Artist Statement
I am currently working on a collection of poems that explores different kinds of labor–the physical and mental labor of manual work, the particular labor of girlhood, stewardship for both the environment and self. When I first started writing the collection I had been doing seasonal outdoor work—on trail crews, as a wilderness field instructor, and as the leader of an all-female wildland fire crew. At the heart of the collection is an exploration of the very first hard job I ever did—watching my father die as a girl—and the labor of the grief that reverberated after. I am interested in the myth of transformation, in the other-people and other-worlds we inhabit before and after a traumatic event. I am also interested in the very real bodily experience of transformation– through hard physical labor, childbirth, flashes of light. I think of myself as a daughter, a mother, and of our transforming world–on the precipice of climate disaster or in so many ways already falling. It is through poems that I am able to follow questions, pull on threads. What does it mean to inhabit other worlds? To be dropped there against our will or to willingly create them for ourselves. How am I, through my labor, transformed?
Illustrated poem on ceramic tile, "Husqvarna Princess".
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