Hello folks!
A not so brief explanation for why there’s a new writing section in my portfolio.
So my creative practice over the past 6 months has been almost exclusively writing. Why, you might ask, the sudden switch to something completely new? The answer is that it isn’t really new for me…just almost entirely forgotten.
A long, long time ago (we’re talking early twenties here) I had two creative practices: poetry and sculpture.
I majored in Fine Art at Washington University in St. Louis, and by Junior year had settled on sculpture as the direction I wanted to head in. I still needed to fill out my academic calendar with language arts, though, and so in spring of 1989 I enrolled in a poetry class with Donald Finkel. And then another.
And I discovered I loved poetry. I loved the way language worked, the way words fit together. It felt visceral; it gave me the same sensations I felt making visual art, when something came together just so. I understood it.
I was also not bad at it.
Halfway into my senior year Don took me out for a beer at a blues bar in University City. He was a great guy, a big booster of students he believed in, and I think this was his way of providing mentorship outside of the classroom experience. Don told me that when he was younger, he had to choose between visual art and writing, and chose writing. He said that it was hard to do both, that he couldn’t do it, but wanted to see me succeed if I could. He was very encouraging. He was, I learned much later, at the end of a 30 year run teaching at WU and about to retire, so I imagine he was in a period of reflection on his own career. On retirement in 1991, he returned to sculpture.
I was 20 or 21, and at the time I had it in my head that there was nothing standing in the way of pursuing whatever creative practice I wanted. I didn’t, of course, know then what life throws at us, the ongoing weathering of the soul that shapes us as we swim through the years, what we carry forward and what we leave behind.
I continued to write as a separate creative practice until I was 23 or so. For a few years the work merged with my sculptural practice - words appeared on my pieces. That work now exists only in 35mm slides buried somewhere in our basement. Sculptors tend to be less archival about their work than other disciplines - it’s literally too much baggage to schlep through life.
But at some point in graduate school, the work went silent. I applied to a few visual arts graduate schools, but I also threw in a writing program - the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I said to myself, “well, if I get into that, then I have some decisions to make”. I didn’t, and when I arrived at Cranbrook, the words started to leach out of the visual practice.
It wasn’t a bad thing - my work was evolving, and grad school is about cycling through rapid changes. This was one of them. But as a consequence, close to three decades sit between the last time I took writing seriously and the next time I committed to it.
Enough time has passed that even the physical act of writing has changed for me. The last time I wrote a poem prior to now, I did so on a typewriter. It wasn’t even electric. I would type, cross out and write in lines with a pencil, then re-type the whole thing. Having taken up writing again, I find I miss that. Not enough to actually drop this laptop, of course! But the tactility of high quality paper as you yank it out of the carriage, the feeling of letters on the page…I miss that. It’s like driving a stick shift.
There’s another angle here, of course. I’m quite aware that poetry wasn’t the only thing I set aside when I was young. Writing is in some way connected to my experience as a trans person. There’s a lot to unpack there and I’m not going to do that today - this entry was just meant to be my attempt to explain why there’s a new writing section on my website.
But am I actually good at writing?
I don’t know and no longer much care, I guess. You can read this stuff or not, your choice! This website has veered sideways as my own creative career has twisted around. It used to be much more of a marketing tool; now it’s more like an ongoing document of my experience. I think I like it better that way.
