Category: Interview

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Hear Me Now Interview

Q&A with Tracy Mikich and Teresa Grimaldi

Q. Together you recently completed a print project entitled M_Other using a RISO copy machine – can you tell us more about the project and the word/image pieces you created?

Tracy: M_Other was a creative-print experimentative collaboration with several people exploring the feelings generated by the word mother. For me, it took me back to my childhood, revisiting vivid memories and reflecting on them. Having a challenging parent can be devastating but it’s interesting to see how it shapes you to grow, learn and nurture others.

Teresa: My involvement with M_Other allowed me to consolidate collage imagery based on personal and local histories from a previous project, Bright Memories, and see how this might work in print form. The final zine worked really well in terms of creating a story with very few words and was rich with imagery from my childhood.

Q. We understand the RISO spot-colour copier you use to great effect is a sort of cult creative tool. Tell us what you like about it?

Tracy: We’re still learning the ropes with RISO, using it in an analogue way. It’s funny how “analogue” is seen as the olden days, but it was the current technology when I was in my twenties! We’re cutting and pasting to create prints that are free from the constraints of perfection. This allows for a more personal connection with the work. Yes, there can be mistakes, mis-registration, and errors – these imperfections might feel unsettling in the finished product. But that’s the point – it doesn’t have to be perfect, that’s life. And sometimes, these unexpected elements lead to even more interesting results, something far more captivating than what we originally planned. In a way, it reflects the randomness of life itself.

Q. You are both multi-skilled creatives, working in a number of artistic disciplines. And I know you are writers of compelling short fiction. Can you tell us about the modern folk tale Chuffle that you co-authored?

Tracy: Chuffle came about through Teresa’s project Splice which explored some of the unique heritage of Sandown especially the time when tigers and pumas were walked on the beach. The resultant collage-style film was rich with specific images anchored to Sandown and is a fertile example of placemaking – exploring the uniqueness of place. We then thought, how could we develop this as often projects are short and there’s an element of work in progress that never concludes. So we conjured up a tiger’s tale, imagining how Sandown Beach got her stripes. We hope to have this printed, on the Riso, for the storytelling festival later this year.

“…the unique heritage of Sandown especially the time when tigers and pumas were walked on the beach.”

Teresa: Again, it is a nice opportunity to transform imagery created for ‘moving collage’ into print that works with Tracy’s evocative story. The challenge here will be to translate very photographic pictures into two coloured layers with a very different feel through the Riso process.

Q. You often work together. How does your creative partnership operate and can you tell us something about your creative partner that you especially appreciate?

Tracy: This is a tale of two cities! Teresa Grimaldi is a fast-paced, interconnected metropolis, firing on all cylinders. I, on the other hand, am a more sedate, quieter city, where the streets have been neatly planned. I often find myself gently pulling Teresa back from a whirlwind of ideas but that’s the beauty of our collaboration – it works! Teresa’s openness to the world and limitless possibilities inspires me, and her confidence rubs off, encouraging me to explore new territory.

Q. Whose work inspires you? Do any writers of fiction particularly fire your imagination?

Teresa: I am not a great reader so I do love a picture books or reference books. My greatest inspirations are Tove Jansson and Lewis Carroll. I have an ongoing fascination with Alice in Wonderland. Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence is a constant source of inspiration as it is both novel and museum that were developed side by side, continuously referring to museums, collections and hoarding. The museum is wonderful to visit if you are ever in Istanbul.

Tracy: I’ve just finished re-reading Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist, this massive semi-autobiographical story details the precarious hand-to-mouth life of Edwardian England’s house decorators. It’s painful to read about their suffering and a sobering reminder that despite progress, vast societal divides persist today. The accumulation of immense wealth is celebrated, while the voices of the vulnerable are often unheard or ignored. Themes of fairness resonate deeply with me, though the struggle can feel overwhelming at times which is why I have to remind myself that my small actions matter and sometimes that’s enough.

I’ve just read, Erasure by Percival Everett, a satire that’s hilarious, profound and anger-inducing – it shows how bizarre our world has become. I also am in awe of Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood is up-there and Somerset Maugham – especially The Painted Veil and Of Human Bondage.

Q. You’re currently working together on a project for Department in Ryde. Can you tell us more about it and give us a peek inside the new arts centre the old Packs department store will soon become?

Tracy: Teresa and I are co-curating an exhibition that integrates elements of Department’s history. We’re working with multiple partners, including the Ryde Social Heritage Group and On-the-Wight. We aim to create an exhibition that tells interesting stories and resonates with a contemporary audience.

“…our research reveals an insecure existence for many, especially during the Crusade Against Outdoor Relief…”

The issues explored in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist are mirrored in the lives of those who lived and worked in the building. One man, George Hopgood, a hairdresser, stands out. His father died in the workhouse, and his apprenticeship was even arranged by the institution. While he went on to have a successful career and even became commissioner of Ryde, our research reveals an insecure existence for many, especially during the Crusade Against Outdoor Relief, which led to a surge in workhouse admissions. People toiled incredibly hard and made do with a pittance and still the spectre of the workhouse loomed large.

Teresa: The exhibition will attempt to peel back the many layers of the building’s history and uncover the tales of trades and crafts of other ages. We will curate several commissioned projects that are developing through community engagement and will celebrate traditional crafts and engage with new audiences. As I grew up in Ryde this project is the perfect fit.

Tracy and Teresa will lead a Brevity Hear Me Now print workshop using the RISO printer on 13 July at Boojum & Snark in Sandown. They also used the spot-colour printer to create the July/Aug Hear Me Now Brevity Issue. 021.

Click here for more about tigers on Sandown beach https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCSalaVoH2c

PHOTO CREDIT Simon Avery

Categories
Hear Me Now Interview

Q&A with George Budden

Q. You recently conceived and led a compelling series of outdoor, hands-on workshops for young people aged 16-25 on the West Wight. Tell us a little more about that project?
A. Yes, my partner and I drafted an Arts Council Project Grant last Summer and completed the workshop series over a 4 month residency over Autumn and Winter. For me, particularly in photography which is often gate-keeped with expensive equipment and overly technical
processes, it’s hugely important that the sessions I run are affordable and accessible to anyone. The series we conceived consolidated these ideas with the incredible source of local natural materials available in the west wight to create workshops that worked alongside nature and eco focused processes. These sessions included things like developing 35mm film with seaweed, or making natural dyes with the gorse flower found on the downs.

Perhaps even more relevant, particularly to the 16 – 25 age bracket we focused on, was creating sessions that allowed participants to work with their hands and on something new, whilst creating comfortable spaces to network and communicate. Though I’m not from the island, it was evident quite quickly that there is a lack of creative and social opportunities for young people on the Island (particularly in the West Wight), and for me it’s important to have exclusive spaces for certain demographics and communities. The issues different demographics face are often exclusive to that community, and so to create an environment where we can talk openly and relate to each other on those issues is hugely important.

Q. You’re a visual artist, a photographer – who are your influences, who moves you? Including possibly fiction writers who inform your creative practice.
A. Though I’m a photographer, it’s pretty rare that I’m hugely influenced by other photographers. There are photographers who I admire and respect, but they’re generally not the ones who influence my practice. If I look at the work that gets me excited to create it generally follows more performative pieces, written work (often analytical but sometimes
fiction), and music.

My themes change fairly regularly, at the moment I’m finding myself asking a lot of questions around masculinity within urban spaces, and the relationship between my own understanding of gender and sex with the physical infrastructure and buildings around me.

As I think through these ideas of emotional man made landscapes, particularly in London where I currently live, I’m drawing back to a range of creative influences. I find Burial’s music, particularly their album ‘untrue’, reflects a lot of my feelings and thoughts on the topic, as well as books like ‘Alone in Berlin’, ‘London Belongs to Me’, and ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’, which all explore different personalities and stories in direct relation to the physical and political contexts they exist in. Their methods of written description are exactly what I look to
convey visually in my visual work; delicate and beautiful with heavier theoretical undertones.

Q. How do you imagine the Queer in Nature walk/talk might inspire the work of new and experienced Island writers?
A. Coming to a writing workshop from a photographic education, I hope my guided walk helps to give a new perspective on creative writing and our influences. Often I find myself stuck creatively, particularly when I’m trying to overthink or over engineer an idea, and generally the best solution to that is to give yourself an instruction or visual task completely separate from your natural way of working.

I hope the session helps to introduce a new way of thinking around descriptions and identities, and by the end of the session participants could have a new set of ‘building blocks’ of writing which can help us describe certain values and identities.

Q. You’ve talked about ‘finding infinite ways to describe and identify ourselves’ – give us a hint how examining and considering plant life makes that possible.
A. Particularly in queer identity, written language often fails us. There are literal examples of this in latin based languages, where everything is gendered and words for certain identities simply don’t exist yet; but also more complicated issues around strict labelling and language when trying to convey our very-much-fluid identities. By illustrating what we
relate to and identify as through abstract ideas and objects, like plants for example. I hope participants feel they can be as nonspecific and uncommitted to these ‘labels’ as they like, whilst still conveying the ideas of an identity.

Q. You’ve led a number of workshops and projects; do you have a top tip for fashioning creative spaces and projects that are safe, welcoming, inclusive and inspiring?
A. Primarily there are practical things I tend to do in all of the sessions I host and facilitate, as well as the queer party I work on. Making it clear that by attending the sessions you are agreeing to a respect and no-discrimination rule, by introducing my pronouns at the beginning and inviting others to do the same (again pushing that these are trans and NB
friendly spaces), and reiterating that if anyone needs to take a break or leave there is no pressure to stay; its generally important at a workshop to allocate a separate quite space away from the session as a break room, particularly when working with neurodivergent participants.

On a deeper level; I don’t run classes, I run workshops, I’m showing a process but certainly not telling anyone how to use that process. There is a natural power dynamic between the facilitator and the participants, and the workshops I see work the best tend to try to neutralise this power dynamic from the get go. Understanding that all the participants will be able to bring their own ideas and practises to the session, and holding those ideas as of equal importance to your own. By doing this we unlock beautiful sessions of skill sharing, experimentation and communication between the participants.

As part of the Hear Me Now project George Budden, a London-based photographer, will lead an inspirational walk entitled Queer Nature starting from The Red Lion pub in Freshwater on 25 May, 12.30 to 2.30pm. The walk is FREE of charge thanks to support from Arts Council England. Hear Me Now is a Brevity writing project, in partnership with StoneCrabs Theatre. To reserve your place on the walk, email caroline@stonecrabs.co.uk

Categories
Interview Poetry

Q&A with Poet Blake Everitt.

Q. What is the best advice you can give a new reader of poetry?

A. Try to be still, silent, undistracted. Try to be open and receptive, like royal ferns (osmunda regalis) in waiting elegance, awash with early spring light and completely present. Try to leave any notions of ‘meaning’ at the door.

The sound of a poem is a living, direct, unmediated communication of something we can never describe. It’s intuitive, not an intellectual exercise. To paraphrase DH Lawrence: the imaginative experience is a movement of vivid association which involves the whole body and soul. So, it’s important to read the poem aloud, hear the poem, memorise poems that speak to you. Engage with all the poets from the past.

Q. Similarly, do you have a top tip for new writers of poetry?

A. I have never written a single poem – and poems always arrive joyfully unexpected – by sitting in front of a blank page with the intention of writing. They find me. I’m always surprised – they’re gifts. I think that’s important. As Derek Mahon said ‘the poems flow from the hand unbidden, and the hidden source is the watchful heart.’

Go outside. Try to pay undeflected attention to where you are. Try to listen to the music of wildness, the music of silence. We’re part of them; they’re part of us. Real poetry is born of this relationship. As Thoreau said, ‘in wildness is the preservation of the world’, and I’d add that poetry is part of the preservation of wildness. When I pay attention enough to see goldfinches playing in marsh thistles, or if I am clothed in quietness enough to hear sea wind passing through the foliage of Tasmanian Blue Gum or Whitebeam trees, then wildness is encountered. The appearance, in all its mystery and wildness, of poetry, is a similar kind of encounter. I think the poetry that comes out of this is an immediate response to unknown, beautiful moments, a way of revering the intimacy of their mysteries, and of saying thank you.

There’s a line in Thoreau where he says that for all of our pretence of ‘knowing’ things, places, selves, others, most of the time our engagement is superficial. Poetry, on the contrary, deepens, allows a space in which mystery may cultivate this attentive way of looking which enables one to recognise the poetry of place, and ultimately the beauty of being alive. Try to follow ‘the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen’ (Thoreau).

Learn from other poets, from their lives and poems. Read poems every day. Be devoted to your own personal vocation or calling. Try not to have any intentions or preconceptions about what you’ll write. Try to keep faith all day with the incomprehensible demand of poetry, as Jane Hirshfield says. Remember what Robert Graves said about examining your conscience in relation to the White Goddess who demands, after all, full-time, not part time service.

Q. Do you read your poems aloud to yourself? Must poetry be read aloud?

A. Always. I memorise some of them. I carry them with me all the time. When reading poems I think the living sound, the personal voice, is crucial in experiencing each poem. It’s a meeting between our present and the present of the poem. It’s intimate. I’m moved when I hear the late W.S. Merwin talk about this. He said ‘I believe that poems begin with hearing and listening. One listens until one hears something.’

Q. Is there a contemporary poet you’d highly recommend reading, one-to-watch, so to speak? And is there an older, possibly departed poet who you feel has been overlooked, deserving of recognition and readership?

A. There are two contemporary poets in particular I’d like to mention. One is Lydia Fulleylove, another Island poet. I recently found a copy of her book Estuary. Much of it resonates. I love the last poem in that book, which imagines ‘if all days / might bring / long shining walks / in high places.’

Sam Davidson is the other one, he’s from Hythe. I was fortunate enough to read alongside him a few years ago now at Quarr Abbey. Like me, he’s a former intern there. His book Love’s Many Names is wonderful.

As for departed poets, I’d like to mention a holy trinity of mine: G.M. Hopkins, John Clare, Ivor Gurney. I love Hopkins for the intensity, the honesty, the spiritual integrity. Hearing Clare’s work aloud is among the most beautiful things in the language. And Gurney’s lyric passion for his native Cotswolds, his intimate sense of the skyscape and of looking through trees across the horizon – it’s inspiring.

Q. How does living on the Isle of Wight influence your work?

A. It was in Ventnor, beside a whitebeam tree, looking across the bay, that I first had an inkling of poetry as my vocation. My poems often sing of the sacramental beauty, as I experience it, of the Isle of Wight’s south-eastern corner. When I walk the Downs or the Landslip, the cliff paths or Chines, I find myself unexpectedly a guest at the wedding feast of its beauty. The ever-present wedding of the natural and the sacramental, it’s this that entered and granted almost all of the poems in my recent work The Shock of Silence.

Q. If you weren’t writing poetry, what might you be doing instead?

A. I don’t know. Working on a kiwi farm in southwestern France, perhaps. I did that during last year’s harvest. It was beautiful to be outdoors with the fruit-filled trees, the soapworts flowering on the river bank, and the spiked manes of daneworts shining in November rain and sunlight. I wrote a thesis on Samuel Beckett and used to ‘teach’ literature in a university, so maybe something like that.

In these last few years poems have been finding me almost every day, and I’d rather not imagine my world without them. As it is, I am grateful that ‘what I do not understand leads me to wait / for the shy wildness of coltsfoots / trusting, trusting only / the miracles they have touched.’ It goes back to William Blake, who said: I know of ‘no other Gospel than the liberty both of mind and body to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination.’

Blake Everitt was born in 1989 and lives on the Isle of Wight. His most recent book of poetry is The Shock of Silence and his work has also appeared in a range of periodicals, including Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, Open: A Journal of Arts and Letters, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, Hawk & Whippoorwill, Harbinger Asylum, The Dawntreader, The Poetry Village, and Drawn to the Light Press. His work has also appeared in Brevity Issues 4. & 7.