of adrenalin? I’m not talking about those things that trigger our appetite for food or other primal desires. I’m talking about those things that awaken us from the familiarity of our present experience and focus our concentration, activate the zoom lens of our minds, and inspire us to make something of it.

Our days are full of Red Elephants, if our eyes are open to see them.

Sometimes we respond like a photographer who, walking through her own neighborhood, does a double-take. She looks, and then she looks again at… what? A moment. A scene. A person. An accident. A collision of lines. A contrast of light and shadow. However complex or simple, however large or small, it calls to her. It demands that she do something about it.

With light and chemicals, she reaches out. She casts a net to capture the mystery. Developing the image in her old-fashioned dark room, she makes an equivalent of that dazzling conundrum. That equivalent will allow her to ponder the mystery further, manipulating it until she can consider it clearly.

She may feel compelled to share it, to ask us what we see there. She may keep it to herself — a private and sacred mystery.

This is the artistic impulse. The creative response. The summons of vocation. There’s something happening here. A Red Elephant is standing in our path. We must make something of it. We must name it.

* * *

So we cast our nets. Nets made of words. Nets made of story. Nets made of images and sound.

Some people cast nets to trap others, that they might impress their ideas upon them. They have decided they have answers, and they want to make me agree.

I’m not fond of these folks. They make me feel cornered. They make me look for the exits. They make me want to cross at the corner and walk on the opposite side of the street. When they interrupt a show, I hit “Mute” or change the channel. When I see them coming down the sidewalk, all polished and professional in their suits, carrying their pamphlets and scriptures, I lock the door, turn out the porch light, put down the shades — sometimes I even turn out the lights to make it clear that nobody’s home.

Others cast their nets of word, image, sound, and flavor to capture ideas and then invite us to behold, to question, to contemplate. They capture marvels that cannot be summed up in mere words. They capture questions that open the world. They take something that I mistook as ordinary and dull, and they have shown me something curious, something that makes me look twice.

The art that means most to me has never given me a sense that its maker was eager to please or persuade. Instead, I sense that the artist, too, is completely enthralled — even mystified — by his subject. He’s cast his net, and caught something by the heel — something strange and wild. It is not a puzzle with a solution, nor an image that ever comes fully into focus. It is a parable that provokes both doubt and delight.

One man will stand with a megaphone on a street corner, shouting about the Red Elephant, explaining it to anyone who will listen. And if you sign on the dotted line, he can even tell you how it can be yours.

Another man will stop suddenly on the sidewalk and stare, open-mouthed, up into the sky, whispering, “Can it be?”

One of these two men bothers me. The other guy makes me stop and look up into the sky, awestruck. I probably look like an idiot, but I don’t care. When the Holy Spirit showed up, the disciples started babbling in strange languages. Remember?

I have been taught to behave like the first man. To learn to explain things. To become a salesman disguised as an artist. I want very much to forget those lessons. I want to remember what I was born to be in the presence of mystery. I want to be listening when “the heavens declare” and the day “pours forth speech.” I want to be wide awake when the Red Elephant drifts through the sky.

How about you?

* * *

I can’t explain the stories I write. I don’t understand why I write them at all.

I’ll see dogs fight over a branch — a stick that, for some reason, on the driftwood-strewn shore of Richmond Beach, just down the road from my house, has captured their attention. Suddenly I’ll be moved to write a scene in which two men fight over a treasure.

I’ll be listening to a sermon, wishing for more legroom, my knees pressed against the back of the pew in front of me. Suddenly, Pastor Kelly will share a quote, or deliver an exhortation, and there is something thrilling in the words. A possibility. A question. I forget where I am, forget who’s sitting next to me. Anne, noticing that I’m gripped by some revelation, will squeeze my hand and smile knowingly. Or she, inspired by the same phrase, will put her pen to a blank spot on the church bulletin and compose the rough draft of a poem.

I cast a net of words out across the journal page, or across the gleaming laptop screen. I’ll wander into a dream of uncertainty, scribbling and typing. Something new develops, in which the implications of the dogs’ snarling play, or the pastor’s astonishing words, take on new meaning. At the end of the hour, I might find that my net fell short, that there’s nothing there worth considering. Or I’ll find a scene, a conversation, a few words with flammable chemistry or music that feels good to me. And I’ll want to share them.

“What is going on here?” I’m asking.

That’s what happened during an afternoon hike near Flathead Lake in Montana. I suddenly puzzled over something. And I spent the next fourteen years writing a fairy tale four books long: Auralia’s Colors, Cyndere’s Midnight, Raven’s Ladder, The Ale Boy’s Feast.

This process binds me to the thing that called me. I’ve caught the Red Elephant in my fist, and now I can know its textures, its lines, and tear it apart to see what’s inside. It was just a little pillowed figure after all, felt sewn around some stuffing. It’s just a bunch of words stitched together. But there’s something alive in there, I tell you. I’ve seen it. I’ve touched it. I’ve spoken with it. When I was a baby and I grabbed hold of that animal, I immediately tried to stuff it into my mouth.

“Eat this book,” the angel told the Apostle John. Mysteries aren’t meant to be read. They’re meant to be savored, chewed, taken in. “Oh taste and see.” It becomes a part of you. You live with it. It shows up unexpectedly in your dreams.

In his poem “i thank You God for most this amazing day,” e. e. cummings rejoices in the beauty of a sun-saturated day. He celebrates “the leaping greenly spirits of trees.” He has seen something, and he is playing with language, casting his net, trying to catch the glory that has made his heart sing. The poem becomes an equivalent. And he concludes, “now the ears of my ears are awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened.”

Indeed. There is something happening here. Behold.

Five Questions for Jeffrey Overstreet

Jeffrey Overstreet — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 11:45:08 -0700

You're a film reviewer, music critic, contributing editor, columnist, novelist, and you're married to a poet. You'd be a fun guy to talk to at a party or social gathering. Do you get lots of invitations?

Why anybody would want to invite me over, I have no idea. Does anybody really want an earful about why the Oscars make me want to smash things, and why today's popular music gives me a headache?

But yeah, Anne and I are part of a fantastic community -- here in Seattle, and online -- that is always throwing parties, going to movies, going to concerts, giving recitals, opening art exhibits, reading original work at local bookstores. It's constantly inspiring.

And yet, we have to say "No" to almost all of these invitations. If we said yes, we'd probably have to give up our lives as writers.

Anne is one of those rare 21st-century human beings who values the rewards of quiet, of solitude. She'd usually rather spend the evening with a good book than a movie. She'd usually rather be by herself than out with a group of people. As a result, she observes things that most of the rest of us miss.

I need that kind of stillness in my life, or I would be a terrible writer. The world of activity is always whirling like a hurricane at my doorstep, inviting me to be busy, busy, busy. But Anne calls me back into stillness, where I find opportunities to contemplate what I've experienced, absorb what I've read and seen, and then take the time to craft something original out of those experiences.

That's one of the things I appreciate about Anne, and one of the reasons I'm so grateful that I get to spend my life with her.

You've written both non-fiction and fiction, but right now you seem very focused on your fantasy series, The Auralia Thread, which includes three books. You've said that the idea for this series came while you were on a hike with your wife. That must have been some hike.

It was. Watch out for the territory around Flathead Lake in Montana. Anne and I were hiking there, and I was inspired by the color and the beauty all around us.

As a kid, I was allergic to just about everything, and didn't spend much time outdoors. I've outgrown that problem, and I think I have a greater enjoyment of the outdoors because of that childhood deprivation. Growing up, I had to enjoy the "outdoors" that I found in storytelling. That's why I loved The Lord of the Rings more than other fantasy stories. Tolkien crafted a world so detailed that I loved venturing through it. The environment of the story was as important as the plot. That's why I loved Watership Down too. Those worlds became as real to me in my imagination as the neighborhood where I rode my bicycle.

Anyway, when I went on that hike with Anne in 1995, we were talking about fairy tales. Anne said, “Isn’t it a shame how so many people, when they reach a certain age, fold up their imaginations, put them in a closet, and forget about them?”

That sparked something for me. I pictured a city set in this beautiful landscape, and I imagined that city draining of all its colors. I imagined that creativity and imagination became illegal there. And then I realized I was looking over the shoulder of a character, a young artist who was heartbroken by the sight of that ash-white city. Then she began to weave a magical expression of love that would address the longings felt by those poor, deprived people.

The story started like that, and that's what became my first novel -- Auralia's Colors. I had no idea that it would lead me to so many wild, frightening adventures and become a whole series.

Raven's Ladder, the third book in The Auralia Thread, was just released by WaterBrook. Some reviewer on Amazon called it "a delightful upward journey to ever greater heights of storytelling bliss. Plus there's cool fighting parts." Does a comment like that intimidate you or spur you on?

Wow. That's quite a statement. I hope it's true. A review like that makes me want to live up to its description.

I write these books late at night, and on the weekends, because the rest of my time is taken up by what I call "the bill-paying jobs." It can be exhausting. Like I said earlier, I miss out on so many invitations, so many events... and I also miss out on exercise, sleep, and time with my wife. The process of writing this series has been tremendously costly, so if the books bring pleasure or any kind of reward to a reader, that comes as very good news to me.

I see so many novels that are written in a hurry, without attention to poetry or nuance. They're so focused on suspense and action that they don't invite the reader to think things through. They're often extremely derivative. And they're often so heavy-handed with their messages that they don't cultivate any mystery that might make the reader want to go back and read the book again. Most novels are forgotten within a few weeks of their release. If I'm going to invest in storytelling, I want to craft something that will live on in people's imaginations and hearts. I want to take them somewhere they haven't been before, and I want to write in such a way that they'll sometimes feel compelled to read out loud. I don't know how close I've come to achieving those goals, but that's what drives me.

C.S. Lewis said to Professor Tolkien, "If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves; but it is very laborious." I couldn't say it better.

You've written and spoken a lot about the "Christian imagination," a term some people would say is an oxymoron. What's happened to the Christian imagination, and how do you suggest we bring it back?

In my opinion, the Christian imagination needs to go back to "the Dark Ages."

The Enlightenment taught the world to believe in what it could observe and prove. This was a blow to the role of imagination, metaphor, poetry, and symbolism.

Unfortunately, Christians have, for the most part, decided to contest the world's narrow-minded reliance on mere science by stooping to argue with the same tools. We stopped crafting art that was beautiful and mysterious, art that would kindle questions about spiritual matters. Instead, we started crafting simple-minded sermons, stories and songs that were fashioned to persuade rather than to intrigue. We became, in a word, salespeople.

And if you're like me, you don't go out on Friday night to listen to salespeople. You go out to the movies for an imaginative experience.

We need to recover what we left behind in "the Dark Ages." We need to prioritize beauty, mystery, and imagination again. Faith is about the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Faith is explored in the language of poetry and metaphor. The recipe of faith requires a healthy dose of mystery, and a little dash of doubt... just enough to keep us questioning, growing, pursuing. That's why the Christian life is about a "relationship" with Christ; it's not about passing a test with the right answers. Thus, Christian artists should be striving to remind us of the world's most provocative questions, and creation's most beautiful mysteries. To tease our minds into active thought, active relationship with the Divine.

Just look at how Jesus spoke: "The kingdom of God is like this. And like this." And his stories were subversive and shocking and confounding. He did not tell "Christian stories" with obvious messages. He invited us to discuss scenarios that were perplexing, and that caught us by surprise.

Artists, by their very nature, draw us closer to God even if they claim they're doing the opposite, because their work suggests that there is something going on in the world that we cannot reduce to a paraphrase. They suggest that we can learn something by pondering relationships, looking at beauty, by contemplating the composition of elements within a frame. They invite us to look beyond ourselves.

Anybody who does that -- Christian or otherwise -- is in danger of sparking profound questions in the human spirit. That's why my own faith has been strengthened far more by secular art than by the pulpit-pounding tactics of what passes for religious art these days.

And that probably explains an ongoing phenomenon: Compare the Literature section of the bookstore with the Christian Fiction section. You'll find authors who are Christians shelved in both places. Most of the books written by authors who know how to tell compelling, artful stories--like Marilynne Robinson, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, J.R.R. Tolkien, Madeleine L'Engle--end up shelved in Literature. The beauty of their work invites a large audience. By contrast, most of those stories characterized by message-driven storytelling, stories written to make Christians feel comfortable, end up shelved in Christian Fiction. Don't get me wrong -- there are exceptions. But I would hope that Christian writers would be aiming for the kind of excellence and artfulness that captivates all kinds of imaginations. Art should not be about persuading or appeasing; it should be an invitation to discovery and discussion.

Why should people read books like Raven's Ladder? Is there a practical benefit, especially for Christian readers?

If you're asking me why Christians should read fantasy, well... that's easy. Fantasy strips away the gadgetry and distractions of our immediate, everyday lives and boils it down to the essentials of creation: Mountains, forests, fire, stone, water. In short, fantasy returns us to a world in which our relationship with each other and with nature allowed mystery (often represented as "magic") to be that much more palpable and inescapable.

J.R.R. Tolkien persuaded C.S. Lewis to embrace Christianity because he was able to describe the purpose and appeal of fantasy and mythology. C.S. Lewis loved mythology, but he suspected that these "pagan" stories were terrible lies. (And Christians continue to make that mistake today, condemning popular mythology as "Satanic" and "demonic.") But Tolkien challenged Lewis to think about the recurring themes of fantasy and mythology. Pagan myths and fairy tales tell us stories in which the world is under a curse. Something beautiful has been imprisoned or put to sleep. Often, a god or a king or a divine figure descends, appears in a humble disguise, and delivers a redemptive kiss or a spell-breaking act of love. The god "falls" and becomes a man. We suspect there is a broken connection between us and the Divine. We anticipate a hero, a savior, a superhuman redeemer. We anticipate that the curse can only be broken by a kiss from a regal but compassionate prince.

"Eternity is written in our hearts," and it manifests itself sometimes in our stories--even the stories of unbelievers. And these stories are pointing toward Christ, the True Myth that entered human history. That's why fantasy stories are so timeless. That's why fairy tales resonate with so many people.
When I write fairy tales and fantasy, I find myself describing situations that capture my own spiritual questions.

Raven's Ladder is a story about an exodus, as a society seeks a new home in a dangerous world. It's about a king named Cal-raven who follows a vision of faith, struggling to reconcile his dreams and hopes with the harsh realities of the world around him. It's about his sense that there is a grand and benevolent presence in the world, and he's trying to define that presence. But when he does, he comes to frightening realization, and his faith suffers a devastating blow.

Meanwhile, a work of magical art continues to tease Cal-raven with the suggestion that there is a better place for him and his people. It's the art that was introduced in Auralia's Colors, the first book of The Auralia Thread. It's the beauty that transformed the heart of a beast in the second book, Cyndere's Midnight.

I hope readers enjoy The Auralia Thread. It may not be the swords-and-dragons kind of fantasy story that they expect. I'm writing it because I'm finding mysteries and questions and adventures in Auralia's world that intrigue me. It's my own creative process of asking God some hard questions by imagining some frightening circumstances. And I'm grateful for where it has led me. I hope that I'm able to share those stories in language and pictures that will be exciting and meaningful to others as well.