ArtSake

Years ago, Mira Bartók‘s work as an artist and writer was threatened when a car accident and subsequent brain injury made even the most basic functions of memory a major struggle. Yet rather than shy away, Mira makes memory a central organizing idea of her memoir about life with a schizophrenic mother; the book is called, in fact, The Memory Palace.

Similarly, the accident complicated Mira’s ability to piece together a life as an artist, making it harder to seek freelance work and grants. But she responded with relentless research, making herself an expert in grants and residencies, and sharing that expertise on her blog Mira’s List.

The Memory Palace was recently released in paperback, and on the cusp of a host of events in New England, we asked Mira about her book, her art, and her life as a multi-faceted, generous, resiliently talented artist.

ArtSake: One of the things I love about your book is its dual portrayal of an artist’s unconventional life and the challenges of living in a family touched by mental illness. Is it possible the same traits that have helped you thrive despite your mother’s schizophrenia have contributed to your successes as an artist?

Mira: Maybe having a certain level of curiosity, optimism, determination, and passion helped me to survive a challenging upbringing as well as thrive as an artist. Possessing those qualities certainly doesn’t hurt these days when the future looks so bleak.

ArtSake: In your interview with Terry Gross on NPR, you mentioned that the largest impact of your traumatic brain injury (TBI) was on your own self-conception as someone with boundless endurance and energy. Did the injury change the way you viewed yourself as an artist, as well? Did it change the way you create art?

Mira: I think that the way I view myself as an artist continues to evolve, but it always did, even before my accident. I grew up thinking I was a painter but that morphed into becoming someone who serves the idea, rather than the medium. There was, however, an earlier post-TBI period when I didn’t know if I had it in me to create anything at all of substance anymore. I was very frustrated because I would immediately forget what I wrote or drew the day after I created it – if I even had the energy to make something worthwhile. I still struggle with that from time to time. But nowadays, I think the biggest change is that I am much more choosy about how I spend my time. I have much less mental endurance now, therefore, I can only take on projects that mean a lot to me. It means saying no to a lot of things. What this injury did was take away the ability to have a day job and also make art.

ArtSake: On The Memory Palace blog, you’ve mentioned your disappointment that some responses to your book have focused on the rare instances of violence in schizophrenia. Have there been other reactions to your book that have surprised you?

Mira: My biggest surprise has been how widespread an effect my book has had on people. I get letters, very positive ones, from people of all ages, genders, races and backgrounds. I have also been astonished how many teens, boys in particular, have read and liked my book.

ArtSake: I’m fascinated by the range of your creative work. You trained as a musician, are an accomplished visual artist, and have written for both adults and children. How does your work in one artistic discipline interact and inform the others?

Mira: Okay Dan, full disclosure – I am not actually trained as a musician. I’ve only taken lessons here and there. But I dare to suck (sometimes). As far as all these disciplines interacting, I feel like they all inform one another. Music informs everything – I write out loud in a voice recorder and the words have to sing or they are not worth putting down on the page. I hear music when I work on certain drawings, like ones I am working on for an upcoming (far down the road) YA novel set in the Norwegian Arctic. I heard music while I was drawing my memory palace images for my book, which is partially why I filmed the drawing of it – so it could be used in a little stop-action animation with a sound track. When I get stuck in writing, I try to draw what I am thinking and vice versa. I think it is not only the way my brain works – one way of seeing overlapping the other – but it is also my way of recycling ideas and seeing what happens to an idea when it is used in another format.

ArtSake: I was interested to note, in your acknowledgements, that you thank Jedediah Berry, who was a colleague in the UMass Amherst MFA Writing Program. Can you speak about how having a community of writers and readers during the writing process has contributed to your work?

Mira: I think having a community of writers and great readers is imperative for an author, at least that is my opinion. We can help elevate each other, champion each other and give each other honest feedback. Everyone needs a b.s. detector once in a while because we don’t always use our most authentic voice. Sometimes we become too much in love with our own language and that doesn’t always serve the project at hand. A good reader can help your best self emerge on the page. And if you are doing muscular reading of good work, it can only help you learn how to edit your own work in a more refined and brutally honest way.

I don’t meet regularly with any writers right now but I think I would like to again in the future, after my book tour is over. And yes, Jedediah was really a godsend during this crazy process of trying to write a book. There were other editing angels along the way too, especially my friend David Skillicorn, who is a documentary filmmaker. I was about to send my book out to my agent until David read it. He made some suggestions that made me rip the book apart again and turn it into the one you see today. I also gave my book to non-writers to read: farmers, teachers, musicians, and others who are not professional writers but who love books.

ArtSake: You’ve moved around a lot in your life, including to some artistically auspicious cities, like Chicago and Florence, Italy. But it seems like you’ve found a home in Western Mass. What appeals to you, as a creative person, about the place you live now?

Mira: I really miss Chicago sometimes, especially being able to go to a major museum any day of the week. But my need to be in the natural world is a much stronger pull. I need to walk out my door and go right onto a forest trail and that is what I have here. I love the silence, the night-songs of coyotes, the stars that aren’t obscured by city lights, and the green, green world that is my backyard and the hills beyond. It is peace – pure and simple. It helps me to create from a quiet, timeless place without the perpetual pressure to be in the world of machines and noise and people.

ArtSake: Shelf Awareness has a cool interview with your editor Dominick Anfuso, who was drawn to the book as an uncommon mother-daughter story. Can you talk about the process of finding and working with your publisher?

Mira: Well, my agent, Jennifer Gates, sent my book out to a bunch of editors at publishing houses in NYC and created a feeding frenzy of sorts. Several editors bid on my book – one was even a pre-empted bid which I turned down because the editor called certain sections of my book ‘artsy.’ That word always makes me cringe. The editor is a fantastic literary editor with an amazing reputation and stable of brilliant authors but I knew she wasn’t right for this particular book. Plus, well, there was that artsy thing.

Anyway, I talked to the editors who interested me and in the end I chose Dominick Anfuso and Leah Miller from Free Press (Simon & Schuster). Not only was their financial offer good, these two editors felt like sensitive, warm, and funny people I’d want to not only work with but also sit down and share a meal. They asked me really smart questions about my work and didn’t try to tell me how they would change my book to fit their needs.

The funny thing is that I assumed that the more independent literary presses would be more innovative in their ideas about how my book could be developed but in this case, the opposite was true. Free Press was open to the most imaginative ideas and loved my unconventional structure, using snippets of my mother’s diary and my own art work to begin each chapter. And working with them was great. Basically, they asked me probing questions on my manuscript, questions that forced me to dig deeper emotionally, and the book you see now is the result of that more intense mining of my past. I would work with them again in a heartbeat.

ArtSake: Your blog has a treasury of superb advice for artists looking for funding (and we re-posted some of it on ArtSake). What’s the most important thing an artist needs to know, going into a funding search?

Mira: Some important things to know are: Where are you in your career? Are you emerging? Mid-career? Established? And what do you realistically need?

Also, it’s really important to know that when you are looking for funding, most larger grants and fellowships have deadlines nine months to a year before the award is actually given. So artists need to plan way, way ahead!

ArtSake: In so many ways, The Memory Palace is the book you were born to write. That’s why I am so fascinated to know what your next writing – or artistic – project will be. Any hints?

Mira: Dan, these days I am all over the map. I have been on book tour since January, except for a brief two month hiatus this summer. And my paperback tour won’t end until Thanksgiving. When I have had a minute or hour or two, I have been working on several things – some short flash fiction pieces and a radio documentary called The Sound of Memory that my husband, Doug Plavin, and I are working on for our new venture, North of Radio. But the project closest to my heart (and one that will take a lot of time which I don’t have right now) is an illustrated YA novel called Nine Valleys in One Twilight, set in the Norwegian Arctic during WW II. It’s based on two true stories but it is more speculative fiction than realism. Also, I am imagining the book as both a print book and something animated for the IPad. I have been thinking about this novel since 2008 and just haven’t had the time to dig in. Hopefully that can happen after this book tour is over! And hopefully someone out there wants to help me fund this thing because my Memory Palace book advance runs out in December.

Thanks for asking great questions Dan. Cheers!

You can experience a reading and/or discussion by Mira:

• Sunday, October 16, 3:30 PM, at the Brattleboro Literary Festival (co-event with Melissa Coleman), Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro, VT
• Wednesday, October 19, 7:30 PM, Working Writers Series at Smith College in Northampton
• Saturday, October 22, 9:45-11 AM, “Telling True Stores” panel discussion at the Writeangles Conference (registration is closed but there is a waiting list) at Mt Holyoke College in South Hadley
• Tuesday, October 25, 7 PM, reading and slideshow at Augusta Savage Gallery at UMass-Amherst
• Thursday, October 27, 4-6 PM, Writers Harvest Benefit Reading (for the GCC Food Pantry) at the Library at Greenfield Community College

New York Times bestselling author, Mira Bartók is a Chicago-born artist and writer and the author of twenty-eight books for children. Her writing has appeared in several literary journals and anthologies and has been noted in The Best American Essays series. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she runs Mira’s List, a blog that helps artists find funding and residencies all over the world. The Memory Palace is Mira’s first book for adults. She is also co-founder of North of Radio, a multi-media collaborative that she runs with her husband, drummer and music producer Doug Plavin.

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A few years ago, photographer Holly Lynton left New York City for Massachusetts farm country, a setting that better fits her desired lifestyle and has a closer synergy with her recent explorations in photography. The photographs in her “Bare Handed” series – some taken in Massachusetts – find mystery and spiritual resonance in people’s voluntary encounters with natural forces, often dangerous ones like honeybees, wolves, or catfish in raging rivers.

We asked the artist about her work, crowdfunding to support exhibition costs, family in art, and how a photographic idea transforms in her hands.

ArtSake: Your “Bare Handed” photographs reflect a reverent, spiritual connection to nature, subtly exploring ideas like sustainable farming and the locavore movement. Can you talk about what aesthetic and creative decisions you make to open up considerations of broader ideas?

Holly: A lot of research goes into the creation of each one of these photographs. In the case of Les (pictured above), I had to find the right bee keeper. One with 30 years’ experience, who wears no protective clothing, because it’s too hot in New Mexico, but also he works with bare hands so he does not crush the bees or anger them. While I was in New Mexico, via word of mouth, I located the wolf sanctuary. The catfish noodling, I read about in the New York Times. Now, in Massachusetts, I also rely on word of mouth, noticing a farm, and visiting agricultural fairs.

When I approach my subjects, I correspond with them first, either by email, phone, or in person. As I am not interested in photographing in a photo documentary or journalistic style, I look for individuals who will collaborate with me. Sometimes, they don’t even realize we are collaborating, but they need to be able to take direction and work slightly outside of their comfort zone. I need them to trust that I know what I am doing when I ask them to repeat certain gestures or go to a specific place. They have to be comfortable in letting a situation unfold. My photographs are an exercise in combining spontaneity and control.

Sometimes, I don’t have a lot of control over a situation. I recognize when someone is at work, and I can’t interrupt them. In that case, I wait for a magical moment. I practice patience. I can watch people at work for hours, and return over several days to try to make a powerful photograph.

In general, I look for moments where two elements intersect, or two contrasting elements come together to create another meaning. I have a psychology background, and when writing up a study, one often has to dismiss findings as possibly being caused by a third variable not anticipated in the experiment. My photographs are meant to be like that third variable. I hope to reveal an aspect in the scene that isn’t anticipated, or might not even be seen the same way in reality, along a time and space continuum.

In terms of aesthetic decisions, I intend my photographs to evoke a sort of fantasy, and have almost a dreamlike quality. I used to say my images came to me as dreams, not while I was asleep, but rather as daydreams of scenarios I would then go about trying to create. Now, they evolve differently, but I intend them to have that same quality.

ArtSake: Can you talk about your experience in the recent Flash Forward Festival Boston, where you were featured in the Fresh Works exhibition?

Holly: The Flash Forward festival was a great experience. The festival was extremely well run, the work strong, and Paula Tognarelli, Director of the Griffin Museum, who selected my work for the exhibition, was a pleasure to work with. The coverage and attendance of the event was great, and the variety of events presented and the fact that it was all free, a rare thing these days, made it particularly accessible to the general public as well as other artists. I hope they keep it up in Boston.

It’s been wonderful, too, getting to know the art community in Boston. It’s a very photography-supportive city.

ArtSake: You’re well on your way to your goal in a Kickstarter project to cover costs for an upcoming  Bernice Steinbaum Gallery exhibition (see prints the artist is offering as pledge rewards, below). Why did you choose crowdfunding? And to what do you attribute your campaign’s strong start?

Holly: I chose to raise funds with a Kickstarter campaign, because going into this exhibition I had two choices, either borrow the money or raise the money. It is a glorious thing to go into an exhibition not completely in debt, (let’s face it, artists always underestimate their expenses and rarely pay themselves for their time) so I thought I would try the approach of raising the money. I chose costs that were limited to the production of an exhibition not the ones that go into just the making of my work, and launched the project on Kickstarter. I had heard about Kickstarter from a fabulous organization called Creative Capital, which is a granting organization as well as an organization that runs programs for the professional development of artists. After researching the site, and watching some fellow artists raise funds for projects, and pledging on several myself (there is great art to be “bought” at prices artists can afford), I decided to launch my project.

Kickstarter is an alternative to receiving a grant. Grants are very competitive and often hard to receive, so this is a way to raise the funds oneself. It’s empowering. With crowdfunding, the hope, obviously, is that a lot of people will give a little money so the artist can reach his/her goal, rather than a few people giving a lot of money. And it’s not for nothing, they get art!

I can’t really say what the initial success of my project was attributed to, actually. People were a lot more generous than I anticipated. I was bowled over. I had read that the average pledge was $71, but in my case people were pledging more than that. I have seen other projects though where they raise a ton of money by generating a huge crowd (300-500 people) where there are many pledges at the $20 level. My rewards are limited edition prints that normally I could not sell at these prices. The small prints would be half as much to produce as the pledge reward. I chose two images that aren’t associated with a series and aren’t even on my website, but were produced for different group exhibitions. Because of the volume and the nature of the project, my lab has agreed to work with me on this, which furthers the sense of community created by Kickstarter. It is a good opportunity to pledge and receive a print of mine at a price point that doesn’t normally exist.

It is also an amazing experience to realize that so many people support my work and what I am doing. Most artists make work to engage in a dialogue, and yet, so often we find ourselves creating in a vacuum or isolated from the general public.

ArtSake: In your Kickstarter video, you daughter serves as your spokesperson, and in fact, she’s contributing drawings as donation rewards and has been featured in past photographs. Can you talk about your decision to involve your family in your creative work?

Holly: 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. He hasn’t been my subject for the last several years, but early on, he often agreed to try out physically uncomfortable situations for the sake of my photography. He has amazing hands! At one point, I think he was concerned that my photography might be more important to me than my family. That’s not the case, but I also couldn’t envision a partner or a family that didn’t support me as a photographer as it’s so intrinsic to who I am.

In general, I have always thought that we, as a culture, undervalue the insights of young people. As a parent, I’ve seen first hand that my children often have amazing insights. They are also incredibly creative human beings and love to be involved with what I’m doing. Sometimes the only way to get my work done is to involve them in it! It has it’s limits though. After watching three hours of sheep shearing, or even something as exciting as lambs being born, my son will bore of it and wish his mother would stop taking pictures. But in general, the choice is to include them or exclude them, and I believe including them makes for a happier family. 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 behaviour to model directly, so the more they are involved the more they see how that all works.

In terms of being in my photographs, they model if they want to, however, as with all my subjects, I can’t force them do anything they don’t want to do. Although, I can be very persuasive! But if I get a flat out “no” I respect that. With the image “The Red Coats,” which is on my Kickstarter, they ran out into the snow like that, bare legged, to follow me outside while I was photographing something. As I swung around they were too perfect looking not to photograph. I told them to hold still, but the expressions were all theirs. With all my photography, I wouldn’t know exactly what the photo would be until I got the film back.

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 first hand. Of course, I don’t tell them everything since they are little, but I try to put things in terms they understand and share what I can. I think this is important for them to see as well, as carrying on an artistic practice is not easy. Both of my children are incredible budding artists. My daughter has a real skill in drawing. She already draws a lot better than I do. My son too for that matter! I have her on my Kickstarter doing drawings as rewards, because I truly believe that if she chooses it she’ll be a great artist some day. I could just say that as a mother, but I’m pretty critical, and I don’t like all her drawings. I tell her when she’s made a great one, and I think anyone who receives one from Kickstarter will be lucky! She’s getting paid for them too! I want to teach her that it is important to be rewarded for your art.

ArtSake: You’ve taught at the New School’s summer art program (and in your Kickstarter video, your daughter says you’re always encouraging her to develop her art). What do you try to instill in emerging artists?

Holly: When I talk to emerging artists I try to be honest. 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.

ArtSake: Share a surprise twist in the Holly Lynton story.

Holly: When I was studying at The Aegean Center for the Fine Arts on the Greek Island of Paros, I met my yet-to-be husband on the ferry dock while we were both waiting for ferries going in opposite directions. We had an urgently intense conversation for 20 minutes, during which time I showed him the brochure for my art school and talked about my creative writing and photography. I tried to convince him to come with me to Athens where I was going to buy a mountain bike. He tried to convince me to go with him to Samos. He was on his way to Turkey and had missed his first ferry off of Paros five days earlier so was behind schedule. Both stubborn, neither of us conceded, and we parted, exchanging addresses. It was a year before we saw each other again, and what happened in that time and after is a long story. Is that enough of a surprise twist? We’ve been together now for seventeen years. I’m quite sure I wouldn’t be the same person or photographer without him.

ArtSake: Can you point to any one decision you’ve made as an artist that has had the most impact on your career?

Holly: When I was an undergraduate at Yale, I began taking classes in photography. Initially, I was into creative writing and thought I’d be a writer. Immediately hooked on photography, I found a natural ease in making ironic and humorous, street photos very much smitten with the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. After a year, I hit a rut. This lasted for three semesters, and each semester I thought about giving up photography, but each semester I found one negative I wanted to print and reasoned that I couldn’t print it without darkroom access. I’d only have dark room access if I signed up for the next photography class, and so I did, and I persevered. In my last semester at Yale, I had a breakthrough in my work that thankfully moved me out of that rut before I graduated. I went from a critique one week with Tod Papageorge where he told me my people looked dead, to having him not even recognize that my photographs were by me the next week.

It’s those moments that add up and have impact. I don’t think I can point to one single decision.

Holly Lynton currently has work in a group show called GREENHOUSE at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami, FL. She’ll have a solo show of work – the work for which she’s raising funds on Kickstarter – at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in November 2011. Watch for a profile of Holly in the July 2011 issue of PREVIEW MASSACHUSETTS.

Images: courtesy of the artist, Holly Lynton; LES, AMBER, HONEYBEES, NEW MEXICO (2008), C-print; ANGEL, WOLF, NEW MEXICO (2008), C-print; SKIPPER, CHRISTIAN, CATFISH, OKLAHOMA (2009), C-print; DREW GARDENS and THE RED COATS, the two prints available as rewards in Lynton’s Kickstarter campaign; TURKEY MADONNA, MASSACHUSETTS (2010), C-print; installation view of GREENHOUSE, courtesy of the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami FL.

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Are you in the mood to be intrigued, amused, possibly a bit frightened? Specifically, by animals masks? Even more specifically, by captivating, colorful animal masks made through an ingenious process using yarn crochet?

Well, good, because thanks to Huckleberry Delsignore and her yarn innovations, such masks exist. And in part due to the masks’ popularity, her career is on a roll. The trailblazing Pittsfield artist is selling her crochet creations at MASS MoCA and elsewhere, is just finishing up a museum residency in the Berkshires, and will soon see her unique masks on an episode of MTV’s Cribs.

We asked Huckleberry about her work, her secret origins as a super-crochet-er, and about how she balances “real life” with the fantastical realms of her art.

ArtSake: First – and you must hear this a lot – your masks are SO COOL. Can you trace their origin? Did the idea and your unique process hit you all at once, or develop over time?

Huckleberry: Gee, thanks! I started making masks about a year and a half ago. Before the masks, I used to make odd dolls. I was sitting around with a friend one night and we thought it would be so cool to make something like the dolls that a person could wear. I made the first one as an experiment, and haven’t been able to stop making them since. The process has become refined over time. The newer ones are technically much better than the earlier ones.

Over time I have realized how gratifying it is to have found an outlet that people, no matter what demographic, engage with. Children can’t stop themselves from putting the masks on, while adults are simultaneously horrified and intrigued when they see my art.

ArtSake: Do you create masks on commission, and if so, what would you say is the general ratio of commissioned work to work initiated independently?

Huckleberry: I love taking commissions. It is so much fun making something knowing it is going to be a part of somebody’s life. I get inspired by bringing pieces of a person’s imagination to life. Right now, I seem to make approximately the same number of commissions as additions to my own mask menagerie.

ArtSake: Artists can often list a long series of day jobs they’ve worked to support their art. But I was intrigued to learn that, as an emerging artist, you hitchhiked back and forth across the country, supporting yourself exclusively by selling your crocheted goods. How has that level of self-reliance impacted your art?

Huckleberry: It’s true, my youth was filled with wanderlust. When I was unable to support myself while going to college, I took to the road. I led a simplistic lifestyle, keeping my expenses very low. I crocheted in coffee shops and curious folks would strike up conversations with me about what I was up to. It was a great learning experience. Eventually I settled down and started a family (and started waitressing). By settling down I was able to take on bigger projects and form deeper connections with people in my community. As for my self-reliance, I have always been a very motivated and fiercely independent lady.

ArtSake: Can you describe your experience as Artist in Residence at the Berkshire Museum?

Huckleberry: I was so honored when the Berkshire Museum invited me to be an Artist in Residence this spring. I took the opportunity to make something bigger and more complex than before. After researching geodesic domes, forts, rock and mineral structures, I set off to create a faceted crocheted sculpture that one could go inside. The process of making the work was difficult. There were a lot of setbacks throughout and I was so proud when it was finally complete. Since on display, the exposure of being in The Berkshire Museum has been so flattering. I get a lot of positive feedback. The residency ends this week and I can hardly wait to have the work back and get to view it in different contexts.

ArtSake: You’ve also produced work as a film artist, and you’ve collaborated in theater and photography projects. What do you draw from working in multiple media?

Huckleberry: Life is experienced in multiple medias, and I love collaborating. For me, it is about being available to participate in inspiring projects.

ArtSake: On your blog, you mention that you did a film shoot for MTV in April. What was it for, and can you describe the experience?

Huckleberry: MTV approached friends of mine regarding filming an episode of Cribs at their beautiful and magical estate. They chose to go with a fairy tale theme and asked if they could use my masks for filming. The entire day was so enchanted. It is supposed to air sometime this summer. I can hardly wait to see it!

ArtSake: You have three daughters! How do you balance your family life with your creative career?

Huckleberry: 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 the masks.

I make art to preserve my sanity. I must been 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.

ArtSake: Share a surprise twist in the Huckleberry Delsignore story.

Huckleberry: I have no clue how to read a crochet pattern.

ArtSake: Can you point to any one decision you’ve made as an artist that has had the most impact on your career?

Huckleberry: A little over a year ago I lost my job. Little did I know at the time, it was the best thing that could happen to me. My children were in school full time and I had only one thing I needed to focus on: making my art career happen. I crocheted as much as possible, kept my web site fresh and up to date, and did my best to let people know what I was up to. A good web site is an amazing resource these days.

I guess the one decision was to take myself seriously as an artist and to work harder than I knew possible to make cool stuff happen.

ArtSake: This summer, you’re teaching a class on DIY art at IS183 and a weekly crochet class in your studio. What will you try to instill in your students?

Huckleberry: Through the IS183 class I hope to share the resources I have gathered in how to find your niche in the art community and how to get your art into the world. The weekly crochet class will focus on teaching the basics of using a hook and yarn and how to use your intuition to make just about anything.

Images: images courtesy of Huckleberry Delsignore. All photos are by Jay Elling, with the exception of AMORPHIUS BLACK (third from top), which is by Eric Korenman.

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Tracy Heather Strain and Randall MacLowry (Film & Video Fellows ’07) have a remarkable thing going with the Lorraine Hansberry Documentary Project (currently in-progress with collaborator Chiz Schultz). It’s the first feature length documentary about Hansberry, and given her impact as a mid-20th century African American artist and activist, the project is an opportunity to inquire into a crucial chapter in American cultural history. In exploring that history, the filmmakers’ work is quintessentially contemporary, mapping out a variety of platforms with which to engage audiences.

We asked Tracy about the origins of the project, the multi-faceted work of a contemporary documentary filmmaker, and her trajectory as a film artist.

ArtSake: Can you talk about how this project began? What led to your decision to make a documentary on Lorraine Hansberry?

Tracy: I had never heard of Lorraine Hansberry when my grandmother took me and my younger sister to see the Harrisburg Community Theater’s production of To Be Young, Gifted and Black. It was quite an experience. First, it was just kind of cool for my grandmother to take me to something called To Be Young, Gifted and Black: I was 17. You hope that your parents and family see you as gifted. And of course I was black. But then I was really drawn in. Her life and her observations particularly resonated with me, made me feel less lonely. I had had some of the same experiences that she’d had. And to put that in context, I was a part of that big cohort of African American families that moved from the cities to the suburbs in the mid-’60s. Mixed in with what was a very happy childhood were some very unpleasant experiences because of race and racism. The pools were still segregated. At certain restaurants, waitresses would sometimes go out of their way not to take our family’s order. Gas stations sometimes wouldn’t let us use their restrooms. People often want to forget that there was, and sometimes still is, de facto segregation in the north.

Hansberry was addressing those kinds of issues. She wanted to foster change using her art. Of course, A Raisin in the Sun is the most visible example. I remember after college, getting out of college – I was an American Studies major – and my first job was in advertising and direct marketing, and I was really inspired by the ’80s independent film movement. I decided then that I would make a film about Lorraine Hansberry. I would go to the Boston Public Library after work and research her. I would talk about her, and people didn’t know who she was and didn’t know anything about her. And I hardly knew – compared to what I know now – I hardly knew anything about her, either.

I found a job in production so I could learn how to make films. Once I saw Eyes on the Prize on TV, I knew I needed to work at Blackside, which is Henry Hampton’s company. After starting there as an associate producer on The Great Depression series, I later worked there as a producer/director/writer on two films for a series called I’ll Make Me a New World: A Century of African American Art. And I did a short segment on Hansberry in that. I kind of debated whether I’d already made my Hansberry film. Could I stop right there? But the more I learned about her, the more I knew I’d have to make a feature length documentary. To just leave her story as it had been told up to that point, a positive tale about opportunities in post-WWII America, would do a disservice to the reality of her experiences. Not to say that that’s not one of the ways you can look at her life. But I saw her life was more of a struggle than I originally thought.

Then I found out that there was someone else who was also on a mission to make a film about Lorraine Hansberry: Chiz Schultz. We joined forces in 2004. He actually – this is so wild to me – he used to work at Harry Belafonte’s company, and he and Harry were the original producers of the Off-Broadway production of To Be Young, Gifted, and Black in 1969. So it felt like it was meant to be.

ArtSake: Contemporary documentary film artists are no longer just making films, it seems. They’re embarking on multi-platform projects that include both the making of the film and a greater outreach and community building effort. Am I right that this is indeed a recent shift in documentary filmmaking? And how does this complicate your work as a filmmaker?

Tracy: Well, creating outreach for documentaries is not new. Almost every project I’ve worked on for public television had teachers’ and study guides, and involved outreach. When I worked at Blackside or WGBH, for example, the outreach was being developed as we were doing the film. So this notion of multi-platform projects was already out there. Now we are expected to develop transmedia storytelling projects in which the public engagement, social media, and interactivity are to be built into the entire life of the project. It is a paradigm shift that is both challenging and exciting.

There are great digital tools, and I’m very motivated, having focused on Technology, Innovation, and Education in graduate school, but the hours in the day haven’t increased. And as you’re working really hard to be a filmmaker, it can be difficult to step out and try to be an expert at something else, or find the right folks to collaborate with when you do not have the money to pay them. The challenge is figuring out how to have the time and resources – both psychological and financial – and even the capacity to make the film and complete the educational and engagement activities. In the Lorraine Hansberry Documentary Project, we’re moving forward on each in fits and spurts. We don’t have any other choice!

All of this has been changing intensely within the last several years. And it’s happening at the same time many foundations are becoming more interested in public engagement and cross-media storytelling. Some want to see if your project has followers on Facebook and Twitter as a way to determine if your project actually has an audience and/or if you’ve started cultivating it.

ArtSake: Because your project revolves around a mid-century writer, much of the film includes archival footage. The footage is, of course, extremely rich content, but it’s also expensive to license. Can you talk about how this increases the financial burden on this project?

Tracy: One of the biggest challenges we face making this film is rights cost. We’d like to make a project available in all platforms known now and in the future. That means asking people to give us rights in all media worldwide, in perpetuity. We’re estimating that the rights for this project will cost $300,000. It’s a lot of money of course. Some people make whole documentaries on that amount of money.

And the historical material is key. Because we need to examine artists like Lorraine Hansberry in the context of the time in which she was operating, in which her parents were operating. I think a lot of funders today want to fund present-day documentaries, social issue documentaries, and I applaud that. But I also think those same issues have important historical contexts. And I think it would be helpful and instructive for today’s activists to see the continuity and the contrasts of what has changed, what hasn’t. Hansberry was an artist – and an activist.

I worry we’re going to start seeing fewer films of this kind because it’s so hard to raise the money. There are people who through kindness will share their historical material at little or no cost. And we hope that that tradition will continue in this project. We’re passionate about making this film happen and have put a lot of our own money into sustaining it between other work.

ArtSake: You just received a $30,000 Arts and Radio and Television grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and other grants panels – the 2007 MCC Artist Fellowships and LEF Moving Image Fund Grant and the 2009 Brother Thomas Fellowships – have recognized you for artistic excellence. Can you talk about grants such as these affect you as an artist?

Tracy: I’m so grateful that the panels recognized what I’m trying to achieve – in the documentary, in the short run. And hopefully they see me emerging, in the long run, as an artist.

I’ve done a lot of work-for-hire and in each project I’ve learned new things. This is the first time I’m making my own film. But it is very important to stress that I’m not making my own film alone. My husband Randall MacLowry and veteran filmmaker Chiz Schultz – we’re all working together on this. And I have friends and colleagues who’ve been supportive and have helped us in a variety of ways. We’ve interviewed several individuals who knew Hansberry personally, and I’ve been moved by their willingness to share their stories about her, including Philip Rose, the original producer of A Raisin in the Sun, who recently died. I’m grateful not only to the grant panels but also to all the other people supporting me, for believing in my artistic vision, and a qualitative approach based on what I learned from working at Blackside.

ArtSake: You mentioned that the collaboration with Chiz Schultz began in 2004. Is part of the reason a film like yours can take so many years to create that the artistic content is enriched by that commitment of time?

Tracy: Lorraine was so smart and so well read. And she drew on references that aren’t commonplace today. If I look at one five page letter she wrote, and if I really want to know what she’s trying to say, I have to look up a lot of material. So if we have notebooks filled with letters, and I really want to understand her, it requires a lot of time to do that work and let the information sit.

She was born in 1930. She died in 1965. Those are four decades of great transformation in American society: the Depression, WWII, post-war progressive politics, the Cold War. And then the modern Civil Rights movement. One reason I really like this story about her is that she and her family show that the Civil Rights movement didn’t just start with the Montgomery bus boycott, Brown Vs. the Board of Education. Her family had been engaged in protests for a long time. Less well known is that Hansberry was also secretly supporting gay/lesbian activism at the time. She gave money to emerging organizations and contributed to publications using pseudonyms or her initials.

So how do I bring context?  I want to make a film that makes deep connections, and that does take time. You have all these wonderful, cheaper, digital media-making tools, but you still have to think and wrestle with the ideas and the vast amount of material we’ve collected from various archives – and you can’t necessarily speed up your thinking.

ArtSake: Social media is one of the facets of the “transmedia” project. Have you been met with excitement about the project through its online platforms?

Tracy: One of Hansberry’s nieces actually contacted me through the Facebook page. And yes, a lot of people are really excited. It’s hard to believe that this prominent artist who died in 1965 has never been featured in a documentary. We think this new scholarship we’ve uncovered and this presentation of a fuller picture of who Hansberry was will resonate with people similarly to the way To Be Young, Talented, and Black resonated with me.

Tracy Heather Strain is a documentary filmmaker, a producer of educational videos and museum segments, and a principal and co-founder of the Boston-based media production studio The Film Posse, Inc.

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Laura Harrington (Playwriting Fellow ’05, ’97) is a two-time recipient of both the MCC fellowship and the Clauder Competition for best new play in New England. In 2008, she won the prestigious Kleban Award for the “most promising librettist” in American musical theatre. Her upcoming projects include a song cycle with composer Elena Ruehr and a series of choral works with composer Roger Ames.

But that’s not the whole story.

With the impending publication of Alice Bliss (Pamela Dorman Books, Penguin/Viking, 2011), she’s also a debut novelist, with another novel currently in the works.

We asked Laura about Alice Bliss and about her whole, fascinating writing story.

ArtSake: Congratulations on the impending publication (June 2) of Alice Bliss! I know you primarily as a dramatic writer – and in fact, on your website, you say that the core idea of Alice Bliss comes from a musical you wrote, Alice Unwrapped. How did you decide on long-form prose as the way to continue telling Alice’s story?

Laura: A few things conspired to open up this world to me. For one, I couldn’t get this character out of my head. And then I was given this incredible award for my music theatre work that gave me two years of writing time. Which was an awe-inspiring moment – so much validation for my theatre career coupled with so much possibility. But I didn’t immediately think: Great! I can’t wait to write my next musical. Instead I thought: This is my chance to be a beginner again, to re-connect to the creative process by trying to do something I’ve never done before. I also wanted to pick up my pen without thinking about anything other than story. No worries about size of cast, cost of production, etc.

ArtSake: As someone who writes in many different forms (stage plays, musical theatre, libretto for opera, prose fiction), I’m curious if there’s an acclimation period when you’re starting a new project – where you have to recalibrate to the demands of the form?

Laura: I think of it as a time of expanding the imagination more than one of recalibrating. Each form has its limitations as well as things about it which are expansive. And I love pushing the boundaries.

ArtSake: Do you find the writing process to be basically the same, no matter the form?

Laura: The actual writing process, the day-to-day activity of writing is the same no matter what the form. You have to show up and give yourself to it. I found I had to make my life very, very quiet in order to create the mental space for a book.

ArtSake: Can you take us through the process of finding your agent (Stephanie Cabot at the Gernert Company) and working with Pamela Dorman Books (Penguin/Viking) to publish it?

Laura: I am blessed with good friends who gave me a hand at critical points along the way. One friend introduced me to her agent, who read my book and passed it along to another agent in the firm who she thought would be a better fit – that was Stephanie Cabot. She’s super smart, strategic, and I feel lucky to now call her a friend. We went through several months of revisions – Stephanie was key to making Alice Bliss a better, richer book – and then she sold the book in a matter of weeks.

Pam Dorman and everyone at Penguin/Viking have been amazing to work with. Every step of the way: editing, book design, selling foreign rights, having a plan for the book and its future. I have been very, very lucky.

ArtSake: What has most surprised you about the process?

Laura: How friendly people are, how open this world is, how easy it is to meet and connect with other writers.

ArtSake: You’ve written about the exile of Napoleon Bonaparte, about a young couple in the aftermath of 9-11, and about events surrounding the Civil War, WWI, and now the Iraq War. What draws you to the subjects you explore in your drama and prose?

Laura: I write about what obsesses me, the things I can’t stop thinking about. I’m also drawn to the voiceless and the displaced. And I’m deeply disturbed about war and wish that I could do something to make a difference.

ArtSake: On a military spouse-themed blog, an early reviewer of your book wrote of your characters, “As one of the 1% who are being impacted by the multiple deployments, these people are mine.” How did you find your way so believably into the day-to-day reality of a family struggling with military deployment?

Laura: My own family was blown apart by war and it’s something we rarely, if ever, talk about. My father returned from WWII and suffered from what was then called battle fatigue. My mother said, “The fellow I married didn’t come home.” In 1966, both of my brothers enlisted in the Air Force, one out of high school, one out of college. One went to Viet Nam, the other worked with NORAD. My parents were both grieving during those 4 years, as was much of the nation. Those were dark times. And nothing was ever the same again. Our family, as I knew it, was gone; my brothers were both changed by their experiences, and in a chain reaction, all of our relationships were interrupted, and some damaged beyond repair.

ArtSake: As your book is being published, you’ve set up a blog, a Facebook page, and book club resources. It seems that writers today often need to assume a more active role in promotion of their books. How have you found this new challenge?

Laura: It’s been really interesting. Social media is not my natural milieu, but as print reviews are disappearing, much of what used to happen in print is now occurring online and in real time. We’re in the middle of a period of transition, which is especially open and exciting in this particular moment. I admit to occasionally being a bit skeptical, but with the advice of some very generous writers who are a few steps ahead of me, I’ve jumped in.

The contact and connections with other writers has been amazing and really fun. I’ve found people who are friendly, open, and supportive; I’ve met and corresponded with writers in South Africa, England, Sweden, Canada, and all over the US.

ArtSake: Can you point to any one decision you’ve made as an artist that has had the most impact on your career?

Laura: There’s one decision I’ve had to make several times that seems like it’s had the most impact. It’s a decision that’s often been made in very dark times. And that decision is simply to keep going, to keep writing.

Laura will read from Alice Bliss at upcoming events at Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge (Weds, June 8, 2011, 7 PM); Barnes & Noble in Peabody, MA (Thurs, 6/9, 7 PM); Jabberwocky Bookstore in Newburyport (Fri, 6/10, 7 PM); Concord Bookshop in Concord (Sun, 6/12, 3 PM); Broadside Bookshop in Northampton (Tues, 6/14, 7 PM); Toad Hall Books at the Rockport Library (Wed, 6/15, 7 PM); and a joint reading with fellow debut author Rebecca Makkai at the Boston Public Library (Tues, July 12, 2011, 6 PM).

Laura Harrington is an award winning playwright, lyricist and librettist. She teaches playwriting at MIT and lives in Gloucester, MA.

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Patrick Donnelly (Poetry Fellow ’08) is one of the superb poets taking part in the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, a three-day schedule of workshops, readings, and performances in Salem, MA (May 12-14).

He’ll present a workshop on How to Be a Good Public Reader of Your Own Poetry at 2 PM on May 14, and, beginning at 4:30 PM that same day, he’ll join a group of his fellow MCC Fellows in Poetry for a reading at the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum.

We asked Patrick about the Festival, the craft of reading aloud, and his life and work as a proud contributor to the literary community at large.

ArtSake: At the upcoming Massachusetts Poetry Festival, you’ll be leading a workshop on best practices when reading one’s work aloud. Without spoiling it for participants, what’s the most important thing to consider in reading aloud your own work?

Patrick: Reading well begins, first, with the idea that readings can be an art form in themselves, and that serving an audience by giving a skillful performance is a worthwhile goal. (Some writers feel that readings are irrelevant or worse, but as a frequent consumer of readings, and an editor who has worked in small press publishing, I strongly disagree.) Secondly, reading well begins with the humbling realization that one might not currently be a strong reader, as well as the desire to become more skillful. Many very fine writers are missing one or more parts of this equation, and consequently we’ve all had to sit through readings that didn’t give the best impressions of the writing (or, sadly, the writer).

To state the obvious, performing for an audience draws on a completely different skill-set from creative writing, which is for the most part solitary, silent work. The skills that one needs to master to give an effective reading are the same that are taught in basic public speaking classes, which is something I highly recommend for every writer who isn’t otherwise an experienced performer. There are five very basic foundations for a good performance of creative writing: (1) plan, rehearse and time your reading well ahead of the event, (2) read slowly enough to be understood, (3) read loudly enough to be understood, (4) enunciate clearly, so as to be understood, and (5) speak like the real person or people whose thoughts and feelings are conveyed in the writing. You’ll notice that the common thread here is making oneself understood – there are many other more useful skills that one can learn in addition to that, but embodying the text will always be the most basic responsibility of the public reader. Simple as it may sound, this requires a greater concentration and expenditure of energy than most “civilians” (that is, people who aren’t professional performers) realize. Here’s an easy test of your own level of skill: if you don’t feel an expenditure of energy during your reading comparable to engaging in vigorous exercise, you aren’t doing it right.

(Hear Patrick read his work.)

ArtSake: I’m always interested in how writers’ jobs interrelate. How does your work as a teacher (including directing the Advanced Seminar at The Frost Place poetry conference center), editor, and translator affect your work writing poetry?

Patrick: My own mentors have been writers who combine their own work with service to the literary community and the larger community, with collaboration, and with creating opportunities for others to learn and to prosper. They didn’t tell me to imitate them in this, but I watched them do it, and it left the impression that this was the way to go. It’s not that living like that is easy to do – it’s not; there’s always some friction between the inside and the outside. But the artists who inspire the most admiration in me are the ones who make their uncertain, stumbling way in the difficult marketplace, not knowing where they’re going but never giving up, and not making it all about themselves. Shakespeare and Bach didn’t lead precious, protected lives; they somehow made all that deathless stuff working with other people, under the pressure of deadlines, worries about money, and all the rest. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, paraphrasing Dogen Zenji, “We are all deluded people, and before we attain enlightenment, we should establish our true practice in our delusion… If you make some mistake, you should establish your practice thereby. There is no other place for you to establish your practice.”

ArtSake: Your next collection, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Is there anything you want to say about this collection, as a teaser of sorts? Any unifying force(s) that drove you to write the poems included?

Patrick: I never want to get stuck in a “shtick” as a poet, doing the same thing over and over, even if it worked well before. So I was conscious while I was working on the poems that became this second book of wanting to shake up my practices, for instance by working the line and stanza differently. And in fact I did that. But also many aspects of the new book were inspired by my encounter with Japan, especially the thousand-year-old Buddhist poems that I’ve been translating since 2004 with Stephen D. Miller, professor of Japanese language and literature at UMass Amherst. (Stephen and I are also married, and we both love having this ongoing project that we can share.) The concerns and worldview of the Japanese poems were so interesting in relation to my own that they seemed to want to be invited into the book; in the final version I incorporated 16 of our translations into my own sequences. This has the added benefit of bringing other voices into the book, in which there’s a primary speaker, a version of me who’s been turned into a character. Some of the Japanese voices do read like his “avatars,” but others talk back to him, criticize and contradict him – which seemed an interesting and healthy development. Primary speakers shouldn’t be allowed to get too comfortable in their assumptions.

ArtSake: Along with the Massachusetts Poetry Festival events you’re a part of, what other festival events are you looking forward to attending?

Patrick: The Festival is such an embarrassment of riches that unfortunately several of the events I’d dearly love to attend – like Mark Doty’s talk, and the translation seminar with Kristine Doll, Bill Coyle and Miriam Margala (both on Saturday, May 14) – are scheduled against events I’m involved in elsewhere. Of course I’m also looking forward to hearing and meeting the 2008 and 2010 MCC fellows at our own reading. I have a feeling I’m going to be tiptoeing into many events in progress, and you can be sure I’ll be at Doty’s reading that evening with Kim Richey and Patricia Smith, with bells on. I’ll just add, too, that Stephen (who is a huge poetry fan) and I are planning to spend both nights of the Festival in Salem, which we’ve never visited. Part of the attraction of the Festival for us is getting to explore another part of this great commonwealth, which nurtures its creative economy in ways large and small. The MCC fellowship made a BIG difference at our house during the year in which I received it, and we’re both very grateful.

At the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Patrick will lead the workshop How to Be a Good Public Reader of Your Own Poetry (House of Seven Gables Hooper House #1, 2- 3:30 PM, 5/14) and read his work in Follow the Fellows (Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, 4:30-5:45 PM, 5/14), joining other MCC Poetry Fellows Ben Berman, John Canaday, Regie Gibson, Sharon Howell, Rosann Kozlowski, and Leslie Williams.

Patrick Donnelly is the author of THE CHARGE (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press) and NOCTURNES IN THE BROTHEL OF RUIN, forthcoming from Four Way Books in spring 2012. He is an Associate Editor of Poetry International, and Director of the Advanced Seminar at The Frost Place. He has taught at Colby College, the Lesley University MFA Program, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Slate, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, and many other journals. With Stephen D. Miller he translates classical Japanese poetry and drama; their translations have appeared in many journals, including Bateau, Circumference, Metamorphoses and New Plains Review.

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Here’s the latest installment of Fellows Notes, the current news of past fellows/finalists from our Artist Fellowships Program.

The April 1, 2011 weather may be a Fool’s Day snow-prise, but the following list of April awards, honors, news, and announcements is pure sunshine.

We’re thrilled to share that Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro‘s (Playwriting Fellow ’11) play Before I Leave You, a portion of which the playwright submitted for her Artist Fellowship, will be produced by Boston’s Huntington Theatre in the 2011/2012 season! Read a Boston Globe article about Rosanna and the production.

Hannah Barrett (Painting Fellow ’04) has collages in the show Family Portraits, which explores the “complexities and possibilities of family structures, relationships, and interactions, both real and constructed.” The show runs through April 22, 2011 at the Foster Gallery in Dedham, with an opening reception Friday, April 8, 6-8 PM. Along with Hannah, the show features Christine Rogers, Cobi Moules, Megan & Murray McMillan, Dustin Williams, and Tanit Sakakini – and was curated by Evelyn Rydz (Drawing Fellow ’10)!

Claire Beckett‘s (Photography Fellow ’07) recent show at Carroll and Sons, Simulating Iraq, was reviewed in Art New England.

Jamie Cat Callan (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ’10) will be at the French Cultural Center in Boston on Tuesday, April 19 to present her recent book Bonjour, Happiness! Read a recent interview with Jamie on ArtSake.

Alicia Casilio, Sara Casilio, Kelly Casilio, and Cary Wolinsky, aka TRIIIBE Sculpture/Installation Fellows ’09) were reviewed in Art in America Magazine for their recent solo show at Dodge Gallery in New York. Also, check out a terrific series of short films by Yari Wolinsky about TRIIIBE’s creation of their recent In Search of Eden show at Boston University.

Watercolor paintings by Betsy Damian are on exhibit at the Harding House bed and breakfast in Cambridge. Read Betsy’s recent Three Stages post about her children’s book Rèv Abnè a: Abner’s Vision.

Joshua Fineberg‘s (Music Composition Fellow ’11) piece for flute and electronics, The Texture of Time, will receive its Boston premiere on Saturday April 30 at Brandeis University’s Slosberg Music Center. This performance will be part of the 2011 BEAMS Electronic Music Marathon and the Boston Cyber Arts Festival.

Regie Gibson (Poetry Fellow ’10) will perform spoken word poetry at Munroe Center for the Arts in Lexington, MA on Saturday, April 9, 8-10 PM, a task to which he’s uniquely suited: he’s a former National Poetry Slam Champion and performer on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. Incidentally, the 4/9 performance is on the heels of Regie’s participation in the final event in MCC’s Commonwealth Reading Series at Newtonville Books in Newton on Tuesday, April 5.

James Haug‘s (Poetry Fellow ’98) new chapbook, Why I Like Chapbooks, has been published by Factory Hollow Press.

Gregory Hischak‘s (Playwriting Finalist ’11) short play Hygiene is included in this year’s Humana Festival of New American Works in April (Louisville KY). Later this year, his new play Clueless & Lark (& Other Geologic Variations) will be staged as part of the 2011 Source Festival (Washington DC) in June, 2011.

Ariel Kotker‘s (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ’07) fascinating His Room As He Left It installation will be part of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Scholars Show, at the SMFA March 30-April 30. There will be an opening reception Wednesday, March 30, 5-7 PM.

Niho Kozuru (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ’09) was commissioned to create a sculpture for the permanent collection of the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska. Read an article in the Lincoln JournalStar about Niho and the unique commission.

Yanick Lapuh (Painting Fellow ’10) currently has a solo show, Yanick Lapuh: Your Ladder is on Fire, at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, through July 10, 2011. He’s also among the artists selected by juror Jen Mergel, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for the show Massachusetts Artists 2011 at The Brush Art Gallery and Studios in Lowell. The show runs through April 30, 2011, with an opening reception on April 3, 2-4 PM.

Rania Matar (Photography Fellow ’07) has a solo photography show, A Girl and Her Room at the De Santos Gallery in Houston, TX, running April-May, 2011. There is an opening reception April 2, 5:30-8:30 PM.

We heard good news from Nathalie Miebach (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ’09) recently: she won a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant! Where can you see her work this month? First, a detail of her installation Changing Waters, on view at the Fuller Craft Museum through September 2011, is on the cover of the March/April 2011 issue of Art New England. She’s in the exhibition The New Materiality: Digital Dialogues at the Boundaries of Contemporary Craft, on display through June 12 at the Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, WI. As part of this exhibit, a trio called Nineteen Thirteen will perform one of Nathalie’s scores, called “Hurricane Noel” at the Milwaukee Art Museum on April 15, 8:30 PM. Furthermore, she’s participating in Craft Meets Technology at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, April 2-July 16, and the Appearances: Provincetown Green Arts Festival, at Art Current in Provincetown, MA, April 15-24.

Caleb Neelon (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ’07) is the co-author of the book The History of American Graffiti, published this month by Harper Design. The book features over 1,000 never-before-published photographs and interviews with hundreds of graffiti artists from throughout the country.

Congratulations to Nancy K. Pearson (Poetry Finalist ’10), who won the Sycamore Review Poetry Prize.

Jendi Reiter (Poetry Fellow ’10) won the 2010 Anderbo Poetry Prize for her poem “Bullies in Love” (watch the clip embedded above to hear her reading the poem). Bravo!

Matthew Rich (Painting Fellow ’10) is among the artists exhibiting in The Thingness of Color at Dodge Gallery in New York. The show runs April 2-May 1, with an opening reception April 2. Read a Studio Views with Matthew Rich on ArtSake.

Irina Rozovsky (Photography Finalist ’09) has a solo show of photography, This Russia, at the Garner Center of Photography at the New England School of Photography in Boston. The show runs April 18-June 3, 2011, with an opening reception Wednesday, April 20, 6:30-8 PM and an artist talk Monday, May 9, 6 PM. Fraction Magazine has a sneak peak of Irina’s soon-to-be-published monograph One to Nothing. The monograph will be published by Kehrer Verlag in Fall 2011; see a preview. Also, Irina is among the artists featured in The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography Vol.2, a biennial sourcebook with new work by 100 contemporary photographers, from the Humble Arts Foundation.

Eric Henry Sanders‘s (Playwriting Fellow ’09) play Reservoir, on the heels of a successful ’10/’11 run at the Drilling CompaNY in New York, will return for a three week run (Apr. 1 -17, 2011) at the theatre. Read a terrific review of the play in the New York Times, and read about the process behind the play, as well as hear a scene performed by Company One, on ArtSake. Also, Eric’s short play Don’t Push the Red Button was performed as part of Elephant in the Room, performed at Raconteur Theatre in Ohio in March 2011.

Vaughn Sills (Photography Fellow ’09) has a solo exhibition of photographs at the Trustman Gallery at Simmons College in Boston. The show, which runs March 21 – April 22, is in conjunction with Vaughn’s new book of photography Places For The Spirit: Traditional African American Gardens. Read a review in the Boston Globe.

Jeff Daniel Silva‘s (Film & Video Finalist ’09) feature-length documentary Ivan & Ivana will have its world premiere in the International competition at Visions de Réel in Nyon, Switzerland on Friday, April 8 at 8 PM. The film chronicles the lives of Ivan and Ivana, a couple who emigrated from Kosovo to California to start anew after the last Balkan war. It’s an unorthodox depiction of the American immigrant experience, revealing the couple’s successes, trials, and tribulations over five years of turbulent economic, political and personal tides. Local audiences will have the chance to see the film when it screens in the Independent Film Festival Boston, on April 30 and May 1.

Peter Snoad (Playwriting Fellow ’09) is among the playwrights whose ten-minute plays were selected for the 2011 Boston Playwrights’ Theatre Boston Theatre Marathon. Read Peter’s terrific ArtSake guest post about the terrain for new plays – nationally and locally.

Rachel Perry Welty (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ’09, Drawing Fellow ’04) will join deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum Director for Curatorial Affairs Nick Capasso for a talk and tour of Rachel’s current exhibition: Rachel Perry Welty 24/7. The events takes place on Saturday, April 2, at 3 PM, at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln.

Tracy Winn (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ’08) reads from her novel Mrs. Somebody Somebody at the Blacksmith House in Cambridge on Monday, April 25, 2011, 8:00 PM.

Past Fellows Notes
Mar. 2011
Feb. 2011
Jan. 2011

Are you a past fellow or finalist with an event, honor, or other bit of news you’d like to share? Tell us about it.

Images and media: Matthew Rich, DOUBLE AMPERSAND (2010), latex and spray paint on cut paper and linen tape, 41×57 in; cover art for WHY I LIKE CHAPBOOKS by James Haug (Factory Hollow Press, 2011); Jendi Reiter reads “Bullies in Love” at the Green Street Café in Northampton, recorded by Adam Cohen, from the WinningWriters Youtube Channel; Cover for PLACES FOR THE SPIRIT: PHOTOGRAPHS BY VAUGHN SILLS (Trinity University Press, 2010).

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The 2011 Commonwealth Reading Series of events with MCC writers and poets concludes with a reading at Newtonville Books in Newton on Tuesday, April 5, 7 PM.

One of the participants in the 4/5 Newtonville Books reading is Leslie Williams (Poetry Fellow ’10), whose poetry collection Success of the Seed Plants was published by Bellday Books in 2010. We asked Leslie about Success and the secrets to her winning ways.

ArtSake: You won the Bellday Books Prize and the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America in the same year you won the MCC grant. You’ve cracked the code to poetry contests! Please promptly divulge your secrets to success.

Leslie: Good things happen in threes! Honestly, I was floored by all of these at once, after years of writing quietly without a lot of encouragement. I would say the secret is a bit of stubbornness, continuing to send my poems out year after year and not paying much attention to rejection or silence on the other end – that is, writing the poems I wanted or needed to write and then seeing where it felt right to send them. I am not very savvy about it. I’m so grateful for the recognition!

ArtSake: Your poems are so invested in the places they’re set. I’m thinking of “So Long,” which compares nostalgia versus memory to Cape Cod’s breezy summer tourist season versus its more severe history of whaling and hardship. Does the place you are writing in – and about – change the way you write?

Leslie: This is a great question. I’m obsessed by “place,” whether literally or in the sense of “the past is another country.” I am very slow to assimilate things, so some poems are the result of jagged outcroppings of memory that keep recurring and start to bother me. Writing a poem is a way to deal with these mental insistencies. Often a place I’ve been, or even lived for a while, does not get processed for many years, as is the case with “So Long” – I first visited Nantucket in the 1980s and the scene took a long time to bubble up into a poem. It’s also easier to write about youth from the vantage point of “not so young anymore!”

ArtSake: As a David Lynch fan, I must ask: is “The famous director said I love to see people coming out of darkness,” which explores an encounter with the film director’s ex-wife that has a profound effect on the narrator, autobiographical?

Leslie: How did you know? I did start out with David Lynch, because I thought his line was a terrific way to explain things, not only visually, but emotionally. I wanted to write a poem that did a similar thing. James Merrill said that once a poem really gets going, it’s like an eddy, and everything just gets sucked into it – that’s what happened here – random bits of experience started sticking, such as meeting a woman at a party who let me know she’d been married to a celebrity, and too many details about it. I find it amazing that strangers will unburden themselves in these settings and then move on, never to be seen again – you’re left carrying these odd pieces of their lives that you don’t really have a place for and don’t know what to do with. I should say a word about the “I” – I am always inventing personae who can trip around in poems – as Emily Dickinson wrote: “When I state myself as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.” There are always elements of autobiography, I don’t think any honest writer could disavow that, but then the imagination goes off and leaves your actual self behind.

ArtSake: Your poetry is rich with details from the natural world. Do you have any background in that area – an amateur gardener, a former plant biologist, perhaps? Or is it mainly a poetic interest?

Leslie: I am a very amateur gardener! I did study biology for a while and was completely fascinated with plant life and dissecting earthworms and trying to watch tulips actually burst out of the soil on a really warm spring day. The world is enormously beautiful and mysterious and I just try to capture that and, I hope, to praise it. I have such a metaphorical turn of mind that everything in nature seems to have a lesson in it, for me.

ArtSake: Can you point to any one decision you’ve made as an artist that has had the most impact on your career?

Leslie: Thank you for calling it a “career” – it doesn’t always feel that way, so it’s edifying to have recognition by the MCC and others, that makes me feel I’m on the right track. I wish I could say I made “decisions” in the sense of strategy, or even in being fully conscious about the work of poetry. The main thing for me has been sticking to it over the long haul, which is not really a choice, as anyone who writes poems knows – even in the dry spells there are little nagging lines and phrases in your head that call you back. For me it’s been crucial to find a group of serious working poets to meet with on a semi-regular basis. I was fortunate enough to stumble into the most magical summer group the first summer we moved here and that too has really sustained me.

ArtSake: What writers and poets are you excited about, these days?

Leslie: So many! I read in phases and right now it’s autobiography, so Mary Karr and Reynolds Price, who just died, and Patti Smith, though I was disappointed in that one. Poetry I dip into all the time so right now on my desk is Larry Levis, Robert Hass, Amy Clampitt, A. R. Ammons, Gjertrud Schnackenberg and an anthology of the Romantics. I always go back to Stevens, Hopkins, and Bishop, even though I try not to like her so much. Right now I have a small obsession with Lisa Robertson’s R’s Boat. I love reading poems that are energizing, that make you want to move – which is a really difficult charge.

Leslie will join Regie Gibson, David Lovelace, Tova Mirvis, and Lara JK Wilson for a Commonwealth Reading Series event at Newtonville Books in Newton on Tuesday, April 5, 7 PM.

Leslie Williams is the author of the poetry collection Success of the Seed Plants (Bellday Books, 2010), which won the 2010 Bellday Books Prize. She is also the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Award, an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship, and awards from the Ragdale Foundation. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Slate, The Southern Review, Shenandoah and in many other magazines. A North Carolina native, she now lives near Boston with her husband and two sons.

Images: Leslie Williams, photo by Ira Jacobs; cover art for SUCCESS OF THE SEED PLANTS by Leslie Williams (Bellday Books, 2010); MCC Executive Director Anita Walker with Leslie Williams at the Massachusetts State House, November 2010.

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The 2011 Commonwealth Reading Series of events with MCC writers and poets continues this week with a reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge on Thursday, March 31, 7 PM.

We asked one of the participating literary artists, Sharon Howell (Poetry Fellow ’10) about her work and life, about being a poet in every time.

ArtSake: You received your MCC award for poems from the collection Girl in Everytime. The poems are structurally and linguistically inventive, with lovely, even odd wordplay (at times it calling to mind Samuel Beckett). Can you talk about where the poems in Girl in Everytime are coming from?

Sharon: I was spending a lot of time on an island in Maine, in Penobscot Bay (interestingly, where George Oppen used to spend summers: and it’s a simply tiny island with only one family – the same as when Oppen and his wife were there – who lives there permanently), and a couple of summers ago I was there by myself in a little cabin with no electricity reading Ovid and Virgil. So I was in a mythic space and a natural, pretty uninhabited space, and started thinking of the natural world in terms of origin myths and the presence of gods that explain and domesticate big elemental forces. Also the way the time of the gods – the way Ovid has them experience time – feels a lot like geological time in its distention and awkward relationship with human time. I remember the first lines of what became this sequence were “Once along a time, and everywhere is another. It kept up.” That to me configures this funny relationship between the time of origins or eternal time and the daily time we experience, and all the other times alongside. I imagined time after a while as a character.

I think that may be where some of the Beckettiness comes from: finding a personality where you didn’t think there was one, in the abstraction – which happens in Stein, as well. It’s also in the fun, I hope, of this defamiliarization of a girl also being an island who has a “westward eye,” a “north slope,” or a road going up and down her spine – and then suddenly becoming a bell hanging from a tower, or a monarch butterfly coming out of her case.

ArtSake: I’m always interested in writers’ and poets’ day jobs. Yours is teaching at Harvard and serving as their Resident Dean at Adams House. How does that work accommodate your writing?

Sharon: I first want to say how amazed I am by the MCC’s Artist Fellowships, which are something of a miracle in the scheme of things: it was incredibly encouraging to receive this award at the moment I did, and it has been such an honor. I feel a great deal of responsibility to write because of it, too – it’s a gesture of great faith – which is something that I did not feel before and has helped me seriously to carve out time from what can be an all-consuming job. So I’m extremely grateful.

Being a House Dean at Harvard involves living in an undergraduate house (which for me is lovely because it puts me in the middle of Harvard Square, and infuriating because it puts me in the middle of Harvard Square) which contains around 450 upperclass students and is host to an endless number of events, performances, programs, dinners, concerts, readings, and crises. It’s extraordinary and exhausting. I also teach in the History and Literature concentration, where we work very closely with students in tutorials to design constantly different courses of study, so that keeps me hopping intellectually. So I think what I’m saying is that my day job is fulfilling and exciting in lots of ways, and I’m awfully glad to have it, but does not in the least accommodate my writing, except in one important way: summer. I make the most of summer and the other academic year breaks we have, and I’m well aware that long stretches of time away are unavailable in most other jobs.

ArtSake: You founded a series of poetry podcast called Ramblebarrow, where you converse with poets like Oni Buchanan and Joanna Klink. What prompted Ramblebarrow, and what are some of your favorite moments from those conversations?

Sharon: My husband is a big podcast listener, and suggested a couple of years ago that it would be a fun idea to do a poetry podcast – he bought me all the sound equipment and arranged all the logistics. He’s much more entrepreneurial than I am, so it wouldn’t have happened without him… basically he set me up in front of the microphone and said “ok, now talk about poetry.”

Doing these podcasts is so much fun for me, and I’ve met some amazing people through them who are now friends – Anna Deeny, who translated Raul Zurita, Patrick Pritchett, Joanna Klink. I have also enjoyed talking with people whose primary work isn’t in poetry but includes poetry interestingly, like Bill Powers and Mark Wolf. My favorite moments have been in the readings – Zurita’s amazing voice, and Mike Doughty’s singer’s reading of “Here’s How it Ends” – where it makes such a difference to have poetry in the ear, resonating non-intellectually.

This isn’t a favorite moment, but my most pathetic moment was when I interviewed Zurita for the first time – he was so gracious, letting me bring all my equipment into his house, and he did these wrenching, emotionally intense readings, and Anna Deeny translated for us – and I realized when I got home that I hadn’t recorded any of it. I was mortified. Amazingly, they let me come back and did it all again, just as wholeheartedly.

ArtSake: I understand a collection of your poems will be published by Pressed Wafer – congratulations! Can you talk about how that good news came to be? And when can we expect to see it published?

Sharon: Yes, I’m very excited about this, for sure, it’s my first book. I am so indebted to my friend, the poet Patrick Pritchett, for the whole thing. He handed the Girl in Everytime poems to Pressed Wafer’s founder, Bill Corbett, and then Bill beneficently also took the other half of the book, a series called Lefty in Luck. So, Sharon in Luck.

The book itself will be called Girl in Everytime, and it’s coming out soon: this spring, probably May.

ArtSake: What are you writing these days? What are you reading?

Sharon: I never read enough contemporary poetry: I do get review copies of FENCE Books that I look forward to. And I’ll read anything by Charles Simic, Anne Carson, or Michael Cunningham. I did scholarly work in English and American Literature previously, and the nature of my current teaching is quite eclectic, so I tend to get hijacked by the canonical before I can attend to the new.

I have just finished another book-length series of poems, this time about a Thief and a Wife. So while doing that I read Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson, and Moll Flanders (who is a thief and a wife, in one), and Melville’s The Confidence Man, etc. etc. and watched thief movies like Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Thomas Crown Affair.

I’ve become fascinated with the problem of the con, and the heist, in the current place we find ourselves in America… bankrupted by thieves who aren’t much like us at all. Part of what I’m doing is eulogizing the thief as a glamorous figure, as someone whose work takes place outside of the realm of everyday exchange, where values are already arbitrary. Jewels, art, etc, are things that only the wealthy monetize, and all of these iconic fictional thief figures have a kind of sympathetic Robin Hood quality, where they steal only from the rich who will not suffer from it, and exploit the folly of arbitrary value. What’s happening now that feels so repulsive is the opposite in every way – our thieves are stealing from the vulnerable and poor to further enrich the rich, and doing it insidiously with no personal risk. No tiptoeing across the roof at night or riding hard away from a train, just sitting cowardly high up in a tower and bundling up toxic assets.

I also realized while doing the piece that almost every good story is about a thief in some way or another – I couldn’t keep up. So in one poem there’s a bronze of him in the town square, to suggest that combination of ubiquity and nostalgia for a brand of heroism. He gets away, though, in the end. Not to spoil it.

ArtSake: Have you found it challenging to balance the unconventional challenges of a writer’s life with other aspects of your life?

Sharon: Absolutely: but up until recently I wouldn’t have even thought of myself having a “writer’s life,” because that part of my existence was so marginal and stolen. As I say, the MCC fellowship and the imminent book have helped me to justify working on poetry to myself and others.

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 (called “The Cloud Forest 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.

All in all, I can’t imagine a much luckier life.

Sharon joins John Canaday, Kathryn Kulpa, Allan Reeder, and Julia Story for a Commonwealth Reading Series event on Thursday, March 31, 7 PM, Porter Square Books in Cambridge. Following that reading, there is one more event in the series, at Newtonville Books in Newton (4/5).

Sharon Howell‘s work has been published in Colorado Review, Diversity and Distinction Magazine, and Notre Dame Review. A forthcoming poetry collection has been accepted for publication by Pressed Wafer Press. She is the creator/director of Ramblebarrow, a bi-monthly podcast radio show about poetry (download on iTunes). She has a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University, where she teaches.

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The 2011 Commonwealth Reading Series of events with MCC writers and poets continues this week with a reading at Forbes Library in Northampton on Wednesday, March 23, 7 PM.

One of the featured writers at the Forbes is Jendi Reiter (Poetry Fellow ’10), who recently won the Anderbo Poetry Prize. Once a practicing lawyer in New York City, she now writes – and champions – poetry and prose in Northampton, MA, and here, she shares her winning approach to the writing life.

ArtSake: Divulge your secrets! I frequently see your name as a finalist or winner of writers’ prizes (including, obviously, the MCC fellowship). What’s your winning formula?

Jendi: Be a good reader. Know what makes one publisher’s style different from another. Target your work.

I credit my high school, St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights, for a fantastic training in how to read poetry. I’ve never gone in for the standard creative writing class where you share your drafts in public and a random group of people pick them apart. I think poets can get far more benefit from wide reading in literature and literary criticism, on their own or in a teacher-guided setting, with the goal of developing a refined intuition about what makes Sylvia Plath, for instance, sound different from Anne Sexton. This skill will then help you understand, first, whether your own work has an original voice and what that voice is, and second, which magazines and presses are publishing work that is sympatico with that voice.

ArtSake: Great advice. And I should mention that you’re the Vice President and Founder of WinningWriters.com, which finds and creates resources for writers and poets. What led to your creation of WinningWriters.com?

Jendi: Back in 2001, my husband Adam Cohen and I were living in NYC and working for large publishing companies – Adam as circulation director of the Atlantic Monthly, and myself as an editor at Facts on File News Service. It was becoming clear that we would be happier as entrepreneurs than as middle managers in a large organization. We’re both pretty opinionated and independent people! Besides that, I wanted the freedom to focus on my own writing. Every other career path I tried felt like a compromise to pay the bills.

So we brainstormed about what we could do that would pool his considerable skills with computers and direct marketing, and my expertise in the creative writing market. The Internet had developed to the point that an online publishing business was feasible and affordable for us.

We initially thought that the “fun part” would be an online anthology of our favorite poems from literary journals, rather like Poetry Daily. But how would it pay for itself? Like most subscribers, I suspect, I buy Poets & Writers Magazine for the contest guidelines, and view the editorial features as a bonus. To make our product a must-have, we needed to create our own contest directory, only better – searchable, with live links, complete formatting guidelines, and background information on the winners and judges.

And (venturing where more cautious institutions feared to tread) we got the notion to rank the contests based on how prestigious they appeared to be, and how favorable their terms were (e.g. prize/fee ratio, scale of marketing efforts for your book, simultaneous submissions rules). Beginning poets often make the mistake of submitting to the most famous contests, where their chances are poor. Scam contests also prey on these inexperienced writers. We’ve always felt our mission is to serve all segments of the poetry community, from happy amateurs to literature professors, and help them succeed in the market niche that is right for them. Our rankings are one tool for this purpose.

That anthology of reprints never happened, but the five poetry and prose contests we administrate have generated a large online library of exciting original writing, from flamboyantly off-color humorous verse to true tales of life on the battlefield.

Ten years later, we have over 35,000 subscribers to our free newsletter, from all over the world, who are eager to share their publishing successes with us. It’s a wonderful counterbalance to the isolated life of the creative writer. We love doing this work!

ArtSake: Along with your poetry, you also write fiction and nonfiction. Do you approach writing prose differently from the way you approach poems?

Jendi: Yes, definitely! Poetry and fiction must be written by hand with a mechanical pencil in a 6×9 Mead Five Star notebook. Nonfiction, by which I mean my blog posts about gay rights and Christianity, is written on the computer. I don’t know how to shape a narrative in creative nonfiction. There are too many facts, and most of them were hard enough to live through once.

When I write poetry, I’m not thinking about an audience. What wants to be written, gets written. It’s like a computer’s self-diagnostic. I write to find out what I think. Naturally, my values and preoccupations are reflected in the poetry, so in that sense, it often contains a critique of society, but it’s driven by my own need to express my authentic inner experience, rather than to have a particular impact on others. (Though I wonder whether the two are really so separable – doesn’t every self-disclosure cherish a tiny hope of being recognized and responded to in kind, however much one tries to cultivate self-protective detachment?)

My novel-in-progress is about a young fashion photographer in 1990s NYC who struggles to reconcile his faith and his sexual orientation. With this project, I have more of a conscious intention to bring about social change, along with telling an entertaining story.

Writing a novel is harder than poetry because it’s impossible to be in the “flow” for that length of time. With a poem, by the time I figure out where my subconscious is taking me, the trip’s over. I don’t have much opportunity to get in my own way. Far more planning has to go into the novel, which means that there are many chances for self-consciousness and ideological agendas to seize control, instead of letting the work tell me, itself, what it needs to be. I counteract this problem by conceiving of the novel as a collaborative effort between myself and my characters. They’ve got to retain the freedom to surprise me. My job is to see enough of the big picture so that they don’t get lost and despondent, but not be so directive that they lose their independent life force. It is a constant, elaborate, frustrating, fascinating dance that calls on all my relationship skills, and maybe even improves them in the so-called real world.

I do my creative writing by hand because this slower, temporally linear method allows intuition to take the lead. Writing on the computer, it’s too easy to pull back and see the big picture, to let the analytical mind start rearranging and criticizing, and skip past that quiet inwardness where the soul of the poem or story gestates.

ArtSake: Your poetic voice is truly idiosyncratic. Is the uniqueness of your language something you cultivate? Something innate to you as a writer? Some of both?

Jendi: I am a weird, smart person and a lot of difficult things have happened to me.

ArtSake: Your poem “Barbie at 50″ is just the blend I love in literature – funny, irreverent, but at the same time almost unbearably sad. Where did that poem start for you?

Jendi: I should probably be on that TV show “Hoarders” because of the number of dolls I have. Like my poem, which you described so insightfully, dolls seem to me to combine playfulness and sadness. They can’t give a voice to the emotions that their faces and bodies are designed to suggest. Thrift-shop dolls are the best. They were loved once, but time moved on and left them behind. The unfinished quality of their stories makes them a great writing prompt. And of course Barbie symbolizes so many of the contradictions of woman-as-doll: the power of beauty and the powerlessness of being an object designed to please others. Middle-aged Barbie has to learn to make the best of events that were outside her control, and find, I hope, a kind of strength and even panache in that.

ArtSake: What writers and poets are you excited about, these days?

Jendi: I have a poetry crush on Ariana Reines – her first collection, The Cow (Fence Books, 2006), was a huge influence on my chapbook Swallow, in that it gave me permission to explode the limits of language and self-consciousness in order to be true to some powerful, embodied, grotesque yet sacred-feeling emotions. Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg’s anthology Gurlesque includes all this plus fabulous pictures of decorated animal skulls and tongues dripping with glitter – what’s not to like?

A lot of the work that comes out of Fence Books excites me because their authors’ voices are unique, though I can’t say I always understand them. Nick Demske’s self-titled collection is one example. From Wave Books, I liked Dorothea Lasky’s AWE and Mary Ruefle’s The Most of It, both of which arrive at spiritual clarity in a very roundabout, Zen-like way, by playfully demolishing our everyday concepts yet enjoying the texture of the detritus, that is to say, without the self-righteous asceticism we associate with the high priests of religion or (for that matter) poetry. To hold my attention, poetry that is experimental or “difficult” must have some humor in it, some physical pleasure in language. It shouldn’t simply be punishing the reader or testing her intelligence.

At the other end of the accessibility spectrum, I was incredibly charmed and nourished by the formalist, pastoral poetry in Charles W. Pratt’s From the Box Marked Some Are Missing, a recent release from Hobblebush Books in New Hampshire. Temple Cone’s No Loneliness (FutureCycle Press) is reverent but unsentimental about rural life. I enjoy the frankness and magnanimity of working-class poetic voices like Jeff Walt, Michael Meyerhofer, and my good friend Ellen LaFleche, whose collection Workers’ Rites was just selected by Dana Gioia for the Philbrick Poetry Prize.

For classics, I return (not as often as I should) to the favorites of my teenage years, Richard Wilbur, W.H. Auden, Anne Sexton, and T.S. Eliot.

My prose reading list is pretty consistent: queer/feminist theology, gay male short story anthologies, and mystery novels. I’ve tried to branch out but I always wind up muttering about “straight male privilege” and “depressing endings” and then I pick up another Mary Higgins Clark at the thrift shop.

Jendi joins Rosann Kozlowski, Nancy K. Pearson, Cynthia Morrison Phoel, and Jung Yun for a Commonwealth Reading Series event on Wednesday, March 23, 7 PM, Forbes Library in Northampton. Other events in the series include Porter Square Books in Cambridge (3/15 and 3/31), Grub Street in Boston (3/18), and Newtonville Books in Newton (4/5).

Jendi Reiter‘s first book, A Talent for Sadness, was published in 2003 by Turning Point Books. Her poetry chapbook Swallow won the 2008 Flip Kelly Poetry Prize and was published in 2009 by Amsterdam Press. Her poetry chapbook Barbie at 50 won the 2010 Cervena Barva Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published that year by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The New Criterion, Mudfish, Passages North, American Fiction, The Adirondack Review, Cutthroat, The Broome Review, FULCRUM, Juked, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Alligator Juniper, MARGIE: The American Journal of Poetry, Phoebe, Best American Poetry 1990 and many other publications.

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