By the time I'd graduated high school, I had plenty of other creative interests to spend my time pursuing, so the lack of the visual arts wasn't really missed. I liked art well enough, swooned over paintings and masterworks but recognized I was never going to be able to make them myself. I made little artist books and collages for my junior year English class and felt that first flicker of frisson between writing (other people's anyway) and art. In fact, made lots of collages cut from magazines but always saw them as image and inspo boards, never as artmaking. I saw with an artist's eyes, but lacked the artist's hands. I could paint a little, and practiced painting scene drops for theater productions, but they were large swathes of color and not much detail. My sister, who was one of those rare creatures, the art kid, was a mystery to me, though I once became obsessed with a book art project she brought home. Again, cool to pore over, but not something I felt like I could do or knew anything about. But I was weirdly obsessed, which is telling now.
By the time grad school had spit me out and I took my first job, I was solely fixated on writing. My second job, however, was at an art school library, so I was surrounded by visual artists and books full of art. I was also designing simple webpages and doing rudimentary graphic design for writing purposes that worked some visual skills--my first website, wicked alice. Our director had launched an art show for library staff and a co-worker encouraged me to submit something. At first I was flummoxed, not sure how to turn writing into art. I was 29 and already set in my ways of seeing text and image as two very different things. Numerous discussions and urgings happened and the product was a text installation, crudely done, that involved poems, three of them from some of my current work then, on sheets of rice paper, wound around the walls, up the stairs, and around the gallery space. It was cool, later leading to a couple other similar projects involving muslin banners and card catalog cards hung from the ceiling. I still felt like I needed something more.
At the same time, I was just starting my MFA program and looking to start the press. The next summer, I took a weekend workshop down at the Book and Paper Center on collage and it was like a match had been struck. Because collage mostly involved vision and paper and glue, this was something I could do, just as I'd pasted up inspo boards and collages about the Crucible in high school. I was actually kind of good at it, or I thought so. Like writing, I look at some of that work and cringe a little, but slowly I started exhibiting those, then later, an artist book collage project at a local gallery (the book of red, which was the first time I had a textual component inspire a visual thing.) it also coincided with more experience designing those first couple years of covers chapbooks and thinking about different manifestations for the printed word. Later, I added in practice and skills in printmaking, painting, and book sculptures and suddenly I was kind of an "artist." When people called me that it always shocked me a little. As if it happened by accident, which was very different than the dogged pursuit of writing my entire adult life. Suddenly there were gallery show invitations and requests for teaching workshops. I was taken aback, but delighted.
In those years after my MFA,. I made a lot of stuff for my etsy shop that was purely visual when I was writing less-shadowboxes, assemblages, visual zines and paper goods designs. Also earrings and hair clips and other visually oriented things. I began to fund the other less lucrative publishing endeavors and the studio space by selling these things. Slowly, as the writing came back, and things changed again. The visual pieces weren't always accompanied by text, but sometimes those words collided, one birthing the other. A set of collages would become a series of poems. A chapbook of poems would spawn a cache of collages. I became a little more comfortable moving back and forth more effortlessly. Things would dovetail nicely when it came to book design, to other book-like things that weren't necessarily books, but boxes of letters and folios of ephemera. Eventually, it led to delving more into zines and zine-culture, which vibed with my DIY-publishing spirit as an indie press. They would eventually become one of my favorite ways to put work into the world, whether printed or digital.
Just this month, I've been fiddling with collages more--mostly digital. Now, those visual efforts are split a little between video poems and more static work, but they scratch a similar itch. Sometimes I go months in a less visual space, even when writing a lot. Sometimes, the art is easier. Sometimes its harder. In February, I started a new manuscript project that doesn't feel at all like it will have a visual component, so it's freed up some other experiments that are completely unrelated, the Iphegenia Series that plays a bit with AI generated bits, or a new bit of sea monster inspo (see above). Both of these feel entirely visual, which isn't to say I will be able stop myself from writing things should the urge strike, but only that I have no current plans to.
Sometimes the visual realm and the written one feel less like countries or lands and more like languages I speak, sometimes both at the same time, sometimes alone.
