I had a dream the other night where high school students started a rebellion using poetry.
In the dream, the kids were concerned about being identified by their handwriting, or by IP addresses, so they took great pains to turn the poems into visual art rather than simply writing out or posting their poetry. They cut out words from magazines and other print sources. They wrote on pictures using Sharpie and their non-dominant hand. They wrote on paper, but then crumpled the paper, copying it multiple times to mask their hand-writing.
After a while, the storyline of the dream became lost and it turned into me just coming up with what essentially now was an art project. What supplies did I have that would work for this "guerrilla poetry?" Could I make this work as a youth library program?
I haven't done kids' art projects as part of my job for 2 1/2 years - and I never did teens - but I still come up with stuff like this. I constantly see things, or come up with things, and think, "gosh, what a cool art project!" Maybe someday I'll get to the point where I'm doing that again, either in my main job, as volunteer work, or even with my own kids some day. (Correction, if I have kids, they will have art projects : )
In the grand scheme of things, I didn't do kids' art projects all that long either - just a couple of years. But I grew up in a house where craft projects were the norm, where my mom taught pre-school and/or art for most of my childhood, and then I went into costume design for a few years.
While my art is mostly verbal now, I do sometimes get the itch to take up paper, paint, pens and just craft something. If I ever get around to doing any "guerrilla poetry," like I describe above, I'll show it to you all.