(Erin Elizabeth Smith tagged me as a brief stop on this cool little blog tour. Enjoy~)
A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME
A writer and visual artist, I am the author of several book, chapbook and art zine projects, including the shared properties of water and stars (Noctuary Press), girl show (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) and the forthcoming major characters in minor films (Sundress Publications, 2015). I live in Chicago, where I run dancing girl press & studio and spend much of my time writing, making papery things, and curating a chapbook series devoted to women authors.
WHAT AM I WORKING ON?
Right now, I’m working on a visual/text project involving a series of epistolary poems I wrote last yearcalled lunarium, which will hopefully manifest as a box project involving the letters, envelopes, postcards , and various ephemera. I am also working on a series of dream poems, a novel-like mss.. in prose fragments about a creepy hotel, and some text pieces to go hand in hand with a series of postcard paintings I’ve been doing. There are also some projects still in their infancy I occasionally turn over in my head, including things like monsters, pinup girls & the atomic bomb, ransom notes to my former self, and other fun stuff.
HOW DOES MY WORK DIFFER FROM OTHERS OF ITS GENRE
Since I tend to float a bit between genres, it’s maybe hard to pinpoint. Most of what I have been writing lately has been more prose-like , but I suppose it still sounds a bit more like poetry than most prose. I think with every new project , I try to something different, be it with language or with narrative or voice. Lately, a lot of things work in conjunction or in dialogue with visual art—collages, paintings, found objects, so those things influence my work in a way that varies from a lot of writers.
WHY DO I WRITE WHAT I DO?
I tend to write toward my passions. My little pet obsessions. On the other hand, I sometimes feel like I’m writing around the same sorts of subjects but with different approaches with every new manuscript—the body, language, a particular kind of female danger/transgression, the gothic, transformation, place and locality. Each one is probably an attempt to get a new understanding of the same sorts of things.
HOW DOES MY WRITING PROCESS WORK?
Since I work both a full-time job and tend to the press another 30 or so hours a week, my writing happens in bits and spurts rather than any sort of disciplined framework. I am always reading though—be it novels, poetry collections, dgp chapbooks I’m working on, so I write down a lot of notes and ideas that eventually go into poems once I can sit down and make something of them. Over the years its sort developed into a collage-ish process where I never know for sure what I’m going to end up with at the end, or the direction in which individual pieces will wind up taking. I also sometimes try to trick myself into writing by pretending what I’m doing is just for fun—my I*HATE*YOU JAMES*FRANCO pieces came from such antics, as did my recent series of apocalypse poems. It sort of takes the pressure off and helps avoid pesky creative blocks.
