Well over ten years ago I was walking our dog Jasper when I noticed a pair of shoes, abandoned, placed side by side as if their owner had been taken up in the rapture. That was the story I told myself. I took a photograph and posted it on Instagram for fun. From then on, I kept noticing more abandoned shoes. Sometimes one, sometimes a pair. Always curious to me. I wondered about their stories: Why were they left? What happened to the owner? I photographed them and shared the images with my friends. There wasn’t really a point to taking the photos other than it amused me. It seemed to amuse my friends too. They would chip in on the story behind the photo. I would occasionally get sent an image of an abandoned shoe with a note, ‘Saw this and thought of you.’ (Now that you are reading this, you will start noticing abandoned shoes too!)
A couple of weeks ago I published a small book of these images. After many years sitting on my phone they finally found a purpose: they are collected together to act as a series of writing prompts. It struck me that if their stories were intriguing to me, they might also be to others. The book contains 20 photographs of abandoned shoes with empty space below for people to write. It also has a short explanation of how to construct haiku poetry and questions to kickstart people’s writing so they can dig in to different creative ideas around the images. The book is called Abandoned Shoe Haiku but encourages all types of creative writing.
Why is this a blog post? One reason is that I want to celebrate the publishing of this little book and let as many people know about it as possible. Here’s the link – www.benchpressbooks.com. The other reason is to communicate that it is fine, good even, to pursue a creative impulse even though you don’t know where it is going to lead. Maybe you feel like you want to review a policy or a process even though nobody is complaining about it. Maybe you want to make a presentation deck about something even though no-one has asked for one. Maybe you have the urge to learn something new because you think it might be interesting rather than because you need to. Do it. Go with your gut. At the least you will be satisfied in the moment and you will learn something or get better at something. But more likely, it will be a stepping stone to something else. The experience you gain may be directly applicable or even find use in a totally unrelated area.
And yes, you are welcome to send me pictures of abandoned shoes, or, even better, include some creative writing with that photograph.
