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"On Queue" Muse Events Calendar
The print magazine is on hiatus until a sponsor can be found, but you can keep the spirit of Muse alive by submitting event information and checking the events calendar often for fun things to do.

Q the Muse continues to promote her favorite events in her weekly Muse 2-DOs segment on Dave Phipps' Creative Department talk radio show, Sundays at noon on KNSI 1450 AM.

To submit an event, call Q at 320-257-3000 and an events submission form will be emailed to you.
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Must ... Read ... Now! The latest and greatest Muse Issue #21 is disappearing fast! Pick one up at Muse Headquarters in the CLOUD Cartographics and Brain Magnet offices : 113 Fifth Avenue South (across from Wells Fargo and next to the bus depot downtown St. Cloud).

Enjoy a low-resolution preview of the magazine in a cool flipbook by clicking here: http://events.muse-magazine.com/muse/ 393KB Flash Application

Or print your very own high-resolution copy : Download the Muse 06-07 complete 13.7MB PDF now.
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Muse Online Bonus ARTicles :
Going Blind (work in progress) by Mara Faulkner, OSB
About Going Blind by Mara Faulkner, OSB
Additional Poems by Mara Faulkner, OSB
Additional Poems by Ryan Kutter

Plus :
Muse Exclusive Artist Interviews with :
Mara Faulkner, OSB, writer/poet
Ryan Kutter, writer/poet
Marshall Brewer, furniture artist
James Loso, ceramic artist

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Going Blind a work in progress
by Mara Faulkner, OSB

Blind spot:--The small, circular, optically insensitive region in the retina where fibers of the optic nerve emerge from the eyeball. It has no rods or cones.--A subject about which one is markedly ignorant or prejudicial.

Like many people, I lost my father when I was too young to know him. I left home at eighteen, fleeing Mandan, North Dakota, my dead little hometown. The college my five sisters, my brother, and I attended was four hundred miles from home, and I had only enough money to go home at Christmas and in the summer. By then, my dad was aging and growing more and more silent. I loved him, but it never occurred to me to be interested in him as a person beyond the one I knew and the earlier one revealed in the stories I’d heard a few times too often.

Then I joined a Benedictine monastery and left him even further behind. As I look now at the stiff, silly letters I wrote home those early years of my religious life, I realize that I must have found it impossible to bridge the gap between my poor home and the world of prayer, study, and constant cleaning that comprised my first couple of years in the monastery. Once my mother sent me a bag of carrots from her garden, with the dirt still on them. At home, I always ate them that way, straight from the garden, brushing the dirt off on my jeans. But the other novices were getting huge boxes of Fanny Farmer chocolates from their families. I hid my carrots and eventually threw them away. With my mother, I was lucky that she lived past my years of self-absorption and shame, and that I chanced upon Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, and many other working-class feminist writers who helped me see her and her hard-working life in a new light. By the time she died in 1993, I understood her and admired her for a hundred reasons.

My father had no such chance at redemption. He died when I was twenty-five, and my grief for him was buried beneath the stony silence of the Novitiate. Shortly after he died, my mother wrote with rare directness, “I know you lost your favorite person.” She was right. But in the years that followed, as my mother flourished in reality and in my estimation, my father diminished to a broken shadow who appeared only once in my dreams–an old, thin man in his faded blue sweater, lying on his side, silent, blind, with his big strong hands helpless and useless between his knees. Have you come, old man, I wondered, to lead me after you, cursing, into the darkness?

In doing research on Tillie Olsen, I learned another lesson: smarts and a flair for language come from somewhere. I came to hate the idea of isolated genius, the onlys, the woman writer “imprisoned in uniqueness,” as Germaine Greer describes it, and to look for visible or invisible evidence of influence and support for the women writers I was studying. It recently occurred to me to look for such evidence in my own history.

So I began this search almost out of curiosity. My five sisters, my brother, and I all have the ability, seemingly untaught, to feel the rhythm and swing of language, to delight in it, and to catch it on paper. Where did this ability come from? Not from our serviceable but unremarkable schools. Not from my mother. The weekly letters she wrote faithfully to her distant children were stream-of-thought sentences, sprawled on the page without much punctuation and no literary grace. She wrote as associatively as she talked and almost never sat down to read a book.

After my mother died, I finally felt free to read the letters my father wrote to her toward the end of their long courtship. I expected to find there a wild flair for language and a skill like ours. For wasn’t our father a great story-teller, and hadn’t he recommended Zane Grey’s Western romances, which my sisters and I carried home by the bushelful from the public library and read through the long summer days? What I found in those letters, written in a crabbed hand on cheap little tablet pages, is not graceful. The letters are inarticulate, filled with clichés and commonplaces, misspelled words and odd punctuation, words spelled the way the Irish say them (lave for leave, for instance), and his distress that he couldn’t put into written words what he felt for the little blond sweetheart he was courting. Dennis Faulkner (even his name has several spellings–Dennis, Denis, Den) was not a man of the pen; he had none of the linguistic skill of a James Joyce or a Frank O’Connor, nor even of a Louis L’Amour. I was so disappointed in those letters it took me another six years to learn some of what they have to tell me. I won’t plunder those letters for my own uses; they are too personal, too intimate, the long love song of a forty-two-year-old man who sees his last chance of happiness being squeezed to death by poverty and the unrelenting economy of the late 1930s in Minnesota and North Dakota.

Those letters didn’t solve the mystery of my literary heritage. But they showed me another connection between my father and me and brought to light another deeper mystery. I was two years old when my father wrote his last letter to me. My mother, my older sister Judy, one-year-old Jeanne, and I we had gone by train from Mandan to Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to visit my mother’s family. It was the first time she’d been back since she and Dennis got married in 1937 and headed west, all their belongings and an out-of-work brother-in-law packed into my dad’s truck. During the weeks we were in Minnesota, Dennis wrote two letters to us. One of them began, “Dear Judy and Margie, This is the first time I have the pleasure of writing to my girls.” But then the letters stopped; my father never wrote to me again; he never wrote to anyone again. By the time I was five, he was legally blind, unable to drive our Model-A even on the deserted roads around Mandan where he wouldn’t meet any traffic except the odd milk truck or hay wagon.

But he had had an earlier life, recorded in the stories he told and the letters he wrote my mother. These letters are the words of a man who lived by his wits, his strong back, and his eyes. By the time I knew him well, his eyes were all but gone, and his blindness had become the central fact of our lives. His blindness made him think we were endangered, a covey of small girls and a boy on the flat North Dakota prairie. He kept us marooned as he was marooned, trying to guard us from predators and growing, over the years, dark and silent.

Blindness was my father’s blind spot, and it became ours, the word we didn’t dare say. In our house there was no gentle, businesslike dog, no white came, no braille playing cards or talking books. My father preferred to hope and pray for a cure–though less and less as the years went by–and walked a step behind my mother, an unobtrusive hand on her arm. In the early days, he made a game of not being able to see. Because there were seven of us, he often dressed my little sisters. His hands were gentle with them as he held them one by one between his knees and pulled on panties, long stockings, and high white shoes. He couldn’t see which shoe fit which foot, but he always made a game of it. “Right-er-left-er-left-er-right?” he’d ask. They’d giggle with delighted superiority and set him straight.

Somewhere along the way, the games and laughter ended, and instead of jokes about blindness, we silently agreed on denial, learning vigilance to help preserve his illusion. We whisked obstacles–the dog, little kids, footstools–out of his way and put cups and tools into his hands so he wouldn’t have to ask or grope. One Sunday when the nine of us were walking from the car up the steps to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, a woman who obviously knew us asked me, “Is your daddy blind?”

Feeling as if she had insulted him or accused him of something obscene, I said indignantly, “No, he just can’t see too well.” All through grade school, high school, and college, I never told a single soul outside my family that I had a blind father, protecting his secret as closely as if he were a gangster or an ex-con.

I can only guess why blindness became our secret. Maybe my father’s refusal to be and act blind was his protection against the narrow world seeing people were able to imagine for the blind in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the occupations they trained them for (chair-caning, rug-making), and the low aspirations they counseled. Maybe it was because of the vast contrast between what his life had been and what it was fast becoming. He had climbed Mt. Rainier, ridden raw-broken horses, danced till dawn and then worked a full day threshing grain. Now he should shuffle along with a white cane as conspicuous and bony as an old woman’s finger? He might as well sit on the street corner peddling pencils. “You can become anything you want,” he told us, and “Your daddy isn’t afraid of anything.” In the face of his desperate courage, how could we name the onrushing darkness?

I have seen this blind spot affect my mother and each of us seven kids in a different way. I think we all became a little ashamed, a little more convinced that we were different from most people and not quite normal or respectable. Twice my brother set the hay field near our house on fire, bringing the fire trucks screaming out from town. Though he swore these near disasters were accidents, I wonder if they were his flamboyant protest against blindness and the secretiveness that made our lives darker still.

For myself, this secretiveness helped make me a watcher, reading the braille of bodies, and then a poet, suspicious of surfaces. For if our family hid so momentous a secret from outside eyes, what about all the lives, all the families around us?

I’ve known the physical facts of my dad’s blindness all my life, but because he and I couldn’t talk about it, I’ve had to guess at or imagine the emotional and psychological consequences. What did the physical facts mean, and how did they shape and twist my father’s life? How can I know? By observation and imagination and sympathy, through the knowledge research has given me, and, most recently, though my own experience of oncoming blindness. For the blind gene is in me, too, and sooner or later the brightness I see today will fade to gray, then black.

I think it’s important that Dennis wasn’t born blind. I’ve read that some people who are born blind and then receive sight are cruelly disappointed by the tattered world that is nowhere near as beautiful as the one they carry in their minds. Nor did he become blind suddenly, as the result of a sickness or accident. For him there was always dread and always a cruel hope. Along with extreme nearsightedness, he had an inherited disease called retinitis pigmentosa that in our family is passed from mother to son to daughter to son, each conception a 50/50 flip of the coin. As the name suggests, sullen patches of pigment migrate onto the retina, like green scum moving in from the edges of a pond in the dog days of late August. The pigment gradually narrows vision on the top, bottom, and sides until the person inside is looking out through two tunnels at the milky shapes moving from darkness into darkness. “Light at the end of the tunnel” is a hopeful phrase, promising brighter days ahead, but for the person with r.p. tunnels are treacherous and terrifying. He can’t trust the air to part magically before him or the ground to lie solid and comforting underfoot. Sidewalks fold and ripple, tripping him. Open cupboard doors leave bruises. Because night blindness accompanies r.p., my father probably never saw a star. Other dear scenes and faces gradually faded, until all he had was the memory of his children’s faces on adolescents and young adults.

The clichés about blindness, invented to console people for having sight, are partially true at best. I’ve heard it said hundreds of times that the other senses become keener to compensate for the loss of vision. It’s true that my father’s ears told him by footstep and voice which one of hundreds of customers had walked into our grocery store and said, “Hello, Faulkner.” He played music by ear, on the harmonica, willow whistles, his hands, spoons. He knew meadowlarks and taught us to hear and love their song, knew approaching weather from the sound of the wind and the feel of it on his face. He knew what ailed our ‘38 Plymouth from the cough in her motor, and he knew how to fix it. His body and his hands, big, rough, always bruised, became a sea of eyes. Balancing on a one-legged stool, he milked Buttercup, our Jersey cow, his cheek against her warm tan side, milk zinging smartly into the galvanized aluminum pail, the melody changing as the rich milk reached the top. Milking was entirely a matter of feel and rhythm, as was harnessing the big work horses, Ted and Dolly, and hitching them to the plow. But how do you plow a straight furrow if you have no fixed point to navigate by?

In our image-saturated culture, most of us would do well to close our eyes and call our other senses to life. For all of us, the other senses stir out of their sluggishness when the need arises, guiding us down a black hallway or haltingly down the stairs. But this momentary compensation makes most of us doubly grateful for sight; we realize that for most blind people, blindness is a loss, a lack, the absence of something essential. We have a hard time believing those few who call blindness a gift.

But blindness is much more than a matter of physical danger or incapacities. What is it like to have only footsteps and the thin music of voices? How does dependence, even on loved ones, twist you, making you always angry, a smoldering peat fire easily stirred to flame that blinds your children to your tenderness? What is it like not to be able to see the face of your wife or child crumple in pain when you lash out, not to know if faces are looking at you with pity or amusement, contempt or love? Not to see rolled eyes, conspiratorial glances, boredom? What dangers lurk underfoot or to each side, and who’s waiting to cheat the old blind guy out of his money, his wife, his kids?

I started working in our grocery store/vegetable market when I was about nine, smart enough to add numbers and make change but no match for two fast-talking con artists. They bought some trifle, then asked me to change a big bill. My dad listened suspiciously, following the transaction in his mind. They left, laughing no doubt, and dad counted the money in the till. We were, as he had suspected, twenty dollars short, a day’s profit in 1949.

Dennis was never a man to cater to other people’s tastes or opinions. He didn’t know or care much about propriety, so even if he hadn’t been blind, I doubt that he would have arranged his face to please those around him. But his letters and a few tender memories show me that he would have worked hard to please the people he loved; that he wouldn’t have deliberately hurt them; that the pain on their faces would have been reflected on his. But after many years of not seeing himself reflected in mirrors, windows, and other faces, I think my dad became invisible to himself. He didn’t remember to control the twitches, the bald gestures, the waves of thought and feeling breaking through to the surface. His naked face freed other people to be as thoughtlessly rude as children, who will gaze with fixed, open curiosity at physical disabilities. I watched normally guarded adults watching him, and hated them for their quizzical looks. If he’d been in a wheelchair like FDR or had had a hook hand or a beautiful red birthmark staining his face, they would have glanced quickly and looked away in embarrassment and compassion. But at my dad with his empty eyes, they could look their fill.

By the time I left home for good, he often stood at the windows of our grimy little store, staring into the darkness at all hours of the day, his face bitter. He cursed under his breath, not the exuberant, inventive workingman’s curses of his earlier years, but a bleak, dreary goddamning of his whole life.

Because blindness was an almost untouchable subject in our family, I needed to turn it over in my hands like a family treasure and do what I’ve always done: look to the wisdom of the language itself to see what it could teach me about my father’s life, my family’s life, and mine. I began with the deepest root.

It was a dazzling surprise to find that the Indo-European root of blind, thousands of years old, apparently means the opposite, its family as varied and colorful as my mother’s flowerbeds. That root—bhel—means to shine, flash, burn; shining white and various bright colors. Bhel bears on its branches beluga and blush, as well as blue and flamingo. It has a branch for blond, like my mother and sisters, their pale hair gleaming among the dark-haired German-Russians and Bohemians in our hometown. This linguistic tree is a flamboyant, so called in Haiti for its blazing umbrella of red-orange blooms. It is a conflagration which burns all this brilliance to black, for it bears on one twig the Germanic blakaz, burned; on another, the old High German blende: to blind,deceive; and on a third, the Old English blind, then as now, verb, noun, adjective, and adverb. The root and trunk of this linguistic tree suggest that there is as much light as there is darkness in being blind.

But the Old English blind apparently fell far from the trunk of its Indo-European tree. In its definitions, synonyms, connotations, and compound forms, there is no color, no refulgence or flamboyance, no playfulness, life, or growth. In the constellation of words surrounding it in the 1979 edition of Roger’s Thesaurus, there are only black holes whose inexorable gravity extinguishes all light. In blindness, or so the conventions of the English language say, there is neither light nor germinating darkness. To be blind is to be closed, drunk, undiscerning, insensible, unaware, unpersuadable, stupid, or reckless; a blinder is a pretext, a trick; someone wearing blinders is narrow-minded, a blind story has no point, and a blind hedge has no openings or passages for light.

This linguistic family tree and especially the metaphorical meanings blindness has accumulated over the centuries sent me looking for the worlds in which this story of my father unfolded. I turned to a useful book called The Timetables of History on the recommendation of poet and memoirist Carolyn Forche. In a memoir writing workshop, she asked us to research the time and place in which our slice of story occurred. I thought this was merely practical advice to help us find historically and geographically authentic details—who was secretary of state? What songs played incessantly on car radios? What was Joe McCarthy up to? When I looked up the years 1945, ’46, and ’47, I found much more than historical window dressing. I discovered a huge world whose existence I knew about only vaguely or not at all. For instance, I learned that in 1945 hundreds of Japanese-Americans were interned at Fort Lincoln, just ten miles east of Mandan. In 1946, the United Stated government offered the Indians of Fort Berthhold Reservation a few fistfuls of money in exchange for thousands of acres of rich river bottomland. It was an offer they were not free to refuse. In that year, the construction of the Garrison Dam began, to prevent the Missouri River from flooding people like my family who lived downstream. The discoveries kept coming. 1947 was the hundredth anniversary of Black ’47, the worst year of the Great Famine in Ireland, a disaster all four of my Irish great-grandparents survived. I found other worlds that intersected with ours: the world of the few black people who came into our grocery story in pre-civil rights United States; the world of visually impaired and otherwise disabled people; the world of the Catholic Church of the 1940s and ‘50s.

I began to understand the truth of William Zinsser’s assertion in Inventing the Truth that “a good memoir is also a work of history, catching a distinctive moment in the life of both a person and a society.” ((15)) I would go further. Good memoirs tell the story of the worlds in which the individual or familial life unfolded and critique those worlds and their hidden assumptions.

Elizabeth Kelly, my dad’s grandmother, brought retinitis pigmentosa with her from Ireland in the steerage compartment of an emigrant ship. That gene, or combination of genes, has wormed its way silently through six generations of our family. I think there’s also a familial or communal DNA that follows a twisting path from generation to generation. It manifests itself in our bodies, our thoughts and actions, our subconscious selves as well as in family and social patterns. I no longer think it’s possible to tell the story of a person or a family without also describing what Antonio Gramsci calls the “infinity of traces” history leaves on the psyche of every one of us. As Gramsci says.,“It is imperative at the outset to compile [. . .] an inventory” of history’s traces. ((Prison Notebooks 324)) So, I set out to trace those big worlds, well aware that historical accounts, too, are full of blind spots, whole blank areas drowned out by the floods of imperialism, colonization, and willed forgetting. As honest scholars admit, some information is lost forever. I hope these gaps and holes in my account will pull others into the conversation—in agreement, disagreement, correction, expansion—as I explore blindness in its many physical and cultural permutations.

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About Going Blind: Work in Progress
9 pages of a projected 200-page manuscript
by Mara Falukner, OSB

A few Januarys ago, I taught a course on the theory and practice of memoir. Because I like to write with my students in order to understand the difficulties they’re facing, I began my own memoir. Rather than being about my life, it’s about my father’s blindness as the central, unexamined fact of my family’s life. My father had retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic condition that blinded him, and will blind my sisters, my nephews, and me. But because blindness was a sort of family secret, an almost shameful one, I don’t understand it very well. The blind gene is in me too, so I thought it was about time I learned what I’ll soon need to know. That’s where this work began. But, like William Zinsser, I think that good memoirs are not only or even primarily about the life of one person or family; nor are they the revelation of trauma or the confession of personal sins. Good memoirs tell the story of the world in which the individual or familial life unfolded and critique that world and its hidden assumptions.

Guided by the dictionary, I began to explore the linguistic family tree of the English word blind, and its connotations, applications, and metaphorical meanings. Soon, this simple story of my father grew into a study of blindness in its many cultural permutations. I’ve drafted five long chapters and have outlined several more for this book-length memoir.

In one chapter, I map the links between my family, especially my father, and the Native Americans who lived around us in Mandan, North Dakota. Many of them were our friends and customers in my father’s store; yet, prejudice and ignorance blinded me, my family, and the white people of North Dakota to a devastating fact: our good luck and prosperity came as a result of the oppression of the Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa tribes.

In other chapters, I ask such questions as these, and offer my answers:

- In language, Jewish and Christian scriptures, and much of Western literature, there are dreadful links between blindness, darkness, blackness, and evil. How do these links affect the imaginations and self-esteem of blind people? How do they affect the way sighted people view and treat blind people? Is it possible to find gifts in all this darkness?

- How do social class, occupation, and gender affect the experience and mythology of blindness?

- What effect do media images have on people with physical disabilities? I’m especially interested in the fascination with “super-crips,” such as blind mountain climber Eric Weihenmayer, who scaled Mount Everest in 2001. Does this fascination with heroic feats expand or shrink the worlds of other disabled people?

- Do our cultural constructions of blindness, revealed in metaphors and synonyms, make the physical condition more disastrous than it already is? (Consider: blind spot, blind alley, blind side, blind fury, blind prejudice, the blind leading the blind.)

- Does blindness cancel imagination or open it wide? What does it do to the imaginative leap we call compassion?

The attached pages come from the Introduction. I’ve also mapped out several more chapters, including one on blind faith, one on the Americans with Disabilities Act and its effects on employment and other facets of the lives of blind people, and one on memoir and its appropriateness to this project.

You’re probably wondering how all of these ideas fit together. I wonder, too. One of my jobs will be to find or create a form capacious enough to hold everything I am determined to put into it. At the moment all I know are the two threads that meander through every chapter: my father’s blindness and his refusal to be reconciled to it and my family’s virtual silence about this black hole at the center of our lives.

I’ve really been preparing to write this book since I was a high school kid and began to think about the ways in which my family was different from our neighbors and the secrets people seemed to carry around inside themselves. I’ve worked piecemeal on the actual research and writing since 1998.

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Additional Poems
by Mara Faulkner, OSB

Autistic - 1
by Mara Faulkner, OSB

the palsied quadriplegic poet taps out on her computer keyboard
a message to the unchallenged children sitting
mute and motionless
in front of
video screens

damn you

who can walk
and run
and jump
and fall in a spray of arms and legs
and leap up again
jointed
mobile
quick

damn your agile tongues
that can argue swear
sing shout
im angry im sad
i want i want
fall silent
then leap again
defying gravity
into speech

how dare you
throw away
your bodys gawky grace
your tongues stumbling songs
and settle for
imagination
my prison

you in your virtual reality
you only think
you've
danced

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The Chain Saw Man
by Mara Faulkner, OSB

is the artist of our age.
He cuts down redwoods as ancient
and wrinkled as the world
and rainforests whose slow breathing
fills the lungs of black bears
four thousand miles to the north.
His hungry saw eats
dream birds--scarlet, azure, emerald--
whom no one has ever seen
nor will.
Their tongues cut out they call
like dead poets
from steaming piles of sawdust.
Thirty species a day of bird and mammal,
insect and reptile, flower and herb,
gone even from the compost heap of memory.

Who will come to take their place?

Only the creations of the chain saw man.
Masked, feet braced, muscles bunched to hold
the heavy saw
he makes wooden bears
from the hearts of felled trees.
Clumsy and still, there is in them
no shadow of swift black flanks
grown furry and supple
in northern woods.

He tries to carve birds
but the trees are gone and he can’t remember
their glancing flight.

To the artist’s bidding only
vultures come.
Hungry for gold
they wait for the carnage of the saw to end
their song the rasp of teeth in wood.

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Dear heart,
by Mara Faulkner, OSB

There where you lie curled in a thicket of bone
having learned the first lessons of life
after love--fear and camouflage--
come out now into the flickering light,
the pungency of clover and wild rose;
walk lightly through tall prairie grasses,
big and little bluestem,
penstamon and yarrow.

Come out into the open field
where the yellow finch rocks
on a black-eyed susan,
in danger
but singing,
blooming.

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The Last Laugh
by Mara Faulkner, OSB

Sarah then said, “God has given me cause to laugh--
and all who hear of it will laugh with me.” Gen 21:6

Sarah laughed once
they say
when the angel
told that joke
about her withered
womb sprouting
a son.

Turns out the angel
was right
as they always
were back then
and Sarah could silence
her rival’s taunting
once and for all--
no need now
to divide love or property
with Hagar’s bastard boy
needful only until God
and Abraham
did the impossible.

Abraham
who always seemed
to be doing something
awful
at somebody’s
bidding
brought Hagar
the news.

Did Sarah’s cackle
of triumph
follow Hagar
into the wilderness
with Ishmael on her back

or did her laughter
die as she caught a glimpse--
mother’s intuition

you might call it--
of Abraham
dragging his old bones
up the mountain
with his burden of belief
in a strange god hungry for sons
and the boy trailing behind
asking plaintively
“Abba, father, where is the lamb?”

_________________________________________

Trickle Down
by Mara Faulkner, OSB

If we the haves
unstint our children
festooning them with clothes
and toys doctors for body and mind
strawberries pineapple artichokes both in
and out of season books to be read both in
and out of utero schools both pre
and post both liberal and
free

if we pour on them love the deluge
of our most intense gaze our ears
tuned only to the ocean of their cries
surely our prodigality will spill over
as the economists say it must
the trickle swelling to a modest stream
flowing south to all the places
whose names are silent under the tongues
of the little running shoes
on our children’s feet

until it reaches Haiti
where a small girl lies
in the street outside the State University Hospital
all the workers out on strike
her calendar-page blanket marking time

Flies gather gaze into her open eyes
dark unweeping waiting.

_________________________________________

Muse Exclusive Interview with
Mara Faulkner, OSB

Full Name : Margaret Faulkner (legal name)

Title(s) : Associate professor of English, College of St. Benedict

Type of art you create : creative nonfiction/memoir/essays; poetry; literary criticism

Name and subject of favorite piece(s) you have created : Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen (a study of this wonderful writer’s work, in the context of her life and the history of the United States); Born of Common Hungers: Benedictine Women in Search of Connections (a photo-essay written with Annette Brophy, OSB, profiling six Benedictine communities around the world); Going Blind (the book I’m working on right now—about my father’s blindness, but also about blindness in its many physical, linguistic, and cultural permutations.)

Did you have to work at becoming an artist or did it come naturally? explain. I’ve always loved to write and had a flair for the music of sentences. But I’ve worked very hard to get better at it. Because each work I write is different from the ones that came before, I have to become a beginner over and over again. I’ve also taught writing most of my life; I try to put into practice the advice I give my students. For instance, I tell them that revising is writing, but that you can’t revise what you haven’t written. So, put something on the page. I was 42 and working on my PhD dissertation before I took that advice seriously. I’ve learned a lot from my students and my writing friends.

What was the first piece you created that made you realize you could be an artist? explain. My book on Tillie Olsen, for which I was able to find a publisher and some appreciative readers. That’s when I began to take myself seriously as a writer.

What do you get out of it? Clarity, courage, community, a bigger view of the world and of my responsibility to that world, a new set of questions

What do you hope people will take away from it? The same things

What makes your art unique? I’m not sure it is unique; that’s not something I aim for. What might make my writing somewhat different is that I’m a questioner. Also, my life has been different from that of many (most?) people in the U.S., because of my childhood and early life and my 40 years in a Benedictine monastery. I think that I see most things from an odd angle.

How has your art evolved over time? I wrote poetry, stories, and essays in high school and college. Then I began to teach high school and eventually college. The challenge of the job and the work load were so big I didn’t have the time or energy to write. I came to see myself as a non-writer, a used-to-be-writer. Then, after almost 20 years, when I was 42 and working on my PhD dissertation (and in despair about ever finishing it), I took a workshop with a wonderful teacher. An exercise she had us do shook something loose in me. Since that day, I’ve written and published 2 books and numerous articles; I’ve written about 100 poems and have published a few of them; and I’m hard at work on a third book, which I hope to finish this summer, with the help of the CMAB grant.

Where are you at now, in terms of your own evolution or growth? I don’t really know what lies ahead. Most of the changes in my writing just sort of appeared on the page, or came in response to someone else’s invitation. For instance, I wrote Born of Common Hungers because Sister Annette asked me to collaborate with her. I’d never even dreamed of writing a photo-essay. So, I don’t know what’s coming next, but I do have a sense of urgency—get the words on the page while there’s still time. I had cancer almost five years ago; in addition, I have the disease that blinded my dad. I know that I won’t always be able to see as I do now. Blind people can and do write books, but I’ll have to learn a new way to do it.

How did you get here? By plugging along and asking people I trust for good, honest criticism. I’m a slow but persistent worker.

What is the biggest obstacle you have had to overcome to get here? Lack of confidence and lack of time, and, sometimes (after a visit to Barnes and Noble) the sinking feeling that the world doesn’t need another book. I’m afraid that no one will read what I’m interested in writing because I’m too far out of the mainstream,

Where do you want to be? I’d like to finish writing and revising Going Blind and then turn to poetry again.

How do you plan to get there? Same as above—I’ll just keep at it until I get there.

Tell us about your life...

- where are you from? Mandan, North Dakota

- what impact did that have on your development as an artist and a person? I wrote this a while back: I became a writer partly because I grew up in the middle of North Dakota with its wheat fields, river bluffs, and endless skies. Summer days, smelling of alfalfa and clover, began with meadowlarks and ended after ten when the wide slow sunset faded. Winter days were brutally cold with shining, austerely carved drifts and an eloquent wind that howled at night around our house. What was a child to do with days and nights like those? Lucky enough to have no television and only the static of an old Philco radio, I filled the loneliness with books and music and stories I invented, sometimes dreaming alone in the abandoned chicken coop we called a play house and sometimes out loud with my brother and five sisters.

- an experience that molded you .... My father’s blindness, a family secret, made me a watcher, certain that other people’s lives also held secrets.

- who your role models were/are ...My parents were not writers, but my dad taught me to trust questions rather than answers, and my mother taught me to love and create useful beauty. Tillie Olsen became a writer herself when she realized that the lives and people she knew (working people, radicals) weren’t part of the literature of the Western world; she passed this advice on to me and many other writers. I admire good story-tellers, writers who use language in fresh ways, poets, essayists, and novelists who have a radical vision.

- your education and what you remember most / the most important lesson you've learned ... St. Joseph Grade School, Mandan High School, the College of St. Benedict, St. Cloud State University, the University of Minnesota. At each step along the way, I found a teacher who told me that I was a good writer. I try to pass that encouragement on to my students.

- something you learned the hard way ... Not to believe people who repeat the old clichés about creativity and writing: Write only what you know, if you don’t write all the time it means that you’re not a writer, nobody want to read depressing poems or stories, and for Heaven’s sake, stop writing about Bosnia and Somalia!

- when you are confronted with a challenge, how do you deal with it? (example) When I was trying to find a publisher for my two books, I sent out hundreds of inquiry letters and received almost as many rejections, many of them complimentary, but rejections nevertheless. I dealt with the rejections by sending out more letters to another round of publishers. I believed in the words on the page enough to think that they deserved readers.

- have you ever been rejected/discounted as an artist? (example) When I was working on my masters’s degree in literature, I tried to get into a creative writing class. I handed the teacher a couple of things I had written; he handed them back with the comment that they had some problems. Then he asked whether I wrote regularly. I said that teaching high school left me very little time to write. He said that if I was a real writer I’d have to write; I wouldn’t be able to help myself. Of course, that meant that I wasn’t a real writer. Unfortunately, I believed him and sank into almost ten more years of silence.

- how did you deal with it? As you can see, I didn’t deal with it well. But then I read Tillie Olsen’s book Silences, in which she explores the many circumstances that silence writers, especially women writers. I found myself in that book and, like many other people, also found the courage to become a writer again.

- your proudest moment as an artist ... Meeting Tillie Olsen and learning that she likes my book about her and her work; hanging two photo-essay exhibits based on Born of Common Hungers; writing poems for my family that they liked; taking part in poetry readings with my students

- something you think everyone should do at least once in their lifetime? Take a public stand on an issue they are deeply committed to; spend time in a developing country, not as a tourist; spend time with people who are in deep trouble—sickness, loss of a child, family troubles—not fixing things, but not looking away.

- something you want to try but haven't worked up the courage to yet? I want to work with other creative, courageous people to confront one of the many problems our world faces. For instance, in August, I’ll help build a Habitat for Humanity house at the invitation of one of my former students. I want to help change “what won’t let life be,” as Tillie Olsen says.

- something that scares you ...We’re destroying the natural world; we’re raising a generation of children around the world who have no childhood, no hope, no future; we keep fighting wars

- describe your ultimate relaxation technique? How do you unwind? I don’t unwind very often. It helps that I pray morning and evening with the community of women I live with. I also love to go on long walks and to work in my garden.

- where/when are you at your most creative? In the garden. At my writing desk, out of reach of e-mail and the phone, with a long day on my hands, so that I can write beyond what I think I know.

- where does your inspiration come from? The whole inner and outer world. I don’t want my world or my writing to be small and narrow. So, I try to keep my eyes and ears open. I also do a lot of research, even for the poems I write. I don’t know enough about any of the subject I’m interested in, and the research always surprises me

What kind of _____ do you connect with/respond to?
music: protest music from the ‘60s and ‘70s, chant, music from many countries (South Africa, for example), some blues, lots of classical music (I love the War Requiem.)
books/authors: early Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, Tillie Olsen, Mary Oliver, Frank McCourt, Marilynn Robinson’s Gilead, everything by Dickens, a thousand others!
visual art/artists: I love black and white photography (Ansell Adams, Annette Brophy), and photography that is socially concerned, such as Dorothea Lange’s.
food: I like to cook, especially food from my garden. I’m always trying new things.
exercise: cross-country skiing, if we ever get snow again; long walks; canoeing

What is the responsibility of an artist? It’s the same as the responsibility of every person: to create useful beauty; to use whatever gifts you’ve been given to ease poverty and hunger, to make peace, to keep children and women safe, to stop the destruction of the natural world.

How do you feel about censorship? Of course, I don’t want censorship. But I think that every artist is obliged to censor herself or himself. We’re responsible for our words or images and have to be attentive to how they affect our audience.

What do you love about ... the art community? In spite of the pervasive message that we should be making and spending money, fueling the economy, and promoting development whatever the cost, artists go on doing this apparently useless work, whether or not they ever make a dime from it. They do it because they love it.
the world? Its vastness and variedness; its beauty; its pain.

What would you change about the art community? I would ask artists, including myself, to be more radical.

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Additional Poems
by Ryan Kutter

He Slept That Night and Was Afraid
by Ryan Kutter

Tines clack in the baler's mouth,
lifting up rows
of molding grass, hay
cured too many days because of rain.

In the machine's metal frame
the hay is bound in dull bales
that rise on dull teeth
to the wagon behind.

A young man whose muscles swell
like uneven hills in a hay field
grasps twine bindings,
stacks bales in brickrows.

This morning he pulled
a writhing garter snake
from the first bale,
threw it angrily away.

Now he reaches, sees the extended
twitching foot of a rabbit,
feels kicking sinew
and finger-like bone.

He is a young man
and no magician.

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How To Eat Raspberries
by Ryan Kutter

You'll come at the canes
with the idea of gorging yourself,
swallowing this rare vision of plenty.
A beginner's mistake, but go ahead.

Sit down in the thorn of them,
grasp all the clusters you can reach
before turning over the leaves.
Turning over the leaves is very clever.

Some berries aren't quite ripe,
but as close to it
as you are to understanding anything.
Eat them with the others.

When your belly roils with uncertainty
sit back. Lay down, even if spiders and slugs
are in the grass, lay down. Next time
bring a bucket. Bring them home.

I've eaten berries this way for years.

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Roosting
by Ryan Kutter

Chickens gather beneath the low,
open branches of the cedar trees.

Their thin lids close at thoughts
of rest away from the foxes.

The moon shines in muddy
puddles beneath the trees.

There is one chicken staring into the night.

We are somewhere, waiting
in that black eye. Curled in a dark globe.

Our back, our body formed
against the thin wall of the cornea.

Outside, raccoons are moving,
descending the basswoods.

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Lesson in Anatomy
by Ryan Kutter

Bumblebees circle the purple blossoms

of the lilacs. Japanese

paper wings are rattling on thousands of black-

orange backs, winnowing

leaves from the thick soup of warmly poured

morning sun. We

stand apart, watching, hands jammed in pockets,

ears buzzing. Reaching out

for a cluster of blossoms is like

reaching your hand

into God's humming aorta.

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Shared Work with Neighbors
by Ryan Kutter

Home from the hospital
with my father's cobbled back,
he is numb with drugs
and disbelief.

The driveway is lined,
our corncrib circled
by a dozen orange-skinned,
yellow brimmed gravity-bins,
heaped as cups of manna.

We watch a disheveled tractor
turn in,
another load in tow,
followed by brother.

Begin to see, this
is the last of it. Last
of the field-hardened ears that we,
crippled, could not reap.

To owe your life
to an unshaven,
big-bellied drunk,
whose own farm is filled
with junked cars,
battered barns and sheds. This
is the last of it.

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Meadow Burn
by Ryan Kutter

He plucks a hollow nest from a boxelder sapling,
kindles it against an already lit match, knowing
how combustion clears away, liberates
integrity in the deep roots of grass.
When the meadow blazes
he sees a sparrow hawk over the untorched, upright stems
where he stands. The wide wingspan spurns the earth.
Wind twitches, catches the hawk,
incites the fire.
Smoke is thrown down his gullet,
he gasps
as a mouse plunges to the fencerow,
a refugee.
Ash-laden air thins his running blood,
he turns,
grasps a brittle blossom-stalk of mullin,
gracelessly lays
himself on the tindered ground.
His body, in a slow burn for eighty-seven summers,
is seared, sealed with molten skin.

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Transmission of Power
by Ryan Kutter

Cicadas hum the way
I want to live.
Imperative, overwhelming,
utterly unnoticeable.

Once I thought the buzz
was a gust of energy
in the electric lines;
an urgent rise and fade.

Now I look into high brush
for a spare black body
reverberating
with burnt intentions.

I bear myself into the gullet
of that thin, blind pitch.

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Vernal Pool
by Ryan Kutter

The racoons, too, died this winter.
Here, beneath the water's edge,
a murky eye gazes stiffly

as oils from inside leak
upward to a glossed
pool on the pond's surface.

Believe me, it isn't what it seems.
Underneath the blue-brown sheet
of spring melting--

All of that white rotted coat and ghostly broken skin.
The clouds are still white and inching
along, but beyond that, imagine

some heavily bolated body
distilling
yellowed oils into the blue.

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Stillborn
by Ryan Kutter

The fawn lay months, silent
under the sumac.

until its disguising white spots were worn
cleanly away.

Remember once you felt the same.

Don't look away from white bleached bone,
ebony hooves going gray.

Let your eyes slip
like a hand through narrow

strips of ribs; wrap meekly
around the violets that have grown.

Imagine those dark blossoms in the sockets
of the skull, pistil as an iris,

petals blinking like lashes.

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A Good Acorn Year
by Ryan Kutter

Unanswered questions of God

fall like raindrops.

I fill a satchel and store them

away in empty cupboards.

Through the winter I take one out each day,

turn my hands crack it,

stare for hours at the white flesh.

I eat unknowing,

while snow sifts through the driftless sky.

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Muse Exclusive Interview with
Ryan Kutter

Full Name : Ryan Paul Kutter

Type of art you create : Poetry, Woodwork

Did you have to work at becoming an artist or did it come naturally? I think being an artist is a natural outgrowth of being fully engaged in the world. It’s an expression of the questions and emotions that all humans have unless they close themselves off to the world. Most people have some active creative outlet, even if they don’t manifest it in words or objects. It may just have to do with the way one connects with others, an internal dialogue, or the care one takes in a garden or occupation. Formal art (visual, performance, writing) does have a special value in their manifestations… they can be put out into the world in dialogue. So, as a communicating artist… that has taken some work. There was always a part of me that was writing, trying to manifest my artistic dialogue. I did this so I could communicate with others, but also to extract something from myself so that I could see it better and be relieved, like pulling out a sliver that could barely be seen under the skin. The work of developing technique, through education and paying attention to other poets, has allowed me to be a more effective communicator, and has also allowed me to engage my emotions and thoughts in a more complicated and honest way.

What was the first piece you created that made you realize you could be an artist? I don’t know if I’ve accepted the title of artist. Creating art, expressions of ourselves and our relationships with others, seems so fundamental to any life. It’s a matter of trying to puzzle out questions of what it is to be human while creating something beautiful or meaningful to others. I can’t imagine not pursuing this, and it seems like creating art and sharing it is just one of the great perks of being human.

My first formal artistic pursuits outside of childhood focused on drawing and photography. I don’t know if I’ve had a tipping point for my artistic self-conception. It just feels so much better to write than to not.

What do you get out of your art? An antidote to existential angst. Also, I find that writing poetry allows me the opportunity to sort out emotions and connections I may not otherwise see. It’s also an opportunity to be honest with myself. As humans, we seem designed for self-deception. By creating a space in a poem I’m able to explore things that my superficial self would rather I didn’t. I’m not a visibly emotive person. Emotions, the universal human challenges of being half-rational and half instinctually reactive, can be pitfalls or sustenance depending on how we deal with them. At its best I find reading and writing poetry to be an exercise in compassion.

What do you hope people will take away from it? It depends on the specific poem. In some cases I’d like to comfort people, but in others I’d like them to be discomforted into a place where they can be more honest and more compassionate.

What makes your art unique? I’m very inspired by place, landscape and people, but I share that inspiration with many other local artists. Central Minnesota, the Midwest, is generally considered fairly homogonous. Not unique. However, I, like my place, am made up of many different borders between very real differences. I’ve had difficulty integrating into any one group or culture that exists in this place and culture, and I’ve grown to appreciate the vantage point and creative tension that comes from living in a border land.

How has your art evolved over time? My artistic technique changes through a process of education and attention to what I and others are doing with words. Evolution would better fit my artistic vision, muse, and imagination, which is much more nebulous. It’s been very rewarding to have a history of my consciousness in poems. I’m able to see themes in early poems that I’ve been able to grow out of, as well as themes and dwellings that are persistently in my work. Many of these themes I’m unable to identify until they’re outside of myself, on the page.

Where are you at now, in terms of your own evolution or growth? Off of the last question, I have a difficult time identifying where I am at the present moment. I’m better able to see a movement or trajectory in my past writing that gives me an approximation of where I am.

What is the biggest obstacle you have had to overcome to get here? I’ve been given an excellent education in poetic technique, and unwittingly have cultivated and maintained an imagination. My past and current obstacles involve self-discipline.

Where do you want to be? I’m in a good place now. I’d like to develop my ability to engage my background with the contemporary world. I’d also like to be able to discern how best to actually communicate with others. There is so much noise in our communications world, and in our minds these days, that I’m sometimes reluctant to add to the din.

How do you plan to get there? Self-discipline.

Tell us about your life...

- where are you from? Have lived in Saint Joseph for four years, originally from a farm between Saint Rosa and Grey Eagle.

- what impact did that have on your development as an artist and a person? Very influenced by inhuman things. The farm was mostly hills and wooded pasture, with lakes, swamps and streams. Also influenced by the personalities in local communities. It’s been said that people my age (and I’ve felt this) are on a generational cusp. I was able to connect to a much more traditional generation. By traditional, I am particularly referring to independent thinking and creativity that has always existed in traditional cultures. Small and isolated communities have depended on fewer people to fill more roles, and the best of those communities maintain a highly creative diversity.

I was also influenced by isolation and boredom. Physical isolation in a rural community allowed me to wander, to develop a sense of myself outside of dominant culture. Some of this isolation was self-imposed by a shy personality as a child. I feel like I need a certain amount of boredom to let my mind wander into poems, but I also have been influenced by the Protestant work ethic. I feel a little guilty allowing myself to become bored. Boredom allows me to drift into the sin of poetry, where I ask too many questions. I place a high value on boredom and isolation.

- an experience that molded you .... Seeing extreme virtue in people whose lives were a (usually self-created) mess. People are paradoxically complicated and simple.

- whom your role models were/are ... family, friends, Bill Watterson (cartoonist of Calvin and Hobbes… or maybe my role models were Calvin and Hobbes themselves).

- the most important lesson you've learned ... The most important part of writing is the process of criticism, from self and others.

- something you learned the hard way ... Wear gloves when cutting hot peppers.

- when you are confronted with a challenge, how do you deal with it? It depends on what kind of challenge of course, but most challenges ask something of our self confidence. I like small challenges, which can be approached like games. For big challenges I get broody, reserved, and try to sort out both the logic and the emotions of the situation.

- have you ever been rejected/discounted as an artist? I think I’ve been reluctant to attach my identity to the title of artist, probably both out of suspicion of my ego and a fear of being rejected.

- your proudest moment in life ... It’s bound to happen any day now.

- your proudest moment as an artist ... My college thesis defense, which involved poetry. I was able to go on about something I care deeply about in front of people I care deeply about.

- something you think everyone should do at least once in their lifetime? Nothing. Everyone should sit and do nothing. As Hobbes (of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip) said, “sometimes one should just look at things, and think about things, and not do anything.” That’s hard to do in our culture but it’s worth it.

- something you want to try but haven't worked up the courage to yet? A novel, or extended written work of some kind. Like most of my generation, and most people in this new world, I have too short of an attention span.

- something that scares you ... existentialism.

- describe your ultimate relaxation technique? How do you unwind? My best relaxation technique calls for some sort of manual labor followed by a beer and a book. If I had my choice I would take a nap every afternoon.

- where/when are you at your most creative? When I’m bored. Right after, or during, a midday nap.

- where does your inspiration come from? Compassion.

What kind of _____ do you connect with/respond to?
music: Unsentimental folk music. Jazz, “roots” music.
entertainment: Books. Gardening. I like foreign films and some American classics, which have ideas and techniques that I’m either unfamiliar with or that haven’t been recycled to death or simplified by industrial producers.
books/authors: Bill Watterson, Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, Mary Oliver, Hafiz. Epics, particularly Gilgamesh and Beowulf.
visual art/artists: The photography of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison. Artists that negotiate light and dark themes simultaneously, of which there are so many that are excellent.
food: Swiss Chard, garbanzo beans, watermelon
exercise: Walking, swimming

What is the responsibility of an artist? To ask and try to answer questions that don’t have clear answers. To communicate that experience to others.

How do you feel about censorship? The biggest censorship problem we have today is self-censorship. With so many specialized media outlets people can more easily isolate themselves from ideas and emotions they disagree with.

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Muse Exclusive Interview with
Marshall Brewer

Full Name : Marshall Brewer

Type of art you create : Functional Custom Furniture

Name and subject of favorite piece(s) you have created : Talon Table Series

Did you have to work at becoming an artist or did it come naturally? I had to work to become the craftsperson who could execute what I envisioned

What was the first piece you created that made you realize you could be an artist? explain. Carved hard maple cane It was a project that challenged my abilities as a carver and my ability to design and then execute what I envisioned

What do you get out of it? Rewarding profession

What do you hope people will take away from it? Apiece of furniture they will enjoy and use. They can also hand down to their kids and their grandkids.

What makes your art unique? My commisioned pieces are tailored to each client. My speculative pieces are one of a kind or limited production pieces.

How has your art evolved over time My skills as a woodworker are continuing to improve and my eye has improved.

Where are you at now, in terms of your own evolution or growth? Far from mature

How did you get here? My wife works at St Cloud State

What is the biggest obstacle you have had to overcome to get here? Keeping my business running

Tell us about your life...

- where are you from? East Tennessee

- what impact did that have on your development as an artist and a person? A huge impact. I grew up on a mountain with a state forrest in our backyard.

- whom your role models were/are ... Sam Maloof

- the most important lesson you've learned ... Listen to that little voice inside that says you are about to do something stupid

- when you are confronted with a challenge, how do you deal with it? (example) I weed or shovel snow depending on season

- have you ever been rejected/discounted as an artist? (example) Yes Many times when I apply to art fairs and am rejected

- how did you deal with it? It happens

- your proudest moment in life ... Birth of a son

- your proudest moment as an artist .. Sale of a speculative piece. This is a piece that is built by me with no client in mind. It is a very tough thing to do becuase it is a gamble. When they sell it means that this piece resonated with someone.

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Muse Exclusive Interview with
James Loso

Full Name : James A. Loso

Title(s) : Teacher/Potter

Type of art you create : Decorative porcelain and raku pottery

Name and subject of favorite piece(s) you have created : No names, but the favorite pieces I enjoy making are porcelain pieces with added copper mica, gold leaf, and sometimes gemstones.

Did you have to work at becoming an artist or did it come naturally? I’ve always had a strong desire to create new pieces, even as a small child, but I’m always working on different pieces and my work has evolved over the years.

What was the first piece you created that made you realize you could be an artist? Drawings in grade school

What do you get out of it? A sense of satisfaction in creating something.

What do you hope people will take away from it? an appreciation of the manipulation of materials and skill

What makes your art unique? I use multiple materials on one piece, and my pottery has surface carving and added embellishments.

How has your art evolved over time? From functional simple stoneware pieces to highly decorative porcelain and raku items.

Where are you at now, in terms of your own evolution or growth? I’m constantly searching for new design techniques and experimenting with surface decoration and glazes and materials.

How did you get here? Formal education at SCSU in print-making and pottery. I’ve taught pottery and design for over thirty-five years and have attended numerous workshops over the years. Conducting workshops has also led to growth in my field.

What is the biggest obstacle you have had to overcome to get here? Time! Too many ideas; not enough time!

Where do you want to be? on a beach in Florida--dreaming up new designs for my pottery!

How do you plan to get there? I haven’t decided yet if I should drive or fly!

Tell us about your life...

- where are you from? Surprise! St. Joseph, MN

- what impact did that have on your development as an artist and a person? it has kept me grounded over the years

- an experience that molded you .... After graduating and working in a field that didn’t provide any stimulation for me (sales), I realized that I needed to work in an area where I could enjoy the creative process and see the steps through in their progression to a final product. That gives me great satisfaction.

- whom your role models were/are ... Gail Christensen, a nationally acclaimed potter whom I was lucky enough to spend some time with in her studio working with her.

- the most important lesson you've learned ... “Take what I have learned and make it my own!”

- something you learned the hard way ... “I can’t do it all!”

- when you are confronted with a challenge, how do you deal with it? I have found that a NAP always does wonders for solving a problem! I always have a different outlook on something after a twenty minute power nap!

- have you ever been rejected/discounted as an artist? Absolutely! Anyone who has ever been through a jury process for show acceptance has suffered rejection. A lot of soul-searching goes on, questioning, hand-wringing, and then you accept it and move on. It makes a person stronger.

- your proudest moment in life ... When my son, who is now in his mid-twenties, decided as a senior in high school to take a pottery class. After pretending to know nothing about pottery for the first 17 years of his life, he sat down at the wheel and threw pottery like he’d done it his whole life. Now, HE’S a natural!

- your proudest moment as an artist ... Actually, as a teaching artist, to witness some of my students choose to go on after high school to pursue something in the art field makes me very proud. I hope I’ve had an impact on them and that they’ll be successful in an art career.

- something you think everyone should do at least once in their lifetime? experience the feeling of clay spinning through their hands on a wheel.

- something you want to try but haven't worked up the courage to yet? I’d like to learn how to weld metal!

- something that scares you ... The day that I no longer have the strength, ability or concentration to sit at a potter’s wheel.

- How do you unwind? Taking a nap on my air mattress in the middle of the swimming pool.

- where/when are you at your most creative? early morning in my studio

- where does your inspiration come from? Absolutely everything around me!

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