writing, art, the vast in-betweens

Sometimes I feel I spend most of my time balancing and straddling different worlds.  There is the world of the library and the creative world.  The balance between poetry and prose and the task of writing in hybrid genres. Also the worlds of writing and the worlds of art.  Of editing and writing of my own.   My work forever how to get them to bleed effectively into and out of each other.  How to balance your time between them and bring them together.  Whenever I spend too much time leaning in one direction it is usually accompanied by a listllessness when it comes to the other.  There are some things that seem to fully bring things together..doing creative programs and exhibits in the library for example. Or creating my zine /artist book projects that successfully meld those things together.

Since I did those summer house pieces, I was struck with an urge to do some writing to go along with them, and what has emerged is rather interesting--a sort of domestic ghost story involving a changeling.  I'm five pieces in and liked them so much I decided to send them off in submission to see if anyone else takes a fancy, mostly because even independent of the visual aspects they are pretty sound writing.  I do still always feel however, that lately, the places where my work is most true, most pure, is in the interaction of the visual with the text, but there seem to be rather limited places for that sort of hybrid work.. I do try to exhibit both visuals and text at the same time, but as far as lit journals, only a few are specifically interested in cross-genre work of this kind.

This week, I've been putting finishing touches on ordinary planet, which combines poems and images in a short artist book project. (more pics of this soon). The poems themselves appeared in a few places recently and seem to hold up well without the images, but the images definitely augment and perhaps change your interpretation of the written pieces and vice versa.  I love the friction they cause between each other, similarly in the summer house, where the written aspects are much spookier and darker than the collages, which are actually more pretty and light than their text counterparts.

Granted, sometimes I still definitely make art without text elements (most of my printmaking and painting projects fall in this vein). Sometimes I still write without visuals (this happens less and less, since mostly I find myself thinking what visuals might accompany what I've written (exquisite damage being an excellent example of this--I'm still trying to figure it out.)   I'm also, excited when my visuals or my my written pieces interact with the work of other artists and writing.  This is probably why I love designing covers so much, why I loved making my contribution to this project and the slender man project I am working on with my sister.

I've talked about my late entry into practicing any sort of visual art, not until I was around 30, having spent most of my efforts up til then on writing and, when I was in college, on theatre (I was mostly a backastager--stage managing, running lights, overseeing costumes). After undergrad, I pretty much focused on writing for about a decade (well that and finding some sort of way to make a living.)  My 30's in general were very much about throwing things at the wall and seeing if they would stick--learning new techniques and skills and applying them to the work I wanted to do.

It's strange to think of the writing I did prior to around 2004 had no interatcion with the visual arts, or maybe it was always firmly embedded in mental imagery that I didn't know how to translate.  I've often mentioned that my collage work impacted my writing style heavily in the years that followed, but I sometimes wonder how much my writing has an effect on my visual pieces (not in the obvious way of combining them) but maybe in the way even the visuals are sometimes working to tell stories.