The Creative Independent

Writer Annakeara Stinson on learning to find clarity in your work

2026-07-20T03:00:00-04:00

How long did it take you to write Nerve Damage and how long did it take you to edit it?

I had been working on a different book for a while, like a few years, but it just didn’t feel like it was coming together. One day mom was like, “How about you try something else?” I was very offended when she said that, then started working on Nerve Damage the next day. The first draft took me about nine months, which is not a wild amount of time for a book—it came out relatively easily. I finished the first full draft at Art Farm in Nebraska, then promptly threw up.

I took another year to do the second full draft. That’s when I started looking for agents. I did edits with my agent, Eloy. After Maris got it at Knopf, we really went through with a fine-tooth comb. We did probably three or four full edits, but it was mostly line level stuff, deepening characters, or needing to rework certain elements of a scene. The main structure remained. They bought the book in early 2024 and it just came out in mid-2026, so we had a pretty long runway. Maris is so artful and so smart, such an awake reader. By the end of the editing process it was stuff like…”You’re using the word ‘just’ too much,” and there was a pass for the word “just.” Had to justify each just.

It sounds like you had the structure figured out before the manuscript landed with your agent and then editor. Did you use any craft books, wisdom from your MFA, or did you just intuitively know how to structure the novel?

It had more to do with being a reader and a movie watcher. I’m less interested in plot than I am in voice and emotional questions. But I also know that plot is an important element to keep someone engaged. I wanted the plot in Nerve Damage to be simple, I wanted Clarice’s journey to be driven by her emotional weather and a relatively contained emotional question. I wanted those to drive the action.

When we switched timelines into the past, that was just the retelling of what was motivating the journey in the present. I decided on an idea for the plot and was like, “Okay, I know what the problem is and I also ultimately know what the end point is going to be,” and it was a matter of just taking her on this journey to answer that one question: “Did she see her ex-boyfriend/stalker, and if so, what is he doing here?”

It moved so seamlessly between the present story and the backstory. How did you manage to balance the backstory with the present?

I wrote the present story in one document and the past in another, in their respective tenses. Then, I wove them together. It was a collaging process. Because the whole plot drives on the reality that the past is extremely present to her, it didn’t feel like there was a huge leap between those two time periods. The reader gets more and more information, but it was necessary to the immediate action of what’s happening in the plot.

It wasn’t like, “She’s a high-powered lawyer, but now we’re going to see her humble beginnings in a tiny town in Kansas.” It wasn’t that. Everything described in the past was linked to her thought process and the choices she was making. I intuited when to break from the forward movement of the plot in the present to go a little further into the past, moments where I felt it fruitful to sink down into what’s driving her neurosis or get insight into why she feels what she’s feeling.

You mentioned earlier placing importance on the “emotional weather” of the book. Something I really loved about Nerve Damage was its atmosphere. Clarice’s East Hollywood Apartment feels so Lynchian with the strange objects left on her doorstep, the couple fighting downstairs, their squawking pet bird. What do you consider when working through atmosphere and setting?

I live in LA now and something I appreciate about it is its dreamlike quality. It’s such a strange place, especially the omnipresence of show business, all these real lives happening in this mythical American land.

A writer is ultimately an observer of life, and what I find most interesting to write about often comes from simply observing or interacting with strangers. An apartment building offers access to many different types of people, their lives are overlapping, everyone’s trying to have some privacy despite living on top or under other types of lives.

Clarice also goes to court and to a police station at one point. In these public places she’s having a personal crisis, around other people also experiencing personal crises, and it’s other people’s workplace. I like thinking about setting in terms of: anywhere you are, you’re sharing the stage, so to speak, with many other people and any one person is having their own experience. Any scene is an opportunity for many people’s stories to meet at once. It allows for poignancy, but also absurdity.

That reminds me of Kaveh Akbar’s blurb of Nerve Damage, that, “It feels impossible for a book so chilling to also be so funny.” How do you use humor in your writing?

I like to think humor can highlight someone’s humanity more than it can cloud it. It’s such a special type of intelligence. It’s a crafty way to show vulnerability, discomfort, an unconscious or conscious belief, or someone’s judgment or critical eye. For me as a reader, humor helps me trust the writer. It makes me feel more relaxed, it’s more pleasurable and alive to me. Humor is a real meeting place for the writer and the reader.

Nerve Damage is mostly a book about fear, and the long-term impacts of fear on somebody’s mindset, psyche, and emotional capacity. Fear can have such a profound, devastating impact on someone. But fear can be so funny, because it’s intense for the person who is afraid, but not necessarily intense for anyone else. That’s tragic, too, and partially why it can be so isolating. It’s like when you’re hearing a friend describe something they’re paranoid about and you don’t have the same immediate fear, so there’s some space to see the comedy. And Clarice has legitimate reason to be afraid and hyper-vigilant, so I didn’t want her to be the butt of a joke, I wasn’t intending it to be an irretrievable dissent into madness, but her fear distorts her ability to see. And to live freely.

I keep comparing her journey in the novel to somebody having a rash and looking up on WebMD and being like, “I’m positive this is a cancer rash,” then going to the doctor and they are like, “Uh, ma’am, you have psoriasis.” It’s not cause for celebration to have psoriasis, but it’s not cancer. There’s also something really informative in that relief, once you remember you already picked out your casket. Now you have to treat the psoriasis, but it’s also a good idea to take a look at the intense spiral you went on.

As a hypochondriac, I can relate. You earned your MFA at the New School. How did the experience of getting an MFA shape you as a writer, if at all?

It definitely did. Part of it was I had gone through a really difficult period in my late 20s/ early 30s and I made the decision to pursue something I actually felt a calling towards. I went with professional aspirations, but my real goal was to figure out how to give myself agency over my own time. I wanted to be around other people who were devoting themselves to writing. I got a really good scholarship and I loved the teachers––Darcey Steinke, Alexandra Kleeman, Dale Peck, Katie Kitamura. The experience taught me to take my own practice seriously and to do it with and in front of other people. Some people naturally have those skills, I needed a container.

At the same time, my day job was as a women’s health writer for Bustle. I was writing things I didn’t have a major emotional investment in. I was writing in the voice of a website. That was oddly helpful, because it allowed me to write without being super precious, to realize that the first draft is just a draft. I learned to make things legible, which is important to me as a writer, because I often am trying to find clarity in things that are difficult to understand for myself and for my reader. Legibility is not every writer’s concern, but it is one of mine, I think because I write a lot about trauma, and the felt experience of trauma is already so confusing.

Having those two experiences at once—the MFA and the job at Bustle—was really fruitful. At work I had to learn how to churn stuff out, I built the muscle that can fill a page with words. And one of the main skills I was getting in the MFA was how to read closely, and how to separate what I might like or expect in writing from what a person’s intention for a piece of work might be. Once I was able to discern that more adeptly, I could be better at actual analysis or editing.

I was lucky, I really liked everybody in my cohort, it didn’t feel competitive or catty. It felt supportive, and I needed that in order to open up. I made wonderful friends.

You said you wanted to take space to work on something that you felt a calling toward. I know that you were a dancer for a long time. What brought about the impulse to focus on writing?

I started writing when I was quite young. I journaled and wrote poetry. There was never a time that I haven’t been writing. It was mostly that I decided to do it in a way that was like, “I want to have a larger conversation with the world through my writing versus just doing it privately.” Because of all the time a person spends alone while writing, there is something really powerful that can happen when you share it. You’re sharing your privacy with somebody else. Even if the story is entirely made up.

I felt a calling to write, but I’ve also always had a calling to be a reader from when I was a pretty small kid. You get this peek into humanity that can be so profound. That can happen through a lot of art forms but for me, it’s most consistent with reading. That’s how I’ve found solace, hope. The process of transmutation gives me hope. I wanted to be a part of that tradition in a more intense way.

I noticed you don’t have an Instagram. How do you approach digital spaces like social media and other online distractions?

Actually, my friend made me an Instagram a couple weeks ago because she didn’t realize I had a New York Times book review. She was laughing, like, “Uh…you need a place to put your book stuff.” Now, I’m on there, but I’ll download it, look at it for a while or post something, then I delete the app. I don’t keep it on my phone all day long. I have a fraught relationship with the internet, a lot of people do. It feels intimidating to me, also dangerous. That probably makes me sound like nine million years old. And obviously I don’t trust the people making these platforms, they’re dark lords. This is me with like 265 followers. Working it out in real time.

I do understand the benefit of having everything consolidated in one place. But really I find the constancy of it discombobulating, often a little sad. Even the short while that I’ve been on it, I’m like, “So, I have to continue doing this? Each day I have to post another thing about my book?” As I’m being bombarded with ads. It’s boring. There’s the whole actual advertising element.

It’s like you’re at the mall.

Exactly. There’s actual stuff being sold (…I’ve already bought a bathing suit) but also I don’t like the idea of making an advertisement out of oneself. That feels at odds with my value system. It makes me feel mentally ill.

I can’t imagine deeply believing in crafting a brand online, and I don’t mean that as a judgment of people who do. But it doesn’t turn me on. It’s a thing people find endlessly fascinating, or at least a necessary evil. People have ideas about how to make it a transgressive part of being an artist. To me it feels like wearing uncomfortable shoes. I could just take them off. Maybe it costs me something, but it doesn’t feel worth sacrificing life-force.

I’m a mid-millenial, plenty of people my age are extremely online, but I don’t think it courses through our veins the same way it does for people even five years behind us. I’m affected by it, I live in the world it’s creating, I know of its power, but I don’t believe in it as an unshakeable reality. My young adulthood was on the cusp of social media. Facebook wasn’t at my college until the end of my sophomore year.

Although I see some of my professors or people in Gen X use social media in a way that doesn’t seem as ego dystonic as it can be for me. They are like “Here’s a realistic picture of my face and my birthday cake, as well as some books I enjoy!” There’s no built-in inclination towards profound image control. Some people use it as a minimally edited digital cork board, that’s more attractive to me. I also really love a lot of Substack writers. I like reading about people grappling with the internet, with AI.

I do like the whole, “Wow, I haven’t talked to this person since high school.” It’s wild. My mom has a friend she reconnected with online who’s a guy she went to preschool with. They’re buddies, they talk all the time. She’s always like, “You know, Tim told me this thing about when he worked for Ronald Reagan, before he became a leftist…” It’s this guy she’s known since she was a little, little kid who she hadn’t talked to and hasn’t actually seen for so many years. They get to bear a kind of witness to each other’s lives in the long-term because of this tool. There is something so beautiful and fun about that.

Annakeara Stinson recommends:

River swimming

Acupuncture

McDonald’s Fries, Coke, and four Advil for a migraine

Jouissance perfume oil

Volunteer and don’t tell anyone

Musicians Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap (Kneecap) on shaking the foundations of the status quo

2026-07-17T00:00:00-04:00

In the last year, you’ve played Coachella and Glastonbury, traveled to Cuba as part of a convoy of artists raising awareness about the U.S.’s siege on the nation, and have won legal battles. Through all of that, you’ve also been working on your upcoming album. How did Fenian come about amidst everything else?

Móglaí Bap: It was definitely chaotic during that period. But I think album time is a time for us to sit back and reflect on all that and process everything that’s happened. At the same time, whatever happened to us or whatever the backlash was, was a fraction compared to what’s going on in Palestine, or what’s going on in Iran or other countries. So we don’t dwell too much on the stress of being Kneecap, because it’s a fraction in comparison.

Mo Chara: We’re very, very lucky.

Móglaí: You don’t really realize how much things impact you until you sit with it for a while. So the album was a bit of a time for us to reflect and process it.

The sound of Fenian and the sound of Fine Art are pretty distinct. How has your music making evolved in these last two years?

Mo: Fine Art had its purpose. I think music in general has a time frame. If we’re sitting on a song for too long, no matter how good it is, you miss that moment. You might not know this, living in the States, but with anything that’s made in the Irish language, if it’s not folk music, it’s very quickly labeled as a parody. So for us now, after Fine Art—which was great, and we’re all fucking delighted with it—we wanted the second album to stand on its own against other albums.

Just because it’s in the Irish language, predominantly, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be judged on the same level musically as another LP.

It’s interesting to hear you reflect on this desire to push away from being tokenized and to create something that stands on its own.

Mo: [When we] started Kneecap, we were in the Irish language movement at the time. Like anybody else who spoke Irish, we loved anything being created in the Irish language. Just the fact that it was in our indigenous language that not many people spoke. But when we started Kneecap, we wanted to develop towards a place where the Irish language was almost secondary to the quality of it. We wanted things to be as high quality as anything you would get in English, and that was the driving force.

How did you go about writing and producing the songs on this album? Do you begin conceptually? Do you start with a lyric?

Móglaí: We use certain elements of reality and use that as our muse. “Carnival” is a good example of using the court case. We recorded the album over seven weeks with Dan Carey in Streatham, and during that seven weeks the court case happened, and also the Wembley Arena gig. The court case wasn’t easy. But it was an easy song to write about, because it was something that’s happening. Dan Carey also sampled the crowd outside the court case for the “Free Mo Chara” bit in the song.

The song “An Ra,” which is about the English empire and all the “good stuff” they’ve done—in reality, it wasn’t good stuff. So that was a joke we had for a long time, about how imperialists have this idea that without them colonizing us we wouldn’t be civilized. That was a joke.

That’s so interesting… My mom is from Morocco, and that was something I would always hear growing up: “The French gave you schools.”

Mo: But what did they fucking take away in the meantime?

One of my favorite tracks was “Palestine.” I thought it was really powerful, especially thinking about your evolution as musicians and as writers. I feel like that came through very clearly on that track. How did the collaboration with Palestinian rapper Fawzi come about?

Móglaí: My brother went to the West Bank Aida refugee camp in 2015, I think, and in 2018 we were helping to raise money with other Irish bands, to start a community gym at the Lajee Center at Aida refugee camp. Because of that, [my brother] met his fiancé from Ramallah, and that’s how we got connected with Fawzi. His fiancé knew Fawzi. And we heard one of Fawzi’s songs called “Castro.” It’s really good. We ended up getting connected with Fawzi and it ended up working really well.

We also had an intention for this album to have a Palestinian artist, because with everything going on, and us talking about Palestine so much, we wanted to give a platform to a Palestinian.

It was really cool to hear Arabic and Irish together.

Mo: Yeah, there’s definitely similarities. We got that guttural kha kha sound, too. I love that. When I listen to Arabic rap, it’s almost like a percussion of itself.

That’s why I love Arabic rap. It’s a language of poetry, so I think the language itself lends itself to the medium. I think Irish does, too, in its own way. A part of me likes being able to hear the music and to not necessarily know what each word means.

Mo: Yeah, I think that’s the same with any old language, or indigenous or ancient language—it’s over 1,000 years old. With English, they’ve kind of purposefully weaned it out of the guttural sounds to make it more palatable to them. But you listen to Arabic rap, you listen to Irish rap, and it’s that kha kha that’s the sound that really draws me.

Móglaí: It doesn’t translate too well, either. When you’re translating our lyrics into English, for example, the English is kind of back to front. The way we put verbs and everything—the way we create a sentence is different, you know? It’s good to have a translation, but it’s never the same.

Can you say a little bit more about relationship to translation?

Móglaí: Irish and English, even though we’re neighbors, it’s backwards in terms of the way you structure a sentence. It’s completely different. A translation is an interpretation of the original, but it’s not the same as the original. And that’s the difficulty of translation. It’s nice to have a translation for you to understand, but compared to the original version, it’s never going to compete. Irish and English have no relation in terms of the origins of the language. English is German. Germanic language comes from a whole different stem. Which I find interesting, because we’re so close together.

Mo: Thank god we’re surrounded by water, as the song goes.

Do you think being surrounded by water protected the language?

Mo: There’s only so long the water can hold.

Móglaí: Yeah we got protected, but we were so…

Mo: Stubborn.

Móglaí: We’re very, very hard to civilize, us Irish. I think the English understood that, because we had a rebellion or a revolution in Ireland every generation. I think that’s what annoyed the English the most, is our lack of willingness to become English. That’s why they orchestrated a famine in Ireland, because they couldn’t actually civilize us properly. So they had a forced famine where they weaponized food to try and cull a population and control the population.

That’s why we resonate with Palestinians. Something that really stayed with me was when they were not letting food into Gaza. I’m not sure if it was an image or just an article about a Palestinian person eating grass in Gaza—and that’s the thing that happened in Ireland. The locals had no food left, and they started eating grass. Once a human starts eating grass, it’s poisonous so it kills you from the inside. I just see how that same blueprint of colonization is happening.

There’s a circle to the name of the album, Fenian. The politics of language, and how language is used in colonization to make certain populations seem less of value than the colonizer. So the word Fenian, in recent times, was used as a means to make us look backwards. They would call us Fenians as if to say we aren’t of the modern day. That is the power of these words and how they are used to justify oppression. You see this in Palestine. They come up with this terminology [to try to say] that Palestinians aren’t of the same value as other people. So that’s how they justify killing them. You can only justify killing people if you actually feel like they’re below you. That’s why 1.5 million people died in Ireland, and 1.5 million went abroad. That’s the reason we chose Fenian, because it ties into the power of language. All language is political, because it is used to undermine people.

How did you find the time to make the album? What did that look like?

Móglaí: We didn’t go to America on tour. I think that was it. So we just had time to work on the album.

Mo: The media, obviously, kind of did run with it as if we had been denied visas for certain countries, which is just not true. Now that the court case is over, ideally all that should be swept under the rug, and we can apply for things and gradually move on. Because I don’t think it’s fair. There’s a lot of good people in America. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t represent them.

So you guys are interested in touring in the US, after all of that?

Móglaí: If we go to America, we are giving money to the American government and to the regime that funds Israel. But we have played there, and we have an audience there—a space to meet like-minded people, people who are conscious of Palestine. It is a hard line to tread… If we didn’t go to America, then Coachella would never have happened.

I think that you’re not only speaking about Palestine, but you have a developed analysis and are able to connect the dots to colonialism in a way that most artists in the US either aren’t allowed to, or just don’t take the risk to.

Mo: I’m not here to call artists out. I fear that this is a way that the Israeli lobby or the US government tries to separate artists: to have us fighting amongst ourselves. I am disappointed that there are certain artists that aren’t coming out, but at the same time, I’m not here to call them out. I think what’s worth noting is that what we said at Coachella, we’d been saying for maybe five years at that point: talking about US involvement, and that the US could end the siege of Gaza in the morning.

Móglaí: That analysis you’re talking about comes from our history, and Ireland being the first blueprint of English colonization. We see new forms of modern colonization happening in Palestine. If you go through something, I feel like you have an obligation to speak up against it happening.

What do you believe your role is as artists in this particular moment?

Mo: I think if you’re doing art authentically, it should be provocative in some way. It should be used as a provocation. It should be used to shake the foundations of the status quo. In Irish culture, you had the kings of the provinces, and alongside the king was the poet. The poet is who held the king, and other kings, accountable. The poet is not necessarily like the jester that you would have in English history. The poet was a satirist. I think that role in Ireland has never died. We’re just following in that long line of Irish artists who have used their platform and used what comes naturally to us in our heritage, which is to hold the powers above us accountable in some way.

Móglaí: Yeah, I agree. Politics is part of the fabric where we’re from. We don’t go out of our way to talk about politics. We’ve been talking about politics way before Kneecap. We were involved in language activism or protests for Palestine. This concept of what’s controversial, that’s subjective. What’s controversial in America is not controversial in Ireland. Being pro-Palestine is a bit controversial in LA, for example, but it’s not controversial in Ireland. So that’s the whole difference… The Choctaw people sent money to Ireland in 1846 during our forced famine. And in 2020, during Covid, the Choctaw tribe had a very hard time. So the Irish people sent over money to return the favor. We see the importance of international solidarity. It’s just a part of our DNA.

Mo: International solidarity lasts forever. Once there’s a free Palestine, and if Ireland ever falls on hard times, I don’t doubt for a second the Palestinians will be the first to act.

Knowing that you can’t really extricate US imperialism from the global music industry, what does success mean for you?

Mo: I think we’re already there, personally. We have enough money to feed ourselves, we have enough money to keep ourselves in a house, and we also are in a position where we don’t have to answer to anybody. We can do what we like, as we always have done. What we believe is the right thing. We don’t really care about the repercussions if we believe we’re doing the right thing. We’re very lucky to have a management and a label and stuff that are very supportive and don’t disagree with what we’re saying. So we’re in a very privileged position in the music industry—and that’s what you don’t get with major labels, unfortunately.

Móglaí: I think another factor in the way we view success is contributing to this idea of going back towards indigenous culture. We’ve seen it with the movie—we ended up connecting with indigenous people all over the world. Being a part of that awakening of going towards indigenous culture—especially with global warming and the way we mistreat the environment, and our disconnection from the land—is a big part of our success.

Mo Chara recommends:

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

Moisturizer by Wet Leg

Móglaí Bap recommends:

The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

Lankum

Filmmaker Jalena Keane-Lee on the power of responsible storytelling

2026-07-16T03:00:00-04:00

Looking back to your childhood, is there a memory or a feeling you had that now feels like a blueprint for the kind of filmmaker you’ve become?

I do think that my childhood and particularly my relationship with my mom and community have shaped my work. I was raised by a single mother in the Bay Area, in California. I also have a younger sister and my grandma was around a lot, so I was raised in this all-female household. My mom worked at an arts education center in Richmond and she didn’t have childcare for me, so I would take all the different classes at the art center. I did drumming, and Son Jarocho, and West African dance, and that taught me how to communicate. It taught me how to laugh, dance, and speak with different types of people with different cultural backgrounds. My mom also took me to a lot of protests. My introduction to art was intertwined with activism. I grew up creating art at protests with my mom and the art’s messages being around collective freedom and liberation. So that mother-daughter relationship shows up a lot in my work, as well as the feeling of freedom when you’re in community, of communal love. The English language doesn’t do a very good job at describing it. But I’ve experienced that feeling while dancing or chanting or being on the frontline together, where you and your community have a shared purpose and feel aligned.

How do those early seeds of lineage and ancestry show up most prominently in your work now?

For many years, I was working on Standing Above the Clouds, which was a short film first, and then became a feature-length documentary. A big motivating factor of my work is exploring families and lineage–the things that get passed down, and the things that get lost. Making Standing Above the Clouds and working with the kiaʻi, or the protectors of Mauna Kea, taught me so much about lineage and culture. Before that project, I had this idea that cultural inheritance might be some sort of ancient text or oral history that’s delivered to you, where suddenly you’re like, “Okay, now I have my culture. Now I understand.” Through becoming so close with the kiaʻi that are in that film, it made me realize, yes, you do inherit things and you do learn things that are ancient, but that culture is also about creating things in the present adding onto what already exists. Culture isn’t something that lives completely in the past.

You mentioned that Standing Above the Clouds started as a short film, and then you expanded it into a feature film. How did your relationship to the story change when you changed its form?

The short was finished at the end of 2019, and premiered at the beginning of 2020. Obviously, we know some other big things that happened in 2020 in the world. As our relationships and the scope of the story grew, the film just felt like it needed to be longer. Originally, I thought that the feature was going to be all about international solidarity. When you see 7,000 people show up to a lava field in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, how did that happen? But with the COVID lockdown, what ended up happening was much more intimate. We went with a super small team and did things very “run and gun”, which complimented the emotional journey that none of us could have predicted when we had first started making it in 2018. Having the space and years of growing together changed the film a lot.

What are the concrete practices that you’ve built into your process that allows for non-extractive storytelling and putting the story back into the community’s hands?

One of my primary methods is a rigorous practice of affirmative consent, meaning that someone is not just willing to do something, but is really invested, really wants to do it, and feels good about it. I also think about who I’m asking, and, based on our power positionality, if they really have the ability to say no if they wanted to. Consent is a continuous process. It’s not like just because you film something, you’re ready for it to be on the big screen. How each of us are portrayed and how our culture is portrayed is very sensitive, and requires sensitive storytelling. In film, we can get so caught up in certain deadlines or film festival submissions that seem so important in the moment, but I was lucky to receive great advice from mentors. “Those things come and go. They happen every year. But you’re the one that’s going to need to live with your film forever.” The people in the film and their community are the ones that will live with this forever. So, if it takes an extra two or three months to make sure that everyone has seen it who needs to see it, and has had time to sit with it and discuss it, it’s worth it. As filmmakers, it’s so important to recognize that even if we’re young and broke and see ourselves as scrappy, which, let’s be real, a lot of us are, we still have power in the inherent fact that we are the ones holding the camera and shaping the story. Sometimes it can feel like, “Who’s even going to see this?” But it’s important for us to responsibly wield our power and understand what we can contribute to movements, to people’s lives, and to cultural conversations.

As documentary filmmakers, we’re uniquely positioned to be on the receiving end of wisdom about humanity. Has anything thematic come up for you through the communities you’ve interacted with?

People really do want to talk about what they’re going through and how they’re feeling if they’re given enough time and space. In general, as a documentarian, I’ve learned that it sometimes just takes asking that first question, and so much can come pouring out. And oftentimes it feels, from my perspective at least, that people have been waiting for someone to ask that question. A lot of human beings process through speaking.

Can you describe a moment in your creative process that changed your perspective on a direction that you had been heading in in the past?

During the Sundance Edit Lab, I had a protected time to just think about the creative. I think the biggest lesson was: no one knows what they’re doing, and that’s the point of this. We’re engaging with a process of creation and experimentation. I also learned to not judge an idea until it’s complete. If you judge an idea when it’s half-baked, then you are cutting off a really important conversation with your work. Even if an idea is not the final form of the thing, it’s what might lead you to something that is the thing. Basically, if you don’t know how it ends up, the idea must be a good one.

How do you figure out when a film is finished, especially when the real life story is ongoing?

I think it’s just a feeling that you have. With Standing Above the Clouds, Hāwane, who is the eldest daughter of the main activist in the film, Pua Case, had a hoʻike, or graduation ceremony, for a healing circle of women. It just felt like such a passing of the torch, a momentous occasion, the weather and the light were perfect–it was just all coming together. I remember my producer, Erin Lau, came up to me and whispered in my ear, “I think you have the ending of your movie.” It was. When you feel like you have your ending, end it. But know it’s fluid. You can always go back and get something if you need to. It doesn’t need to be an absolute. But in terms of emotional, spiritual boundaries, it’s important to communicate an endpoint with participants. You can tell them that although this part is ending, we’ll still be around, that we can of course still talk, but it won’t be filmed anymore. You’re negotiating that change of relationship.

How do you stay present during shoots that feel a little bit hectic?

It’s important to take moments to look away from the monitor and take in your surroundings. “Wow, yeah, this is happening.” I also try to do a bit of a debrief with myself afterwards, reviewing footage and maybe journaling if I’m being my highest self. It has been really nice to look back on journals from times of being in production that track what I was thinking and feeling. I try to remember that in those hectic production moments, taking even just a little bit of time to write things down can be really nice to learn from in the future. I also try to maintain spiritual and energetic boundaries. A big thing for me after a demanding shoot is taking a long shower and washing with a salt scrub, visualizing that I’m washing off everything that I heard and took in, resetting and regrounding myself in my own experiences and emotions. It’s so natural and human to take on the things that we’re hearing and interacting with, but having a moment to return to myself has been really helpful.

Jalena Keane-Lee recommends:

Going on an adventure without your phone

Reading Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi

Reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

Watching a movie in theaters by yourself (my favorite solo movie snack is an empanada)

Staring at the moon and basking/journaling in the moonlight

Mauna Kea Education and Awareness

Stop the TMT Petition

Editor Hillary Brenhouse on emboldening others to take risks

2026-07-15T03:00:00-04:00

You are the founding editor of Elastic, a print magazine dedicated to psychedelic art and literature. With your background as an editor, at Guernica and The Guardian and Bold Type Books, was there a way of working or collaborating with writers and artists that you wanted to do differently with Elastic?

Elastic was conceived as a playground for writers and visual artists, a space of freedom and experimentation and innovation. We publish work that feels psychedelic in that it can’t be contained: not by inherited narrative forms, not by genre labels, not by linear time, not by the boundary between waking and dreaming life.

What this means, in practice, is that our contributors aren’t beholden to anyone or thing but their own creative impulse. And I can edit in the way that I’ve always wanted and tried to edit, without restraints. At other publications and publishing houses, I’ve sometimes had restrictions handed down to me. Things like, “You need to ask the writer to explain themself to the reader here.” And of course, in publishing, that reader is most often imagined as a white middle-class reader. There’s also this expectation that a piece take a particular form, and get edited in a particular way, depending on whether it’s being called a poem or a short story or a personal essay. That’s how literature is packaged and sold.

Now that I’ve started my own project, I can do away with all of that. We don’t classify anything that appears in the magazine by genre. Nothing is labeled “fiction” or “nonfiction.” That simple fact gives writers a lot more room to stretch out. I’m able to say, “You go and I’ll follow.” I’m able to advance work that’s elusive and disorienting and that, I think, really vitally reflects our mystifying, unhinged present, without asking it to over-explain itself. Elastic is an artist-led magazine. Our contributors determine the shape of these pages and the criteria for psychedelic art. And the art and writing they send in is more formally ambitious and stranger than anything I could have thought up myself or imposed. It’s incredible to witness what someone can do with language and structure when they’re encouraged to expand past the slim creative containers that are constantly being foisted on us.

The truth is that I collaborate with writers in a lot of the same ways that I always have, only now we can break whatever we want to.

You’ve said in a few interviews that to you, psychedelia goes beyond experiences with hallucinogens; that childbirth, transition, chronic pain, and grief, are psychedelic in that they alter one’s perception of reality. Seeing as the pieces you publish develop their own internal logic, their own rules, I wonder how you approach editing?

My goal, as an editor, has always been to try and divine the shape a piece wants to take through discussions with the writer and by reading closely. Then we can better determine if things need to be moved around, what needs to go, what needs to grow.

What’s remarkable about editing Elastic is that much of the time the pieces want to take shapes I’ve never conceived of or seen before. The footnotes overtake the primary text. Syntax collapses as a way of mirroring how we experience things in the body. The piece takes the form of a ritual or a land acknowledgement or a numbered list and some part of the way through collapses on itself. In every case, my job stays the same: How to bring this work closer to the form it’s reaching for? Occasionally I’ll feel the need to remind a contributor that they can get as weird as they’d like, that they can keep pushing the limits, because the work is clearly calling for it, which for me is a special joy. And I need to be reminded, too. There’s a writer in our brand-new second issue who, after several editorial rounds, was like, “Why assume that the things happening in this piece are things happening in the world? Maybe they’re just happening in the characters’ minds.” And I was like, “Holy shit.” And then I promptly chucked that limitation that I’d inflicted on the story out the window.

All of this is very time-consuming, and one of the things I really love about this project is that I can give the editorial process all the time it needs. Sometimes I’ll go back and forth with a writer for five months. Sometimes it takes that long to muddle through it together.

I’m also trying to divine the shape the issue as a whole wants to take, which is an interesting process. Usually, I approach writers I admire and whom I see as working in a psychedelic register, invite them to submit, and then consider how the pieces I’ve received speak to one another. I’m pretty regularly astounded by the resonances and echoes that crop up between the works, and I think those resonances are at the heart of this magazine. They make every issue feel like a collective dream or hallucination. I spend a lot of time thinking about sequencing, trying to accentuate that strange déjà-vu feeling and enhance the psychedelic experience that is reading this thing.

What would you say in the case of a piece you’re editing for five months, for example, leads you to have faith in it?

When I accept something for the magazine, it’s because it’s clear to me that it has a place in our pages. I’ll decide to publish a piece that’s utterly mysterious to me or half-formed if it makes me feel something or transports me somewhere, or I’m bowled over by its language or the formal risks it takes, or it appears to be in dialogue with the rest of the issue, or it somehow captures the sublimity and the tragedy and the absurdity of being alive right now. There are a million reasons why we choose the art and writing we choose.

The point is that once I’ve decided to publish something, I already have faith in it. And more importantly, I already have faith in the writer to bring it with me to wherever it wants to go, because I’m familiar with their work or because of the preliminary discussions we’ve had or both. The writer-editor relationship runs on trust. One of the things I can do to build that trust is put in the hours. Pieces come in in various states of completion and some require more back-and-forth than others. That doesn’t bother me. On the contrary, it’s usually wildly rewarding to do the rounds, over many months, with a writer whose work I love. What’s imperative is that we have confidence in each other and in our shared goal, which is for the text to become the best and most impactful version of itself.

It takes time to figure out what’s serving a piece and what isn’t. It takes time to figure out how to fine-tune a narrative structure that I’ve never seen before and that the writer has never used before. And also to brainstorm solutions, like, “Maybe this piece needs two different typefaces to operate in the way it would like to.” We’re experimenting together. If the piece has a hold on me, and the writer is open and willing, I will gladly show up for however long it takes.

What impact do you hope Elastic has on readers and writers?

Instead of imagining a response to the magazine, I’ll tell you about the response I like best. It’s when people approach me after having read it to say, “Elastic made me realize that my art practice is psychedelic.” Some people tell us that they’d never considered the psychedelic undertones of their work before coming to the mag. Others tell us that they always felt that their work was psychedelic in nature but never dared to call it that, because of the narrow, cheesy, cartoonish way that psychedelia shows up in the popular imagination. Either way, it’s thrilling. The goal of the magazine is to testify to the tremendous breadth and vitality of psychedelia. Every issue features a hugely vast body of psychedelic work and puts fifty-plus contributors into dialogue with each other. People reading this magazine and seeing themselves as part of that conversation is proof of how expansive the category is and can be.

I’m convinced that there’s a psychedelic art movement that’s already in motion. We’re certainly not inventing anything. The work exists. The people creating it exist. What’s missing is a shared framework: spaces where makers of dreamy, strange, form-bending things can meet, and where this creative register can be explicitly named and explored.

Most of what we print is contemporary, but we publish overlooked work from the first psychedelic era, too, much of which was made by artists and thinkers of color. There’s an entire archive of psychedelic art that’s been tragically underrecognized by historians and arts institutions. In the first issue of Elastic, we featured a portfolio from Keiichi Tanaami, a Japanese artist who died in 2024 and only had his first dedicated US museum show a year after that, even though he was hugely influential and prolific. He was and still is something of a psychedelic daddy for a ton of art makers. And including him in our pages made a lot of readers realize that the contemporary art they’re creating or consuming is actually part of a kind of psychedelic lineage. I love that.

I also and mostly want for Elastic to inspire readers and writers to do away with arbitrary boundaries that aren’t serving them. Like, why should anyone have to call the piece they’re writing “fiction” or “nonfiction”? And why should a reader be oriented by those markers? What a garbage distinction. We don’t compartmentalize our lives like that. Our dreams, our fantasies, the inexplicable ways that experiences like grief and childbirth scramble our perspective—all of that is part of us. Loss, for instance, messes with everything, with our notions of time and space and scale. So it makes sense that a piece wanting to capture the texture of loss might mess with time and space and scale. Is it really necessary that we describe that piece as fictional, when its strangest and most fantastical elements access the deepest kind of realism?

I’ve been teaching a psychedelic writing class where we’ve been looking at some of the work in Elastic and at the various ways authors have chosen to write ineffable states and feelings. And right at the start I announce that we’ll be steering clear of genre labels. The way that participants react to that permission is amazing. So many writers have been boxed in by standards that don’t have anything to do with how we write or live.

I am obsessed with those moments, when readers look at this magazine and say to themselves, “Oh, shit, I didn’t know I was allowed to do that.”

Some people say you can’t edit poetry, and although editing is such a cool collaborative experience, I often think about this.

It’s truly wonderful to be able to help usher a piece of writing toward its final, or final-for-now, form. But a lot of editing is knowing when to get the hell out of the way.

Hillary Brenhouse recommends:

Sixties- and seventies-era Japanese psychedelia. In particular, the work of Keiichi Tanaami, Key Hiraga, and Tadanoori Yokoo, and the movie Belladonna of Sadness (1973), which is one of the most daring, explosive pieces of art I’ve ever seen.

Potlucks. There is a way to throw constant dinner parties without burning out and it’s asking your friends to bring food to your house.

The Seas by Samantha Hunt (2004).

The Mauskovic Dance Band.

Montreal’s Depanneur Café, aka my office. Live music from 10am to 6pm daily, and so much of it is exceptional; musicians often come here to try out new material and practice for upcoming shows. You’ll find me writing emails in the corner.

Musician Angelo De Augustine on healing over time

2026-07-14T00:00:00-04:00

I know you grew up in a musical environment. I’m curious if you remember the first time you made something, and what that was?

If I look back, probably I was around five. I remember making up little songs while movies were playing, when I’d be at the movie theater… I probably didn’t think of that as actually writing a song at the time. When I was like 14 I got a guitar from a family friend. My uncle had played, and I wanted to be able to write some songs on my own. I pretty much started writing songs right away, which probably is not as common as what most of my friends have told me. I was writing songs right from the get-go, I think because I already grew up around a lot of musicians, and because both of my parents did that for their work. So it wasn’t a big deal to write a song in my household; it wasn’t weird or special, it was just a normal thing to do. Maybe that’s why I had the confidence to do it right away.

Do you remember if you were keeping stuff to yourself at first? Or did you start sharing with other people pretty quickly?

I shared relatively quickly. I was homeschooled, so in high school I didn’t really have a lot of friends to share it with. But there was this group of kids that would put on little concerts at each other’s houses, and everybody would sort of share the songs they were making. I remember doing that a few times, but not a ton, mostly because I shared them with my mom or something.

On the new album, there’s lyrics that talk about childhood and the past—I’m thinking of, “all your life’s a distant memory, freckles on your cheek.” Or, “tomorrow you may recall yesterday wasn’t there at all. Time left you when you were small.” Are there ways you still feel connected to how you were as a child?

I feel like I’m getting closer to connecting with that again. I feel like right now I’m in this in-between stage of trying to find my old self again. I’ve been through a lot these past four years. I’ve been on this healing journey after everything happened to me, and for a long time I felt like I was a completely different person, or like I wasn’t a person at all, just a ghost walking around. So I’m slowly starting to find that old version of myself that’s, you know, me. I’ve always been the same since I was a kid. Pretty much anyone that knows me knows that I haven’t really changed much… But it’s a process, it’s a journey, and it isn’t necessarily a line. It’s one where you move forward, and then you maybe experience dips, and move a little back, and then you move a little forward, and then you move a little back. But you’re constantly trending towards moving forward. If you look at it over time, you can see that you’ve actually moved forward, but it just exists as a very slow and nonlinear process, which I’ve never experienced. In a sense I’m getting closer to myself, and in a sense I’m still looking for myself. And that’s what a lot of this record is, is a reflection of my journey and trying to find myself again.

The name of your studio where you recorded the new album is called A Secret Place. I’m curious how that name came to be, and what your relationship with the word “secret” is?

I think it was initially a joke, because I had to come up with a name, and I didn’t want to have a name for it, I just wanted it to be a secret. Somebody said, “You should just name it A Secret Place, because it kind of sounds funny.” It doesn’t really sound like a studio… It’s a private facility, it’s not really a commercial facility. But it’s a recording studio that’s my own, or for friends if they want to use it, but it’s not open to the public.

When I heard it, I wondered if maybe there’s something that you’re trying to protect within it.

Well, sure. I feel like I’m always trying to keep my relationship with music as pure as I can. Obviously we’re in the music business, so there’s the business side of it, too—whenever you make anything into a business, there’s a danger of losing some of the purity of it, because you’re commodifying something. I found that I have to keep real strict boundaries around what I let in, and who I let in, so that it feels yours. I want to keep doing it, because ultimately I feel like most people who get into music, who like making songs, get into it because it’s the way that they express things the best, or the way that they know how to express things. It isn’t necessarily to be famous or something like that. It’s because it’s important—it’s the making of the music that is important to them in some way. With all that stuff being said, I definitely do skirt that line between sharing things and also keeping things to myself, to keep it sustainable for me and so that I want to keep doing this.

How much of your internal world do you feel like you can access through your work? Does it feel like you can translate it into words and melodies, in a way that’s complete, even if it’s only temporarily?

If I could just express what you can express in a song with words, I probably wouldn’t write songs. The song is a song. People always ask people to explain songs, and I think it’s silly, because the explanation of a song is the experience of listening to it; it doesn’t get any more clear than that. And obviously it’s going to be different for every person, because everybody’s going to have different feelings or emotions they’re going to feel. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true or false, objectively. It just means that for each person it’s going to be a certain thing, and so it’s true for them.

Songs can do things that words can’t, because the song is the words, but it’s also emotion, and it’s music, it’s vibration. It’s a whole experience, and I can never express those emotions in a different way other than writing a song. That’s the way that’s easiest for me. I imagine it’s probably different for everybody.

I was really moved by the short film you made, “Can I Come Back to Earth?” I read that typically once you finish a project, you tend to move on rather than look back too much. But in the beginning of that film, we watch as you move by these images that connect to your past work. Do you like having physical reminders of your past selves around you?

That’s a good question. I don’t know if that’s a conscious thing. But it does appear that I have those things around me… Most of the choices in that movie were the director’s choice of what to shoot and what not to shoot, and maybe he just found those images more interesting than others. I’m not really sure. But anybody’s house, I would think, would contain things that remind them of certain memories or parts of themselves.

There’s also a piece of it where you’re leaving those things behind and going into an empty hotel or swimming alone. Is there a feeling that connects to that?

Well, one of the things that was really helpful for me, since I’ve been going on this healing journey, was doing some of my own research into what I could do to help myself. Because the doctors didn’t give me any real answers or ways to help. They weren’t able to diagnose anything, and they weren’t able to tell me what I could do to help what was going on. So I did a lot of research of my own—and I obviously am not a doctor, but I think that a lot of what I’ve been dealing with is related to the nervous system. There’s a lot more evidence and research coming out about the role of the autonomic nervous system, and chronic stress and fear plays on the nervous system, and how your brain wires can get crossed, and they can create chronic symptoms that don’t really make sense.

There’s something called the allostatic load. Everybody has it, and it’s sort of the ability that the brain has to come back to homeostasis, and the nervous system to come back to homeostasis, sort of like this line. If you cross that line, you can be thrown into a state of fight or flight, where the brain can’t communicate to the nervous system that you’re safe, and to go back to homeostasis. So it gets locked in this state, and that can cause symptoms that seem to be mysterious and unexplainable, and difficult to go through. The good news is that you can rewire those pathways in your brain by teaching yourself that you’re safe. One of the things that I did was I joined a spa, and they have all these swimming pools. Almost every day for a long time now, like four years, that was one of the things that was helpful for me. When I went in the water, my symptoms would go away. It shows a direct correlation to nervous system regulation. Being in the water, for most people, can be relaxing. You go on a walk somewhere in the forest, or in nature, wherever it may be, and then all of a sudden the symptoms go away. I put that in the film because I wanted to show something that was helpful for me, but also to make space for showing where I’ve been, where I was, and where I’m heading to, which is a place of healing.

After I joined the spa, the other thing that I did was I joined this program. It’s difficult to describe, but they call them neuroplasticity or brain retraining programs. It’s based on this concept that we’ve known for a long time—since the 70s, actually—that the brain is, in a sense, malleable and plastic. It’s not set in its ways. That’s how we can make changes, in our personal lives, or our internal lives. We can make these changes because the brain is constantly growing, changing… Even if wires get crossed in the wrong way, like what has been going on with me for a long time, it’s possible to rewire that part, so that you don’t experience those symptoms anymore.

The song of yours that I feel most grateful for is “27,” which came out when I was 27 years old, and that year was filled with a lot of physical pain and uncertainty for me. The one thing I really chose to do for myself was swim, which connected me back to my childhood. I don’t think I realized this at the time, but that was a sense of safety.

Maybe similarly,so much of this new album seems to believe that love is the thing we can rely on. I am curious if that’s something you’ve always believed. Did you always feel that love was steady, either the love that you gave or received?

Whenever you go through something that tests you beyond what you think you’re capable of enduring, it changes you. It just made me appreciate so many things that I probably overlooked. When you go through something really hard, you feel that you’re given a second chance, and you feel so incredibly grateful to be alive. In my case, my priorities have totally changed. For most of my life, my priority was that I really wanted to be a great songwriter. It was kind of the only thing that I really cared about. I probably paid the price for that. I worked myself too hard, and I got too stressed, and I just don’t think it’s worth it, even if you were to attain something great. If you don’t have your health, if you’re not feeling well, then none of that stuff matters.

I just think that it’s so important to take care of ourselves. That’s kind of the only thing I care about anymore. Like I obviously care about music, but I care about myself more than making a nice song or something. It’s something that I had to come to in my own time.

I want to ask you about the opening line of the album, which is, “Where do you run when your life’s on the line?” Then there’s also a line in the song “Pictures on My Wall,” which is, “When you’re pure of heart and on the run.” There’s this sense of urgency there, of needing to find something to hold on to. Does that feel right? And I’m also wondering what helps you slow down or helps you trust that you can.

In my journey, I found that certain connections and certain things showed up for me. Sort of like an angel in plainclothes, you know. It could be a person, it could be a symbol, it could be a spiritual practice, it could be whatever you want. But it’s something that shows up for you in your time of need, that you don’t necessarily expect, but helps to tell you that everything’s going to be okay. It helps to affirm to you that things aren’t good, but life’s going to be good. Life is going to ultimately be good. I definitely had symbols that showed up for me. And I had people in my life that showed up in really terrible ways, and then I had people in my life that showed up in really amazing ways. The people I kept were the ones that were supportive. Also it’s just about taking priority, making my wellbeing a priority over other people, over career, over anything, really.

Strangely, in our culture we’re taught to suppress our own feelings and take care of other people. A lot of times people view taking care of yourself as being selfish, which isn’t true. If you’re not okay, you’re not going to be able to be there for anybody or make the world nice.

Do you feel comfortable sharing any of those symbols that showed up for you?

I feel like the Virgin Mary was something that showed up for me a lot. I had not much prior knowledge about the Virgin Mary, but there was one near my house, and it would be somewhere that I would go… I have a necklace that I still wear of her on it, for her protection. I think the reason why I was drawn to it is I was drawn to the idea of a mother, because I grew up with a single mother, and I know how amazing moms are, and how the act [of mothering] in itself can be. I’ve always been more drawn to women, since I was a kid. So maybe that’s why it felt more safe to me to go to a symbol like that.

I want to go back to your relationship with your body. How present do you feel in your body when you’re working, and has that changed over time?

For a long time I couldn’t hear or see very well. I couldn’t play the guitar really at all, or sing. So it’s been a very slow process of introducing it again… With me, there was no structural damage to me or anything like that. It’s the brain that creates these things. And so what you do is you very slowly introduce safety into being able to do these things—like, I can play the guitar, or whatever it is you want to. You do it with ease, so you don’t overdo it, or you do it just enough. Then you push it a little bit more, and a little bit more, and sometimes you have a dip where you go back… It’s this very long process of learning how to do everything again.

Can you feel when you’re pushing yourself too hard?

I find that’s harder to know. They say you want to test it, but you don’t want to totally drain yourself. It’s this balance, like anything in life… You have to also listen to yourself, but it’s not easy. Sometimes you don’t know when you’ve pushed yourself too far.

Your work often feels shaped by the spaces you’re in. You use objects and sounds that already carry meaning, and it’s almost like you’re discovering what they could become. Do you think finding the right tool–or even the right limitation–is a part of the creative act itself?

I feel like the writing, and the arranging and recording, are two different paths. That’s what it feels like to me. Historically I’ve always sort of done everything on my own, in terms of the writing. But then I also record or engineer them, I arrange them, and then I play all the instruments. It’s a very kind of self-contained thing, and so it can be a lot. That’s why with this record, I brought in some other people, just because I needed some extra help at the time. I needed a little extra support, for people to play things, because I wasn’t feeling well enough to do some things myself.

I sort of had to teach myself to do a lot of this stuff that’s not natural to me, like the technical side of it. Learning about all the technical sides, things like compression ratios, all this gobbledygook kind of stuff. I’ve forced myself to learn it because it makes me more self-sufficient and it decreases being potentially manipulated in some way. It allows you to retain ownership of your work, which falls under that same kind of thing, too. In my career, I do what I want. That’s what I’ve always done. I don’t do something because somebody else tells me to do it. If I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, I just wouldn’t do it. I just wouldn’t do music. The most important thing is still the songwriting to me. I think if you don’t have a song that is real strong, as far as I’m concerned, you don’t really have much.

What are you finding comfort in these days, or what do you find yourself facing toward?

What’s helpful to me is to try to stay day to day, one day at a time. A “next right action” kind of a mentality, to not get too far ahead into the future with worries or things like that. Just to focus on my program that I do, and the good things that I do for myself, and to keep on this path where I hope to end up feeling like my old self again. That’s what I’m moving towards. And even though it’s slow, I think it’s possible to get there.

Angelo De Augustine recommends:

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Gustav Holst’s “The Planets”

Snorkeling

Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan

Get off the internet

Author and anthropologist Ashanté M. Reese on using ritual to connect to your work

2026-07-13T03:00:00-04:00

I read that you taught middle school in Atlanta before you enrolled at American University to get your PhD, and that led you to all the work you’re doing today. What was the impetus to get your PhD? Did those early years as a teacher influence your work?

Teaching middle school is the hardest job I’ve ever had—it probably will be the hardest job I will ever have. It taught me a lot about what being an educator really means. The actual teaching and what you’re delivering in the classroom—maybe 10 percent of that has to do with the knowledge transfer and more of it has to do with how you’re modeling how to be in the world, and how to support young people emotionally. I taught in a Title 1 school, so sometimes it was also figuring out how to make sure your young people had what they needed materially and financially.

I grew up in a rural area. In terms of living in cities, when I went to undergrad, that was the first time I lived in a city. So four years after that, I moved to Atlanta and I was really fascinated with how cities are organized. I was green in terms of really understanding how city design itself actually contributes to producing inequalities. And that’s where I really first started thinking about food inequities, honestly, because of the students that I taught.

I’ve always known that I wanted to write. I was a big fan of Zora Neale Hurston. I knew her as a writer. I knew that she had this experience of being trained as an anthropologist. And I maybe naively thought that something about anthropology helped her be a great writer.

That is literally how I chose anthropology… I wanted to read and write and research and do deep study. I had no goals of going into academia at all. At the time, I thought I would continue doing some more public work through maybe working for the CDC or other government or nonprofit organizations that did work in health. I took a few twists and turns from that.

When you get to the writing of your dissertation, what was the moment where you thought, “Okay, I’m going to be in academia?”

You would think there was a moment where I was like, “Yes, this is the path I’m choosing.” But truly it happened because while I was writing my dissertation, I had run out of funding. And the job that was offered to me was a fellowship at Rhodes College that involved some teaching while I wrote my dissertation, but was also a job that would convert into a tenure track job if I completed my dissertation and if I wanted to stay.

I had decided after the first semester that I was not going to stay at Rhodes College, whether I had a job or not. It was not a good fit for me. But while I was there, I was having a conversation with a friend about jobs and she’s like, “Okay, well, would you want to stay in academia?” And I was like, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m probably going to move back to DC.”

And she said, “Well, if you were going to stay in academia, are there conditions that would work for you? Would you ever teach at an HBCU, et cetera?” And I said, “The only HBCU I would teach at is Spelman College.” And a week later, there was a job posting for Spelman College for food studies.

I saw it and I said, “This is my job and this must be my path.” Everything about my pathway in academia has really shown me that if there really is something you’re supposed to do in the world—if there’s really [a] purpose or calling or whatever it is people want to name it—sometimes, for some people, I think the universe says, “I need to make this as easy as possible because you’re not going to do it otherwise.”

In your book, GATHER: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness, you focus on how Black folks gather around food to create safety, joy, and connection. You also opened the book by introducing us to your grandmother who was a really important figure in your life. How do you approach blending your research with a personal lens of your own history and experiences?

That’s a recent turn for me in my writing, at least. Maybe not so much in my thinking, but certainly in my writing. Christina Sharpe, who is a theorist and a writer who I deeply admire, wrote a book called In The Wake: On Blackness and Being that was published in 2016. And in the book, she really articulates this concept of a “we” that I felt was really important. She basically made the argument that we as academics and writers actually need to write into the concept of a “we.” And she says a concept of a “we” that’s Black and global. I love that. And she talks about shared risk. And so when I take these concepts together, “we” and shared risk, one of the things that I think about as an academic, but also as a writer, is that I want people to trust me as a reliable narrator… Some of it was about the subject matter guiding me in terms of how I would show up.

But then the other part is going back to what you said about my grandmother. In our academic lineages, we do not always include these figures who are not academics. And my grandmother, in my opinion, was a great theorist. I wanted to put her and other people, but particularly her, on the page as part of my academic lineage, not just my personal lineage.

You invite readers to think about food justice and mutual aid. And also to reevaluate some stereotypes that non-Black readers might have about Black people and food. That work is also, I would imagine, complex and also vulnerable in its own way.

It’s so necessary too. My good friend and colleague Hannah Garth just wrote a book called Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement and she spent 10 plus years working with food justice organizations in LA, trying to get at what some of the assumptions are in those organizations… Her book is wonderful and it shows us that we all need to take a pause sometimes and think about, Why is there an assumption sometimes that people just don’t know how to cook healthy food? Or they don’t know how to eat healthy? Those are racist assumptions. Those are classist assumptions. Where are they coming from?

I’m thinking, too, about nourishment in relation to the creative life. How do you see nourishment and connection showing up within your creative life?

I have a writing group called The Quiet Quills.

I love that.

We mostly get together and write quietly, but we also have lunches together. We exchange work. We all have academic training and are people who are trying to unlearn some of the habits of that academic training to lean more into creativity. The Quiet Quills have been really important to me.

I am learning how to quilt. Part of the reason I’m learning how to quilt is because my grandmother taught me how to sew and my great aunt used to run a quilting guild and it was amazing. I have all these images of these beautiful quilts that she and the other women made. I see quilting as a way of stitching myself more closely to my own lineage.

Oftentimes, I want a material practice to help me work through things that I am thinking about or feeling around about. I love hosting and cooking, so that shows up as a part of my creative life… I am a lifelong journaler. I have a 30-year journal collection.

My best thinking happens on long walks. I’m lucky to live in a city that has a lake in the middle of the city with 12 miles of trail around it. I walk many hours a week around the trail.

I know you mentioned in the book and in other places the importance of rituals. So I was wondering if you had writing-specific or maybe even research-specific rituals? It sounds like walking is one and journaling is another. Are there any others?

When I am getting stuck… I write by hand until I feel unstuck and then I transcribe all of that onto the computer and I keep doing that. I’ll be typing again until I feel stuck, and then I go back to my legal pad and start writing by hand again. I still feel like writing by hand feels like the truest version of anything I want to say.

A lot of my research rituals are deeply connected to whatever I’m writing. I’m writing a book about sugar and Sugar Land, Texas, which was the birthplace of prison agriculture in Texas. And sugar was instrumental to that and to launching the Imperial Sugar Company. And so for that project, I do a lot of altar work actually honoring the named and unnamed people who worked during the convict lease system to establish the sugar industry in Texas. As part of the altar work, I bake and then I put offerings to the mostly men and boys who had done this labor in the same way that we might make offerings to our ancestors.

Part of the reason I do that is because part of the question that I’m meditating on, in the book, is “what is owed and to whom?” … I do that as a way of working with sugar as a material object. But also to, even in my small way, try to reinscribe these men and boys into this legacy that is also theirs.

Ashanté M. Reese recommends:

Multi-hour walks with no particular destination in mind

Village Weavers by Myriam Chancy. So heartbreakingly good!

WNBA Community on Threads!

The audiobook for Kennedy Ryan’s Score. The narration is excellent!

Impromptu day trips with friends…make the plans as you go along. So good for reconnecting with wonder

Artist, writer, and chef Nancy Barber on being good at looking

2026-07-10T00:00:00-04:00

You recently released a book of your photographs and writing on the food and art scene in 1970s downtown New York. How did you find your way to making art, writing, and food?

Well, art kind of saved your life, didn’t it? And then art is—if you kind of have a nervous breakdown, you go sit in front of a painting and you could get fortified. It’s a fortifying experience.

I guess as a child, I always made art. I do remember very little about my mother because she died when I was five, but she had us very mindfully always doing projects at the tables. I do remember a few memories of her, and there we were at the card tables, cutting things and painting things. I remember a very sad thing where we did that when we stayed with my grandmother while my mother was dying in the hospital and we didn’t know she was dying. I was making art and I said to my father—who had just been at the hospital—I said, “Oh, take this to Mommy.” And he said, “I can’t.” And I said, “What? You can’t.” And he said, “Because you don’t have a mother anymore.” And that’s how he told me when my mother died. And it was like, “What?” and you just feel like the bottom fell out of your life. It was horrible. I don’t even know if we discussed anything about death. I don’t think we ever did. She died of leukemia. It was probably doctor induced. They were using sulfur drugs, kind of like they used penicillin and they used too much. It was a medical story of 1944 and five.

Anyway, how did I get into art? I don’t know. It just was there. I was an art historian in college and I guess I just gradually kind of had an art teacher or something in college that was my friend. It wasn’t serious, but if I had an extra something or other, I would take an art class. But yeah, we like art. And then ceramics was just making things with your hands.

Nancy Barber, Crowded Castle, 2022. Glazed terracotta. 11 x 10 x 4 in.

There is a sense of exuberance and the unexpected across all your mediums.

I guess we like the unexpected. Everything is on the verge of original, right? I would say that’s about it. And not too many rough edges. If something’s too ugly, well, then you dip it all in black or something. There was a time that everything was black because it just took care of that problem. Or white maybe. Green is probably my favorite color because of the growth, the leaves, and grass, and so green just seems to come up. And green is a better color to work with than blues. I’m not a blue person, although we did majolica once, didn’t we? And that was all blue and white. I use a lot of black and green and gold and yellow. A little red. You have to have a little red in everything.

I agree. Tell me about how you got into writing about food.

I guess I liked those writers—and there were very, very few of them—that used their own experience with the situation that they were in. I didn’t like that more formal way of writing an essay about something. I wanted to talk about the personal iterative interactions. That’s what drew me. So if things got too dry or too formal or like the perfect food or the perfect recipe and this lovely dinner, I would rather write about more amusing people.

Similarly, you’ve said that your public access TV show, New York Eats (1974-76), was created as a reaction to the formal format of cooking shows of the time. In your show, you’d go into the homes of everyday New Yorkers—including a circus troupe and their elephant—and film them cooking in their kitchens.

I didn’t like polished things. Interesting people, but not famous people. I had access to quite a few circus people. That was really great. I had about five or six circus people that I wrote articles on. And my artist friends, I think, were pretty original. They had their own way of cooking. I think most artists always have a handful of recipes that they kind of invent themselves because they look at food as a raw material to do things with. Maybe they came from Spain or maybe they came from Portugal, so they bring that information with them. That international community of artists that we had in New York—certainly the Italians—I learned a lot. Just a few Italians will set you up for life.

There was a thing called a Portapak that everyone had. It wasn’t super broadcast-good at the time, but that’s why the show went out with smaller channels. You could spend money and have it perfected more. We didn’t have any money. That was a wonderful thing. And I don’t think they have that now. It was kind of a raw system, black and white. We had reels and it was real, real life, early recording equipment. It was arduous to edit. It was manual. You had to sit there with the reels. In the beginning, you just literally cut it and put Scotch tape. Then I guess then it got a little more sophisticated. You could get a rendering somewhere, somewhere in the ether and do it that way, more abstract. I can’t exactly explain, but that was the beginning. It was a very physical thing. We did a lot of shooting. “We” being mostly me.

My idea was to get people in their homes. But then I think that I had a personality that people really liked to watch. It was always my little introductions that were more amusing than the boring people cooking. Purdue Chicken [was] very interested in working with me, very interested. But I had a little trouble. I didn’t really have a very big vocabulary with how to cook. My uncle would say, “Nancy, you should go to blah blah school.” And I’d say, “No, we don’t need to go to blah blah school. Oh, no.” But in truth, probably I should have gone to blah blah cooking school for a year and then probably gone back with my camera.

And then you opened a restaurant, The Tenth Avenue Bar. What was that like?

Well, I’m glad that we had the restaurant. It’s probably really good to work until exhaustion. It was sort of like a Broadway play. I mean, the show had to go on, the cooking had to be done, the people had to eat. And it’s kind of a performance.

The food always had to be kind of originally right and not overcooked and it had to—I don’t know—t had to have some originality all the time and freshness of the season. I really probably could’ve been a contender. We were written about by a lot of people. Everyone wrote about us, our restaurant, and I had written about a lot of our food, too. But maybe we just didn’t have a restaurant long enough to become a real staple on the scene.

And what was wrong with the restaurant? Well, it was kind of in an odd location, but it became a major location—it was around Chelsea. We were amateurs, so I think that sometimes we weren’t the fastest. You had to wait awhile for your food.

Have you gone through periods of not making anything?

Oh, yes. That’s awful.

What do you do? How do you get out of it?

Well, it happens almost every winter. You get really blocked and you go, “Oh, no.” I mean, how many books can you read? And then you read newspapers and magazines, you go, “Oh, god, this is so mindless.” I’m at a certain age now that, well, you don’t want to waste time, but here I am wasting time. I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t have to raise children. I don’t have to work for a living, so I can waste time.

It’s an interesting phrase, to waste time.

But maybe wasted time is good. It’s downtime, a little bit.

That’s true. What do you do to get going again?

I guess I have an exercise thing. I love exercise. I mean, I love going to Pilates. I love running. I used to run four or five miles a day, at least five days a week. Physical activity is the best. Or you could just go into the kitchen and start making anything. As soon as you pick up a knife or cut into a vegetable, an onion or an apple, you’re kind of out of it all day because you’re going to do something.

Action.

Action cooking. That’s what I do. You listen to music, you dance, you talk to friends. Oh, my god. If we didn’t have friends, I would be very depressed. But we’re so lucky that we still have a nice group of friends. And we travel a little bit. So you don’t really get depressed, if you’re lucky enough to keep moving and if your health is good enough—and mine is certainly good enough.

I’m very thankful for the meditation practice, too. I’m an intermittent meditator, but it’s very important in my life. Basically I kind of get a little meditation every day. We kind of meditate as you walk, when you’re alone in your garden. It’s pretty easy to get in the zone once you recognize that zone.

I’m very fortunate to have this piece of land here [in Germantown, NY] near the river. So it’s not like in the city where you look out and there’s a building there. I guess I like looking, and I’m probably pretty good at looking, seeing something. That gets incorporated into your work, other people’s work. Art comes off of art, and it’s refined by, inspired by—well, inspired is an awful word.

Why is “inspired” an awful word?

I think it’s overused. Like, “You’re so creative.” It sounds like a lady’s afternoon tea party or something: “Oh, you’re so creative. What a nice crochet you’re doing.”

Are you obsessive?

Yeah, I think you have to be. Otherwise what’s the point?

What words feel resonant to you right now?

I mean, love and kindness.

Those are good ones.

I think those are very important. And listening and intention. Having an intention and caring to hear. Maybe I don’t hear nearly enough, but it’s one of my goals to listen to what people are saying.

What would you say to your younger artist self?

Don’t worry. Just keep working. I think that’s the best advice I ever got. Just keep working. Keep doing it and it turns into something. I think that’s the thing. Don’t question it to the point where you’re incapacitated. Keep doing it, because even if it goes zigzag, something comes out of it. Even if you stop and something else plops in, you keep the process processing.

Nancy Barber recommends:

You have to go see Excavation by Willem de Kooning at the Art Institute of Chicago. That was transforming.

You have to go to Italy. Without Rome and Florence I would be nothing. Well, Venice is pretty good, too.

Deep Meditation is really important. Even intermittently. T.M. and Tibetan. You’d be nowhere without meditation.

A good omelet. Everyone should know how to make a good omelet. Thank you to Julia Child.

Pina Bausch. She’s my favorite.

Musician Wendy Eisenberg on finding your way by improvising

2026-07-09T00:00:00-04:00

When do you decide it’s time to start working on a new album?

I write songs constantly, and I want to release them immediately because I’m excited, but now that I have this band with Mari [Rubio] and Ryan [Sawyer], I need to play them for a year or so and make sure they’re good. Slowly, some ballast builds up, and all of a sudden, the stuff I’m holding onto starts to organize, and I can understand it as a record. This is a recent development. Before this last record, I would release the ones that I thought were best, but this record was very deliberate. When things cohere, you can tell.

Do you think the record starts to take shape as you continue to write more?

When I write songs, they’re like a psychic diagnosis of my world at the time. Sometimes when I have writer’s block, it’s not actually writer’s block. I’m just not ready to hear what the songs have to tell me. Once I get a clearer image of what I’ve been working through, or what the world has felt like to me for however long I’ve been writing, everything becomes easier. You can tell when things start to gel and create a cogent statement. Sometimes it’s chronology, and sometimes I’ve edited down the songs that make sense.

What does the organizational process of an album look like when songs come out of different phases in your life?

Usually, you look for other tips. Ideally, every song you write is coming from a very original, deeply felt place you can’t access except in the world of songs. There’s some urge that requires such a ridiculously detailed form. The song is done when it feels like it’s harmonizing with the feeling that you had that made you write it in the first place.

Making a record is like putting together an outfit or designing a room. Certain things work with the emotional palette, and certain things harmonically repeat. Throughout the self-titled record, certain chords and voicings repeat, which makes it seem coherent to me. Certain chord progressions start to mean something beyond the original song they came from. I never do a passage of chords on purpose. Over time, you keep returning to familiar figures. If you can find a smart way to let them coexist on a record and sequence them correctly, you can see that the feelings you were dealing with in all of these different times actually do have the same origin, which is nothing outside yourself.

When you work on old songs, like for this last album, what did you notice had changed about your storytelling or your stylistic choices?

What changed was my life. We live life, and our frame of reference for everything changes as we do. Before, I was concerned with being more explicit about how experimental my guitar was on the songs. As I play these more and more, I realize there’s a false binary between experimental that sounds experimental and experimental that’s palatable to people.

I didn’t set out on this record to make a different record from the ones I’d made before. You know what you wanna do because of the music you like and the things that interest you. I’ve always been so moved by Willie Nelson and Judee Sill. Those were the lodestars—whereas on Viewfinder, it was more Bennie Maupin or Jenny Hval. The frame of reference will shift as you shift and your interests grow.

A lot of your songs start by improvising. How do you identify a creative lead, and how do you follow it?

When I’m improvising, I feel like a low-flying bird searching for something. It’s so corny, but you know when something strikes a chord for you. You’re improvising, and all of a sudden, something becomes irresistible to you.

I was struggling to write recently, so I decided to meditate, which is always an event for me. All of a sudden, I heard this super hilarious, ultra-basic C chord in 4/4. Mid-tempo, normal shit, and I heard a very basic melody over it. I knew I had to write it. In that situation, I was improvising away from the guitar, but I heard a form that revealed itself. That’s less noodling around until I get something, and more taking an interest in this familiar form. The writing process itself becomes more improvisatory because we’re starting with something basic, but I have too restless a mind. I’ll be like, “Okay, it has to change key within three bars.” These are not conscious decisions. The writing process tells you what you do. You just have to get out of the way.

When you’re working with other people, when do you accept their suggestions and when do you forgo them in favor of sticking to your original vision?

My original vision is an improviser’s vision, so the other people’s opinions about what is happening are as important to me as a momentary reaction. I’ll bring it to Ryan, and he’ll improvise with it, feel his way around the form, and start to understand what’s going on. I bring it to Mari, and since she’s heard every record, she makes suggestions based on her frame of reference. Mari’s living in Mari’s version of the song, and Ryan’s living in Ryan’s version of the song. Trevor [Dunn] plays fretted strings, so sometimes our interpretations are the most similar.

The first stage is their reaction to what I’m bringing in. I’m ruling with a light hand because this project is not so much about, “I’m writing a song, and you’re god now, determining what the song is.” I’m not interested in that kind of control, and I also think what’s so deep about this band is that when we’re live, you can tell they have a say in what’s being played and how.

Some things bother me and I’ll tell them not to do that, but usually it’s not a problem. It’s tougher playing with new people because I get a bit fussy. That’s why I play with my best friend and my girlfriend. It’s the same with my band Editrix. I get to be with the people I love. The music’s great because I love these people. There’s something irreplaceable that only we can do together. It’s way less about me disapproving or approving of what they’re doing, and more about me being existentially comfortable with who they are.

You write a song ‘cause you’re in a specific mental or emotional space, and you have to live with how it sounds. You’re free to release it or not, but ultimately, it’s about whether you can be with this thing that’s outside of you. It’s all about otherness and interaction.

When you’re contributing to someone else’s project, how close do you try to stay to their original vision? When do you decide it’s okay to suggest something or stick with what they had in mind?

It’s difficult to know what someone’s original vision is because you don’t have access to it. Unless it’s very conservative, or references an existing style, someone’s original vision should be pretty much incomprehensible to someone else. That’s what makes it specific and valuable.

First of all, I have to trust they’ll tell me if they don’t like something. What I value in collaborators is clarity of intent. They don’t have to know what it is; they just have to know when it does or doesn’t work. I observe their body language and try to see where their ears are coming from. Anyone who says they have an original vision for something that doesn’t exist yet is correct, but that vision only happens when the other people are given a fair space to play with it. It’s tough because you don’t know how much freedom you have until you test the limits of it.

When I toured with Bobby Previte’s band, I played conservatively in rehearsal to see what others were doing. One day, he was like, “You should always be playing every hit with the enthusiasm as if you’ve been doing it for way longer, as if you’re hot shit.” And he was right. That’s the way I approach these things now. If I bring my full self to it, the self that’s perceiving why the person I’m collaborating with makes the music they do, I have to exhibit as much faith in my own vision for what they’re doing. Otherwise, they would’ve hired a far more normal guitar player. They usually hire me because I’m weird. I just have to figure out what flavor of “weird me” they want.

How do you balance your day job with your creative work?

I’m very lucky that my day job is in music. I’m a full-time professor at the New School. I’m counseling talented, driven people on how to achieve their goals. Every day I’m talking about theory, and now I’m better at it. I get to hear their work and see how these brilliant young minds engage with the received forms we call western music theory.

I do get burnt out. The difficulty is only on the level of time. Emotionally, teaching is one of the most rewarding things you can do. It’s generous in every direction. I get to keep my finger on the pulse ‘cause the kids are gonna have a different listening diet than I do. They have a whole different relationship to finding new music than I ever have. I learn a lot, so they feed into each other. When I’m having a good season in my career, or if I’m writing a lot, my students benefit from what I’m learning at these new plateaus and about the industry. It feels very holistic.

It’s hard to have the kind of dumb, bored time that you need to as a songwriter and as a creative person in general. Within the semesters, you’re totally back-against-the-wall busy, and that’s not good for the creative process. It’s tough to carve it out.

What have you learned about the way your students discover music that has clashed with the way you discover music?

I’m a reluctant streamer. I listen to a lot of music on this. *holds up iPod Classic*

One of the joys and tortures of teaching is seeing yourself become the old freak that taught you. I love it because I’m a freak—and I’m actually not old, but to them, who knows?

My students are more comfortable with the algorithm and forces like Spotify. I’ve always been such a tinfoil hat person about that stuff, not even necessarily because of the exploitative practices that make sure artists stay poor. They find amazing stuff that bubbles up on the algorithm, or they’ll find a song on TikTok by somebody I’ve loved since I was in middle school. I can’t make a blanket statement, but they have a lot more faith in forces beyond themselves when it comes to finding music.

Myself and the people in my life are digging around. We’ll dig on the internet, we’ll dig in the record store, we’ll dig in our old CD collections. When I was a jazz student, I remember having these hard-drive parties where people would share whatever they had. It’s totally illegal, but who gives a shit? The real ones are always digging and connecting the dots. There’s always gonna be people who do that, and I feel lucky that when I teach, I can usually find them.

What is your relationship to social media, email, and other online distractions, and how do you separate that from your work?

It’s amazing that you refer to email as a distraction. I don’t know how casual [you meant it to be], but it felt incredibly poignant and true. That kinda distracted me, which is amazingly meta. I remember loving email in 2017, when I was super fucking DIY. It was so intimate and romantic. I have not had that experience in a very long time because my inbox has been overtaken by the champagne problems of, “Do you wanna play this? Do you wanna do this?”

I’m fortunate to be in a season of my life where email is overwhelming, and I’m getting a lot of cool information from it, but it has taken away that fascination… My relationship with email is pretty much, “I miss romance; thank you for emailing me; I’m gonna have my manager help me with it.”

I try to make the internet fun by having an actual, rich physical life… On the internet, the more physical the joke is, the funnier it is to me. I love language. If you can say anything kinda generally good about the internet, it’s that even the most fucked up linguistic formations with the most shadowy origins are fascinating. It’s crazy that these words and memes bubble up in this extreme vision of post-modernism.

What is a creative instinct you have to fight against, and how do you do it?

The only time I genuinely feel 1,000,000% comfortable is when I’m in the moment of problem solving that is songwriting—when I’m sitting there, and I’ve found the thing that might be the song in the array of emotional stuff. My tendencies are so far from the front of my mind when I’m solving this kind of existential problem. This isn’t to say I’m pure or that I don’t have any bad taste issues. I have a thousand issues.

I have to fight against overcomplicating certain things. One of the best songs in the entire history of humankind is “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder).” It is the most complicated piece of music that I can think of, just in terms of harmony alone. If Mike Love thought he was making things too complicated, the song wouldn’t work.

I don’t have to fight against this, but a closed mind is the worst thing ever. If you’re making music for imaginary fans, you’re only writing music for people who only know this corner of your songwriting now. It’s so rude to assume an audience likes something. I think the algorithm’s pretty daring at times, but that’s what I hate about this mediated reception of music. You assume, based on some kind of data-driven demographic information, that people are gonna like this. What about all of the evidence to the contrary?

When you do that in your own music, it’s the same thing. Polonius-core: to thine own self be true. Whatever bad artistic impulse you have is probably pointing at something else that needs to be met. If you wanna communicate something complicated, sometimes you do it through complicated music. Sometimes, you do it through simple music—whatever the hell simple music is, ‘cause all music is crazy.

The things that make you write a song are beyond human comprehension. Whatever people hear in the song is what they need to hear.

Wendy Eisenberg recommends five books about the visual art world that have changed their relationship with making music, the music industry, their artistic community, and themself:

Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees: a life of contemporary artist Robert Irwin by Lawrence Weschler. This iconic biography has been a friend to me for a long time. It is as much a portrait of Irwin as it is a documentation of how the art world moves geographically after particular movements become stylizations, and how the forms of discipline you take can move you forward in the work and the world.

The Legacy of Mark Rothko by Lee Seldes. Seldes demystifies the economic savagery of gallery world with the urgency of a thriller as she recounts the failure of Rothko’s trust to reach his orphaned children after his death. Paradoxically transcendent beach read.

Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer. I read this in grad school. Lozano’s relationship to the art world became her art. A cautionary tale, except that her pieces stayed brilliant. My first foray into the seductive archive of Quitters’ Theory.

On the New by Boris Groys and Marxism and Form by Frederick Jameson. The Groys isn’t a tome, and the Jameson almost is, but both books are worth the challenge they give you to see the developments of art and the imagination against (and through the totalizing forms of) capitalism. Excellent perspective-givers.

Disidentifications by José Esteban Muñoz. Being a queer artist never feels like a limitation, especially when you’ve got the thought of the late, brilliant Muñoz on your side, your better angel. This book helps you understand the ways people outside of the mainstream (potentially everyone) transfigure public and commercial symbols towards their own liberations. Essential guide to negotiating any culture not meant for you.

Visual artist Michael Haight on the distance it takes to make work from your own life

2026-07-08T03:00:00-04:00

Walk me through what a working day in the studio looks like right now, start to finish.

An ideal day, I put my stuff down and go to the bookshelf where I keep my singing bowls, my Guanyin [the bodhisattva of compassion], all my Buddhist accoutrement. I make an offering of tea or water, use the bowl to get into the right mindset, do Metta [loving-kindness meditation] and at least five minutes of sitting. Then I open my studio journal. I write the date, and every entry starts with the phrase “Here today,” because I’m here. I mark the time and either what’s on my mind or what I plan to do, as a way to slowly build motivation. That’s the ideal.

Usually I come in unmotivated, sit, look around, get into the muddy waters of the cell phone and Instagram, and try to will motivation into being. Before I paint, I’ll do exercises, mark-making on a page or a preliminary sketch, so I’m not diving in headlong without a plan and getting lost in the sauce. I can usually work three to four hours before I need to eat or leave. I keep multiple tables going with different projects so I can rotate between them. I work a lot wet into wet, so I want the paint to pool rather than drip.

As the day goes on, I return to the journal: the time, what I’ve done, the names of people I talked to and what we discussed. At the end I mark the time I leave. Part of it is to prove, from a business and tax perspective, that I’m working. Part of it is to prove to myself that I did something that day. My studio journals go back to about January 2014. As someone interested in data, I like having the data set, looking back at goals I had and where I’ve gone since. It’s like seeing where the fog of war used to be and where it still is.

Michael Haight, Forest Lawn, 2026, Gouache on paper, 24 inches by 18 inches unframed.

You mentioned building motivation. A lot of artists struggle with that even when they have the space. What does it look like for you day to day?

I see it as bifurcated between external and internal motivation, the external locus of control and the internal one. It depends on who I am when I walk in: whether I worked a full day first, whether I exercised, how much I’ve eaten. It’s about how much strength I have to rouse the energy. My meditation practice undulates, from sparse to consistent, and that affects my head space as much as anything external.

Deadlines are very motivating. Without one, when I just have some half-formed concept and I’m in this vast sandbox of what am I going to do now, I wade in the water. So I use the list method, and when I make the list, I include things I’ve already done or that are easy. If there are 10 things and three are already checked off, I feel better about getting four or five more done. I write it in my studio documentation with the date each thing was finished, so I can track my progress.

What’s a habit or rule in your studio that you didn’t have five years ago and now wouldn’t give up?

Five years ago was 2021, which is when I moved into this space. I had it organized very differently, no real structure. Even though it looks messy in here, I’m more systematized now about what I have and where it goes. The longer I’m in the same space, the more I refine it.

When I first moved in, I set it up according to the bagua [the Feng Shui energy map], certain things in certain areas because they contribute to wealth, or knowledge, or helpful people. The entryway is where I keep my shrine, the business cards of people who’ve helped me, and images of artists I find inspiration in. Over the past couple of years I’ve adapted it for flow, so that when I open the door there’s a direct view from one end of the space to the other.

So the rule I can’t give up is organization. If everything gets too messy, I go crazy and lose motivation. When I get stuck now, I start cleaning, even when there’s no studio visit coming, so that my brain is clean.

Michael Haight, Mother Realization, 2025, Ink and Polymer on Canvas, 24 inches by 20 inches.

You’ve said certain feelings only surface after time and sobriety let them. How do you know when a memory is ready to be in a painting, versus when you’d be forcing it?

It’s weird to have my own words sent back at me. I might have to blame this on astrology. Being a Taurus moon means having trouble with change, with moving on from things that no longer serve you. More often than not I’ve held onto things from the past, turning them over, trying to understand them. It’s almost like trying to photograph an electron. The more you try to touch it and define it, the more it eludes you, so closure is hard.

That time-and-sobriety thing comes from the series I made about my relationship to alcohol. I stopped drinking in 2015. I’d first gotten drunk at 14, so that’s 1999 to 2015, sixteen years. I didn’t start making paintings in that series until 2020, five years before I could look at it, reference it, and make a narrative out of it.

It’s like standing at the front door of a skyscraper. You see the door, some of the sides, the edge of the top, but not the scale. To see the scale you have to walk away and keep walking, so the angle from your eye to the top gets wider. I needed a certain amount of temporal distance from that mass of life experience to see an arc, to understand it as a story. I had to wait for the karma of those actions to bear fruit before I could see the value. The most valuable memories are the ones worth making art about.

Michael Haight, Signal Over Sea, 2026, Ink and Polymer on Paper, 48 inches by 60 inches.

A lot of creative people fear that if they wait too long, the urgency dies. How do you tell the difference between something cooling off and something that just isn’t ripe yet?

Something’s ripe if I can produce something coherent about it on the first try, if there’s luck in just putting it into form. It’s not ripe if I have to keep making paintings or sketches about it. That happens a lot with commissions, because I’m taking someone else’s expectations and trying to understand them. It’s rare that someone tells me exactly what they’re thinking and I immediately say, “Oh, it’s this,” and explain it back visually, and they say, “Yes, it is that.”

The urgency feels different when the inspiration comes from inside me rather than from someone else. That’s the best feeling, to urgently paint something and have it come out wonderful. That piece right there was an urgent creation. I didn’t do any preliminary sketching. I knew what I wanted to paint and I went for it.

The work often changes for people who’ve made art through both active addiction and recovery. What changed for you, and what stayed the same?

I made art when I drank, but I don’t think I ever used alcohol to make art. Alcohol was about putting down social anxiety. Cannabis is different. It’s always lit a creative energy in me. I use it with the same intention as coffee. Caffeine is a good ADD medication for me, good for focus, and cannabis is the same. It gets me to sit and focus, and I don’t have that interior voice of “Don’t do this, why are you doing this.” It’s not that I’m hopped up every time I paint. It depends on the task. If it’s straight labor, stretching and prepping canvases, then stone-cold sober is best, because it just needs to be done.

What sobriety does to creativity is keep me in the rut of past experience: this worked last time, so I keep doing it, and there’s zero experimentation. Meditation is how I find experimentation when I’m sober. It taps into the same relaxation of the mind that lets the experiments and the childlike mind come into play. That’s what I’ve been working on, coming at things with childlike wonder, without expectations.

I really think it’s not substance use that ruins my productivity. It’s my reaction to things, my self-imposed anxiety. It’s not substances making me lazy. It’s being so tired and burned out from anxiety that I want to leave, but if I leave and rest, then I’m not being productive, not making enough to post on Instagram and prove that I’m working.

Michael Haight, Study for Sporting Goods Attendant, 2025, Ink on paper, 24 inches by 18 inches.

You studied creative writing before you came to painting. What did the writing brain give you that painting training alone wouldn’t have?

It gave me the difference between being literal and being poetic, and it developed my interest in narrative. I’ve always loved storytelling. My mom’s father was a prolific storyteller. He could take any mundane thing from his life and make it sound like he was reading from a storybook.

When I approach a painting, and this goes back to the alcohol series and to commissions, the preliminary sketches are very literal. Very journalistic. The who, what, when, why, and where, almost a visual list of what exists in the space. Then over the course of many sketches, reworking the arrangement of the visual information, I move from that literal list to a poetic sensation of what the experience felt like or what it means metaphorically.

A lot of these paintings are based on songs I wrote. There’s the music, the lyrics, the direct reading of the lyrics, and then the literary-analysis reading of them. My best paintings are when I’m speaking about the abstract concepts in the writing rather than the literal illustration. I used to teach literary analysis and write curriculum for a private academy, so I can’t help but approach my own past work that way, to develop new creation from it. I’m taking songs I wrote in 2010 and 2011 and making paintings about them. They’re little creative engines. I build them, and then they start making more things out of themselves.

One song was the impetus for my show Paper Thin Friends, which I did at a popup space during COVID. Another, called “SLS,” has a phrase about bucolic prisons without decisions, and that painting is about finding comfort in being completely alone in a beautiful place. There’s a Walmart series I’d love to turn into a film like Jacques Tati’s Playtime [the 1967 comedy]. [Gaston] Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is something I read while I wrote most of those songs. It’s hard to come up with something new right now, and I think that’s because I’ve already come up with all these other things I can still generate from. Why think of new ideas when I still have so many? Maybe the new ones come once I’ve brought all of these to life.

What’s something you used to believe about being a serious artist that turned out to be wrong?

That a gallery will save you. That representation is the finish line, you’ve made it, you can go to bed. That if someone says they love your work and want to live with it, they mean it. That a painting is good if someone buys it at the price you asked. And that when someone calls another person their friend, it means friend, and not friend in the LA sense, that they can help you with something, not that you actually hang out and can count on each other.

In the past year I’ve started to notice when people are paying lip service versus being sincere. Sincerity is hard to come by. I like to think I’m a sincere person, but I’m suspicious of people whose job it is to sell art, about where their sincerity lies. A lot of the time they’re lying by omission when they describe the market’s reaction. So now I want to close out consignments within a month of a show ending. If I ask whether there was any interest and they say no, what’s the point of leaving it consigned? The time is done. I’ll sell it myself. You tried.

I came to art because it was mysterious to me how people made it, where they got their ideas. As often as I want to give it up and throw everything away, a serious artist doesn’t let that happen. A serious artist is shrewd about who they deal with, because they only have so much energy. For someone still working on his reaction to rejection and to being ignored, I think serious artists let the water fall off their back. I’m learning how to be a duck.

Michael Haight, Crepuscule with Trampoline, 2025, Polymer and ink on canvas, 48 inches by 40 inches.

Before we stop, any other thoughts you want to get down?

I’ve been listening to Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out podcast. It’s about comedians, but it feels like I’m listening to studio visits. They bring jokes to the table they’re working on and try to find the punchline, and I apply it to my studio practice. There was a Jack Antonoff episode about songwriting, about how less instrumentation can take up more space and sound more full.

One thing I’ve been trying to do is pare down the subject matter in my compositions. For a while I was interested in multiple points of view, multiple vanishing points, and I was told in studio visits to stop because it was getting messy. That usually happens on paintings I dive into without a plan. Even in poetry workshops, my professor, Christopher Buckley, would write KISS at the top of my papers: keep it simple, stupid. I come to the table with a lot, and I don’t always self-edit.

A serious artist self-edits more than I realized starting out. Growing up I only knew art that was in museums, so I assumed those works were instantaneous, that each brushstroke was right the first time, that the artist didn’t have to make a hundred other paintings to make this one. Sixteen years in, I’m still working on editing and refining. I’d like to make a painting with as few brushstrokes as possible that still delivers all the information I want to present. Refinement and simplicity, that’s what I’m working toward.

Refinement is the name of the game. I was always told the perfect piece of writing is one you can’t add to and can’t cut from.

Right, being able to tell that adding anything more won’t be a beneficial contribution, and subtracting won’t either. “What’s the benefit?” is the root question of so much of what I do. Sometimes the answer is just that it looks pretty, that it would look cool in someone’s house. A lot of art is just that. It’s cool, or it feels good.

Michael Haight recommends:

Album: Music for Saxophone and Bass Guitar by Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes

App: Musical Astrology by Lionel Williams

Book: Always Coming Home by Ursula K LeGuin

App: Dubblr by Kyle Petreycik

Thing: Medium Density Overlay from Anderson Plywood for painting panels

Visual artist Clips Split on moving into alignment

2026-07-07T03:00:00-04:00

When did you realize you would become an artist?

I was always doing artistic things—dressing crazy, doing skits with my sister—but not knowing what that meant for my life. I don’t think I ever knew you could just be an artist. I went to performing arts high school; I wanted to get to New York and thought that was the way to do it. I felt connected to acting, but I didn’t feel connected to myself when I was doing it. I got into photography because I was following this girl on Instagram and I thought she had a cool eye. My grandfather was a photographer, so I had my parents check the basement for any old cameras of his. When I saw the photos from my first roll, I thought, “Oh, this makes sense for me.” I felt aligned. I submitted to Rookie Mag, too, and that gave me the confidence I needed to continue. Looking back, I can see that my vision was always there.

How has your understanding of “being an artist” evolved?

In elementary school, I won $25 for drawing a city skyline, and I was so excited because I loved money. And I got into acting because I had a lot of emotions and it seemed like a good way to make money. My understanding now of an artist is… broke. [laughs]

Being an artist is so much bigger than the word. I asked one of my clients if he was an artist, and he was baffled because he’d already told me he was a nurse. We got to talking and it turns out he used to be a documentary filmmaker but it wasn’t paying the bills, so he stopped. I think an artist is someone who just does it, even when it’s bleak and there’s no money. It’s just something that has to come out of you.

How did your experience of being an artist change when you got sober?

I always thought the things I was doing pre-sobriety—partying, having a lot of sex—were what gave my life meaning. I thought that lifestyle made me interesting, but truthfully I wasn’t able to connect in a real way. I could see external parts of my life that I loved in the images I’d created, but I couldn’t really love what was inside of me. Getting sober has made me realize that it’s okay for my life to be a little quieter; I don’t have to try to make a story happen. I can live in the mundane and be interested in that. I still live in New York and I’m still a sex worker, but the things that were interesting to me then as an artist are so uninteresting to me now.

What do you wish someone had told you when you started making art?

I wish my parents or someone had told me that there are other options besides school. I tried to transfer to SVA but I couldn’t afford it, and thank God, because I think it would have changed my work so much. Everything happened the way it was meant to, but I wish I’d had people supporting the dream, to help with my self-esteem.

What is your relationship to feedback?

I took a class last year and a big takeaway was, “Divorce yourself from the work.” My work is so personal, so about my life, and I tend to use that as an armor against feedback. It’s been such a slow burn for me to participate in critiques, but feedback has opened up my work in ways I couldn’t imagine on my own. I’ve made this very distinct voice for myself, and I know exactly what I’m doing with a camera, so now I’m open to hearing other people’s opinions on my work. It’s actually a gift. Receiving more critique has allowed me to not be so sensitive about how people view my work, because I know how I view my work. I want other people to be able to step into my art, so I need to make space for that. Sometimes I’ll call someone and cry about it, but then I continue to show up. As scared as I am in those moments, the work has always gotten better.

When and how did you start doing commercial work?

People say you can either be a commercial photographer or a fine art photographer, with no in-between. Before I started doing commercial work, I was scared of it. I thought it would lessen my fine art, that it would cut me off from my own work. It took me eight years to build the confidence to start doing commercial work. Ultimately, photography feels easy for me, and I want to be able to make money doing something that doesn’t take all of the energy out of me.

Does making art take energy out of you?

Commercial work takes energy out of me, but my personal work does not. It’s always been the thing that gives me energy, that I turn to when I’m feeling insecure, or when I feel like my life is not worth living or not big enough. I have a whole archive, and when I look at those moments, even though they’re up close and devoid of context, I think, “Okay, this meant something to me at some point.”

While I love my work and what I’ve created, it can’t be my lifeblood. I have this gift and I hope that I get to do it forever, but what if one day I couldn’t? I’m not “a photographer”—I’m just Clips. My photos, my money—this is not where my worth comes from, or what makes my life complete. Realizing that has taken the pressure off and made my work better.

How do you deal with burnout? Do you take breaks?

It’s been a long time since I haven’t had a camera on me. It’s compulsive. I drop off film minimum once a week. There was a time when I wasn’t shooting a lot, because I wasn’t using the proper tool. Then my mentor told me I needed to invest in my tools, so I bought an $800 point-and-shoot, which is crazy, because they break. But now I never get burnt out on shooting my own work. I only feel “burnt out” when I’m future tripping, thinking about what’s next, what I “need” to be doing. I get burnt out on the fantasy of what my career will become. Showing my work in any capacity outside of Instagram gets me back on my path, into alignment with the present, with how I feel in the moment when I am shooting.

What is your relationship to digital spaces and social media?

I used to be very unhinged on the internet. I’ve been sharing my work on social media from the beginning, first on Tumblr, then on Instagram. The images I’d post were artistic in their own way, but I was leaning into being perceived on the internet as like, hot and on the scene, and photography took a backseat. I was still making images, but I was obsessed with the fact that no one was talking about me as an artist or a photographer. No one is talking about that now either, but I’ve experienced a shift within myself. I’ve started taking myself more seriously. Right now, my Instagram is reserved for my photography. At the same time, I’ve gotten really rigid, and I do want to change that. I can be serious about my work and less serious about posting. I’m a freak, and for me, Instagram is a good place to let that freak flag fly, to release this tenseness and be more free. Every time I post I’m like, “This is a fucking nightmare, no one cares, I’m just posting into the void.” But when I step outside myself for five seconds and have a real conversation with someone, that feeling disappears, and I’m able to remember that Instagram is just an archive and a living resume.

How do you feed your curiosity? How do you nourish your creativity?

I’m most curious when I’m in a meditative state. Right now I feel blocks around the things I want to do, so I keep asking God to allow me to dream. My dining room table broke recently, so I put a carpet down in that spot and I’ve been trying to lay on the ground and lean into childhood memories, on a mission to be less judgmental and more curious.

I nourish myself by going to the movies. It’s the whole thing: going to this third space, this liminal space, especially in the dead of summer, New York, 2 p.m., Lincoln Center or wherever. It’s otherworldly, even though I’m just watching something. I love the experience of leaving my home to sit in the dark with a bunch of strangers, consumed by color and sound. It fuels me.

What are your most valuable resources as an artist?

For a while, I didn’t think looking at other people’s work was important. I had a mentor who was appalled by my lack of photographer knowledge, and he was right—it was such a snobby way to go through the world. Now I can see how my work has come from elsewhere, even if it wasn’t intentional. Photography is a ladder: someone makes a step and then I get to create, because of what came before me. I can’t be so isolated and think I’m so different. So collecting images and knowing other photographers is super important, plus always having my camera on me. Pushing myself to ask people for a photo if I want it and giving up judgment of what I want to shoot. I’m intentional, but I need that freedom from my inner critic. I try to have a new favorite photo every week, which keeps me looking for the good.

What are the rewards of your creative practice?

My work has given me a purpose in this world. I know exactly where my voice belongs. If I have nothing, I have that. Maybe it won’t bring me anywhere, but I’m just so happy to have found it early in life and leaned into it. It’s taught me to listen to this instinct I have to keep going, even if I have no money and no one screaming, “You’re the best!” This need to keep moving and pushing, that perseverance, is a gift. Photographing my entire life—it never ends, and that can be hard. How do I make a book if it’s an ongoing project? But it’s helpful for me to know that it doesn’t have to end. It doesn’t have to be a complete work. It can always just be happening.

Clips Split recommends:

Tru Fru Frozen Fresh Strawberries

Congee from Oh Dumplings

The album Sweet Like Everything by Auwbe and Glitter of the Harvest

Mt. Everest Deli & Grocery

$600 Tom Ford sunglasses