ArtSake

An artist’s creative practice shares time and energy with family, financial, and other necessities of life. In our conversations with working artists, we’ve asked: How do you balance the unconventional challenges of an artist’s work with other aspects of your life?

Huckleberry Delsignore, crochet artist
My daughters are ages 3, 5 and 7. Balancing life as a single mother is complicated but they are proud of what I do and love playing with (my) masks. I make art to preserve my sanity. I must be actively engaged in a creative project or I feel myself wilt. Fortunately, my work is easily transportable, so I am often crocheting at the park while they play. I also stay up very late and get a lot done while they are sleeping.

Joan Leegant, writer
The crazy late night hours are an inconvenient aspect of my writing life that I’ve more or less learned to live with. Sure, every now and then I tell myself that now, this time, I’ll write during the day, but invariably the experiment falls apart after a few days or a week when everything I attempt comes out wooden, and I’m pulling teeth and grumbling at everyone in my path. So then I’m back to keeping hours that make it hard to do a “regular” life and require all kinds of compromises. There are times, for instance, when I don’t go out with people in the evening because it takes too many hours afterward to unwind and get down to work. There are other times when I don’t write at all, weeks or months, because I’m teaching and need to have a more normal sleeping schedule, or I can’t throw myself into the teaching and the writing at the same time. There are still other times when I’ve chosen not to write because there are other opportunities I don’t want to ignore… What has helped me with this question of balance – or, more accurately, perhaps, the lack of balance – is to try to fully embrace whatever it is that is keeping me from the writing, including things I didn’t choose, things that are difficult or painful but are simply part of the messy business of life.

Holly Lynton, photographer
My family is hugely important when it comes to my creative work. My husband is extremely supportive of what I do, and has also been a model in many photographs… Both of my children can articulate clearly what it is that I do. Involving them in my art is a sign of respect, and they understand the ups and downs of it, as they see it firsthand… I also want to teach them what it means to have ambitions, creative desires, and a goal to pursue, and how one goes about pursuing one’s goals. I believe this is important behavior to model directly, so the more they are involved the more they see how that all works.

Sharon Howell, poet
I have a husband – who is an artist – and two children under 10, so my life has some significant delightful chaos in it. One thing we’ve been doing as a family over the past couple of years has been helpful, if difficult: my husband and kids have been spending about half the year in the rainforest of Costa Rica, living on a farm and riding horses to a little bilingual school. I miss them terribly, but the unaccustomed solitude here in Cambridge has allowed me the mental space to write in a way otherwise impossible. I also get to visit them and hike through the mountainous jungle looking out to the Pacific Ocean, where giant blue morpho butterflies float by and you see toucans and monkeys regularly. This provides a healthy contrast to winter in Massachusetts.

Allan Reeder, writer
I’d say it’s more juggling than balancing. Getting to my desk at five in the morning or even earlier used to be the solution, until my son decided that he, too, liked the early morning (a writer-in-training?). So now I write during whatever moments I can. It’s continually surprising – and reassuring – what can happen, what can fall out of the imagination and into words, if I just sit down to let it happen. But I know that when only twenty minutes of writing produces a promising new turn in a scene, it wasn’t just those twenty minutes that did it – there were hours of previous writing in the mind that contributed. And reading.

Further research: Somerville artist Tim Devin surveyed artists to find out how they managed their time, in terms of hours and routines. You can read what he found out by visiting his web site and downloading the “Creative people and time management” PDF.

Image: a crochet mask by Huckleberry Delsignore, photo by Jay Elling.

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On the blog, we’ve had the chance to exchange ideas with dozens of Massachusetts artists, exploring their work and the way they make it.

A number of these artists, along with creating their own work, also teach. What do they try to instill in emerging artists? Here, we share some of their insights into the creative life.

Melinda Lopez, playwright
Break your characters. Don’t protect them. That’s the number one thing I see — a playwright has everything lined up, beautiful words, great characters, and killer story, and then they can’t follow through because they love their characters too much. You have to break their little spines, and leave them in the dirt and see if they can get up. If they can, then it’s a comedy.

Daphne Kalotay, writer
Of course it’s possible to over-revise, but most people don’t revise enough. I know it sounds schoolmarm-ish, but it’s true. The ability to revise is probably the most underrated and necessary skill, even more important than imagination. Because your imagination will only get you so far; then you need to fix everything up – develop it fully, make sure it flows and is well-formed, that it isn’t under-baked or overly wordy or unnecessarily confusing. From what I’ve seen as a writing teacher, in most cases what stops aspiring writers from reaching their goal is an unwillingness to revise as much as is truly necessary.

Holly Lynton, photographer
A teacher of mine once told me that it was not talent but persistence that carries you through as an artist. I firmly believe she is right. There are many aspects that go into a creative practice. Determination, critical evaluation, perseverance, challenging oneself, and staying true to a vision. I was taught to work to find my own point of view and perspective, to have as a goal the ability to create photographs that would immediately be recognized as mine. If I showed you a slide show of images by truly great photographers (assuming you had a good photo history background), I bet you’d be able to name most of them. That is a lofty goal of course, so I also try to encourage artists to find balance. Happiness. Happiness for me is key, as it’s an attribute that so often seems highly unattainable. At least among several people I’ve known. I try to encourage emerging artists to find a way of living and working as an artist that gives them a happy, balanced life, because I also believe that self-esteem can be fragile when developing an art career. For me, having a family enabled me to stay grounded, that and moving to the country. It took me a while to learn an important lesson, again taught to me by a great teacher, that being an artist is a way of life, a way of seeing the world, a way of thinking, and that you are that no matter what. Having an art career is something separate.

Steven Bogart, playwright and director
Be patient and give yourself permission, lots of permission, to explore anything that stirs your heart and imagination. We hear the word “no” way too much in our lives and it puts a vice grip on our creative impulses. I see this all the time in schools. As a director and theater teacher, my mantra to them is to be invested in the success of every other person in the room with you. I don’t believe the art of theater can be achieved without this kind of commitment.

Allan Reeder, director of Writing and Publishing Program at Walnut Hill School for the Arts
I like what novelist Zadie Smith wrote in an essay a few years ago – that “[r]eading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing.” I agree with her that good reading is not only a skill but an art, a talent. I try to cultivate this through my teaching, in part because the possibilities for development of a literary piece depend so much on a writer’s being able to see what’s already there in a draft, or potentially there, if she can read it and re-read it with imagination, with vision – to see it on the screen in the mind. Go back and look again, see again. I strive to help our writers to get better and better at finding the possibilities that are inside that scene, that moment, that line, that gesture they put there in a draft originally for no clear purpose. Once a detail on the page is picked up again for its promise or potential, then it’s time to pick up the pen again and get to work on the language, making it more specific, more precise. The possibilities open in achieving precision.

Lois Roach, playwright and director
Life is messy. I tell my students that all the time. And that’s where your scripts and your stories come from. They don’t just come from four friends sitting in a coffee shop.

Jamie Cat Callan, writer
Follow your muse. Don’t worry about where you’re going or where you’ll end up. Write from the heart and believe that there is a place in this world for your voice, your story, your style. No one else can be you. You are completely unique and amazing in your own way. And as long as you stay true to yourself, your contribution to the world will be completely true and unique. Oh, and one other thing. Be kind to your writing. It lives and breathes outside of you. It’s a gift to you from your muse, so if you are kind to your own creations, your muse will make a habit of visiting you often. I don’t believe in tough love when it comes to teaching writing. I believe in love. Kindness. Gentleness. And of course a whole lot of joie de vivre.

Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, playwright
Keep a journal, write two hours a day, read hundreds of plays, go to a play a week, get to know your local playwrights and rush to see their plays, when you have writer’s block distract yourself with a 10-minute play and submit it to the innumerable festivals in your favorite cities all over the country, have close friends (other than yourself) that you study and know inside out. Never give up, never despair – after three decades of doing what you love most, the Huntington might give you a call. (Ed. note: Alfaro will premiere her play Before I Leave You at the Huntington Theatre Company in October 2011. The above is quoted from Adam Szymkowicz’s blog.)

Justin Casinghino, composer
As a teacher, I have two primary concerns. I want my students to stay open minded about everything they hear and everything they create, keeping them unafraid to go out on a limb and try something they are unfamiliar with. At the same time, I am particularly concerned with teaching composition as a craft. In other words, it is important to me that my students be aware of and study what and how the past masters of the craft have done. I think that allowing students to explore their own path, while also keeping them in touch with the lineage of composition, is the most beneficial method of study for the young composer.

Adam Schwartz, writer
Keep writing because it brings meaning to (your) life and not because (you) have visions of fame and success.

Image: East Somerville Community School mural project led by artist David Fichter, part of MCC’s STARS Residencies.

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In January, we shared the first half of a conversation between Lise Haines and Elizabeth Searle, where they talked about recent projects, like Lise’s novel Girl in the Arena and Elizabeth’s rock opera Tonya and Nancy, and otherwise explored the writing life and their life as writers.

In this second part of the two-part conversation, they discuss new trajectories in their careers, the things you don’t talk about in polite society (but you write about in interesting fiction), and the fun kind of suffering that is a writer’s work.

Elizabeth: I’ve noticed that we’re both going on a new trajectory, in our careers. You could say that our earlier works would be classified as literary, capital L, which is sort of like the word liberal, people don’t say it anymore. And with Girl in the Arena, not that it’s not still the high quality literary writing, but it’s definitely got the page-turner, plot element that’s very clear and strong. And I also feel that Girl Held in Home will be a plot-driven book. It was based on an actual incident in our neighborhood, where a girl – in real life, it was a grown woman – was being held in a wealthy home as an unpaid servant, and her visa was under the family’s control. They had frightened her somehow into believing that she had to do this. In my version of it, a teenage boy discovers this situation and gets a crush on the girl. In his All-American way he wants to help her but in a way he’s exploiting her. What set this book in motion was that some of the boys who lived in the real-life house where the woman was being held did a very strange thing on Halloween of 2001 – right after 9/11. They came from a family that claimed to be related to the Saudi royal family, and they went Trick or Treating in the neighborhood dressed as, in their own words, a terrorist and a dead American. In my fictional version, they have a reason: in their own misguided way, they think they’re protecting their family. I have no idea why, in real life, they did what they did. But it was one of those incidents that I wanted to explain to myself, to delve into.

Lise: It sounds like we’ve both found ourselves wandering into a very political area. Why do you think that is, for you?

Elizabeth: I come from a very political family. You mentioned 9/11. Girl Held in Home is very much a post-9/11 book. And Girl in the Arena strikes me as a post-9/11 book.

Lise: I still write mainly about families, triangulated relationships, how we move on from loss. But suddenly, I found I couldn’t hold back about something larger. It feels as if all of the stakes are higher, now.

Elizabeth: Have you ever written scripts?

Lise: No, I haven’t.

Elizabeth: You’re the one writer in America who’s held out and not written a film script!

Lise: I’m giving serious consideration to the screenplay, and maybe a graphic novel at some point.

Elizabeth: You should do a graphic novel of Girl in the Arena – do the sequel! I love that form, and you’re such a visual person.

Lise: I’m finishing up a novel as we speak, and then it will be time to clear the board again. I like this concept of transmedia overall, where one creative product can take many forms: a novella becomes a libretto becomes a film becomes a rock opera. And can’t you just see Tonya and Nancy The Game? It’s such a playful concept, that we can invent and reinvent and completely torque things around. And maybe in some ways this keeps us ahead of some of the unending anxieties with bookstores closing, lower profits on e-versions, the closing of libraries, less people reading in a traditional way. It would be very easy to simply get depressed and derail. But I think we have to fall back on that adage about the mother of invention and get re-energized. And that gives us the steam to do the fundraisers and other events to help the libraries and bookstores, and so on.

Elizabeth: The direction I’ve moved in is mixing writing and music. I’m a huge music fan, so putting words to music is such a joy to me. I got to do this for the musical and for the rock opera, and now I’m working on a new full-length opera with a terrific locally based composer, Pasquale Tassone. It is based on a play by an Italian playwright, and I am translating it into a libretto.

Lise: Do you sleep?

Elizabeth: I don’t. I don’t sleep. My son goes down around nine, and the hours between nine and one AM are very key for me.

Lise: That sounds like my schedule, though my daughter stays up late too. I usually get about four and a half hours of sleep.

Elizabeth: But nighttime is a great time to write, because everything shuts down. I get a lot of work done during those times. And I enjoy it.

Lise: Another thing about graphic novels and musicals and the themes of celebrity: it’s an interesting blend of high art and low art.

Elizabeth: I love that blend. It’s a very current thing.

Lise: We have that impulse to turn everything upside down and re-examine it, make sure we haven’t boxed ourselves into a corner with art that nobody can relate to.

Elizabeth: I think the current generation – even including us – is so steeped in pop. Pop culture and popular entertainment are about the only things America does well. That’s why the words “Celebrities in Disgrace” mean so much to me. (Ed. note: “Celebrities in Disgrace” is the title of Searle’s novella, short film, and blog.) That’s a title that came to me with the Tonya and Nancy incident, back in ’94, but to me, it just becomes more and more what our culture is all about. I feel like that part of a writer’s job is to engage your times, whatever they are, and our times are certainly tabloid times. These are our stories, our folk tales. And that is in a way what my blog is all about. Not only do we just dish on celebrities in disgrace and indulge in it, but especially in the guest posts, people talk about the weird deep emotions they feel about some of these people. One of the impetuses of the blog was a conversation I had with Steve Almond. At the time, he was worried, he said, about Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise was having his jumping on the couch moment, and not many people were sympathetic to him. But Steve was reading all sorts of mid-life crises things into whatever was happening with Tom Cruise. And I know that feeling. Again, I think people can identify heavily with something from a tabloid story. Maybe they don’t want to talk about it. But those are the most interesting things in writing, these weird feelings you wouldn’t talk about in polite society. But you would on my blog.

Lise: Okay, to switch tracks for a second. Here we are in an organization that supports and funds artists. What do you think it takes to feel really supported in this culture? Do you think we’ll see a point in time where people can no longer create art because they simply cannot afford to produce it?

Elizabeth: I feel the thing that writers, and artists in general, can do, that can save us, is to band together in groups and support each other. I feel, for instance, that self-publishing can work, but it’s often not a good model. It’s one person doing everything. If only these people would band together, form a collective – there are models for that in poetry publishing, like Alice James Press. People are constantly bemoaning how many people are studying to be writers. Why can’t that work for us? We could support each other, buy each other’s books, support our local small presses.

Lise: So what’s going to happen when we see the day, as with music, when you can download literature for free? And suddenly, all of those years of the writer crafting an individual property, a novel…

Elizabeth: With e-books, I think there will be, as a literary agent acquaintance of mine told me, a period of chaos. And then things will start sorting out.

Lise: Although, the difference between the writing world and, say, the music world is that the musicians are living off their performances, right? We don’t have that track.

Elizabeth: But I feel like we’ll come up with things. It’s not like we’ve been making a mint the old way. Just to come back to Literary Death Match (Ed. note: discussed in part one.), which was packed with people: if you make it – whatever it is – a fun, interactive experience, you give people a reason to get off their couches and come out for an event or off their computers and into your book.

Lise: That brings up the idea of how much art is here to entertain, and how much we’re afraid of that idea, that it’s somehow too commercial if we actually entertain someone through our art. But look at the classics. Dickens, that’s pure entertainment, with those really deep notes in it.

Elizabeth: He would have won the Literary Death Match! People would pack the halls to see him read. The global economy has had a terrible affect on fiction publishing, but I think the smart, small presses are going to find ways to make it work for them – like e-books, like events.

Lise: I think as life gets more sketchy on the financial end, my characters go more and more into survival. The novel I’m working on now certainly echoes that.

Elizabeth: Writers tap into the zeitgeist.

Lise: Where does your sense of humor come from?

Elizabeth: Well, I think a dark place. (Laughs) I often find things funny that I don’t know if everyone does. The various plots I’ve mentioned are terrible things, really scary in real life. But they have a dark humor to them that’s appealing and interesting to me. It’s just where I’m drawn. You are not on the bubbly bright side of humor, either!

Lise: No, it’s a very dark humor. I think mine comes primarily from my stepfather, whom I call my dad. He just has a certain sensibility. Kind of wry and dark. I see my daughter has it now.

Elizabeth: The kids these days!

Lise: Humor is, in another way, a survival skill.

Elizabeth: I remember something you said once at a reading, Lise, “I dedicate this reading to my daughter, who will never be old enough to read this book!” (Laughs) That, I totally relate to. I told my son that. He’s starting to get all-too-curious.

Lise: Yes, that was my first book, In My Sister’s Country. Another story I tell is that when Sienna was a baby, I was very focused on her as a stay-at-home mom. So when she napped was just about the only time I would write. Sometimes if I was right at the end of a scene, I’d turn up the heat a bit in the house. So she’d keep sleeping.

Elizabeth: I can remember doing that in my car. If we were driving along; I’d turn up the heat so he would fall asleep, and I could sit up in the front seat and get some writing done. Every writing mom knows those feelings.

Lise: And you can also change the type of project you’re writing. When my daughter was little, I wrote in small sections – prose poems or flash fiction that I eventually strung together.

Elizabeth: I’m glad you mentioned that, because one of the factors in me getting involved in theatre and film writing was that it much better suited having a young kid. I hadn’t had a book published in a while, partly because I tried a couple of times to write a novel with a young child, and I just could not get that continuous trance that you need. But I got the opportunity to write for the theatre, and I found I could do that in short bursts.

Lise: So when you actually sit to write… for me, I’m probably the happiest when I write. The actual act of writing-

Elizabeth: Is always fun.

Lise: Is such an absolute high.

Elizabeth: And if you lose touch with that, you’re in trouble. I’ve never lost touch with that. If I’m not happy with what I’m working on, I switch to something different. That’s the advantage to having all of these different projects.

Lise: But there have been well-known artists and writers who really suffer all the way through-

Elizabeth: You do suffer, but it’s a fun kind of suffering!

Girl in the Arena by Lise Haines was recently nominated for a South Carolina Book Award.

Elizabeth Searle is among the authors participating in Books in Bloom at the Robbins Library in Arlington, MA, on Friday, March 4 at 6 PM. Watch for another production of TONYA AND NANCY: THE ROCK OPERA in Summer 2011.

Lise Haines is the author of three novels: Girl in the Arena, a CYBILS nominee in 2009, was published in the US (Bloomsbury) with foreign rights sold in Turkey (Alfa-Artemis Yayinevi) and Brazil (Editora Underworld); Small Acts of Sex and Electricity (Unbridled Books), a Book Sense Pick in 2006 and one of ten “Best Book Picks for 2006″ by the NPR station in San Diego; and In My Sister’s Country (Penguin/Putnam), a finalist for the 2003 Paterson Fiction Prize. Her short stories and essays have appeared in a number of literary journals, and she was a finalist for the PEN Nelson Algren Award. Haines has been Writer in Residence at Emerson College since 2002. She has been Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, and her other teaching credits include UCLA, UCSB, and Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. She holds a B.A. from Syracuse University and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She grew up in Chicago, lived in Southern California for many years, and now resides with her daughter in the Boston area.

Elizabeth Searle‘s new novel, Girl Held in Home, will be published in Fall, 2011. Her previous books are: Celebrities in Disgrace, a novella that the New York Times called “a miniature masterpiece”; A Four-Sided Bed, a novel, and My Body to You, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. Celebrities in Disgrace was produced as a short film in 2010 by Bravo Sierra. Elizabeth’s theater works have been featured in stories on Good Morning America, CBS, CNN, NPR, the AP and more. Her Tonya & Nancy: The Rock Opera was reviewed as “brilliant and touching.”

Images: cover art for GIRL HELD IN HOME by Elizabeth Searle (New Rivers Press, Fall 2011); praise by author Tom Robbins, from the back cover of GIRL IN THE ARENA by Lise Haines (Bloomsbury, 2009); Elizabeth Searle with the cast and creative team of TONYA AND NANCY, performed at Club Oberon 1/31-2/2 (photo by Barry Weiss); cover art for IN MY SISTERS COUNTRY by Lise Haines (Blue Hen, 2002).

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Both authors have made careers of writing highly-acclaimed literary fiction; most recently, Lise Haines wrote Girl in the Arena and Elizabeth Searle wrote the novella and story collection Celebrities in Disgrace. And both authors find their creative lives veering in intriguing new trajectories — working with genres, forms, and subjects previously uncharted in their writing lives.

Here, the two authors conduct a reciprocal interview, touching on literary death matches (of various sorts), writing what isn’t comfortable, and the way creative ideas take hold of us and don’t let go.

This is part one of a two-part conversation (read part two).

Lise: You just won Literary Death Match.

Elizabeth: I did! I got a gold metal. It was just like what Nancy Kerrigan always wanted so that was deeply meaningful for me.

Lise: I’ve not been to a Literary Death Match-

Elizabeth: Oh, you’d love it. It’s a literary event that really pushes the boundaries. There’s this great guy, Todd (Zuniga), who runs Literary Death Matches all around the world. He asks bookstore owners and people like that to recommend four writers. Jaime Clarke from Newtonville Books recommended me. Then each writer picks a literary entity to be their sponsor and get some publicity. I ended up being sponsored by Post Road magazine. For the Boston event, we gathered in the Enormous Room, which could not be more fun. I was trying to describe (that space) to my son, and he said, is it like an opium den? And I said yes, actually, it was kind of like an opium den-

Lise: From all your years of experience in opium dens, right?

Elizabeth: (Laughs) But with the giant pillows, it’s so comfortable. It’s a fantastic venue for readings. So they paired us into two groups, and I won my round somehow.

Lise: I did a reading there for Four Stories when my second novel, Small Acts of Sex and Electricity, came out. I loved it. Did you win by reading something?

Elizabeth: Yes, exactly.

Lise: And did the crowd vote?

Elizabeth: No, thank goodness. I would not want to be on the applause-meter. There were three judges: Steve Almond, Jennifer Haigh, and Steve Macone, who’s known as the “comedian-for-the-people.” Todd made it very clear: this is like American Idol, only not mean. And they all got into the spirit of it. So those three judged each round, and then you had two finalists. The final round of Literary Death Match was madness, just absurd. Whoever chose the most-followed Facebook authors won. All my Facebooking came into play! And I got the gold metal.

Lise: Okay, so you’ll have a new book coming out in 2011.

Elizabeth: Yes, in October 2011.

Lise: Called…

Elizabeth: Girl Held in Home.

Lise: If there was a symbol, like the Oprah symbol or the Newbury Award Winner symbol, would you put “Literary Death Match Winner” on your cover?

Elizabeth: I actually would, I would be crazy enough to do that. My work doesn’t tend to be that earnest, so this was my kind of contest, and I was really happy to win it. I think the literary community can do more of these kinds of events. It’s the opposite of sitting on uncomfortable folding chairs in a florescent lit space.

So Lise, you and I both have Girl books: Girl in the Arena and Girl Held in Home. Your novel was a big jump for you. Young adult literature is a hot market, but I know you didn’t necessarily write it knowing it was going to be billed both for YA and adult readers.

Lise: It’s not uncommon now when you have a young protagonist to see your work dually marketed as adult and young adult. I just wrote a book that I had to write, and I think the crazy thing for me was not how it got marketed but why I was writing this book in the first place. I think of myself as a pacifist. Any way to de-escalate violence is a good thing in my mind. And I’ve always avoided watching violent movies or graphic news programs. Suddenly I found myself writing about this girl who grew up in an entirely violent culture, the premise being that in the ’60s, someone introduced an underground movement which became a replica of gladiator sport in ancient Rome, with hints of Fight Club. Now, this girl is 18, and she’s watched six of her fathers die in the arena, because her mother is very embedded in this culture of gladiators. But I couldn’t figure out why on Earth I was writing it.

Elizabeth: But I don’t think you could read that book and miss that you are anti-violence.

Lise: No, but I was entering a world that I wasn’t necessarily comfortable in. About six months into it, I thought, that’s good, that I’m not comfortable.

Elizabeth: Right.

Lise: That I’m taking a lot of risks and exploring things I would not have done. I think a lot of it was a response to events like 9/11 and the quest to survive in a difficult economy, in difficult times.

Elizabeth: You’re in the arena.

Lise: We all are, every day.

Elizabeth: And (Girl in the Arena is) a mother/daughter story. There’s a lot of resonance. I also liked how you explore the culture of fame. You wrote, “The cameras are like a wall of painful light.” Were you consciously taking on that theme, too?

Lise: So many people who make marks in our world now are suddenly escalated to this crazy place of paparazzi. I saw a documentary recently about a young boy who was functioning as a paparazzo. He was in Hollywood and everyday he’d be out there until two, three AM, shooting photographs of the celebrities. And then because of the documentary, he became a celebrity. And pretty soon, he didn’t know who he was, and what he was doing. It’s hard not to hold a mirror up to that, since it’s such a part of our culture. You’ve focused very much on the Tonya (Harding) and Nancy (Kerrigan) drama. One of the things I love is that that story has created various streams for you. You started out with a libretto…

Elizabeth: Actually, I started out with a novella, Celebrities in Disgrace, although Tonya and Nancy are just background figures in that. And then I did the libretto for the chamber opera, Tonya and Nancy, which we performed at what was then A.R.T.’s Zero Arrow Theatre. Almost all of the libretto are words that Tonya or Nancy or (Jeff) Gillooly – all these various figures who are stranger than fiction – spoke. And then we created a whole different show that premiered a couple of years ago in Portland, Oregon, the home of Tonya. We did a showcase of it in L.A., and we’re going to bring it to Boston. It’s a ninety minute rock opera, with music by Michael Teoli.

Lise: And then you have the film short.

Elizabeth: Yeah, the film short (Celebrities in Disgrace).

Lise: You’ve created an empire.

Elizabeth: Well, sometimes you do find something that, for whatever reason, strikes deep chords.

Lise: So it’s a comic tragedy…

Elizabeth: And that’s something that I love about the Tonya and Nancy story. It has a dark comedy element that’s just absurd. It’s the dumbest crime of the century and yet it’s also poignant and sad if you know anything about either of their backgrounds, really. For those who are too young to know, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were two rival Olympic skaters, and Nancy Kerrigan was dramatically and horribly attacked, her knee was whacked with a steel baton. And she was seriously injured right before the Olympic skate-offs were about to begin. Suspicion focused on her rival Tonya Harding, who was in some way her opposite, and proof was eventually found that Tonya’s ex-husband Jeff Gillooly – you could not invent a character like him – was behind it. Tonya was never, it should be mentioned, proven to be in on it. But most people suspect she was. It was one of the first crazy tabloid stories that took over 24/7 news coverage. One of my inspirations for pursuing it was that at that time, the conservative commentator George Will made the comment, “This is a ridiculous story that has nothing whatsoever to do with life in America today.” And I thought, ridiculous story, yes, of course. But it has everything to do with life in America. I thought that back in ’94; I think it even more now. This story just carries for me. It touches on all sorts of themes of American life: jealousy, the glittery surface of these pretty skirts and girls skating, but violence right underneath it, just brutal violence. And this desperation for attention and fame and acclaim that they both in their different ways had.

Lise: And that phrase that Nancy was shouting out, “Why me?” That goes to the heart of anyone who’s ever suffered a tragedy.

Elizabeth: That got so much attention, and people view it in different ways. Both (Tonya and Nancy) bring up strong feelings. And when we do the show we’re now developing in Boston, it’s going to be very interactive, and we’re going to encourage – and you would relate to this with Girl in the Arena – a Roman coliseum kind of feeling. I would love it if the audience gets into a frenzy and then afterward thinks, whoa, what was that. Because these two women tap into primal stereotypes of women – the good girl, the bad girl. I’ve been working on this crazy stuff for the last six years, having many conversations with people, and they get worked up about Tonya and Nancy.

Lise: When you look at your entire writing career, which has many phases, do you ever wish you could just take all of the marketing end and just hand it to somebody? Okay, you do that, and I’ll go back to my study.

Elizabeth: That’s interesting. I imagine maybe a lot of writers would feel that. I have to confess that I like the marketing side. I look at it as totally different, though, from the creative side. As Bill Clinton used to say, Compartmentalize. The morning time, or the late night, my best mind times, are for writing, and I try to block out everything else. But then I enjoy promotion, otherwise I wouldn’t have either entered or won the Literary Death Match. Now that I have been introduced to Facebook and Twitter, and blogging, I enjoy that, too. But, do you feel differently? I remember a terrific interactive Powerpoint presentation you did at the Belmont Library.

Lise: At the time, I thought, I’m so modern, doing Powerpoint. I guess that’s so last century…

Elizabeth: I thought it was wonderful!

Lise: Two young guys at Emerson recently created a book trailer for my book. We’re seeing more and more book trailers, but I knew that I couldn’t get involved in making an elaborate film. So I talked to one of my former students, and he said, Well, I’d love to do that.

Elizabeth: And then your daughter did some trailers.

Lise: She got dressed up as a gladiator, she and her friend, and they went into Harvard Square and took their shields.

Elizabeth: Thinking about Girl in the Arena, I’m reminded of one of my favorite movies, Carrie. Stephen King knew the true horror begins in a high school gym shower. I think you play on some of the things that happen in a regular teenager’s life; they’re bigger here, and they’re horrifying. Quoting your book: “Survival can sharpen the mind if it doesn’t obliterate it.” That idea is so relatable. And Girl in the Arena strikes me as so filmable. Really, all of your other novels are very filmable, In My Sister’s Country and Small Acts of Sex and Electricity.

Lise: Maybe it’s because I have such a passion for film, almost as strong as my passion for literature.

Elizabeth: When you’re writing, do you see the scenes cinematically?

Lise: I think my mind is very cinematic when I write. For me, an average day has three realities. Along with dream/sleep time and the waking world, my writing life is like a very vivid daydream. I feel like part of my job is to report back on this third reality.

Elizabeth: That’s a great metaphor. You’re mixing, in that dream-like way, so many things from your real life. But it creates something new.

Lise: And once a character exists in your mind, you can’t really change their actions. You can change their stimulus – you can create a car crash, you can have somebody walk out a door – but the person you’re really invested in, that main character, you can’t ask them to make any decisions than the ones they have to make. Even if those decisions are suddenly so crazy and wild and bring out some different aspect of their personality.

Elizabeth: Knowing you, I could tell as I read Girl in the Arena that you were being led along. At a certain point, you were following what the characters you set in motion needed to do. One of the lines that really struck me was, “I am everything I am not.” (Your protagonist) becomes her opposite – which is great in fiction, a classic thing – she becomes the opposite of everything she stood against, at first.

Lise: And that line that keeps threading through, which is a Biblical line, “We know not what we do.” We’re compelled, we’re following this course, but we don’t really know exactly what we’re setting up, or where this could take us.

Watch for part two of this interview, where the authors talk new career trajectories, new trends in publishing, and writing what you don’t talk about in polite society!

Lise Haines will appear at Books in Bloom, a library fundraiser open to the public on January 28, 2011, 6:30 – 9:00 PM at the Belmont Public Library along with Leah Hager Cohen, Ellen Fitzpatrick, Daniel Golden, Megan Marshall, Mameve Medwed, Tom Perrotta, Clara Silverstein and Greg Tang.

A new production of the rock opera TONYA AND NANCY by Elizabeth Searle, music by Michael Teoli, directed by Janet Roston, will be playing January 31, February 1, and February 2 at Club Oberon of the American Repertory Theater (ART) in Harvard Square.

Lise Haines is the author of three novels: Girl in the Arena, a CYBILS nominee in 2009, was published in the US (Bloomsbury) with foreign rights sold in Turkey (Alfa-Artemis Yayinevi) and Brazil (Editora Underworld); Small Acts of Sex and Electricity (Unbridled Books), a Book Sense Pick in 2006 and one of ten “Best Book Picks for 2006″ by the NPR station in San Diego; and In My Sister’s Country (Penguin/Putnam), a finalist for the 2003 Paterson Fiction Prize. Her short stories and essays have appeared in a number of literary journals, and she was a finalist for the PEN Nelson Algren Award. Haines has been Writer in Residence at Emerson College since 2002. She has been Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, and her other teaching credits include UCLA, UCSB, and Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. She grew up in Chicago, lived in Southern California for many years, and now resides with her daughter in the Boston area. She holds a B.A. from Syracuse University and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Elizabeth Searle‘s new novel, Girl Held in Home, will be published in Fall, 2011. Her previous books are: Celebrities in Disgrace, a novella that the New York Times called “a miniature masterpiece”; A Four-Sided Bed, a novel being developed for film and My Body to You, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. Celebrities in Disgrace was produced as a short film in 2010 by Bravo Sierra. Elizabeth’s theater works have been featured in stories on Good Morning America, CBS, CNN, NPR, the AP and more. Her Tonya & Nancy: The Rock Opera was reviewed as “brilliant and touching.”

Images: cover art for GIRL IN THE ARENA by Lise Haines (Bloomsbury USA, 2009); cover art for CELEBRITIES IN DISGRACE by Elizabeth Searle (Graywolf Press, 2001); Elizabeth Searle in the final round of Literary Death Match; avatar created in Second Life by Sienna Haines, based on GIRL IN THE ARENA; poster for TONYA AND NANCY playing at Club Oberon in Cambridge Jan 31-Feb 2.

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Candice Smith Corby, BENDING OVER BACKWARDS (2008), gouache on paper, 20 in x 24 in

In our recent Artist to Artist discussion between Candice Smith Corby (Painting Fellow ’08) and Julie Levesque (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ’05), Candice discussed how she balances her work as a painter with her life as a mother – and she sometimes incorporates the idea in the work itself (see above balancing act).

Another Massachusetts artist is exploring similar terrain, though in a different medium. Winchester director and producer Pamela Tanner Boll (who co-executive produced the documentary Born into Brothels), has produced/directed Who Does She Think She Is?, now screening at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston on selected dates from Jan 9 through Jan 18. The film explores the lives of women who have declined to choose between motherhood and creativity, including Cambridge painter Camille Musser.

Who Does She Think She Is? next screens at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston on Friday, January 9, at 8:15 PM.

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At first glance, their work bears little resemblance. Candice Smith Corby (Painting Fellow ’08) creates enigmatic paintings of peculiarly placed women and furniture, on unconventional surfaces like doilies and handkerchiefs. Julie Levesque (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ’05) invents sculptures, installations, and drawings that tell mysterious stories of identity, memory, and duality through striking monochromatic figures and objects.

But creatively, the two artists draw from a similar place – a basis of stirring personal inquiry.

We invited Candice and Julie to engage in a dialogue about their work, and they found shared ground in explorations of family connections, domestic imagery, and frozen moments.

Detail from FORK, KNIFE OR SPOON? by Julie Levesque (2006), wood, mixed media

MCC: I am curious how a particular work of art begins for each of you. With an idea? With a material? With an image?

Candice: A lot of times, I get an image in my head, or at least a portion of it. Or maybe I’ll hear a phrase from a song, or when I’m reading, a phrase will strike me. Sometimes they’re family quotes. But they’re always visual – the language is always visual – so I get an immediate picture. And the material is already figured out for me: gouache and watercolor. Although sometimes I’ll bring other things in, like acrylic, flocking, glitter or different sprays.

Julie: For me, it really depends on what I’m doing. If it’s an installation, it almost always starts with a space. But if I’m just working on individual sculpture, it usually starts with an idea that has a sliver of potential. And then I just hope that, somewhere along the line, there’s that moment of magic that expands it and touches something that’s universal. Materials, in the beginning, were really important to me. They really helped me sort things out. But now its really moved more toward concept, and then the materials fit the concept.

Candice: So you have a concept, and then you think about how it might become physical, and what might make the best match?

Julie: Exactly. There are some materials that I’m really excited about, like salt. If I can drag that in there, I will.

MCC: One thing that you pointed out, Julie, was that both of you explore a kind of domestic narrative in your work, both in the materials you use and in your subject matter. What is it you find in this domestic place that’s so fertile for your art?

Candice: There’s a public image and a private image that are always hand in hand. What somebody might see from the outside might be completely false from the inside. Now that I’m a mother, there are days when I feel like I’m a crazy person, and then there are days where I feel totally at ease. You can be the same person and have opposite ends of saneness. I look to the women in my family as references – those are the stories I hear. I definitely have specific little dramas that I reference in my work.

Candice Smith Corby, ‘TIL DEATH DO US PART (2007), gouache on cloth napkin 14 in x 20 in

MCC: So it’s not as much that you’re attacking the grand theme of the domestic, but that you work from ideas and events from your own life and family?

Candice: I do both. I think there are definitely autobiographical stories that I’m referencing but I think everyone has those stories. I’d like it to be more universal so that not just I can identify with it.

To give you an example: one of my grandmothers is not a nice lady. And she never has been. She’s older and sort of senile but she’s still able to muster up some nastiness every time we see her. She went to church because you’re supposed to go to church, and she wore certain things because you were supposed to. But the way she behaved behind the front door is different. Ironically, everyone at the nursing home loves her and thinks she is the sweetest old lady. Those are the things I think about – the personal vs. the public, and the humor within the serious.

Julie: I think this is where we match up really well. Because I could have just said basically what you said. It’s that contradiction of what’s presented as what family life is supposed to be, as opposed to what it actually ends up being, when you get right down to it. Everybody thinks that they really shouldn’t be quite the way that they are. I think we really suffer from what marketing projects to us in that respect. It sets up a perfect tension.

I like to think in terms of spaces. When you’re a kid and you’re growing up, you have to walk that minefield. Whatever landscape youve got is the one that you’re going through, and there’s just no way out of it. When you look at it through a kid’s point of view, those worlds are really small and really intense. We have forgotten how intense they are. I keep dragging myself back there to visit that – like the second grade classroom that I built (What Remains). When people got into that space, they exploded with their own stories.

Julie Levesque, installation view of WHAT REMAINS (2002), wood & mixed media

MCC: Identity is such a strong current in both of your bodies of work. Can you describe how identity plays into your art, such as Julie’s installation Fork, Knife or Spoon?

Julie: Fork, Knife or Spoon? is a show that’s based on surprising people into telling the truth about themselves. The core of it is a table with a graphic of all the European silverware, like a pickle fork and a slotted spoon and a dinner knife. People are invited to trace the image of one and write why that utensil best describes themselves.

It started out with my mom. I had just seen Pat Shannon’s exhibit at Boston Sculptors. She had taken furniture that belonged to all of her family members and sanded it down to its bare wood and arranged it together. I started thinking about what I would choose as an object for my mother, and what would she choose. And so I tried to ask her that question. And she refused to answer me. It was hitting a button, and she just would not go there. And I got really frustrated with her, and I said, “Okay mom, just tell me, are you a fork, a knife, or a spoon?” And she immediately said, “Oh my God, I’m a salad fork. I just like to poke a little bit!” And we laughed so hard because it was so true. That’s exactly her. I built the idea into a show at Clark Gallery a while ago, and I’m bringing it back to Babson College. I’m expanding it to an online conversation. It’s a blog and a network. People can post there directly, or they can text or email me and all of their responses will be on the site and then printed out and taped to the windows as part of the physical exhibit. I want to see how viral I can get this to go.

Candice: That’s really exciting.

Julie: It’s something really different for me. It’s made me talk a lot to other artists who are working with collaboration, like my studio-mate Deb Todd Wheeler and Jane Marsching.

Candice: When I choose furniture (to depict) in my work, I’m thinking about how they represent people. Or somebody’s posture. The way that the chair might be positioned. I try to find furniture that gives a sense of personality or a point of view, confrontational or coy, turned over or turned away.

Candice Smith Corby, STARVING FOR ATTENTION (2007), gouache on handkerchief 12 in square

Julie: Is there furniture that you use that’s authentic, like your grandmother’s couch?

Candice: There are a few. But I also have a furniture fetish. So if I could, I’d probably have ten couches or more.

Some of my images aren’t exactly someone’s specific piece of furniture, but they do reference the situations they’re from. Some are symbolic, too. Furniture and objects also go back to that idea of representation of perfection, what you have and what you don’t have.

Julie: A lot of your imagery could come from a ’50s ad, with that perfect woman in there holding up hundreds of objects. I love the balance you’ve gotten in that frozen moment. There’s a sense of, if I could just hold on! I think you capture that so well. I have the sense that there’s stillness there in that chaos. That contradiction totally speaks to me.

Candice Smith Corby, BENDING OVER BACKWARDS (2008), gouache on paper, 20 in x 24 in

Candice: I like how you talk about the stillness and the frozen moment. I don’t deal with change very well myself. It makes me think of a drawing I made once. It was 95% finished. This drawing was pretty detailed, immaculate, no mistakes. Then I spilled my whole cup of coffee on it. It’s on the paper, it’s there. You can’t erase it. So I looked at it, mopped it up some. And I think – there was a train or an airplane – and it all became the exhaust smoke.

I’m always trying to freeze things, but you don’t always have control. And you have to keep going.

Julie: I’ve come to really cherish that. Being a sculptor, there are times when I have made a mistake on an expensive piece of material, completely shattering what I was trying to build. And in that physicalness, I end up really changing it – having to sit down and say, now what? Most times, that will shift me into a direction that is almost always 100% better than where I was going. That’s where a small idea starts to change to something that becomes meaningful.

MCC: What’s up next for both of you?

Candice: I’m working on a project in which I’ll do a wall installation that goes beyond one wall, an interior space. But I’ll be using furniture.

Julie: Using actual furniture or paintings?

Candice: They’re painted, life-size furniture on canvas that I cut out and then apply to the wall. A lot of times I paint the wall either a graphic, flat pattern or a wallpaper pattern. But I might play with having more of a spatial situation to set the furniture in. But it all comes back to a flat surface.

Julie: Which works really well – taking a three-dimensional object and making it two-dimensional in three-dimensional spaces. That’s a lovely play in itself.

Candice: Thanks. So I’ll make some new pieces for that. And then I have a series of drawings/paintings that I’m working on, that are loosely based around feats of strength.

Julie: Kind of the supermom thing.

Candice: Playing on that.

Julie Levesque, SMOKE (2008), 48 in X 34 in X 3 in

Julie: After “Fork, Knife or Spoon?” I’ll be in the salon show at Clark Gallery in December and then I’ve got a show in Appleton WI at Lawrence University next March. So that is going to carry on the two-dimensional work I’ve been doing.

My work is really changing. I’ve been making these drawings of crouching figures on large white panels that are really spare. Working on “Fork, Knife or Spoon?” has given me a break from that. I’m not quite sure where I’m going quite yet, but I hope that it gels into something new.

Candice Smith Corby’s (Painting Fellow ’08) paintings have shown at Miller Block Gallery, Danforth Museum of Art, and HallSpace Gallery, among others. She has an exhibition forthcoming at the Essex Art Center in Lawrence, May 8-June 12.

Julie Levesque (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ’05) has shown at Rice/Pollak Gallery, AJ Japour Gallery, and Clark Gallery, among others. Her installation Fork, Knife or Spoon? runs at the Reynolds Center at Babson College, through December 15. You can read and contribute to the online version of “Fork, Knife or Spoon?” here.

Join the dialogue – share your own responses to these questions or the artists’ discussion by adding a comment below.

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Recently, we posted an Artist to Artist featuring novelist Karl Iagnemma (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ’02) and installation artist Brian Knep (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ’07) discussing science and technology in their art.

In an interview to gather material for the piece, Brian spoke on a number of topics we didn’t have room to include in the Artist to Artist dialogue. Below are some “outtakes,” where his imaginative mind ranges from cell suicide to arts funding to an installation artist’s version of lab research. Intriguing stuff!

On working with scientific concepts in his art
Brian: The way I find deeper meaning is to somehow make associations between the science and questions we all have. So you can look at… theres this process which I find really fascinating, called apoptosis. It’s basically the process of programmed cell death. Say a cell is damaged, its DNA is damaged, maybe from radiation. So the cell has a process where it’s checking its DNA all the time, and it finds it’s damaged. And so it can decide well, let me try to fix it, or it can decide I can’t fix it and I’m going to kill myself. And that process, of making that decision to commit suicide or not, they’ve found out recently is extra-cellular, meaning it doesn’t do it in isolation. It actually sends signals out to its neighbors, and they signal back to it. And somehow, some consensus is made, and the cell decides whether to kill itself or not.

There are all these metaphors–consensus of a suicide, the decisions we make in our lives, how we might think we’re in isolation, but actually, we’re constantly extending, having interactions with people around us. But the other interesting thing is, the scientist who was explaining this to me said that cells have no state of partial death. In other words, if you look at the signaling mechanism, the actual chemistry, that figures out whether it’s going to kill itself or not, it’s a switch. It’s not a lever. It’s yes, I’m going to kill myself, or no, I’m not. So when I hear that, and I think about cell suicide, I start thinking about how we all live in a state of partial death. There’s a lot there to explore, about the ways we hold ourselves back, about anxiety, neurosis, all these ways that we are not very present in the moment. I’m not saying that there’s this exact connection–at all. It’s the metaphorical connection that fascinates me. So I can make a piece using the science, which hits people on two levels. One, it’s sort of cool science. And the other is that there’s a deeper meaning to it, which I think hopefully can speak on a more unconscious level, and a deeper level, and maybe create some sort of transformative experience. When I have both of those, that’s when I feel like I make some of my best work. (more…)

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Science and art are often posed as counterpoints, opposite extremes on the brain-type spectrum. But try squaring that with the brains of Brian Knep and Karl Iagnemma (left to right, above), Massachusetts artists with vital connections to cutting-edge science.

Karl Iagnemma (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ’02) is the author of the short story collection On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction and the new novel The Expeditions, a creator of stirring fictional worlds with keenly observed details from the realm of science. But along with his acclaimed writing career, Karl is a noted robotics engineer in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. So groundbreaking is his work that NASA has enlisted Karl’s team to improve how robots interact with environments, for use in its Mars Exploration Rover Mission.

As an artist, Brian Knep (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ’11) has created dynamic, often interactive art installations that have shown throughout the world and won grant support from Creative Capitol and the LEF Foundation. But he’s also made pioneering contributions to computer science, helped develop special effects tools used in films like Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers, and published articles in ACM Computer Graphics and other scientific journals. Since 2005, Brian has been artist-in-residence at Harvard Medical School, expanding on scientific concepts and utilizing cutting-edge software (often written by the artist himself) to create fascinating works of art.

We contacted these two remarkable artists and invited them to join a discussion about the interaction between science, technology, and art.

MCC: It’s fascinating that both of you spend a good deal of your time in scientific environments – Karl as a researcher and engineer at MIT and Brian as artist-in-residence at the Harvard Medical School. How does that scientific environment inform and affect the artistic work you do?

Karl: I draw considerable inspiration for story, character, and language from MIT. The insulated nature of academia seems to breed a particular type of person; their peculiarities and passions are alternately frustrating and fascinating to engage on a daily basis. I have been at MIT for thirteen years, but try hard to remain observant of the individuals that haunt the Institute’s hallways. And I try to keep my ears open for the nuances of language and attitude that accompany–and, in some ways, help define–particular disciplines.

Still image from Brian Knep’s “Frog Time,” 2007

Brian: There are two elements to working (at Harvard Medical School) that are fascinating to me. One is the science itself, which I really do find incredibly fascinating, just this sense of how much we don’t know. You learn all this stuff in high school biology about cells and nucleuses and mitochondria, and they make it sound like it’s all figured out, but I’m learning that there’s very, very little that we actually know. What we don’t know far surpasses what we do know. So that’s half of it. The other half of it is more similar to Karl’s answer: I’m very interested in the people there and what brought them to study biology. And what’s their fascination-their histories, their stories, whether they think about it as curiosity or as altruism, helping the world, or some combination of that. That I find is really interesting. It is also kind of neat being on the outside, and looking at the culture there.

What I do is I’ll grab one of the scientists for an afternoon or a lunch, and I’ll just speak to them, I’ll just ask them all kinds of questions about how they got to where they are, and about their science. For me, it’s just about asking questions and seeing where they want to take it and where I want to take it. And just pushing in the directions that we both want to go. So we find a common way to talk about it, and then we separate, he goes to work on science, and I sit in a cafe and drink coffee and think about what to do with it in my work.

MCC: It’s tempting to assume that work incorporating technology and science would somehow be about science. But that’s not necessarily the case here. Could you speak about how you use your work to reveal something about human beings, or human nature?

Karl: I would argue that my work is, in part, about science, but that the scientific focus is secondary to the more “traditional” preoccupations with character and story. I have found science (and pseudoscience) to be a fertile subject area, since the everyday work of science gives rise to surprisingly rich palette of emotions and conflicts–the stuff of fiction. The cliched view of science is that it’s cold, analytical work performed by cold, analytical individuals. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Brian: I love when I look at something that happens on a sub-cellular level, and it feels like things that are happening in society. You’ve got cells that are talking to each other and interacting and dying and giving birth. It’s all stuff that we deal with. These similar dialogues are happening at a different scale, the scale of the cell and the scale of the human, and I love that. And I think we can make those connections. I believe that if you want to affect change in yourself, or others, it has to happen on a subconscious level. There’s a lot of work right now that deals with war, but some of the work is so overt that it’s not going to change anyone’s mind. You yell at somebody, “Your way is wrong,” they’re going to hit you back with all their defenses. If you want to talk about war, you might reach people better talking about empathy. And how do you find empathy for people on the other side. Or why do people go to war–maybe because they’re afraid of changing their status, they’re afraid of “other.” So you can talk about change, and about impermanence. I think more successful work works on that level. If I talk about science but there’s this other layer, which is about interaction, change, human emotion, I think it can actually be a more powerful piece. And my goal is to help people have a transformative experience, because otherwise, I’m just making entertainment, or I’m just screaming out my emotions, and neither of those is totally satisfying. I see science as a very rich way of making the art work on deeper level for people.

Installation detail from Brian Knep’s “Deep Wounds,” 2006 (photo by Kris Snibbe)

MCC: Both of you have delved into American history in your art. In “Deep Wounds” (Watch a video clip), Brian uses cutting edge science to explore how we think about Civil War soldiers, and Karl frequently writes about scientists from previous eras, including the new novel The Expeditions, about a 19th-century scientific expedition. What, if any, is the connection between this interest in history and your backgrounds in science and art?

Brian: That piece (Deep Wounds) came as a surprise to me. I initially was going to do a piece about biology or-not about biology, but about interactions, about buildings around us and how they have a memory, a cultural memory. I picked this building to do it in – Memorial Hall – and I talked to the Assistant Director, Raymond Traietti, who is a historical buff. He told me all about the building, and about this controversy. For over a hundred years, there’s been a memorial for the Union alumni, the alumni who died for the Union cause, and there’s no mention of the alumni who died for the Confederate cause. It just stuck with me. One of the ways I work is I try to trust the inarticulate, which is actually a phrase I got from Laurie Anderson. Because if you understand everything, then it’s not really interesting anymore. When I feel something pulling me, and I haven’t gotten to it yet, I have to at least explore it. In some ways, this is a piece about the red and blue states dividing the country, and about the Iraq War and wars in general, but instead of talking about that directly in a piece, I try to talk about it indirectly, through a historical piece. And that’s similar to what I do with the science work where, instead of talking about death and dying directly, I use science to explore it. So I think the process is very similar. And then I actually used some of the science I’d been learning to create the fake skin (used in the piece).

Karl: The only connection is a personal one: I happen to be interested in both science and history. That said, there’s something wonderful about viewing science through a historical lens, since it allows us to view a particular scientific discovery process with full knowledge of its success or failure, and its historical implications. This can give rise to a variety of emotions: awe, for an experiment that will lead to a profound insight; dread, of work that will lead to a destructive invention; or even sympathy, for scientific research that will, like most research, lead nowhere in particular.

MCC: Brian, you’ve been successful in design and film, including being part of an Academy Award-winning technical team. And Karl, as a robotic engineer at MIT, you’ve advanced, among other things, the Mars Rover robots. Clearly, both of you could lead full and successful lives without the arts. So why create art?

Brian: You said it right there. You said I could lead a full and successful life, but I don’t think I could. I think on paper I could. I really enjoyed working in the film business and I worked in the design business for a while, but I ultimately found them unsatisfying. What I find is that when I create a piece that has a bit of a soul in it, I am the most happy. It’s also the hardest thing for me to do. For instance, right now, I need to work on a couple of new pieces, but at the same time, I have a part-time job doing design and programming work for a company. It’s a fun job. If I sit down at my computer and I force myself to work on my pieces, I will probably work on (the part-time work). Because it’s easier, in terms of mental challenge. It’s creative, and it can be a scientific challenge, but you’re not forced to examine yourself on a deeper level. But I know that if I make these pieces of art, I’ll be much more satisfied internally with the end result than I will be with the design and engineering work I’m doing. And that’s fun, I love the people and all that, but my own work is just more satisfying.

Karl: Brian’s put it very well. I write because I enjoy the process, and find it both difficult and immensely satisfying. It gives me a sense of fulfillment that I haven’t found in any other activity.

Karl Iagnemma is the author of On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction and, most recently, The Expeditions. He’ll be teaching a Fiction Workshop at Grub Street’s Muse and the Marketplace conference, April 26-27.

Brian Knep’s 2007 exhibition “Aging” at the Judi Rotenberg Gallery was recently honored by the International Association of Art Critics, New England chapter. See more of his work at www.blep.com.

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