I’ll try my best to clearly articulate my intention and focus:  I need this blog to help me get creatively organized.  I’m counting on it to get me back on track.  I’m counting on it to help me solidify and make sense of the last 5 months.

In the last five months I said goodbye to my partner as he began a cross country trip.  Within a week after his departure I was hired to teach a foundations art class part-time.  I moved across the country, reunited with my partner, and started my new job.  We gradually moved into our new house and became acquainted with new neighbors and friends, cuisine and culture.  I worked at my new job and my old job simultaneously.  I reached a range of successes and failures in both.  I was pushed to my absolute limits.  I took refuge on the beach, in the bottom of wine glasses, and on the couch staring at the ceiling.

The fall quarter ends this week.  In preparation to get working in the studio again, I swept, dusted and rearranged my studio room this weekend.  I am greatly looking forward to exploring new ideas, new surroundings and new inspiration in the work to come.

Things on the forefront my mind right now are:

1. Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
2. Yoga/Anatomy/The Body
3. The house across the street from my studio window
4. Fireplaces
5. Textures

We’ll see where these bits and pieces take me.

The story my literature class was reading referenced the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, so on a sunny afternoon after jotting down a lesson plan, I wandered to the public library and picked up a box set of Parker’s music. Teaching, as I’ve come to understand it, requires asking incessantly What will help illustrate? What in the world will the students be excited about? The hard part, though likely inevitable as a first year teacher, is the failure. How cool! I think, popping disk 1 into my stereo, and listening to the ways in which the music could speak volumes about the character in the story. I’m not a music theorist, but I’m emotionally attuned to music enough to be able to say that a certain rhythm is persistent or a melody moves from smooth to angular and to think about how that could represent the character’s persistence or moodiness. It’s not a lecture class, so I didn’t prepare a great speech on how the intricacies of a particular song mirror the quirks and trials of the character; it’s a discussion class. The students, I figured, would carry their weight in making connections between the jazz and the story.

The lesson I continue to be smacked with goes something like this: Teach: Guess whose music I brought in today? Students: (Silence) Teach: It’s someone mentioned in the story. His nickname is Bird. Students: (Silence) Teach: It’s Charlie Parker. I’m going to put on a Parker song so we can listen to the kind of music Sonny [the character in the story] wants to play and eventually masters. Students: (Silence, some smirks). The music plays, and some of the students start giggling, likely embarrassed by the awkward feeling of sitting in an English class, staring forward at a teacher who is clearly excited about the outside media she’s brought in to illustrate the text but is now pacing around at the front of the room to jazz, trying to perfect the volume level and praying the students will find something useful or interesting in the exercise. The first song finishes and another one starts, and the teacher can sense that the giggling, shifting-in-their-seats students are done with Charlie Parker and feel sorry for the lost soul at the front of the room who thought this might be “cool.” The silence after the music is far heavier than any silence that comes after “Will someone read x out loud?” or “Does anyone have an idea about y?” It is the silence of pedagogical flailing. The students know it, and the teacher, with all of her good intentions knows it, too. Slowly, painfully, the teacher asks a few students for their reactions to the music, and when the answers fail to penetrate the level of “yep, it’s jazz,” the teacher steers the conversation back toward the comfort zone—the routine—discussions of plot, character, and theme.

But maybe I’m a little hard on myself. Not all learning happens in the classroom. I’ve experienced as a student how something my prof. said or did clicked weeks or months later. And maybe there is value in being pushed a little out of the comfort zone, departing from the usual let’s get in a circle and talk about the reading routine. The lesson in the moment of flailing, as I understand it, is a simple one: teaching is hard. Teaching something you love has its own peculiar challenges. I’ve never brought music to my composition classes because the material never plucked at my soul the way fiction does, begging to be discussed and presented in ways that can, with hope, encourage students to find intrigue and value in narrative. And maybe the crux of the problem is that I’m expecting students to find that intrigue in the same ways I do, without doing much explaining regarding my pedagogical choices.

Like making and, maybe more so, revising art, teaching requires a keen understanding of one’s purpose as well as an open mindedness toward purpose and meaning that comes to mind (both teacher’s and students’) in the moment, in the classroom. I know that the dreaded questions are the most vague and often feel rhetorical: What did you think? What does it mean? So??? But I ask them anyway. And my hope is that, as I gain confidence in myself as a teacher and my ability to impart wisdom about the material at hand, I’ll continue to ask those questions, but I’ll have a few specific and interesting back up plans. I’ll know exactly why I had them listen to jazz, besides the obvious reference in the story, and I’ll be able to talk about it with grace. Until then, I’ll flail, but I’ll pay close attention in the process.

Last Thursday, June 12, 2008 I officially became a Master of Fine Arts. All hail the master! Um….er…right. One nervous breakdown, a few grant proposals, and 3 temp jobs later I am finally comfortable in my new school-less lot in life. I wasn’t expecting fireworks or balloons even, but the anti-climactic post-graduation experience shocked me to the core.

The Monday after Pomp and Circumstance, I took a walk through my neighborhood pretending everything was the same. The Online Coffee Company was the same Online Coffee Company I’d written many research papers in, the Hot House Spa was the same Hot House Spa I’d spent many hours soaking with my girlfriends in. But there was something different about the way I was experiencing these places. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

I realized that nothing was the same and that I’d been living in this city as a ghost resident for two years staying dry under the umbrella of graduate school. Though I made a consistent effort to make friends outside of the program and stay plugged in to the goings on in the city, I didn’t get the “real” taste of what it means to be a true Seattlite; graduate school is a very sheltered, private, introspective experience.

Over the last two years I learned to be with myself. I’ve always been a bit of a loner, a bit of an independent, but I think most of the privacy I’ve required can be chalked up to protecting myself from heartbreak, loneliness, and disappointment. I would try on different personalities, jobs, and hobbies, people even, but never really see any of them through to completion. In graduate school I didn’t have a choice. It was sink or float. I came face to face with my needs, habits, and insecurities as well as my joys and my cares. Alone in my studio or installation space I was faced with self-imposed challenges that I had to complete or at least investigate. These explorations became so much more than just work – the ways I dealt with the highs and lows of painting became a metaphor for the way I function in my daily life.

From my studio practice I learned that I hate not knowing whether or not the thing I’m pursuing will result in success. Ironically, this very struggle is the impetus for creating in the first place. If there were no struggle, no uncertainty to the outcome, no room for error, painting would be dead. It is my firm belief that an artist’s pursuit comes out of intense curiosity and a desire for surprise. There’s also a daredevil aspect to making art: you set up a scenario that guarantees excitement, dread, confusion, and disorientation and willingly surrender to it. You don’t know if you’ll make it out alive, but the thrill of the experience outweighs this minor concern.

This is where the metaphor for life part comes in. I live because I am curious, because I want to surprise and be surprised. It’s so enlightening to peel off my grad school goggles and see my city through fresh eyes. Everything feels comfortable, yet new. Like in my painting practice, I have moved through the oh-my-god-i-suck-that’ll-never-work phase and into the there-that’s-not-so-bad-opportunities-abound phase. By being patient and submitting to the nebulous nature of my situation I’ve been offered a few opportunities to show my work and have even started applying for grants and jobs. Like in my studio when I’m struggling with a painting, I accept that I don’t know how my new life will pan out. And I’m ok with that. Or at least I am right at this moment. I know this feeling will wax and wane as it does in and out of my studio.

This isn’t one of those “good things come to those who wait” stories because that would be sickening. Rather it’s one about a freshly crowned MFA coming to terms with herself, her practice, and her role in her new/old city.

A couple weeks ago I went to see Siri Hustvedt read from her new book Sorrows of An American a layered novel written from the view point of Erik Davidsen, a psychiatrist who lives in New York City. In the book Erik and his sister Inga return to Minnesota after the death of their father and discover a note from an unknown woman in his belongings. Ideas of past, identity, and secrets are explored while Erik and Inga uncover their father’s life through his memoirs and ephemera.

Some elements of this novel have been extracted directly from her own experience. Other elements of the story are outside of her own experience, most notably the profession and gender of her main character.

In her talk she spoke of the extensive level of research she undertook in order to bring authenticity to the profession of her main character. She studied and took the New York psychology licensing exam until she was able to pass, read passages of her book to the New York Psychology Board, and began to teach a writing workshop at a mental hospital.

When a member of the audience asked what her next book would be about, and she responded that the next novel will most likely be told from a woman’s point of view. She mentioned that since it takes her about 5 years to write a novel and her last two have been from the point of view of a male main character, she has essentially spent the last 10 years as a man.

I know that playing a role, or inventing a character is common practice for writers, actors, and some visual and performance artists. I also know that we all have different reasons to go about creating the way that we do. When I think of this practice and how it would benefit the writer, I believe it would allow you to the opportunity to view your experience in a mirror, rather than through a camera.

I’m curious to know, for those of you that make work that embodies a reality outside of your waking experience, what is that like and what has it taught you that self-portraiture or auto-biography is unable to?

Harrell Fletcher might be my new hero. I’ve attended a few lectures at California College of the Arts and nary a one inspired me to come home and make stuff.
Harrell Fletcher makes me want to make stuff.

Many of his projects involve him going into communities and getting the residents involved in art pieces. You might be most familiar with his collaboration with Miranda July, www.learningtoloveyoumore.com a site that gives readers art assignments to create and post on the web site. A number of the results have been featured in gallery shows and in the Learning to Love You More book published last year.

I will not go further through the laundry list of awesome projects he has made, inspired, orchestrated or curated because I think this is better off discovered if you go to one of his web sites and become inspired yourself:

• www.learningtoloveyoumore.com
• www.harrellfletcher.com

Yes.