Jekyll2024-03-19T05:03:36-04:00https://thecreativeindependent.com/feed.xmlThe Creative IndependentAuthor Rita Bullwinkel on only making something when you’re driven to it2024-03-19T03:00:00-04:002024-03-19T03:00:00-04:00https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/author-rita-bullwinkel-on-only-making-something-when-youre-driven-to-it<p><strong>Your debut novel <i>Headshot</i> revolves around a boxing tournament set over a weekend at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno. The focus is on eight characters, one weekend, one tournament. When you began to write, were you thinking about constraints, either time-wise, location-wise, and so on?</strong></p>
<p>Yes. I was thinking about how the space of a sports tournament is incredibly, relentlessly finite. Tournaments are very small, claustrophobic spaces where time both hurtles forward, and can also feel suspended. <span class="highlight">When one is competing in a tournament, like when reading a very good book, the rest of the world seems other and flimsy, which can be a good feeling.</span> It’s intoxicating. Also, I was trying to write a book of portraiture, and eight seemed like a good number of portraits to try to tackle, and also a number that would work in a class tournament structure, so that’s why the book has eight characters, as opposed to 16, or 32, or 64.</p>
<p><strong>Were there any particular books that served as models in terms of writing portraiture?</strong></p>
<p>There are books that I love that are portraits, but they’re usually portraits of just one person. <i>Kick the Latch</i> by <a href="https://www.kathrynscanlan.com">Kathryn Scanlan</a> and <i>Lord of Misrule</i> by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaimy_Gordon">Jaimy Gordon</a> are both incredible, voice driven books of portraiture of individuals that also both happen to be about sport, in their case horse racing. One of the reasons I like both of those books so much is because of my ignorance about the sport that they deal with. I know nothing about horse racing, so when reading about the language of the sport, and the politics and the drama, I might as well be reading about dragons.</p>
<p>Another complicated but beautiful book-portrait that I love is <i>Ray</i> by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Hannah">Barry Hannah</a>.</p>
<p>With <i>Headshot</i>, it was a great challenge to have eight main characters, and to try to take each of their portraits with equal weight. I don’t think the weight is equal on each of the girls. Some do stand out more than others, and obviously some progress in the tournament while others don’t, so we spend more time with them there, but I feel like I was able to make each girl contestant sit for a portrait, if ever briefly. Hopefully the reader feels like they know each of them.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">Literary portraits are so different depending on whether or not the narrative is in the first person.</span> Voice can be a kind of portrait. <i>Headshot</i> is obviously in the third person, so it’s not the girls’ voices that are primarily painting the picture, it’s their interior thoughts and what is important to them, and what has hurt them, and what influences how each them understands themselves in the world, and how they walk through space.</p>
<p><strong>You and I have talked a little about your background as a competitive water polo player. Win or lose, it seems like athletes are constantly forced to face their own limitations, bodily, mentally, spiritually or otherwise. Can you talk about how being an athlete might relate to being a writer?</strong></p>
<p>Many writers have athletic practices, or were once great athletes, and I think this is not an accident! Years ago, I pitched a panel to AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) where I proposed that all the writer-panelists be former competitive athletes, and that a t-shirt gun would be rented, and that, mid panel, we, the panelists would try to articulate this connection, if there is one, and also t-shirt-gun-hurdle free t-shirts into the convention center crowd. The panel was not accepted. <span class="highlight">I think writing and sports-playing are both obsessive, deluded acts where you have to have some will, and some ability to improvise, and some imagination.</span> Writers are also massive addicts, and that seems related, too.</p>
<p>In regards to this book specifically, I had this trove of memories, of being 12, 14, 16, 19, 21 and structuring my entire life around these tournaments, of traveling state to state, pool to pool, where everything was always the same, same girls, same tournament structure, same competition, but sometimes we were in Phoenix or sometimes we were in Texas or sometimes we were in Michigan. <span class="highlight">It was like traveling between space ships. I wanted to write about that feeling, the smallness and infiniteness of that world of the youth athletic tournament, and I felt like I could better write about that feeling if it was longer work, if it was a novel.</span> Some other writers that write beautifully about the feeling of playing a sport are the way that <a href="https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/natalie-diaz-on-the-physicality-of-writing/">Natalie Diaz</a> writes about playing basketball, and the way that David Foster Wallace wrote about playing tennis. Joyce Carol Oates wrote a book <i>On Boxing</i>, but that book is about the feeling of watching boxing at Madison Square Garden, mostly, which is something else entirely. That book isn’t at all about the feeling of competing, it’s about watching and projecting on those that are inside the ring. I wanted <i>Headshot</i> to chase the feeling of competing.</p>
<p><strong>I think I was going to be on that panel. I was really confused about AWP’s lack of support for us. Anyway, there are so many beautiful and strangely grotesque images throughout <i>Headshot</i>. I’m thinking of this moment when one of the boxers, Rachel Doricko, is eating an orange. “She picks the white veins of orange peel gunk carefully off each segment.” The phrase orange peel gunk is so pleasing. I love the way you see and hear the world. Do you have a practice of noticing? Do you keep a notebook? Or are these images more spontaneous and intuitive?</strong></p>
<p>Oh gosh, Patrick, this compliment means so much to me coming from you, one of the greatest noticers, and therefore writers, that we have! James Wood very aptly titled his beautiful book of literary criticism <i>Serious Noticing</i>, and I think that is a good description of not just what happens in literary criticism, but also what happens in literature at-large. <span class="highlight">My favorite books show me the world in a way that changes how I see and hear. I try to notice things, although I think my powers are limited. I don’t keep a notebook, but I am an obsessive list-maker, but it’s almost as if as soon as I make the list, the list becomes irrelevant.</span> Somehow, the making of the list is the only thing that seems to help me. Here, with the orange peel gunk, I think you are right that I liked the sound! I do like the sound. <span class="highlight">I write out-loud, so will often privilege the sound of a word, or the sound of a sentence, above all else.</span></p>
<p><strong>Would you say your attention to and privileging of the sonic was honed through your editorial work with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Williams_(author)">Diane Williams</a> at <i>NOON</i>?</strong></p>
<p>Absolutely. Diane is brilliant and working with her at <i>NOON</i> was one of the most impactful experiences of my life. I was deeply changed by working with her, by listening to her orally consider work, and <span class="highlight">by listening to her turn over the merits of sentences both for their sonic qualities and for their narrative meaning.</span> I first started working for Diane in 2012, which was also when I first started producing a great deal of writing. <span class="highlight">Diane always says, good writing needs to stand up orally. Serious readers will read your work aloud.</span> There is some writing that I like that does not sound good aloud, mostly stuff with a lot of dialogue, and that’s fine, but for my own work I do want to try to make it stand on its own legs when read aloud.</p>
<p><strong>With the structure/form of the tournament in place, you’ve created propulsive energy and a lot of forward momentum because at the end of the book, we know someone will win. You can move forward and backwards in time while still having the anchor of the tournament to come back to. Did you always have this form in mind?</strong></p>
<p>No. I wrote a draft of this book from a single character’s point of view, in the first person, and it wasn’t good, it wasn’t what I wanted the book to be at all, so I just threw is away and started over, this time with the frame of the tournament, from the third person, and that frame felt true and right, so when I started that draft, I wrote it all the way the way through, and thought, yes, this is the book that I wanted to write.</p>
<p><strong>I’ve thrown away huge piles of words and pages and sometimes it can be so freeing. If one feels stuck in one’s writing, what do you recommend?</strong></p>
<p>I recommend reading. I also recommend walking. <span class="highlight">I think a lot of bad writing happens when people write at a time when they do not want to write. I only write if I’m driven to it, if it feels like there is no other option than to begin.</span></p>
<p><strong>Your work, including the story collection, <i>Belly Up</i>, frequently revolves around the horror of having a body. There’s so much physicality and visceral movement in your book. I’m thinking of Andi Taylor who visualizes “a tunnel of vacancy” in another boxer’s rib cage which must be filled by her hand or the way Rachel Doricko imagines her “insides looking like pounded veal.” I myself have a problem writing about physicality and the body. You’re really good at it. How do you do it?</strong></p>
<p>This is a great compliment! Thank you. I think having a body is really strange, and so I think that is likely why I frequently circle it. Although I’m not sure I am horrified by having a body, I think I am mostly just confused. <span class="highlight">Bizarrely, the periods in my life when I have been most in control of my physical form, when I was competitive athlete, are the same times when I felt most estranged from my body.</span> It’s almost like the more I asked of my body, the more it seemed like a tool, as something separate from myself, as something that could be used.</p>
<div class="rec" id="recommendation">
<div class="rec-content"><p><b>Rita Bullwinkel recommends</b><br /></p>
<p><a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/dead-in-long-beach-california-venita-blackburn/19994805"><i>Dead in Long Beach, California</i> by Venita Blackburn—</a>nobody bends time, or writes sentences, like Blackburn. I’ve loved all her books, but this sci-fi masterpiece is my favorite yet.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.isolarii.com/">Isolarii</a> publishes incredible, small, pocket-sized books in the tradition of renaissance island books, and everything they make is brilliant, but they’re newest,<a href="https://www.isolarii.com/book/under-the-wings-of-the-valkyrie"> <i>Under the Wings of the Valkyrie</i> by Sjon</a>, is magnificent.</p>
<p>The images of<a href="https://jenna-garrett.com/"> Jenna Garrett</a> always leave me changed. I’m grateful that two different versions of two of her images don the American and UK <i>Headshot</i> covers.</p>
<p>The best art gallery in San Francisco is<a href="https://staircase.place/"> Staircase Gallery</a>. See any show they have up. They’re always stunning and otherworldly.</p>
<p><a href="https://babaa.es/">babaà,</a> which was recommended to me by the brilliant writer Natalie So, makes the world’s best sweaters.</p>
</div>
</div>Patrick CottrellYour debut novel Headshot revolves around a boxing tournament set over a weekend at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno. The focus is on eight characters, one weekend, one tournament. When you began to write, were you thinking about constraints, either time-wise, location-wise, and so on?Poet Tayi Tibble on trusting your influences2024-03-18T03:00:00-04:002024-03-18T03:00:00-04:00https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/poet-tayi-tibble-on-trusting-your-influences<p><strong>You’ve wanted to be a writer since the age of eight. Do you remember what sparked this decision?</strong></p>
<p>I think two things. Writing was the one thing I would get praise for at school. I was quite shy and a people pleaser and I didn’t get noticed for anything else, so it disproportionately affected me, obviously. I really liked stories, too. I remember being young and most of my cousins, all the kids my age, they would just play. But <span class="highlight">I always wanted to sit around with my grandparents, my nana especially, and hear her stories. I feel like I was almost being trained to listen, so I could write about them one day and pass them on.</span></p>
<p><strong>Have you tried writing prose?</strong></p>
<p>When I was a teenager, I did. I’d write a lot of fiction and short stories and novels. I haven’t had a proper attempt at it as an adult writer, but I do really want to. It’s one of my aspirations. I think having so much space and time to really go at a set of ideas would be really satisfying. I am trying, but it’s really effing hard. I’m having to learn things like structure from writer’a TikTok. My brain is wired to write poetry these days. <span class="highlight">If I write a boring sentence, I immediately become frustrated.</span></p>
<p><strong>Editing fiction can be especially difficult. How do you edit your poetry?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I actually really love editing poetry. It’s my favorite part. I love how you can change just one word and it suddenly elevates the line or even the whole poem. When I’m writing poetry, I’m looking and reading through and I’m really interrogating each word and trying to figure out: Is this the best word? Is this exactly what I’m trying to say at this moment?</span> And I do a lot of reading aloud because cadence and rhythm are really important to me. I try to feel where the lines are sitting or where the stresses are, where the hits and the rhythm are. <span class="highlight">I also like to use those read-aloud functions on the computer because I feel like if it can still sound somewhat bearable with this monotone voice reading it, then that’s probably going to be alright—it’s the final test.</span></p>
<p><strong>Do you have a certain kind of voice or accent that you select with the computer?</strong></p>
<p>I select Australian because it’s the closest to finding a New Zealand read aloud voice. There’s this Australian robot woman called Karen that I use.</p>
<p><strong>When do you decide to pepper te reo Māori in your poetry?</strong></p>
<p>When I use te reo Māori it’s probably more for voice than anything. It’s like, would I say the word in English or would I say it in Māori? I speak a lot of te reo Māori, but I’m not fluent. Lots of people here in Aotearoa, Māori or non-Māori, will incorporate te reo Māori in lieu of certain English words, so it feels natural to use it interchangeably. But then at other times, I might use it for the sound. <span class="highlight">The marriage of consonant and vowel sounds in te reo Māori is really satisfying for me. So sometimes it’ll be for the sake of rhythm but also meaning as well, because a lot of our language in te reo Māori doesn’t actually have a direct translation to English and there are lots of layers of meaning in our words, each phonetic will have its own meaning.</span></p>
<p>For example the title, <i>Rangikura</i>, “rangi” means sky or heaven as it is related to Ranginui, our legendary sky father, and “kura” means red or scarlett. <i>Kura</i> also means school or getting an education so, to me, Rangikura means “learning from the red sky,” which Māori would understand as observing <i>tohu</i>, looking and learning from signs in the natural world. “Ikura” is a term we use for a woman’s menses. I like that meaning being in the title because the book has a theme of girlhood. In that way I’ll use te reo also because I find it more layered and poetic.</p>
<p><strong>I’m completely obsessed with your poetic imagery. I’m thinking specifically of the glow-in-the-dark stars in “Can I Still Come Crash at Yours?” How do you choose objects in your poems and what kind of objects resonate with you as a reader?</strong></p>
<p>When I was a kid, I would be attracted to lists of objects or items in books. I remember reading this one Jacqueline Wilson book when I was eight and it had a list of all these different lollies this character was eating and that imprinted on me. It was so satisfying to read all these English lollies I’d never heard of. I think my attraction to objects is almost like a feminine impulse. All the girls I know have always had attachments to certain items and collecting. Have you seen that trend going around? It’s like girl clusters or girls who cluster, that kind of thing. These little clusters of ordinary but talismanic objects.</p>
<p>I really like Sofia Coppola and Petra Collins and Nadia Lee Cohen. I was inspired by these artists who really emphasized femininity, and they always were focused on items and objects. I’m also interested in world-building and world-building my world that’s hybrid te ao Māori, but modern. And that’s why I feel like peppering these physical items and objects is important to me. I love physicality in poems and having a sense of groundedness because some of my poems deal with concepts of colonization and the effects of that, or the spiritual aspect of Te ao Māori. To balance that, it’s important to have some concrete ideas in there as well, some stick-on stars or a broken iPod.</p>
<p><strong>I noticed the world-building, especially in the poems about early girlhood, like listening to <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_to_Die">Born to Die</a></i> on a desktop computer without internet and “skulling” 10-dollar Kristov. What interests you about girlhood?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I think of <i>Rangikura</i> as kind of being a coming-of-age narrative. I’m interested in that phase of life because you’re coming into adulthood, but you’re also coming into awareness and your social conscience at the same time. The characters in this book are discovering their positionality in the world as wahine Māori and also their consciousness about why the world is like this and why the world is like that to them, exploitative and predatory. It was the phase of my life where I, and surely other women, felt the most vulnerable. You’re becoming a woman, but you don’t have access to your own money or have your own ideas fully formed. <i>Rangikura</i> is a coming-of-age narrative that’s supposed to be a metaphor for colonization and the climate crisis. I associate the kind of desecration of the earth and what’s happening with the environment to the kind of disrespect and desecration of Indigenous women. And I wanted to put the climate anxiety I was feeling into the anxiety of being a young and vulnerable woman.</span></p>
<p><strong>Your poems speak to American culture—endless reality TV shows, a stepbrother asking if he should destroy a Beavis and Butthead gift, etc.—but I also read your essay in <i>Newsroom</i> where you talk about the world of Māori influencers, musicians, and stars. I’m curious about this divide between cultural icons while you were coming-of-age, or if you even consider it a divide.</strong></p>
<p>I personally don’t consider it a divide because I’m in both worlds, but I’m also aware that Americans might not know much about our pop culture and music, and the things we have here. <span class="highlight">Maybe I’m generalizing, but I feel like Americans don’t really know much about anywhere else in the world.</span></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I love American pop culture.</span> The level of celeb worship and enthusiasm is so different from NZ culture. It’s something I’m definitely interested in and I’m passionate about. <span class="highlight">But at the same time, I do think of American pop culture as the second colonization of Aotearoa New Zealand. I feel like American pop culture has more influence, at least among my generation, than the legacy of Great Britain or anything like that.</span></p>
<p>It’s funny because I feel like I walk in both worlds pretty easily and confidently, and I feel comfortable existing in sort of the axis point of them. My friends and I use the terms “modern Māori” or “bougie native,” as terms for being a contemporary Indigenous person who enjoys pop culture, music, dressing up, going out for dinners in a way that has an element of reclamation, of taking up space while still being Māori and representing our ancestors and tradition. I do acknowledge that there’s obviously tension there. <span class="highlight">American pop culture is so predicated on capitalism, colonization, exploitation… I’m trying to think of a gentler word, but I can’t. You know, exploitation and displacement of Indigenous people and the slave labor of Black people in America. Obviously, these things are quite in contrast to our values and the way that we operate in Te Ao Māori. But I do think that the tension that that creates, for me, as a person and as a writer, is really interesting. I use contrast and juxtaposition a lot in my writing. I like a clash.</span></p>
<p><strong>Your poetry mentions astrology a lot, and I know that you run an astrology column, too. How do you use astrology as a tool, both in your writing and in your life?</strong></p>
<p>In my life, I like it as a shorthand for analysis, but also, it has some sort of esoteric resonance for me as an Indigenous person. We Polynesians are traditional star gazers. We navigate the world through looking at the stars and other elements in the environment. That’s why I think astrology made sense for me, that you would look at the stars and draw meaning from their location in the sky. That was not a far leap from what I already believe in, coming from navigators. And obviously, I like it for the fun, girly pop nature of it, comparing charts and looking at synastry.</p>
<p>In poetry, I’m more attracted to the language of astrology and how that can be used. I just love a lot of the language around astrology, like the planets, the symbolism and even the names of the signs. For example, I have a poem in Rangikura that I could have called ‘I’m determinedly destructive when it comes to my desire’ but instead I called it ‘Mars in Scorpio.’</p>
<p><strong>You went to graduate school for an MA. What’d you learn there?</strong></p>
<p>I definitely learnt to write even though I always thought I was the man. I got in by submitting these really silly, aesthetic poems I was posting on Tumblr. I think I was lucky to get in, but I remember on the first day of class, my teacher asked, “Are you going to take this seriously? Are you going to be serious about this?” I was like, “Yeah, I’m paying all this money and I signed up to do this,” all indignant. But no, I did listen to her and I learnt real quick.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">My poems before I went to study were really self-indulgent and didn’t really mean anything when you poked through a certain aesthetic veneer. What I learnt mostly was to be more generous to the readers.</span> That really stuck with me and I take that forward. But also, I hadn’t really written about my Māori identity, or the cultural state of Aotearoa before I went and did that course.</p>
<p>It was about six weeks in and I wrote this lyric essay about Indigenous hair, and I got a really positive response to it and everyone was saying, “This is what you’re supposed to be doing, this is what you should be writing.” And that really changed the trajectory of my studies that year and also for my career, and the things that I’m still writing about. <span class="highlight">I was really lucky in having a good experience in doing my MA, but I know not everyone does, especially not Indigenous people.</span></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I came at the right time where some native writers had gone before me and made vocal the issues they had with the MA program and the way it was structured. By the time I came through, people were more open to my perspective and prepared to look after me.</span> The MA program has a prize at the end of the year for the best manuscript. It’s pretty evil and I don’t really think they should do it because it makes the year weird and competitive, but I won mine and I was happy to win. It fast-tracked me getting published here in New Zealand. Suddenly all the publishers knew me and were interested. <span class="highlight">The MA was significant as it gave me a lot of institutional support.</span></p>
<p><strong>You also teach others. What do you want your students to come away having learned?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I try to press perspective. I think it’s the most important and powerful thing that a writer or artist can have. It’s better than talent or even discipline. If you write from a place where only you can write from, that’s when you’re going to hit the good stuff.</span> Usually, I end up tutoring or teaching Polynesian or brown girls, so I always tell them it’s about honoring your history, your heritage and your whakapapa but whakapapa can be a range of different things.</p>
<p>It can be your actual ancestors and your culture, but it also can be even just the types of art you consume or the music you liked as a kid, things like that. <span class="highlight">When you believe, trust, and enjoy your influences and let them color your work, you’ll make work that’s really special and impactful.</span></p>
<p>The course I usually teach or lecture is called “Turangawaewae, A Place to Stand, Ways of Writing about the Land.” It’s about the different ways that Māori address and talk to the land, whether it’s through personification of the natural elements as gods, or the way we introduce ourselves by naming all the rivers and the mountains and the physical landscapes that we come from. I use that to get writers to consider place and their positionality and relationship to the land. Place is really important to me in my writing.</p>
<p><strong>What are you working on now?</strong></p>
<p>The poems I’m writing right now all focus on the ocean. I just finished writing this long lyric essay about the Pacific Ocean being a highway, talking about my times traveling over in the US as well as our pacific voyaging history. It’s called Te-Moana-nui-a-Kiwa: Ocean Memory. That’s going to come out in April with Alta Mag, as a little pull-out book. I’m just really obsessed with the Pacific Ocean at the moment. My first two books have been really focused on Indigenous identity as a Māori, but this next one’s more focused on being Māori in the context of being a Pacific Islander. This one’s very Polynesian.</p>
<div class="rec" id="recommendation">
<div class="rec-content"><p><strong>Tay Tibble Recommends:</strong><br /></p>
<p>My e hoa from Aotearoa, Rebecca K Reilly also has a book out in The States, <i><a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Greta-Valdin/Rebecca-K-Reilly/9781668028049">Greta and Valdin</a></i>. She’s crack up.<br /></p>
<p><a href="https://www.westman-atelier.com/products/vital-skincare-complexion-drops-skin-tint">Westman Atelier Complexion Drops</a>—My friend Harry put me on and I was hesitant because he has the most perfect skin anyway, but now so do I because these drops are infused with glamour magic or something.<br /></p>
<p>I’ve been repeating <a href="https://yullola.bandcamp.com/album/monastery-of-love">Yullola’s <i>Monastery of Love</i></a> album—very ambient and unique with some swag.<br /></p>
<p>Having lunch from a bakery. My current obsession. NZ has a lot of bakeries and I’ve only just started appreciating. Cheap and cheerful and convenient because I need a sweet treat all the time. I like a strawberry tart.<br /></p>
<p>Luca (<a href="https://www.instagram.com/lucidluca/">@lucidluca on IG</a>) is a tongan painter in Aotearoa who paints the dreamiest portraits of south seas pacific wahine. I just bought a print of their painting “Hinewai” and it’s so ataahua.<br /></p>
</div>
</div>Shy WatsonYou’ve wanted to be a writer since the age of eight. Do you remember what sparked this decision?Writer Alexandra Tanner on trying to create something real2024-03-15T03:00:00-04:002024-03-15T03:00:00-04:00https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-alexandra-tanner-on-trying-to-create-something-real<p><strong>I couldn’t help but notice that, in your acknowledgements, you thank Jess Tanner for “coming to stay and stay and stay.” The narrator Jules’s sister Poppy does the same. Correct me if I’m being presumptuous, but was this based on real life? And, if so, how do you go about life writing or auto-fiction?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">Auto-fiction is such a loaded term these days.</span> Everyone’s doing it, and it has so many forms and boundaries. But yeah, <i>Worry</i> <i>is</i> based on my life. My younger sibling, Jess, came to New York for an internship back in 2016. I was living in the West Village in a little studio. They had student housing, but there was mold in the student housing. And they have chronic hives–with mold, not a good situation–so they came to stay with me. And at first I thought it would be a weekend, a week, and then it wound up being six months that we were living on top of each other. So that’s where the idea for Jules and Poppy cohabitating together came from. I think they really are us.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">The situation is different, the setting is different, the constraint of space and time is different. But as far as writing from life and writing whatever your definition of auto-fiction is, I think whenever you’re doing that you’re just sort of transfiguring yourself into a more loaded situation that’s more dramatically interesting.</span> So you’re working to preserve the impulses of a real person and thinking about that person while you’re writing them, or thinking about your own impulses while you’re writing a version of yourself, but just sort of heightening the stakes a little bit.</p>
<p><strong>Auto-fiction can be so hard because life itself isn’t really plotted.</strong></p>
<p>Anytime the book started pulling away too much from life, I would get anxious. Because what’s interesting to me is capturing what a dynamic really is. But then, of course, in order to sustain a story that pulls people along, you kind of have to give life a narrative. <span class="highlight">There has to be drama, there have to be other people involved. Even though my memory of living with Jess is this really specific insular experience, it had to open up in order for me to tell the bigger story I wanted to tell, to explore the things I was interested in writing about. So dramatizing life is always…You feel like you’re cheating, because life doesn’t have the patterns that fiction has.</span></p>
<p><strong>Yeah. But you got to.</strong></p>
<p>You got to.</p>
<p><strong>How did you know when <i>Worry</i> was ready?</strong></p>
<p>I still don’t know that it’s ready. I feel like the beginning and the end were sort of easy for me to get into, and so determining when it was ready in the initial drafting was more about getting to a place where I felt that the whole middle had a rhythm and had the right measure of repetition, but also growth and also backsliding. So I don’t know. <span class="highlight">I had to use my emotions in a way I hadn’t before to gauge when things felt true and solid.</span> So that led me toward pulling away a bunch of artifice, and anything that I was writing because I felt like: there’s a scene that should be in here, so now I have to have a scene about this in here.</p>
<p>There’s still things that I look at in the plot where I’m like: “Oh, I could do that better if I started over right now.” So <span class="highlight">I don’t know that a book is ever finished, except that it is, because you have a deadline from a publishing company. I think especially when you’re writing from life, it stays with you, and the what ifs follow you a little bit more.</span></p>
<p><strong>Now that <i>Worry</i> is published, are you able to let go of it and move on to the next project? Or are these potential changes haunting you?</strong></p>
<p>Throughout the editorial process, you still feel that measure of control, like: “Oh, I can still email my editor and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we should do this. What do you think about doing this?’” For a long time, you have the manuscript, you’re doing the copy edits, it feels like it’s alive and it’s with you. And there’s a moment where they tell you, “Okay, it’s done.” And that for me is sort of when I felt haunted. I would wake up in the middle of the night and be like, “Is it right? Can I change this one line still, maybe on this one page that for some reason is coming to me at three in the morning?” <span class="highlight">I’m haunted but I have no choice but to move on.</span></p>
<p><strong>At times, <i>Worry</i> almost read like a screenplay. How do you know when dialogue’s working well, and how do you know when it’s failing?</strong></p>
<p>I did a lot of playwriting courses throughout my life, in college and in grad school, a lot of screenwriting as well. And a big thing that they have you do in those classes is like: “We’re going to break for 45 minutes, and you’re going to go to a coffee shop and sit down and listen to someone else’s conversation and try to write it down. And <span class="highlight">you’re going to realize that when people are telling a story, they don’t fill in all the details for you, and they don’t leave something off in a way that’s easy to pick back up later.</span>”</p>
<p>And once you do that exercise a few times, I think it goes from feeling like those gaps are something that’s frustrating about creating dialogue to something that’s really freeing. I wanted it to feel very natural. So while I was writing the book I would pay that kind of close attention, <span class="highlight">whenever my sibling and I would talk to each other on the phone or during visits, the way we’d use language specifically with each other. How we’d defend ourselves or pick up on a memory or whatever. I realized it didn’t have to make clear sense. I didn’t have to package it to make sense to the reader. Because if the characters are understanding it and you as a writer are capturing a pair of characters’ intimate understanding of each other in language, the reader’s going to have that understanding too.</span></p>
<p><strong>It takes a lot to make me laugh out loud. I’ll think something’s funny or whatever, but with Worry I was cackling in my office, worried my boss would hear. How do you use humor in your writing? What effect do you hope it has?</strong></p>
<p>Because this book is so much about the texture of my relationship with my sibling and the texture of our humor with each other, that’s what I was looking to throughout the writing. <span class="highlight">I wanted to write something that would make this one specific person, who I think is the funniest person in the world, laugh. So what I’ve learned about humor is that the funniest memes you see online, or the funniest videos are the videos that people made for one specific person, the memes that reference one really specific event. I guess the key to humor in writing is specificity. Again, the same thing as with dialogue. It’s about not being afraid someone’s not going to get it, but trusting that if you build in the emotional secret behind it, the thing you want is going to come through.</span></p>
<p><strong>I read that you were a MacDowell fellow and also a fellow for the Center of Fiction. Have those experiences helped you develop as a writer?</strong></p>
<p>What’s been most important for me about those experiences is that they’ve legitimized me to myself. It’s so easy to feel like, “What’s special about me? What’s special about my work? Is this worth anything?” And I think both of <span class="highlight">those fellowships came at a time when I was out of grad school wondering, “How serious am I going to be about this? Am I going to have a career?” With those really scary, big questions, getting just a little bit of validation from an institution gave me the ego boost I needed to keep going. So that’s the big thing.</span></p>
<p>And then once you get to those places and once you’re in community with other writers, you realize that that’s what really helps you grow. When you’re at MacDowell, you’re with amazing people working in all different disciplines, and they feel frustration in their work as well. You come to dinner every night and talk about what went wrong and what went right in the studio. <span class="highlight">The thing you’re working on, whenever you’re a fellow or in-residence somewhere, the material becomes so secondary to having that experience of being in community and feeling like: “These other people are here and they’re doing this, and I’m here too, so I must be able to do this.”</span></p>
<p><strong>I agree. Jules is very obsessed with social media, particularly Instagram. Why is she drawn to these Mormon mommies and all their conspiracies?</strong></p>
<p>Jules is really without a center. She’s lonely. She’s both self-obsessed and full of self-hatred. So I think for her, the mommies are a way to feel like she’s constructing some sense of self based on what she’s not, that she’s building herself up in relief against these people. I think she even says it at one point, something like: “I like feeling better than anyone.” They’re a way for her to feel superior about her inner life, which is all she has. And of course, using social media that way, from a really cynical and hateful point of view, it can put a bandaid on whatever you’re feeling in the moment. Watching a crazy ass skit video that someone you hate made can let you be like: “Isn’t this so embarrassing? I can’t imagine being this embarrassing person.” That feels good for a second. But you’re not doing anything to improve yourself in that moment. You’re giving into your lowest self.</p>
<p>I had my own journey of following Mormon mommies, and I still don’t totally know why, but they drove me crazier than anyone else on the internet. So when I wanted to write a really internet-heavy book, I thought that giving them to her as her challenge would rupture something in her brain even more than it was rupturing mine.</p>
<p><strong>Writing something really internet-heavy—was that an intention that you had going into this?</strong></p>
<p>Yeah, <span class="highlight">I really wanted to try to capture the internet in prose, just because I was noticing I was spending so much time on the internet in 2019, 2020 while I was writing this. And I found myself not being able to remember the reasons why a particular post drove me crazy or what the experience of encountering a piece of content that had a big effect on me had felt like initially, so I started wanting to use the power of narrative description to hold onto that unconscious monologue you have when you’re scrolling.</span> I felt in this book, description would be wasted on a tree or a building, and it would be more interesting to stretch that muscle by using really ornate descriptions in trying to get at what about a post was so uncanny or so funny or so sad.</p>
<p><strong>Jules’ miserability, how she’s so irony-poisoned and judgmental, felt really real to me. How do you approach digital spaces? What’s your relationship like with social media, email, and other online distractions?</strong></p>
<p>I have control over it until I don’t. I’ll often feel really scarily gripped by my phone or really gripped by scrolling, just to encounter other people’s thoughts. And then I’ll have a moment where I’m like, “Okay, but I’m not being present in my own life.” It comes in waves. In times of uncertainty, whether it’s personal, professional, global, you want that chorus of people that you’re looking at, to live inside someone else’s thoughts for a second.</p>
<p><strong>Aside from money, what are the rewards of your creative practice? What do you get out of this work, and what has it taught you about yourself?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I feel most authentically myself when I’m writing. I feel safe and really at peace when I’m writing. And when you’re creating a character, what that gives you is this ability to reflect yourself and the people in your life back to yourself.</span> I feel very, very mesmerized by that challenge, it makes my brain feel really alive. I feel out of time, but also connected to something. The whole ego journey of writing as a career and thinking of yourself as an artist falls away, and it’s just about trying to create something real and interesting.</p>
<p><strong>What is your writing process like?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I want to say I don’t have a process, but I know that I do. And I think it just involves creating a setting that feels boxed off from the rest of the world. I sit, I put on music, I light a candle, all these little creature comforts that just help me feel present in the moment.</span> But I don’t really have a codified structure to my writing time, because <span class="highlight">I’m very work avoidant. When I have the sense that this is a job or that I have to work within a certain timeframe or certain parameters, I get really freaked out and angry and have authority issues with myself, even though I’m the only one setting those boundaries.</span> But I like to write in bed. <span class="highlight">I like to write at night. I like to write when I feel really unseen.</span></p>
<div class="rec" id="recommendation">
<div class="rec-content"><p><strong>Alexandra Tanner Recommends:</strong><br /></p>
<p>Adania Shibli’s novel <i><a href="https://streaklinks.com/B3O9Sd1PD3WRg-Vpkghhnlzm/https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fp%2Fbooks%2Fminor-detail-adania-shibli%2F14219194%3Fean%3D9780811229074%26gad_source%3D1%26gclid%3DCjwKCAiA29auBhBxEiwAnKcSqmKMLxvN7GQhbUf38eUC-linHP3ZFhdl6a7YMtk1GrQLgt8-40ZI7RoCjgwQAvD_BwE">Minor Detail</a></i><br /></p>
<p>Brett Story’s film <i><a href="https://streaklinks.com/B3O9Sd1BQX6sCYbqigtBOqej/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thehottestaugust.com%2Fwatch">The Hottest August</a></i><br /></p>
<p><a href="https://streaklinks.com/B3O9Sd5SEsM_9HKREQjMbVUj/https%3A%2F%2Fkettl.co%2Fcollections%2Fsoba-cha">This soba tea</a><br /></p>
<p><a href="https://streaklinks.com/B3O9Sd5gIPWGu0Q-bwgpABOO/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kobocandles.com%2Fproducts%2Fsomerset-thyme-plant-the-box-collection-9-oz-candle%3Fvariant%3D43633106223342%26currency%3DUSD%26utm_medium%3Dproduct_sync%26utm_source%3Dgoogle%26utm_content%3Dsag_organic%26utm_campaign%3Dsag_organic%26gad_source%3D1%26gclid%3DCjwKCAiA29auBhBxEiwAnKcSqhU0z9_T7Od6-_faxmhEtgqQj4yCeEza8h95i4SlFl02dXr2z1Vv-xoCW9QQAvD_BwE">This thyme candle</a><br /></p>
<p><a href="https://streaklinks.com/B3O9Sd9c3EEjShz20Q1eDr0f/https%3A%2F%2Fpapasteves.com%2F">Papa Steve’s protein bars</a> (sponsor me, Papa)<br /></p>
</div>
</div>Shy WatsonI couldn’t help but notice that, in your acknowledgements, you thank Jess Tanner for “coming to stay and stay and stay.” The narrator Jules’s sister Poppy does the same. Correct me if I’m being presumptuous, but was this based on real life? And, if so, how do you go about life writing or auto-fiction?Musician Cakes da Killa on creating your own opportunities2024-03-14T03:00:00-04:002024-03-14T03:00:00-04:00https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/musician-cakes-da-killa-on-creating-your-own-opportunities<p><strong>When you were first getting started a decade ago, you were lumped in with the regrettable, narrow, and othering term “queer hip-hop.” How did getting put into a box just because of your identity and lyrics shape your songwriting and creative process?</strong></p>
<p>It kind of didn’t at all because I was always so visibly and vocally queer. I thought it was going to be a deterrent for my music. <span class="highlight">It put me in a box but also put me on a platform</span>, in a sense. It’s kind of a double-edged sword. I had no complaints about it until it got to the point of people continuing to talk about it as if it was a sub-genre, as opposed to appreciating the music for just the music.</p>
<p><strong>Over the years, have you had to hold day jobs alongside your music career? If so, how have you managed both? If not, how have you successfully made a living off your creativity?</strong></p>
<p>I was blessed to not have to work until COVID when I had to get a job at a supermarket, which was very humbling, very rewarding, and also traumatizing because that’s the only time I ever had genuine culture shock as an adult.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">Falling into my music career, I didn’t know it would be a source of income, because there wasn’t many people before me doing what I was doing that was actually able to survive off it. When I was able to start touring very early in my career and pay my bills, it was kind of just like, what?</span></p>
<p>That went on until COVID started, and that’s when the market was really hit, and I had to get a job. From that experience, I was able to get inspired to make my first short film, <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ihwCRIKC68">Visibility Sucks</a></i>. Now, I’m back to working for myself again because, as an adult, I spent more years living this entrepreneur hustle life versus working, clocking in at a nine-to-five.</p>
<p>My main form of income comes from touring, so when you take touring off the table, there’s only so much money from royalties and publishing. <span class="highlight">The reality about most musicians is, a lot of people live double lives where, regardless of how fabulous they look on Instagram, most people do have a nine-to-five.</span></p>
<p><span class="highlight">So many people would ask me, “What do you do?” I’m like, “I make music.” And they’re like, “No, what do you do?” And it’s like, “I don’t do anything.” There was a rumor that I came from money or I was this kept woman. I was like, “No, I just was very blessed to get into a lot of tour circuits early on in my career that kept me afloat.”</span> When those wells dried up, I had to do what I had to do. Period.</p>
<p><strong>I’m curious how you first broke into those tour circuits. That’s a major part of you staying creative without having to do anything else career-wise.</strong></p>
<p>It was mainly timing…and the quality and amount of work I was putting in. My first tour came about on a fluke. There was an Australian tour with [Kalifa fka] Le1f, Brooke Candy, <a href="https://soundcloud.com/houseofladosha">House of Ladosha</a>, and a DJ named Mess Kid. Brooke dropped out of the tour, and I was at a Lil Kim concert, and the promoter reached out to me and said, “Can you fly to Australia tomorrow?” I’d never been on an international flight before, and I looked at my friend and I said, “We got to go home. I have to pack.”</p>
<p><span class="highlight">Having that freedom to throw yourself into the system always helped me.</span> That was maybe eight years ago, and I’ve been to Australia over 10 times. <span class="highlight">For me, it’s always being open to just do it.</span></p>
<p><strong>Looking back to that first international flight to Australia, what fears were sitting with you, and how did you get over them?</strong></p>
<p>The main fear was whether I was going to get my fucking money. I mean, at that point, I was kind of scared of flying. I’d only been on one other flight, but <span class="highlight">I just let go and let the universe do what it’s going to do.</span> I was obviously super excited to go to Australia. How many people even get the opportunity to go to Australia, especially a Black independent artist? I was just excited for the opportunity.</p>
<p><strong>I’m curious about any recent times you’ve let the universe take you where it’s going and it’s led to something amazing creatively.</strong></p>
<p>There’s so many things, whether it’s picking management or working with this label I’m on. <span class="highlight">The main thing is reaching out to artists who I’m inspired by and to know that they’re willing to work with me.</span> I dropped a mixtape series during COVID called the <i>Motherland</i> series, and I was able to work with an artist named <a href="https://www.instagram.com/nomiruiz/?hl=en">Nomi Ruiz</a> and an artist named <a href="https://www.instagram.com/samsparro/?hl=en">Sam Sparro</a> who I always looked up to.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">As artists, especially independent artists, we kind of doubt ourselves because we don’t have that mainstream success, but that doesn’t mean other artists don’t respect our talent. I’ve had interactions with a plethora of artists that I never thought would know who I am. That’s always really affirming and makes me feel like I’m doing something worth something.</span></p>
<p><strong>There were six years between your first and second albums, <i>Hedonism</i> and <i>Svengali</i>, but only a year and a half between your second and third albums, <i>Svengali</i> and <i><a href="https://cakesdakilla.bandcamp.com/album/black-sheep">Black Sheep</a></i>. How do you know whether something you’re working on is an album, an EP, a mixtape, or a single, and how do you know that it’s done?</strong></p>
<p>I’m very creative and very much an artist, but I’m also very business-minded. It depends on how much I’m working on. I could write as many songs as I want to. As an independent artist, I don’t have the privilege of mainstream artists to go into the studio for a week and make 200, 300 songs and then whittle them down. I’m paying for studio time, typically out of pocket, and I recoup that money when I get an advance from a label after I pitch the whole project to them.</p>
<p>For me, it’s about how much money I’m willing to pay for the mixing or the mastering and the recording. The creative side is, “Am I saying what I want to say in that moment?” For me, it’s always, “What is the vibe or message I’m trying to get out?” If I achieve that, then that determines whether it’s an album or an EP or whatever.</p>
<p><strong>To what extent do you view your music career as running a business?</strong></p>
<p>This comes with being an adult. <span class="highlight">I always said for the longest time, “Once my career or my art becomes a business, I wouldn’t want to do it anymore.” But the reality is, it’s a blessing that you can do something creative that people want to buy, and it comes with the territory.</span></p>
<p>Artists need to sell work. <span class="highlight">Do you need to sell things to be considered an artist or feel fulfilled as an artist? No, but most artists want to be successful, and to be successful, you do need to understand the business side of your career and industry.</span></p>
<p>Slowly but surely, I’m looking at myself more as an entrepreneur, a business, or a brand. That kind of thinking is making me operate differently. It’s not about going out to the clubs and nightlife and getting drink tickets. Now, it’s about setting up my royalties and publishing, trying to write for other artists. It’s more about exploring the other side of the industry.</p>
<p><strong>I’m especially curious about your writing for other artists, because I speak to a pretty decent amount of musicians, and increasingly often, they’re telling me, “I’m writing for other musicians, and it’s a way to make more money.” I’m curious about that and what it does for you creatively to write for other artists.</strong></p>
<p>I haven’t had too much experience doing that yet. I mainly do it when I write my records and I collaborate with somebody. I’ve had some inquiries to collaborate with other artists, but they didn’t come to fruition. That’s definitely something I’m more willing to explore because <span class="highlight">I’m constantly writing music. I love to hear how other people interpret my thoughts. I also love the collaborative nature of making music. If making music is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, I want to explore all facets of it.</span></p>
<p><strong>You’ve worked with Sam Katz on <i>Black Sheep</i> and <i>Svengali</i>. Why has he proven to be such a meaningful collaborator for you? What is it about collaborating with him specifically that works so well?</strong></p>
<p>He genuinely doesn’t give a fuck, which I’m obsessed [with]. Me and Sam, we met really early on in our music careers. He’s the first producer I worked with that was giving me original instrumentals. <span class="highlight">We know each other and how to push each other.</span> What we create is very unique and cool. It doesn’t fit in one genre. It encompasses all the things I love, whether that’s dance music, house, jazz, rap. <span class="highlight">We’re just weirdos and we don’t judge each other, so that’s why it works.</span></p>
<p><strong>I feel like, listening to the arc of <i>Hedonism</i> through <i>Black Sheep</i>, you’ve leaned away from the club and more toward jazz and smoother sounds over time. What has the inspiration for that been, or is it just the natural consequence of how you collaborate with Sam?</strong><br />
<br />
That’s mainly our natural progression of getting older. We started making music in our early twenties, and now, we’re in our early thirties. I don’t want to be screaming over the kind of beats I was screaming over before. I make music that fits the time I’m in and what I’m going through, and that’s why you can hear the progression in my music. It’s not a calculated decision. This is just the vibe I’m in right now.</p>
<p><strong>How do you start a song?</strong></p>
<p>There’s a lot of different ways. Sometimes, I could write directly to a beat, so somebody could send me a beat, and the beat tells me what to say. If I’m recording a demo, I can lay down the framework and start mumbling out a melody. Sometimes, I could just be walking, stumbling drunk from a bar in Berlin, and then, a melody comes to me and I have to make a voice note. It could also be the poem format, where a concept will come to me, I’ll write it down in my notes, and then, I’ll apply the beat. It depends, but once it comes, <span class="highlight">I just have to record it, because I’ll forget.</span> I was just going through my voice notes and deleting some of them because I have so many.</p>
<p><strong>How do you choose, from that giant pile of voice memos, which ones to build out into songs?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">It’s kind of a feeling. I think I have that as a creative person. I can’t really explain it, but you just know what works.</span></p>
<p>With the hook on “Mind Reader,” it just came to me when I was on tour, that little melody. I recorded it as a voice note, and then, me and Sam worked on the track, and I knew it felt good. In my mind, I’m like, “What do I want it to sound like?” That’s how it forms, but I can’t explain it. I just kind of know. But also, I edit myself a lot. I’m constantly working on demos, which is a privilege I didn’t have in the past. I’m constantly editing the lyrics. It has to flow right. It has to feel right. I’m known for a kind of very compact, fast style, so I’m always on top of my shit.</p>
<p><strong>We’ve talked about you being on tour. How do the places you go, and your travel, affect your creative process?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">If I don’t tour, I don’t have anything to talk about. I can only talk about going to a bar in Bushwick so much. It’s not like I’m writing to get a hit per se or I’m trying to write a viral record. It’s mainly me experiencing life and writing about the things I experience on this journey. Touring is a great moment for that because you’re constantly on the move. You’re constantly meeting people, constantly being stimulated, being around different cultures and sounds. That gets the juices flowing</span>, and then, it’s just the downtime [on] tours when I’m able to write based on what I’ve experienced.</p>
<p><strong>From what I understand, when you’re working with Sam, the process is, you write something and he produces it. Do you go in with lyrics and a melody? Do you go in with lyrics, a melody, and somewhat of a beat?</strong></p>
<p>It depends. Some of the songs on [<i>Black Sheep</i>], I legitimately recorded a demo and gave Sam the vocals, and he formed something around the vocal. We talk about what type of vibe we want, or my voice dictates what the beat should be, and he makes something that complements that, which is why I keep Sam very close as a collaborator. He gets what I’m trying to do with my voice. There are some tracks where Sam already had the beat, and then I’m inspired, and I write to that. It depends on the situation.</p>
<p><strong>How do you bring other collaborators into the fold?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">If I’m working on a body of work, I don’t like working with a lot of producers. Early on in my career, that was a big part of my creative process, getting a bunch of beats from a bunch of people. I feel like that complicates the cohesiveness of records, so I like working with just one person.</span> With Sam, he did <i>Black Sheep</i>, he’s done <i>Svengali</i>. Before that, I collaborated with a producer named Proper Villains on two EPs.</p>
<p>I like crafting it with one other person, but I also do a lot of features. For my own releases, it’s a bit more cathartic. I’m able to express different sides of my creativity when I do features for other people, because working with Honey Dijon or LSDXOXO, I can do something I’m not so committed to. It’s not like a marriage.</p>
<div class="rec" id="recommendation">
<div class="rec-content"><p><strong>Cakes da Killa Recommends:</strong><br /></p>
<p><i>5 Queer Classics:</i><br /></p>
<p><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_to_Brother_(film)">Brother to Brother</a></i> (2004)<br /></p>
<p><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_(1968_film)">The Queen</a></i> (1968) <br /></p>
<p><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_(film)">Philadelphia</a></i> (1993)<br /></p>
<p><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/But_I%27m_a_Cheerleader">But I’m a Cheerleader</a></i> (1999)<br /></p>
<p><i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1486558/">ANGEL</a></i>, a documentary by Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva (2010)<br /></p>
</div>
</div>Max FreedmanWhen you were first getting started a decade ago, you were lumped in with the regrettable, narrow, and othering term “queer hip-hop.” How did getting put into a box just because of your identity and lyrics shape your songwriting and creative process?Writer Gabi Abrão (sighswoon) on not taking yourself too seriously2024-03-13T03:00:00-04:002024-03-13T03:00:00-04:00https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-gabi-abrao-sighswoon-on-not-taking-yourself-too-seriously<p><strong>I’ve always admired how you effortlessly weave the internet into your work. It always feels natural. Can you describe how you perceive the internet as a medium?</strong></p>
<p>The internet is such an outstanding realm for endless input, output, collecting, documenting, sharing, archiving…it’s its very own art studio. When I feel I am using it properly, as in, I am inspired and enjoying myself, it comes close to being an extreme form of collage art. Like, a scrapbooker’s dream. <span class="highlight">I love that I can go back to my old Tumblr and observe my teenage consciousness, or go into my old tweets and Instagrams to see how I was expressing myself in my early 20s. It’s like how when you’re stumped on a project, you think you need to create something brand new, never-before-seen, but you really just have to go into your studio and expand on hints in your old work.</span></p>
<p><span class="highlight">The internet is an incredible notepad, with room for some of those notes to evolve into solid ideas, and while you’re in your process, you can observe others in their process as well. This is the first time in history that we can get daily updates on the process of our favorite storytellers and artists.</span> It’s unreal. I especially love interactive internet art, like memes or retweeting/reblogging inspiration, and getting to see different people’s takes on a single context. It’s like one big art class if you use it right!</p>
<p><strong>In one sentence, how would you describe the zeitgeist of the internet right now?</strong></p>
<p>Soul-searching with everyone in the room.</p>
<p><strong>What guidance would you offer artists on navigating the current era of the internet?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">Don’t take your image so seriously that you stop experimenting.</span> Use the internet to connect, collect, take notes, get inspired, tell stories; take advantage of this new medium and use it for whatever feels fun to you. You don’t need to get caught up in trends or customs or impressing others. You can do anything you want.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/resize=width:800/iBOP2kdRDqrey4CqlG1g" alt="" /></p>
<p><em class="caption"></em></p>
<p><strong>Your <a href="https://www.instagram.com/sighswoon/p/Cba51BZP53W/">“Digital Resting Points”</a> have evolved into a popular meme. I often see people sharing their own online. What do you think makes them resonate with so many people?</strong></p>
<p>I think they are simply a new way to frame pretty scenes we’ve always shared, and they also speak to a quest-like, video-game-like tone, which has always been innate to the internet’s language. Adding “Congratulations! You’ve reached a digital resting point,” over a video creates a frame, or a doorway.</p>
<p><strong>How do you currently engage with AI? Have you considered its hallucinatory and surrealist possibilities with art making?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I love AI art, especially those morphing videos where it feels like you are watching the AI try to compute things in the moment, sort of shrooming and breathing, morphing different faces. I’d rather it look like that than completely accurate because it has such a subconscious and psychedelic quality. I think there’s room for both robot poetry and human poetry.</span> I haven’t used it yet, though. I just watch everyone else…</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/resize=width:800/x9FKGKm1TFmnJmdlNNjf" alt="" /></p>
<p><em class="caption"></em></p>
<p><strong>Last year, you released a book of poetry, <i><a href="https://notacult.media/books/p/sighswoon">Notes on Shapeshifting</a></i>. What unexpected lessons did you learn from publishing a book?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">Online, I’m used to seeing my work circulate through a series of algorithms that cater to similar age groups and styles that are mostly likely to enjoy it, which in my case is women ages 20-35 who are interested in spirituality and scroll Instagram. Having a book out, I got to watch my poetry reach so many more people out of that bubble, like elderly men in small towns without social media.</span> Plus, you never know where you’ll catch your book: at a thrift store, in someone else’s hands at the beach… it’s like having a little secret with yourself out there. That was a pleasant surprise. Second, you’re never done editing. I am always finding typos and things I could have said “better.” <span class="highlight">You’re never done editing! How could you be? Life is process…</span></p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/resize=width:800/Ere9nIvDRFW4VatAhSo5" alt="" /></p>
<p><em class="caption"></em></p>
<p><strong>Can you talk a bit about the business side of your work and how you sustain your practice?</strong></p>
<p>I am sustained by my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/sighswoon">Patreon</a> which I’ve been using for over four years now, and it is one of the few platforms I feel is beneficial for artists, as it is not only a way to gain material support, but is also a nod to traditional artistic rituals. I find it to be the digital version of the “patron-artist” relationship that has existed in art worlds for centuries. It feels like readers dropping in at tea time for more specific break-downs of my work, like an intimate room on the internet. I really enjoy it. It also pushes me to do more research, read, and stay sharp because I love having fresh ideas and high-energy content for subscribers.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/resize=width:800/pg2Z5vI8TRWMRawBnYUK" alt="" /></p>
<p><em class="caption"></em></p>
<p><strong>During a poetry reading in LA, you said, “the only truth in life is movement.” What inspired that?</strong></p>
<p>I remember thinking about the concept of “ruts” or “stagnation” or “creative blocks,” and began getting the hunch that they are sort of made up, or an illusion of the mind. <span class="highlight">I process things through visual metaphors, so I imagined everything that is moving regardless of if I am still or stagnant, for example: my blood circulating, time passing, the earth spinning. These visuals serve as a reminder of how movement is an inescapable state of being alive.</span> If your blood isn’t circulating, you die. If water stays still, it begins to gather bacteria and bugs. <span class="highlight">Movement is life. Energy is moving, time is moving, life is moving, and we get to have the magical opportunity to steer it all as best we can. But, no matter what, we are moving, moving, moving. If you ever have a problem, whether it’s in the mind, heart, or body, I believe the first question one should ask themselves is how can I move through this, with this, beyond this, physically, mentally?</span></p>
<div class="rec" id="recommendation">
<div class="rec-content"><p><b>Gabi Abrão recommends:</b><br /></p>
<p><b>2% Fage Yogurt with Honey on Top.</b> The most decadent dessert. It tastes like a more simplified cheesecake. I sometimes feel this is as decadent as I should get.<br /></p>
<p><b>Thinking about Pangaea.</b> I think about Pangaea every day, just this surreal image of one giant land mass uniting us all, and the reminder that natural disasters that alter the surface have always been part of earth’s personality.<br /></p>
<p><b>Live Tweeting.</b> I love live tweeting and catching someone live tweeting about anything. I wish people did it more often, and not just for big events. I’d love to see someone live-tweet a doctor’s office waiting room, a mundane road trip…<br /></p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OQ99ROFlCk">“Might Be Dead By Tomorrow” by Soko</a>. This was a huge song when I was a teenager that changed everyone’s lives and I’ve had it on repeat again lately. Still the truth.<br /></p>
<p><b>Dr. Teal’s Salt Scrub.</b> I have tried every salt scrub and this is the only one worth your time. Incredible texture. Salt has healing and protective powers in multiple ancient spiritual practices, so I like to think about this while I scrub it all over my body.<br /></p>
</div>
</div>Samantha AysonI’ve always admired how you effortlessly weave the internet into your work. It always feels natural. Can you describe how you perceive the internet as a medium?Guitarist, artist, and model Hayden Pedigo on confronting your fear of what the audience thinks2024-03-12T03:00:00-04:002024-03-12T03:00:00-04:00https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/guitarist-artist-and-model-hayden-pedigo-on-confronting-your-fear-of-what-the-audience-thinks<p><strong>What role did isolation play in your creative path?</strong></p>
<p>It’s a double-edged sword. For me it was integral because I was incredibly bored when I was young. I was homeschooled, lived out in the middle of nowhere. The only way I could entertain myself was through music and art. It’s something I think about a lot even now because I still live in Amarillo. <span class="highlight">Sometimes I think being entertained is the death of creativity. Boredom can be one of the greatest things to inspire creativity.</span> Boredom forces me to do things because there’s a sense of paranoia, a fear of missing out. Musically, the culture is not in Amarillo. Whenever I go to L.A., it feels like everything’s happening, it kind of blows my brain. I always knew if I lived in L.A. I would be so overwhelmed that I probably wouldn’t make things anymore.</p>
<p><strong>I’d imagine it pushed you to be more self-sufficient as well.</strong></p>
<p>Absolutely. When I was a teenager, I got into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fahey_(musician)">John Fahey</a>, like a lot of others have. I dove into it head first, but I wasn’t associated with any kind of regional scene, I had none of that. It opens up this whole Pandora’s box. We’re living in this post-genre, post-everything age. I was reading about this shoegaze band, they’re super young and their influencers are wild, all over the place. Thinking about bands like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_gecs">100 Gecs</a>, the post-genre idea, about how awesome that is. I saw it bubbling up when I was younger with people like James Ferraro and Ariel Pink. To me, they were early post-genre, post everything musicians. We’re in this post-genre age because we have access to everything. We don’t really have regional music anymore. Everything from western swing music from a certain part of Texas, like Bob Wills or hill country blues, like R. L. Burnside.</p>
<p><strong>I think it encourages bands to skip that stage and go on tour right away.</strong></p>
<p>I didn’t tour at all for eight, nine years. I started putting out music when I was 18, and only started touring in the past two years. I waited a crazy long time. My first four albums were made in Garageband at home. Rough, minimal recordings. <span class="highlight">I only just now feel like I’m coming into my own with my music and understanding what it is that I do.</span> I wouldn’t have wanted people to hear me live five years ago.</p>
<p><strong>How did Odd Future impact your approach to releasing music?</strong></p>
<p>I discovered <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Future">Odd Future</a> when I was 18. I was a little late to them. They had already gotten quite a bit of buzz. I was into blog-era experimental music. There was a website called <a href="https://www.thewire.co.uk/news/23081/mutant-sounds_dies-and-is-resurrected-in-the-flames-of-the-fma">Mutant Sounds</a> that I was obsessed with. I hadn’t listened to a ton of rap music, but was intrigued by their aesthetic. It was brash, obnoxious, and it clicked with my sense of humor.<br />
<br />
I was more interested in their aesthetic and approach before getting into the music. All of a sudden, it started to make sense. I was like, “What if I take Odd Future’s approach and attach it to what I do?” That’s why I ended up reaching out to people I wanted to collaborate with through Facebook, and how things started to grow from there. That was part of the internet that I really enjoyed.</p>
<p><strong>Did you have any hesitation when you started reaching out?</strong></p>
<p>I didn’t have a lot of fear. The reason why is because I was homeschooled the entire way. I never went to public school. I was very isolated, and didn’t have friends growing up. I’ve always said that if you’re homeschooled, it rewires your brain. I think public schooling, for better or worse, instills in you a kind of social hierarchy. You understand a chain of command in terms of how things are done. For most public schoolers, if they wished chicken strips were on the menu, they wouldn’t walk down to the principal’s office, knock on the door and say, “Hey, I want chicken strips on the menu. How can we get this done?” They would understand that would be kind of inappropriate, and wouldn’t do that. If I wanted chicken strips for dinner, I would go talk to my mom, she was also my school teacher.</p>
<p>Immediately the hierarchy is different because the hierarchy is my parents and I feel comfortable to go talk to them. <span class="highlight">Once I got on the internet, I was an incredibly odd, forward kid.</span> I probably have so many embarrassing Facebook messages that are cringey because I was like, “Hey, I have this idea.” It was unreal how many people I was reaching out to, but I was probably too dumb to know how weird I looked. That was the whole deal, I didn’t understand that I looked strange, but it worked to my benefit that I was overly forward with people asking, “Hey, want to work together?” <span class="highlight">My intentions were good, people picked up on the fact that I wasn’t doing it for clout, I was doing it for interest.</span></p>
<p><strong>It’s important to start from a place of pure excitement.</strong></p>
<p>I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago on tour. I was in San Francisco and stayed with my friend Chip Lord. I believe he’s 80 years old. He’s one of three guys that created <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Ranch">Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo</a>. An absolutely unreal artist. While I was there, he was showing me pieces he’d made over the years. While he was telling me about them, <span class="highlight">his passion was so tangible that I said, “The reason why your stuff is so great is when I look at it, before I even think about art, I see the interest.” The best art should have the same feeling as when a 5-year-old kid is telling you why he loves his train set. That’s the truest interest you’ll ever see.</span> This 80-year-old artist still has that same interest as a five-year-old kid.</p>
<p><strong>You are now doing music ‘full-time.’ What are the pros and cons of holding down a day-job?</strong></p>
<p>For over 10 years I was working at bank jobs. For a long time, there was this level of intrigue. Playing in experimental noise bands and working at a bank during the day. <span class="highlight">There was chaos in it that I liked.</span> Two opposite things clashing together into this messy hodgepodge of insanity. It feels more insane than being a full-time artist or musician. There’s something far more chaotic about it. I liked the dual personality thing.</p>
<p>I would also have some of my best ideas on the clock. I feel weird saying this, but sometimes I would do the bare minimum and pretend to be on the computer while I was reading articles about music and art. I was also sending emails to record labels. I signed with Mexican Summer while on the clock. Signed my contract and scanned it on the workplace copier. There’s an element of being sneaky, trying not to get caught.</p>
<p>In 2016 or ‘17, I took a trip to San Francisco to perform. After the show I met Christopher Owens from Girls, who I’d looked up to forever because he lived in Amarillo. We stayed up walking around till 1 A.M. talking about music. It felt like a dream. The next morning I get on the plane, fly home, then I’m in my cubicle at the bank. <span class="highlight">That was the worst part, it felt like I was giving myself brain damage.</span> The whiplash was too much. I realized going back and forth is actually dangerous and not healthy.</p>
<p><strong>Have you felt more at ease since leaving?</strong></p>
<p>Yes and no. Yes because I’ve been able to focus on what I do, and that is incredibly liberating, but also terrifying because it makes you view what you do in a more serious way. <span class="highlight">It’s a different type of pressure and expectation from yourself.</span> People say, “Oh, you’ll feel more pressure to make stuff when it’s your full-time thing.” I appreciate having pressure to do something I enjoy versus the pressures I had at banks to get work done that I had no interest in. <span class="highlight">There’s nothing worse than pressure to do something you don’t care about. It can be scary to have pressure to do something you deeply care about.</span> I feel honored that I feel pressured to do something that means a lot to me. I take it incredibly seriously. I can seem silly on social media, but I care a lot, even when it’s joking around, posting something dumb or writing an essay or posting a photo.</p>
<p><strong>Do you feel pressure to finish songs or albums quickly?</strong></p>
<p>I opened up this discussion the other day on Instagram. I was talking about streaming killing the album and the pressure of constantly having to produce singles, EPs, Bandcamp subscriptions, etc. I had a caveat where I was saying, look, for some people being prolific and releasing a lot of stuff works. I understand that. It’s not inherently bad. I’m a motivated person, but I don’t like being motivated by stuff I don’t care about. I view albums like films. <span class="highlight">No one ever asked Stanley Kubrick to release short films in between his movies.</span> It’d feel weird. “Can you release a 15-minute short film before you release <i>The Shining</i>?” No one ever would ask that of him. He always produced intriguing, bizarre films that are different from each other. You can see the time that went into then.</p>
<p>I try to hold tight to the fact that <span class="highlight">I don’t owe anyone anything when it comes to my music.</span> I don’t owe it to people to put it out. <span class="highlight">Ultimately I want to impress myself. If I do that, it’s good for everyone else.</span> I have no interest in fulfilling expectations in terms of how much I put out or when people want to hear more. Unfortunately streaming, Bandcamp Fridays, things like that put pressure on me to go faster, even though I don’t want to. That’s bad motivation. That’s not the positive motivation that I naturally have.</p>
<p><strong>You’ve described yourself as a competitive person. Does competition create motivation?</strong></p>
<p>Absolutely. Again, it’s this double-edged sword. I’ve been competitive with other people, along with being competitive internally. <span class="highlight">Being competitive to create, to me, is like nitrous oxide with a car. It will make it go faster and it works, but there’s a high risk of blowing up your engine.</span> It works well until it doesn’t. <span class="highlight">I can get into trouble quickly with that mentality. It’s a young thing. When you’re in your 20s, you’re very competitive. That can be a great motivator, but it’s not a sustainable motivator.</span></p>
<p><strong>You speak about stage fright during performances. What led to wanting to be vulnerable with audiences?</strong></p>
<p>This past summer I went on tour with Jenny Lewis. I agreed to do that, but didn’t actually think about what was required to do those opening sets. It wasn’t until I showed up to the first show in Chicago, an 8,000 capacity venue, that I realized, “Wait, I don’t know if I can do this.” I agreed to play these shows without knowing if I can play a solo guitar set to this many people. It was pure terror, but also this belligerent “Hell, no, I can’t let this stop me. I have to do everything in my power to ensure I can play this show.” Luckily, the first show I played I held on for dear life and made it.</p>
<p>It was terrifying, but I made it through. I started to get my confidence up, had one show where I nearly lost it on stage. I thought I was going to have to walk, my nerves were so high. I had my head pressed against the guitar, as if I was going to fly away. The first three shows had gone great, then that fourth one went so bad. I was terrified the next night because I thought it would be a repeat. From there I started talking about my stage fright. I saw massive improvements when I was just addressing it. Mentally this wall was broken because the audience had context. <span class="highlight">Internally I started having this mentality of, I don’t care if I look insane or dumb on stage.</span> A lot of that came from comedians like Nathan Fielder. You know he’s the most confident person because he doesn’t care how embarrassing he looks. That translates to live music, this idea of “I don’t care what the audience thinks of me” as a tool to know that I really do care. <span class="highlight">The best way to give them my best performance is not considering what they think.</span></p>
<p><strong>What happens if you get stuck?</strong></p>
<p>If by the second or third day I’m stuck and it’s not working, I usually will scrap it. I find an open tuning and start picking around until I find a melody or something I like. I follow that melody to the end of the song. I have to be willing to scrap the entire thing and move on because I can’t waste a lot of time. Everyone has a different approach with writing, this long excursion, excavating out of the ground, like you’re digging and finding it can be this long process. For me it’s more like following a bird. <span class="highlight">If it flies away too quickly, it just wasn’t meant to be.</span></p>
<p><strong>How do you deal with the post-release come down?</strong></p>
<p>That goes back to why I don’t write a single piece of music for over a year. A lot of people don’t understand, you can write a whole other record four months after the last one, but it could potentially be B-sides because you haven’t given enough time to create a new thing. I think of music like going to a greasy-spoon style diner. The joke being that on those grills, you can taste everything. You get a burger, you can still taste the pancakes or bacon. There’s a beauty in that, but when it comes to music, I don’t want people to hear my record and be like, “Well, this feels a lot like that last record.” <span class="highlight">I’m always trying to give myself enough room to tell a different story.</span></p>
<div class="rec" id="recommendation">
<div class="rec-content"><p><b>Hayden Pedigo recommends:</b><br /></p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_Lindahl">Mason Lindahl</a> who is the greatest living guitar player<br /></p>
<p>Releasing less music. No singles or EPs. I’m kidding but I’m also not kidding at all.<br /></p>
<p>Sprayaway glass cleaner.<br /></p>
<p><a href="https://georgezupp.com">George Zupp</a> out of Marathon, Texas. He is probably my favorite painter.<br /></p>
<p><a href="https://www.galveston.com/whattodo/tours/self-guided-tours/historic-architecture/stjosephchurch/">The 1859 St. Joseph’s Church in Galveston, Texas</a>. The most beautiful room I have ever played in.<br /></p>
</div>
</div>Jeffrey SilversteinWhat role did isolation play in your creative path?Curator and film programmer Lydia Ogwang on staying open to the world around you2024-03-11T03:00:00-04:002024-03-11T03:00:00-04:00https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/curator-and-film-programmer-lydia-ogwang-on-staying-open-to-the-world-around-you<p><strong>Can you tell me about the path that led you to where you are in your career today?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">Growing up, I was [always interested in art] and was a voracious reader. I went to business school for university, which I didn’t love, but it was nice to integrate so many different disciplines</span>, especially once I got into the marketing and branding kind of conversations [in the later years of business school]. <span class="highlight">After graduating, I didn’t take the traditional path. The things that were most exciting to me were the work that I was doing in independent publishing outside of the day jobs that I had.</span></p>
<p>I worked for a couple of different magazines, including an alternative fashion magazine based in Toronto called <i><a href="https://wornjournal.com/">WORN Fashion Journal</a></i>, which was so exciting. I started writing for <i>WORN</i> and then writing book reviews. From book reviews, I got into writing film criticism. I was lucky for [the writing that I did on film] to be noticed by people who thought that it was interesting and encouraged me to move further into a career in film. After that point, I started working in film distribution, and then from there, I moved on to <a href="https://tiff.net/cinematheque">TIFF Cinematheque</a> in Toronto, which is really where I started dabbling in film programming, or at least learning the ropes.</p>
<p><strong>There’s such specificity to Toronto’s art and culture scene. What was it like to leave that to work in New York City?</strong></p>
<p>I think the biggest shift for me was moving from a not-for-profit world to a for-profit model. Coming from that not-for-profit context to working in New York, it’s been an exciting opportunity to learn a new curatorial language, because you’re having to [rise to the challenge of] servicing different audiences.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">I like to physically be at the theater a lot, even if I’m not seeing or introducing a film. I just want to see who’s there, what are the vibes? Is the audience skewing older or younger? Is there a certain ethnic demographic strongly represented for a certain screening? All of these different things are information that you should be using to inform what you’re doing. It’s that commitment to being a sponge.</span> I find a lot of times if I introduce a screening, at the end of the screening, I’ll stand in the lobby and a lot of people will just come up to say hello and to just chat, say thank you, or, “This film made me think of this.” <span class="highlight">Being present and creating the opportunity to have those interactions has been important for me in adjusting to this new context.</span></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I don’t think that you can be a film programmer in New York and be working in a silo. I think that you need to be going to theaters across the town, you need to be going to the micro cinemas, you need to be just checking out the scenes, seeing who’s there, seeing what works in different spaces or for different audiences, and just knowing that you’re there to learn. I think that has been key in becoming more confident about the transition.</span></p>
<p><strong>What are the frameworks, goals, or guiding principles that you stand by in the work that you do as a programmer and cultural worker?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I’m always surprised at how simple the work can be. It’s just understanding why you respond to something and then figuring out how to translate that externally. If you can do that, you can speak to different audiences or provide different experiences.</span> It’s context-specific but if you can get comfortable with, “What is the thing in the work that I’m responding to?” and then figure out how to communicate that, I think that will serve you in any curatorial position.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">As much as it’s about knowing yourself, it’s also about understanding that this work is service work in a lot of ways. You have a duty to your audiences. In an ideal scenario, you are providing them with something that they didn’t know that they needed or wanted to see. Your job is exposing them to that magic.</span></p>
<p>There is no framework for me. It is just getting to the essence of whatever that thing is in a work and figuring out, “Okay, who’s going to respond to this? Who needs to see this? How do I reach those people? How do I get those people to the screening that I’m planning?” All of that will come together if you have a clear sense of what the work is offering and what you are offering by putting that work on a pedestal.</p>
<p><strong>I used to identify as someone who was very suspicious of documentary film but that shifted for me after watching <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mother"><i>Black Mother</i> by Khalik Allah</a>, which I discovered through your writing. You’ve written about and programmed so many other groundbreaking documentaries, including <a href="https://www.criterion.com/films/28629-mur-murs"><i>Mur Murs</i> by Agnès Varda</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(2020_film)">Garrett Bradley’s <i>Time</i></a>. What draws you to documentary film?</strong></p>
<p>For me, all of film is an opportunity to see the world how someone else sees it, whether it is narrative, nonfiction, short format, or long format. I think that is what is exciting about the medium in general. Documentaries can get closer to that feeling or closer to someone literally showing you what life is for someone else.</p>
<p>Whenever filmmakers find different ways to narrativize within the documentary form, I think that’s very interesting, too. A kind of bending of reality. That’s what a good documentary-viewing experience feels like for me. Khalik Allah is a great example because he is first and foremost a very gifted photographer. So, is he shooting anything much more than people that he’s encountering on the street or people in his community? Not necessarily. But you can’t deny that there’s quite a bit of magic in the way that he’s done that. <span class="highlight">And I think examining how that magic comes to be is a very potent space as a viewer and programmer.</span></p>
<p><strong>In past interviews, you’ve alluded to the omnipresence of the white male critic and film spaces being dominated by consensus opinion. What has your journey been like in cultivating your taste, and learning how to trust it?</strong></p>
<p>Even though I’m quite early in my career, I feel like I couldn’t have done it when I was younger because so much of becoming a good curator is knowing yourself. <span class="highlight">I’m just now getting to a place where I have a good enough sense of myself that I can understand why I am responding to something. And because I know why I’m responding to it, I can kind of intuit how other people might respond to it who are different from me in some ways or similar to me in some ways. That deep inner reflection is at the core of curatorial work for me. When an idea clicks or comes together, I can feel it. It’s so striking and electric and undeniable. Emerging curators should familiarize themselves with that feeling and welcome it.</span></p>
<p>I’ve been so fortunate throughout my short career to be working with some of the best people to ever do it in terms of repertory film programming or contemporary film programming, but that’s a lesson that I had to learn for myself. And since I’ve had that realization, it’s unlocked an entirely new phase of artistic and curatorial engagement for me. <span class="highlight">Film programming is not a thing that exists in a vacuum, you have to bring yourself to the work, and that’s the only way forward. I don’t think there’s any way around that.</span></p>
<p><strong>There’s something very exciting there about trusting a somatic feeling. What happens to you in the aftermath of watching a movie? When the screen fades black, do you immediately try to get your thoughts down? Do you give yourself a moment to sit with it?</strong></p>
<p>I always watch all of the credits roll at the end of a film. I’m not trying to chat with my neighbor or the person I came with. <span class="highlight">I actually prefer to go to screenings alone because the experience is about me and the art.</span> And I think for someone who programs for a for-profit movie theater, that’s maybe an interesting take because, of course, you do want the theater to be a communal space and a space where people can come and see their friends and all of that and meet other people. But for me I just like to sit with what I am feeling.</p>
<p><strong>What are the tools that you’ve learned to employ in making the theater feel oriented around connection and community-building?</strong></p>
<p>The thing that I was saying earlier about just being a familiar face goes a long way. I’ve always loved it when I’ve gone to a theater that I don’t often go to but every time I’m there I see the same front-of-house person or you see the curator standing in the back, the same way that I do. I also think making space for all types of people, even just in the physical space, is important. <span class="highlight">Physically having a space that is open to the public with no strings attached is important.</span></p>
<p>In terms of things that I can do myself, when I’m at the theater, having dinner upstairs, or introducing a film, I want to be cognizant of the energy that I’m bringing into this space. I’m someone who needs a lot of alone time and this job is quite social. You are in meetings all day or hosting filmmakers, whatever it is. Even if you are on the street outside, sometimes, and it’s so lovely when this happens, someone will come up to you and tell you, “I saw a screening that you did a couple of weeks ago and this is what it meant to me.” You do have to be open and receptive to those kind gestures.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">I make sure that when I’m around, I have positive energy. That means that if I’ve had several social engagements during the week and I’m feeling overwhelmed or in need of alone time, I won’t come to the theater. In that sense, work-life balance is a big part of this. Just knowing what you need and knowing that people will remember the energy that you brought to the space or the impression that you left on them, matters as much in community building as what the physical space looks like and offers.</span></p>
<p><strong>I also want to demystify and understand the more solitary parts, like the research processes. What tools and resources do you turn to when you’re in the early stages of planning a new series, for example?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">What I always want to impress is how singular or solitary a lot of the work can be because I know on the surface it can look like this very glamorous lifestyle.</span></p>
<p>In a lot of film programs or any kind of curatorial engagement, you’re building projects from scratch. These are essentially just pet projects, and you are the only one that can push it forward. It doesn’t have any shape before, you create that shape. It can be just reading books by yourself for hours and hours. A lot of my evenings and weekends are just me in Wikipedia wormholes, for example. <span class="highlight">It is just deep diving into things that you think are interesting and trying to figure out a way to translate that magic. Getting to that place, when you’re starting from zero, can be a kind of lonely journey but the exciting part is that you are pulling inspiration from all over.</span></p>
<p>It’s exciting how freeform that work can be. Maybe I’m listening to a song, or curating a playlist, and I’m inspired by the way that certain sounds rub up against each other. I’m thinking about the way that each of those individual works is activated by being in proximity to each other, and that can inspire me about the structure of a shorts program, which recently happened to me. <span class="highlight">All of that is rooted in just being sensorially open. So, in terms of the tools and resources, it’s the world. Every single thing around you can be inspiring in a curatorial sense.</span></p>
<p><strong>I’m curious about how being sensorially open helps you to keep the spark alive in your relationship with film.</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I feel like it’s a commitment to remaining open to inspiration or messages through any kind of art, or forms of knowledge through art, and committing to seeing things in new ways. It’s about paying attention to art in general, not just film, because engaging with creativity of all kinds is going to sharpen your senses.</span> For example, curating playlists and also starting to DJ, especially working with vinyl and having that kind of tactile relation with the artwork, has reinvigorated my interest in moving images, just thinking about how all the sounds work together and all of that.</p>
<p>I’ve also been really into design and architecture lately and thinking about how film is such a sensorially rich way to present design and architecture, especially when you are in a theatrical setting. You’re sitting there looking at the scaffolding of a building on a huge screen in front of you. It’s hard not to be stunned by that, just based on the scale.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">Everything that you are taking in is going to inform the work that you’re doing. You have to understand that and live your life in a way that facilitates those experiences. I think that if you can tap into that, you’re always going to remain inspired.</span></p>
<p><strong>What makes you feel hopeful about the future of film programming?</strong></p>
<p>In general, I’m inspired by things being interdisciplinary. And I think we’re seeing that not just on the curatorial side, but I would say we’re also seeing it from the creator’s side. Films aren’t just living in movie theaters as they traditionally might have been, they’re also living in galleries. <span class="highlight">I’m excited by how curators can uplift the work that artists are doing by re-imagining ways of exhibiting those works.</span></p>
<p>And I look forward to whatever I am going to be doing in five years because I’m very inspired by the work that I see other more experienced curators doing around me.</p>
<div class="rec" id="recommendation">
<div class="rec-content"><p><strong>Lydia Ogwang Recommends:</strong><br /></p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/@congo45s">Soukous archives on YouTube</a><br /></p>
<p>Lemons—for the best chance at a pleasing life, always have two in the kitchen.<br /></p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica_Kincaid">Jamaica Kincaid</a> books<br /></p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX4QcUWNGp8">“Muana Bangui” – <i>Empire Bakuba</i> from Empire Bakuba (1985, LP)</a><br /></p>
<p>Moving your body—this usually helps.<br /></p>
</div>
</div>Jessica KasiamaCan you tell me about the path that led you to where you are in your career today?Musician and visual artist Devendra Banhart on getting out of the way of yourself2024-03-08T03:00:00-05:002024-03-08T03:00:00-05:00https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/musician-and-visual-artist-devendra-banhart-on-getting-out-of-the-way-of-yourself<p><strong>Many people who make creative work cite the importance of getting out of your own way. Have you developed healthy ways to do this over time?</strong></p>
<p>Like the journey of every artist, <span class="highlight">your best work is when you get out of the way.</span> Developing healthy ways to do this is a huge challenge because unfortunately, but also for our benefit, the most unhealthy ways are fucking awesome. The fast track. They’re seductive because they’re effective. There’s stuff you can do that’s going to bite you in the ass later on, but gets you out of the way fast. It’s a subjective journey, whatever that unhealthy or healthy thing is. <span class="highlight">Through the journey, hopefully you become grateful for getting to a place where you find healthy ways. It’s still quite mysterious to me. How do I get out of the way?</span></p>
<p>Intention is important. Why are you making this piece? At the same time, I’m so into being carried away by pure mystery. Sometimes you know what kind of song it is, you know what you want to say. You even know how you want it to sound, and can hear and see it. The rest of it is making that manifest. That’s one version. Then the other is, I’m going to fumble in the dark until I find the switch.</p>
<p><strong>So often there is fear at play, too.</strong></p>
<p>Fear, of course, can fully freeze us, assault and petrify us. <span class="highlight">Fear can also be where all the good stuff is.</span> The most vulnerable stuff is the most beautiful to share. That’s our challenge. People can sense that. For me, it’s an attitude that is helpful because it’ll never go away. I’ll never not be afraid. For the rest of my life, I’m going to be afraid. Can I look at it as this psychopomp, this person that can take me over to a place where I’m moving towards something like healing. Or it can be something that keeps me from ever considering expanding. I’ll never write another good song if I don’t let fear guide me. It’s weird. We don’t hear it. <span class="highlight">We hear not to be guided by fear, but it can be an incredible guide.</span></p>
<p><strong>You’ve always struck me as unafraid.</strong></p>
<p>It’s been a lifetime of getting to a place where I don’t think my work is the most important in the world and I don’t think it’s the most valueless, unimportant work either. You stop getting in that zone. Your work is meant to be shared. Beyond that, it’s not up to you anymore. That’s what I mean by engine of propulsion. I’m not making work for the byproducts of having made that work, which could be tremendous rejection and horrible reviews, which I’ve received. Or it could be accolades and amazing praise. Anyone’s complementary expression towards you is wonderful. But really it’s them, you facilitated a beautiful feeling in them. They’re just expressing that. It’s not actually about you.</p>
<p>It’s much harder to deal with ‘this is shit, man, you should give up’. That hurts so bad. They haven’t worked out their shit and are dumping theirs on you in a weird way. Most of the time we’re cruel because people have been cruel to us as opposed to trying to avoid being cruel because it feels so bad.</p>
<p>It’s not that the rejection didn’t mean anything or didn’t hurt. I joke around and say, “Yeah, I just annoyed people until somebody finally let me play a show.” There’s some truth to that. I actually sat in front of the venue on the Seine in Paris with a guitar. I was just playing, not loud. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t have an in. I didn’t know anybody on a label.</p>
<p>I was like, well, this is a venue. I’m going to sit nearby, dangling my feet off the Seine, and I’m going to play my songs. Eventually the booker actually did walk by me and go, “You know what? The opening band canceled. Do you want to just play?” I had to do that for days, sit there for eight hours every day. Not even imagining that could happen.</p>
<p>That was my only strategy to somehow get in. The rejection came when I started to get addresses for labels. Then I’d go to a record store, look at the back of the label and start sending CDs and cassettes. No one’s into it, it doesn’t feel good. I’ve felt that with the art world too, going around with my portfolio, my paintings. No, not interested. I don’t keep going because I think oh, my shit’s so good. You just don’t see it. <span class="highlight">You just have some sense that there is a space where you fit.</span></p>
<p><strong>You describe your visual and music practices as separate portals. What sets them apart?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">Songwriting is heavy for me. I’m working out that fear. What am I afraid of sharing? What am I afraid of singing? What is the secret that I’m keeping even to myself? Those are roadmaps, guiding lights.</span> What’s terrifying? What’s uncomfortable? What a heavy trip to lay on someone. I don’t want to do that. How would I sing this in a way that isn’t some heavy trip? I have a therapist and a spiritual practice. That’s where you lay things out. They’re going to come out in your art without a doubt. Even if you’re the person that paints one dot in the center of the canvas, somehow you’re working something out.</p>
<p>I’m working with words and melodies. I know the material is fear-based. Fear-based, trauma-based, pain-based and of course, love-based. We get to a place where we can share it. It’s an emotional exchange. Humor really helps, but it’s still a serious process. After a day of writing, recording, or working out the tune, I go into the painting studio to balance it out. I start drawing dicks and tits. Big things and big snot coming out of a nose or a foot stepping on a dick, doing that for hours. The whole day I’m cracking up. Pure adolescence, just letting go. That’s how it’s been with the last few records. I’m taking it so seriously that I need an outlet that’s more playful. That’s shifting now. I want to approach at least some of a new body of songs with that playfulness. Maybe a song about an egg as the main person.</p>
<p>It’s also a natural thing. Once you finish an album, you’re so excited to do the complete opposite of whatever that record was about. Rarely are you ready to use the same instruments, same themes, same chords. You want a new approach, something exciting. <span class="highlight">Getting out of the way also means being taken by inspiration and curiosity. You get out of the way and put curiosity in the driver’s seat.</span></p>
<p><strong>You’ve had a handful of long-term collaborative partners. What’s allowed for this longevity?</strong></p>
<p>When you’re around people that you admire, respect, and look up to, we want to impress them. It helps us. It sharpens us. This applies to any friendship or partnership in our lives. <span class="highlight">These people challenge us by being so inspiring. We’re not complacent in those kinds of relationships.</span></p>
<p>Writing is so solitary. Andy Cabic (Vetiver) is one of the few people where we can get together, have a conversation with instruments, and for some reason, we’re not mortified at the embarrassment of writing a song in front of another person. <span class="highlight">It is embarrassing, the amount of stuff that you have to go through in order to get to the good stuff.</span></p>
<p>When you’ve got a few friends you can talk about writing songs with, it’s so valuable. You’re speaking a particular language that you don’t speak with everyone. It just feels like I’m part of something, part of a community. Other than that, it’s a lonely, solitary thing. In the words of Sigrid Nunez, every writer walks around with a banner that just says loneliness. I love that line, it’s true.</p>
<p><strong>What’s different when working with someone you have personal history with vs only knowing one another via your work?</strong></p>
<p>All of it has its own novelty. It’s all exotic to me because 90% of my work is done alone. Andy will say “Yeah, I went down to LA and met with this songwriter. I didn’t know him. My manager put it together and we just got in the room.” To me, that’s incredible. It’s exotic, taboo. I should definitely challenge myself, try that out.</p>
<p><strong>Do you keep routines for creative work?</strong></p>
<p>I tend to put demands on myself. In my mind, I should finish a record every day. This is madness. That’s totally unrealistic and very cruel. What I can do is write one line every day so that discipline is maintained even in the smallest bit. The more we’re away from it, for me, this chasm starts to grow. Then I’ll look, and it’s so big and I’m terrified of it. The idea of picking up the guitar, the pen or the paintbrush becomes terrifying. That’s a real thing that can happen to me if I spend too much time.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">If I give it space, then I’m excited to get back to it. Typically, it’s a night or two. If you let too much time go past, we’ll find excuses to never do it again. It’s scary when you start saying “I’ll get to that when I have time” or “if only.” There’s a million if onlys, and there’s never any time. I’ve never had time.</span> Those are the things to watch out for that consume me. I figured out how to make sure there is one little drop, just one line. Playing guitar for a moment. There’s a feeling of, okay, I’m still in touch with this thing. As I get older, it becomes scarier. It isn’t like I understand music. I don’t understand. I thought at this age, I would totally get it, that I’d understand music fully. The guitar? Every time I play it is like, what are you? What is this thing?</p>
<p><strong>How does clothing impact confidence on stage?</strong></p>
<p>I’m very sensitive to that. I think everyone is. Wearing something you don’t feel comfortable in affects how you’re dealing with the world. It affects how you think about yourself. It’s so powerful. I wonder if some people could give a shit and don’t notice it, truly aren’t affected by it. I hope there’s some people that could care less. That’s awesome, I love it. I’m not one of those people, but you said confident. It’s funny, this concept of honest humility.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">Genuine humility comes from compassion and self-love. You’re not measuring yourself up to the rest of the world.</span> It’s like the wave that sees the big wave and goes, ah, I wish I was that big wave. Then sees the little one and goes, aha, I’m bigger than you. Always measuring yourself up. True humility is an expression of knowing you’re part of the ocean, not the wave. <span class="highlight">Confidence is different from arrogance, but sometimes they look similar.</span> You see someone playing a show and it’s an arrogant trip, we can tell. They’re doing things that look confident, but in fact it’s arrogance. Confidence is what we’re trying to cultivate.</p>
<p>We just did a tour with Hayden Pedigo. Hayden talks about stage fright every night. His hands are shaking, he’s sweating, he can barely get on stage.He still struggles with it, but he gets on stage and he makes that point. If anybody else feels like, how do people do this? He’s showing you that you just do it, but it’s still terrifying and you do it until it’s not so scary. Talking about being frightened on stage makes him the most courageous person I’ve ever seen play. That’s confidence cultivated from compassion. This is a total tangent, because that’s not what you were asking me.</p>
<p><strong>It’s okay.</strong></p>
<p>What we wear is going to affect us so much. When I think about this last tour, the moment I’m most proud of was the last show in Vancouver. I wore a brown, corduroy mini skirt and a cashmere sweater. My mini skirt felt sexy. I could feel the wind going up my butt crack. It felt great. Then the show’s over. I take off my sweater. Then it’s like, oh shit, people are still there, let’s play another song. I played in just the mini skirt, no shirt, and was basically naked. It was so fucking fun. I don’t even know why that felt so good. Maybe it’s that childlike play. <span class="highlight">Here I am, that’s it.</span> I’m naked in front of y’all and I’m jumping around. A wild experience that certainly was a little frightening, too.</p>
<div class="rec" id="recommendation">
<div class="rec-content"><p><strong>Devendra Banhart Recommends:</strong><br /></p>
<p><a href="https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/hoarders"><i>Hoarders</i></a> by <a href="https://www.katedurbin.la">Kate Durbin</a> — This is one of the most interesting collection of poems i’ve read in a long time. It’s an incredibly dynamic read, shifting between the intimate and clearly downplayed admissions of the “Hoarders” and the crystal clear poetic scrutinizations of Durbin make for an incredibly unique and dynamic read. I no joke wept and laughed out loud to many of these, totally brilliant. (I gotta give <a href="https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/cate-le-bon/">Cate Le Bon</a> credit for seeing it and knowing I would love it!)<br /></p>
<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74965727"><i>Unseen Beings</i></a> by <a href="https://www.erikjampa.com/">Erik Jampa Andersson</a> — This is one of those books I want everyone to read and at the same time don’t want to share with anyone ! It’s so special…A reminder that I’m not insane when I talk to trees…<br /></p>
<p><a href="https://www.pasadenaplayhouse.org/event/kate/"><i>Kate</i> by Kate Berlant</a> — There’s a few days left of its run at the Pasadena Playhouse, get a ticket NOW, or wait till it tours it again, in the meantime, PRAY that it does! This is easily the best play (is it a play? It’s certainly a play…but it’s also so much MORE!!!) I have ever seen. Truly.<br /></p>
<p><a href="https://pharoahsanders.bandcamp.com/album/pharoah"><i>Pharoah</i> by Pharoah Sanders</a> — I’ve had to listen to this on Youtube for years as it just hasn’t been available. Thank you, Luaka Bop, for this much deserved and needed reissue. I listen to Harvest Time on repeat for hours and hours….. extremely inspiring.<br /></p>
<p><a href="https://sylvester.bandcamp.com/album/private-recordings-august-1970">Sylvester - <i>Private Recordings August 1970</i></a> — A tender and oh so romantic collection of the legendary Sylvester singing classic show tunes. Strikingly intimate. Every time I put this on, I think someone is at the door but it’s just Sylvesters foot tapping to the music…a must for fans of sentimental elegance and peacock feathers.<br /></p>
</div>
</div>Jeffrey SilversteinMany people who make creative work cite the importance of getting out of your own way. Have you developed healthy ways to do this over time?Painter Olivia Hill on making art no matter what2024-03-07T03:00:00-05:002024-03-07T03:00:00-05:00https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/painter-olivia-hill-on-making-art-no-matter-what<p><strong>How do you decide when to make a painting? When does a painting feel inevitable?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I think a lot about my childhood instincts to paint and draw, and how at the very earliest stages they were kind of covetous. The urge to make something or to recreate something was to own it or to make it real.</span></p>
<p><span class="highlight">And now it’s often about recreating something in order to know it, to get a sense of the connectedness in things.</span> And that’s a pretty consistent through line in my work even though it takes different iterations. I’m always finding the connectedness between things, and I find those connections in imagery.</p>
<p>That brings me to your original question. <span class="highlight">How do I identify a painting that I want to make? It’s like I’ve been following this constellation, connecting the dots and finding the similarities between them on a micro and macro scale.</span></p>
<p>And then through the process of painting, I’m finding other similarities that weren’t immediately apparent to me when I felt the compulsion to make the painting. For instance, for this show [at Bel Ami], I made a painting of an aerial landscape. It’s an aerial image of the California landscape inspired by last year’s super bloom. It was maybe the first time we had the technology to get really vivid images of wildflowers from outer space. So I was like, “I have to paint that. I just need to know more about that.”</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/resize=width:800/vwPX60DTRuxrZoecc8mA" alt="" /></p>
<p><em class="caption"><i>Poppies From Space 33°47’03.9’‘N 117°25’17.5’‘W</i>, oil on canvas, 60 inches x 72 inches, 2024</em></p>
<p><strong>I feel like there’s an interesting tension in your work between fact and fiction, artificial and real.</strong></p>
<p>I’m kind of a science enthusiast. <span class="highlight">When I read, I read what I guess you would call pop science, pop cosmology, pop physics. That gets me into this state of awe that I like to be in when I’m thinking about what I want to paint. It gets me excited about existence. My version of sketching in a sketchbook is to just look at Google Earth and sort of fly over the planet.</span></p>
<p>Mostly I start with my own hometown, and that’s why I’ve used California as a backdrop. I like to start with the familiar and then zoom out and look at it as if I’m seeing it objectively, as if I’m someone from another planet looking at our own planet, trying to understand what the humans are up to, trying to look for signs of life.</p>
<p>I always get excited about the way that the landscape looks from that altered point of view. Often it’s very abstract and it’s hard to tell whether you’re looking at something macroscopic or microscopic or what planet we’re looking at, if we’re looking at something ancient or new. Aesthetically, I find it really beautiful.</p>
<p><strong>How do you toggle between looking at images online, scrolling through Google Earth, and painting?</strong></p>
<p>Actually, toggling is a good word for it because I think I go back and forth between those two mediums pretty fluidly. <span class="highlight">As analog my actual method is, I love digital tools. I’m not very tech-savvy, so I use digital tools in a really clunky way. I think that’s come to define my aesthetic a little bit. I get excited about it, like somebody who’s using a computer for the first time going, “Isn’t this wonderful?”</span></p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/resize=width:800/Vq8Yv0fySKOLAIOpslRa" alt="" /></p>
<p><em class="caption"><i>Picnic Table in Poppy Field</i>, oil on canvas, 60 inches by 48 inches, 2024</em></p>
<p><strong>I’m curious about your interest in representing California and Los Angeles. Is there a desire to represent California in a way that you feel like hasn’t been represented before?</strong></p>
<p>I actually am interested in the LA simulacra just as much as I am in the real thing. Something that was a big part of my childhood was walking with my dad in the Hollywood Hills and looking at the castles, at people’s version of happiness. The environment they create. There isn’t really a standardized look to LA. It’s a place where you come and you make anything you want. And so I’m interested in the cultural interpretation of LA, too.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">If there’s one thing, though, that is very personal to me and my representation of it, it’s the dirt and the mountains. The unglamorous, publicly available side of it. People think of LA as a place where there’s a lot of glamour and you’re going to see celebrities. But my experience of it growing up was more like, “Well, what can we do for free?” And that was usually hiking.</span></p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/resize=width:800/UU4Z7HLSOCkbc9rIjOQx" alt="" /></p>
<p><em class="caption"><i>Star Field</i>, oil and acrylic on canvas, 60 inches x 72 inches, 2024</em></p>
<p><strong>I know you’ve painted the <a href="https://modernhiker.com/hike/bronson-caves/">Bronson Batcave</a> a lot, too, which I loved. I hiked there a lot as a kid.</strong></p>
<p>Yeah. I first started painting the LA landscape in grad school. <span class="highlight">I had to go away from LA and then come back and I went back to my childhood.</span> A lot of the places that I painted at the beginning were places that my dad took me when I was a kid to be like, “This is a pretty weird and wonderful place that we live in.”</p>
<p><strong>How did you handle the transition to and from grad school?</strong></p>
<p>When I went to grad school, it was the first time that I realized that there were all these different ways that people could come into making art. We had visiting artist lectures, and a lot of these professional artists would talk say, “Yeah, I mean, I was studying tech, and then somebody offered me a scholarship.”</p>
<p><span class="highlight">That kind of helped me to actually reset my own practice and say, “Okay, let’s pretend like this isn’t a thing that I just do, because it’s what just comes naturally. Let’s pretend like this is a career that I’m trying to pursue. How do I do that?”</span></p>
<p>After undergrad, I had no interest in going back to school for art. <span class="highlight">I was really disenchanted by the art world. I thought everybody was kind of a downer, and I didn’t understand how to make a career out of it.</span> So I started working in the film business for a while, and I was at the San Francisco Art Institute, and I sort of smoothly transitioned into just working with film students to doing production design and costumes. I found that people’s drive and energy in the film business was refreshing. I found other artists to be a little apathetic.</p>
<p><strong>I get that.</strong></p>
<p>I went and worked in the movie business for a while. I ended up working full-time on a television show for five years, and I thought, “Maybe this is what I’m going to do because I understand how I get a paycheck.” I lived in Nashville working on the show, and I bought a house there. It was a good time to buy houses. I also bought a house in the high desert in Yucca Valley. I was like, “Well, I am throwing a stone over there. I’m going to come back one day. It’s there for me.”</p>
<p><span class="highlight">But after five years, I said, “Enough with this.” I had built myself a studio in my backyard, and I was still painting, and I thought, “I have to get back to this. This is what’s the most fulfilling to me.”</span> And that’s when I applied to grad school, and I only applied to schools that would bring me back to Southern California.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/resize=width:800/uKiXZaCLSQuQ1C0EN7Eq" alt="" /></p>
<p><em class="caption"><i>Stone Formation #2</i>, oil and acrylic on canvas, 18 inches by 24 inches, 2024</em></p>
<p><strong>How was school, once you were there?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I thought going to grad school in my early thirties after having a taste of being a real working stiff was great. I was like, “I’m so ready to learn. I’m ready for critique.” I was ready for the things that grad school wants you to do: to just tear down your practice and forget everything and start from scratch.</span> And I really did that while I was there. For the first year, I hardly made any paintings. I made videos and weird stuff knowing that I would probably come back to painting, but I wanted to have just a different approach to it.</p>
<p>I had to get some motion picture making out of my system after working in the movies. And I thought it gave me better tools to explore things that I wanted to put into my paintings. Artificiality, motion, phenomena. When I was making little videos and stuff, I was making sets and little models. That’s what got me into looking at Google Earth. I realized that Google Earth was a shortcut to looking at the environment as if it was a little model.</p>
<p><strong>That’s fascinating.</strong></p>
<p>And when I was in grad school, I was already thinking in terms of how I would fit this into my practical life. I was a little older than some of the other people in my program, and I needed it to fit into the lifestyle I already had. UCR is a fully funded program, so it didn’t cost anything.</p>
<p>And when I came out of grad school, I was doing the earliest versions of the paintings that I’m doing now. And I was like, “Okay, I think this is an area that this is going to give me the sustained interest for a long time.” And then I came out of grad school during the pandemic, and that gave me a little bit of a buffer.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/resize=width:800/N4OQSgoVSxWHvAJgIzuy" alt="" /></p>
<p><em class="caption"><i>Sprinkler</i>, oil on canvas, 48 inches x 36 inches, 2024</em></p>
<p>But then a year later I had my thesis show in LA, and Lee at Bel Ami came to see it, and I already had a baby. I got pregnant during the lockdown. I had a baby with me at my thesis show. <span class="highlight">Everything happened at once because I suddenly had a six-month-old, Lee offered me my first solo show at Bel Ami, and I got my first teaching job at Chapman. I’ve been doing some assistant work for an artist for years now, and her work started to ramp up, and I didn’t feel like I could say no to anything. But I thought, “I’ve done movie work before. I know how to work 14-hour days.”</span></p>
<p><strong>That makes sense.</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I thought, “I’m just going to say yes to everything right now.” And it was brutal. I was absolutely exhausted. But I wanted to have an art show more than anything in the world. And so I just said, “Let me make this work.”</span> It was sort of limping to the finish line, but it was okay. And that push back then got me into a place where things are a little bit easier. There’s more of a flow now. My daughter’s in school during the day, and then we have a nanny for a couple of hours. All my income might be going towards childcare, but that’s okay because I get to paint all day.</p>
<p>And that’s the dream, just to support what I love doing. I don’t have a lot of overhead with my painting practice, because one of the benefits of having done it all my life is that I can kind of make any space an art-making space. I always built my own canvases, so I know that I can always find a way to do it for free.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">My practice is pretty fluid and evolving. I always think that no matter what situation I get into, I’ll find a way to make my art.</span> I think often about somebody who was really influential to my practice, a teacher named Mr. Lynn in high school. He taught a Chinese watercolor class.</p>
<p>He had grown up in China, and he had always loved making art. For a period of his childhood, making art was outlawed, but he found a way to make paintings. He made paintings with soy sauce on tablecloth.</p>
<p><strong>Whoa.</strong></p>
<p>It was sort of gross, but he had a really grown out pinky nail. He would use it as a fountain pen and paint with his fingernail and soy sauce. And I was like, “That’s hardcore.” <span class="highlight">You really have to make paintings no matter what. There’s always a way.</span></p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/resize=width:800/Tha9LUWPTxGICXvJpfP4" alt="" /></p>
<p><em class="caption"><i>Play Space</i>, oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 inches x 36 inches, 2024</em></p>
<p><strong>And that’s when people actually end up innovating in their practice a lot of the time, I think. That necessity pushes people to a place where the work often becomes more compelling.</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">Necessity is the mother of invention. I’ve always looked at it that way. I’m feeling good about the balance right now between evolution and innovation and consistency in my work. I’ve gone through periods where it’s just all evolution and experimentation all the time, but so much of the discovery is realizing, “Oh, this is not working.” I mean, maybe you can get past the point of really making mistakes, but maybe that’s kind of boring.</span></p>
<p><strong>Is there something that, as an artist, you haven’t gotten to do yet that you would really like to do?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I always hope that at each stage in my life as an artist, I’m already doing what I want to do.</span> So I always check in with myself all the time and say, “Is this what I want to be doing with my day?” And right now it’s this small scale version of that, but it’s already sort of there. I can imagine that I can fill a much bigger space with this breadth of work. Larger paintings, too.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">And then I hope it resonates with people. That’s the most important thing to me. When people catch my drift, that’s the most rewarding thing to me.</span></p>
<div class="rec" id="recommendation">
<div class="rec-content"><p><strong>Olivia Hill Recommends:</strong><br /></p>
<p>Reading pop physics and cosmology books (Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking)<br /></p>
<p>Taking studio breaks to lie in the sun<br /></p>
<p>Choreographed dance (watching and doing)<br /></p>
<p>Second-hand shopping<br /></p>
<p>Relating situations in life to scenes from Jurassic Park (the first one)<br /></p>
</div>
</div>Claudia RossHow do you decide when to make a painting? When does a painting feel inevitable?Musician Madi Diaz on learning to accept your success2024-03-06T03:00:00-05:002024-03-06T03:00:00-05:00https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/musician-madi-diaz-on-learning-to-accept-your-success<p><strong>Your new album is coming out in nine days. How are you feeling?</strong></p>
<p>I’m excited and I’m a little bit nervous. I feel like I am trying to give up anticipating how I’m going to feel. Releasing the single “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsM-2EfG5x8">Same Risk</a>” felt like a relief to put out. And then “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iazcp2yLvDA">Don’t Do Me Good,</a>” a single with Kacey Musgraves, was fun to put out because it was with a friend, and then the last single, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDw2vBI5-PE">Everything Almost</a>” was much more emotional for me than I had anticipated feeling. It’s a pretty personal song and it knocked me sideways and put me in a headspace that I wasn’t ready for. So <span class="highlight">I’m just walking forward because I’m ready to do it.</span></p>
<p><strong>How has your songwriting process changed over time? Or is there a particular ritual or technique that has remained constant?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">With touring so much and traveling again in my life, I think I’ve had to be more flexible with chasing ideas and trying to keep that part of my mind ready to catch whatever is coming to me.</span> That can be difficult. I can fall out of that routine or that way of thinking and I’m a super routine-based person, so the more routine I can add to my life, the better I am. <span class="highlight">But the most helpful and the most elasticizing technique I’ve found is when I wake up in the morning and just do a free form, a word vomit for 10 minutes.</span> Or there’s this thing called object writing, where you pick an object and you stream of consciousness right to that object for using all of your senses around that object. That’s been the most helpful thing to me. <span class="highlight">As for the writing, the process is about the same, but the ways that I get to it have had to be a little bit more fluid.</span></p>
<p><strong>You write songs for yourself and other artists. How do you know when a song is finished or when it is good?</strong></p>
<p>It’s so weird. I feel like that’s so tough. You just know, you do. I feel like if I could explain that, I’d probably be better at writing songs or something. If I knew the trick to it, then I would just do it every time and just always land the dismount. <span class="highlight">I don’t think that every song I write is <i>the</i> song, but it’s part of the practice of staying in your expression and your expressiveness and just trying to find the nerve and hit the nerve well every time. You know when you hit the nerve, it’s like hitting a funny bone or on your knee when they’re doing the reflex thing at the doctor.</span> It’s like you just know when you hit it and you know when you’re not hitting it.</p>
<p><strong>Is your songwriting process different when you write for other people than for yourself?</strong></p>
<p>When I’m writing for other people, I just try to make sure that whatever’s on their heart, whatever practices that they’re in or life situations that they’re finding themselves in, <span class="highlight">I try to make so much space when I’m writing for other artists.</span> And just try to be a guide rail more than anything. And I can be as big or as small as required of me in any of those rooms. But I love it when an artist comes in with a thought, something that they’ve been excited, a way of thinking, something that they’re trying to describe, or a complex emotion. And I like trying to concentrate on that the most and make that the purest and find the arrow and the bullseye with them. That’s the most exciting thing to me. <span class="highlight">When you can communicate with one other person and the other person understands when you’re saying it just right and then you hit that thing together, that’s the best. It’s such a fun feeling.</span></p>
<p><strong>Is there a particular process that you like when you are collaborating with another artist on writing a song?</strong></p>
<p>Typically it comes out in just getting to know each other. And getting to know where they are in their lives at that time and where I am in my life at that time. And if we’ve both been through something similar that we’re trying to process through, I think that that’s usually where the song always comes from.</p>
<p><strong>Your album <i><a href="https://madidiaz.bandcamp.com/album/history-of-a-feeling">History of a Feeling</a></i> it’s about a specific time of your life and what you were living back then. And this is also the same case with the new album <i>Weird Faith</i>. Are the albums connected in any way?</strong></p>
<p>I think <i>History of a Feeling</i> feels like turning the page completely, if not even just the last chapter of my life. I feel like <i>Weird Faith</i> is just the next chapter in the book. <i>History of a Feeling</i> was so much about grief and really being present in that grief and sometimes being present in that anger and being present in that heartbreak. And then <i>Weird Faith</i> is still processing the last page, the last chapter to some extent. And how <i>History of a Feeling</i> has almost shaped me to prepare myself for this next chapter of my life where I’m meeting a person and falling in love again, or I’m trying to trust myself.</p>
<p><span class="highlight">Because when you love something and the thing that you love inevitably breaks your heart, because it always does, and that doesn’t mean that it’s over.</span> But I feel like you can suffer lots of little heartbreaks in a relationship. But <span class="highlight">when something hurts, you’re always going to try to learn how to not do that again, and if you can, avoid it at any cost.</span> I think that <i>Weird Faith</i> is a lot of trying to figure out how to not step on the potential landmines, and looking at that and being like, “How do I do this?”</p>
<p><strong>I wonder if in the process of releasing something so personal, there was a part of you that was hesitant or that said something like <i>don’t go there</i>?</strong></p>
<p>My only hesitation was releasing it. <span class="highlight">I knew I needed to write about it. I knew that I needed to do that for myself, and that was going to happen no matter what. I think my hesitation was to include certain songs that were so personal.</span> And even still playing them live depending on what’s going on at the moment, can still hit me in that way that it’s either so transporting and it’s time travel and I’m back in that head space again. Or it’s weirdly speaking to something that’s going on in my life at that current moment, and I’m going, “How am I still talking about the same thing?” <span class="highlight">That’s been my only hesitation, just knowing that once you put a record out, it becomes part of your story no matter what, and you’re going to continue to have to face those parts of yourself.</span></p>
<p><strong>Also when you release something what happens with the material after that is out of your control.</strong></p>
<p>Out of my hands. <span class="highlight">Completely out of my hands for better or for worse. And I think that’s been such a beautiful experience. I didn’t know that by going through something so difficult and so painful I was making so much space for receiving so much love and joy and thanks and connection with people that I just don’t even know.</span> Strangers that resonate with the lyrics or they just feel like it’s talking them through a similar place in their lives. That was special. That was the gift on the other side of that, as hard as that was.</p>
<p><strong>You have collaborated with some of your friends on your songs. For example, Kacey Musgraves. How do you feel about bringing someone to sing something with you that is personal to you?</strong></p>
<p>That to me just felt like such an obvious special moment. I feel like the whole record is so inward-facing and so reflective and internal, and that’s not always how I’m processing things. <span class="highlight">I am a pretty verbal processor. I rely on my friends to talk through some bigger things with me.</span> And so for me, having Kacey sing on “Don’t Do Me Good,” it was so wonderful to not be so alone in that feeling of like, “God, man, I keep going back.” Having somebody on the other end of the telephone line while I’m trying to work through this feeling felt important to illustrate in the song.</p>
<p><strong>How are you preparing to also sing all of this live for the first time on your tour?</strong></p>
<p>One step at a time. It’s been really fun to go back over these songs and start singing them. The melodies are really fun. I am proud of the record and I’m excited to sing it live because so much grows even beyond what we made in a record sense when you’re playing it in a live sense. I’m excited to see what it becomes out on tour. Hopefully, it becomes even melodically bigger or structurally bigger than the record. Hopefully, it takes us somewhere totally different.</p>
<p><strong>You’ve mentioned that <i>Weird Faith</i> tells a story of you falling in love and having all this hesitation. Was this an intention that you had from the beginning? Did it just start unfolding little by little?</strong></p>
<p>It’s so funny. <i>History of a Feeling</i> is all looking backward. It’s very much looking at a thing that happened. And <i>Weird Faith</i> is very much in the present moment and talking about what is actively happening for me in a visceral [way]. <span class="highlight">It’s walking into the future and I’m terrified.</span> I’m walking into the future and I’m terrified and I’m just talking about it the whole time. I was lucky enough for it to become what it is. I do think that it captures just a lot of really vulnerable moments within a relationship and learning how to trust myself and discovering and unearthing these desires that had been living in me for so long that I didn’t even know were there, but [realizing] that this person [in me] is inspiring.</p>
<p><strong>You just mentioned that <i>History of a Feeling</i> was more about looking into the past and now <i>Weird Faith</i> is the present and what you’re looking for. Creatively speaking, what’s the difference between looking back and reflecting on that and writing about what is happening at the moment?</strong></p>
<p><i>History of a Feeling</i> is just pretty much talking about what happened. I’ve experienced it so I know what it was. And I’m just trying to open the box and go through what’s in the box and go through what’s there. As opposed to <i>Weird Faith</i> where it’s like, “Well, the box is empty again, and I don’t even know… I could try putting this in here. And what does it look like when the room is arranged like this? And how do I feel when the room is arranged like this? And how do I feel when this color is on the wall?” And it’s so much more maybe emotionally experimental than the last record is. Because <span class="highlight">grief is grief and healing is healing.</span> And this is just like, I don’t even know what the future is going to bring.</p>
<p>So it’s almost like bracing for impact and playing out all of the ways that it could go right and playing out all of the ways that it could go wrong and playing out all the things in between. And additionally, I’m just trying to talk myself out of that space and just be present. This is why there are mantras almost in the record where it’s like I have to have weird faith about it, and nothing is a waste of time. Trying to tell myself that it all is happening and I’ve learned so much and I know so much more about myself than I ever have, and I feel closer to myself than I ever have, and that’s the reason for all of it.</p>
<p><strong>You live in Nashville, a city where so many of your artist friends live. When you are working on something new, do you share it with your community right away or do you prefer to work on your music by yourself and share the work until it’s done?</strong></p>
<p>There are certain songs that I’ve written that I’d get really excited about and I’ll share with my friends. But I’m pretty private about that stuff, not because I feel secretive about it, but because I don’t know, it’s not all about me. Everybody’s got their things going on. But every once in a while, if I’m excited about a song, I’ll share it with a close friend that either I know loves the art of melody or song structure, or maybe appreciates production and will think that we’ll just have thoughts on what we did. And then sometimes I don’t want to hear anybody’s thoughts, and so I won’t.</p>
<p><strong>Sometimes feedback can be a bit overwhelming or distracting.</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">Sometimes it gets out of hand. I try to keep things to myself because I know at the end of the day, I know I’m proud of it, that’s the most important thing to me.</span> I don’t want to get caught up in what my friends think, versus me knowing that I really did some good work and hopefully, it doesn’t suck.</p>
<p><strong>In the past few months, you were the opening act for Harry Styles and were part of his band. You’ve also had your daytime and nighttime debuts, and you’re about to release a new album and go on a national tour. Is this how you envisioned success?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">I just feel like every time I make it up one mountain there’s another one to climb right behind it. It’s that elusive peak that you’re just ever climbing and reaching.</span> I don’t consider myself successful. I consider myself absolutely fortunate as hell. And I mean, I can’t believe that people want to talk to me about this stuff. This is so crazy. <span class="highlight">I think the success thing changes all the time, every day.</span> Honestly, if I can get a good night’s sleep, that’s successful for me at this point.</p>
<p><strong>So singing at Wembley Stadium with Harry Styles does not count? <i>[Laughs]</i></strong></p>
<p>That was a crazy <i>[laughs]</i>. I don’t think I’ll ever feel whatever that feeling is ever again. I had never played a stadium by myself before Harry asked me to open for him, and it was so cool. I didn’t realize that he had the kinds of fans that would just be so encouraging and so loving. <span class="highlight">From the second that I walked on stage, I felt like I had already won.</span></p>
<p><strong>For your new album, you mentioned that you wanted to explore also how anxiety-inducing falling in love can be. Did you learn anything about that process?</strong></p>
<p>When I was writing <i>Weird Faith</i>, there was a lot of shallow breathing. With the love that I received for <i>History of a Feeling</i>, even that was anxiety-inducing. I’ve had so many things that weren’t good in my life. So <span class="highlight">it’s a crazy moment when you have a good thing happen to you because you’re terrified immediately that it’s going to stop.</span> I’ve found myself so many times, whether it was something was going well in the music world or something was going well in my personal life, where my friends were like, “Oh my God, this is so amazing. Are you having the best time? Aren’t you enjoying yourself? Enjoy it.” And I’m like, “How the fuck am I supposed to enjoy this when I’m terrified?” <span class="highlight">It’s like I have this thing and I’m already grieving losing it. This is so fucked up.</span></p>
<p><strong>I can relate to anticipating the loss or ending of things.</strong></p>
<p>And how to not numb out and just go, “Well, whatever’s going to happen is going to happen.” And have some aloofness. I don’t want to be an aloof person. I don’t want to be a cold numbed-out version of myself just so I can protect myself from things feeling good and bad. That’s not the idea either. The record is struggling with that all-or-nothing feeling. It’s how to hold all of it at the same time.</p>
<p><strong>What do you think life is asking of you in this phase of your life?</strong></p>
<p><span class="highlight">Right now, I’d say my life is asking me to prepare, and I am almost prepared. And I also think that at some point you just have to accept that you’ve gotten as far as you can get and that you have everything that you need, and that now it’s just time to show up.</span></p>
<div class="rec" id="recommendation">
<div class="rec-content"><p><strong>Madi Diaz recommends:</strong><br /></p>
<p>Always write it down even when you think it’s too dumb to write it down.<br /></p>
<p>Do a cartwheel<br /></p>
<p>Light a candle<br /></p>
<p>Keep going<br /></p>
<p>Sometimes when I can’t sleep at night I imagine myself spooning me. Try that!<br /></p>
</div>
</div>Miriam GarciaYour new album is coming out in nine days. How are you feeling?