Creative Thresholds

by Melissa D. Johnston

It’s not often you’re able to get the story behind a groundbreaking collaborative artistic project, so when I got the chance to interview the artists behind “Year of Glad,” I immediately took it. “Year of Glad,” which premieres this Saturday, April 16, at Roosevelt University in Chicago, is a song cycle composed by Patrick Greene for the coloratura soprano Joelle Kross, inspired by poet Jenni B. Baker’s Erasing Infinite poems. Baker’s poems, which also provide the lyrics for “Year of Glad,” are poems formed by erasing words from each page of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.  (Jenni shared her project to Creative Thresholds readers in 2014 with “Erasing Infinite Jest: Five Poetic Approaches.”)  The spirit of Wallace suffuses “Year of Glad” and the process of its creation.

Patrick, Joelle, and Jenni give a rich account of what it means to be an artist working with other artists in today’s world.  They speak of the value and freedom that constraint can bring to the act of creation, the role of love and grief in art, the joy and excitement of collaboration, the challenge and fecundity of working in many genres/media, and what inspires them in the work of David Foster Wallace. They have inspiring and wise words for all of us who hunger to create and especially for those of us who long to create with others.

Update May 13, 2016: Here is the live recording from the premiere:

Tell us about your journey as an artist. Who or what influenced you the most? What provides your primary source of inspiration? What aspirations do you have for the future?

PATRICK: I didn’t start “seriously” composing until I was in college; prior to that, I was primarily a singer: boy soprano, musical-theater tenor, rock-band frontman, etc. In the spring of my first undergraduate year, I heard a visiting string quartet perform Maurice Ravel’s Quartet in F Major, and the thing seriously changed my life. I’ve been writing music ever since.

I’ve always drawn inspiration from a variety of sources; poetry’s one of my favorites. I’ve set texts by Eliot, Ammons, Crane, Poe, Cummings, Sappho, you name it. Until last year, however, I (somehow) hadn’t worked with a living poet. That changed when I collaborated with W. S. Di Piero on Come Soon, You Feral Cats, a setting of poems from his recent Tombo (McSweeney’s). It was a tremendously edifying, enjoyable process, and led me to seek out a living poet for my next text-setting project – Jenni Baker.

David Foster Wallace has influenced me just as deeply as any composer. My first reading of Infinite Jest was a transformative experience, and it’s stayed with me in a very deep place ever since. I think eclecticism is a fundamental part of my aesthetic; we’re lucky to exist in a time characterized by the dissolving of barriers, and I try to incorporate that into my music wherever I can. One of the reasons I enjoy reading his work is that I feel like we share stylistic priorities: to be complex yet sincere; to be elevated yet vernacular; to be formally playful yet structurally rigorous. He’s definitely emboldened me to compose in a way that feels honest.

My chief aspiration is to continue to collaborate with interesting people on worthwhile projects, and to find new ways of challenging myself to stay artistically relevant while creating a diverse, non-duplicative body of work.

JOELLE: I started in musical theatre and choirs in elementary school and went to college for acting with minors in voice and French. But as I had more classical voice instruction and sang in opera ensembles, I began to realize that was where I wanted to be. It’s so much more comfortable in my voice, and my vocal and character types match a lot better in opera than musical theatre. The big moment was when I was studying abroad in London and joined the London Philharmonic Choir for a performance of Mahler’s Resurrection symphony and just knew classical music was it.

My inspiration comes first from the gorgeous music I get to sing and hear all the time. I’ve been especially lucky over the last year and a half to be back in grad school and surrounded by inspiration from the music, my amazing colleagues, and the incredible teachers I’m studying with.

Aspirations for the future is a timely question, since I graduate in a month! I hope to someday make my entire living from only singing. I’m not terribly picky about what form that takes – opera, concerts, choral, weddings, whatever. I may try the sort of “standard” track of getting into a young artist program apprenticeship with an opera company, then get into a better one, then get into an even better one, then “have a career,” but maybe not. A European audition tour may also be on the horizon; they have smaller opera houses there and tend to favor lighter voices like mine.

JENNI: Over time, I’ve come to discover that, for me, writing under constraint leads to greater creativity. The constraint can take various shapes – you can limit yourself to text written by others, to a specific source text, to specific letters of the alphabet, to specific concepts, to specific forms, and so on. In Erasing Infinite, I constrain myself to a single page at a time from a single source text using a single procedure (erasure). In other work, I’ve experimented with constraints made popular by the Oulipo group and played around with more conceptual approaches – for example, pulling out phrases from a podcast transcript that start with the same words –  to craft a piece. I’m always looking for new source texts and new approaches to try.

There are a lot of people dipping their toes into the experimental writing field right now. It’s easy to write under an easy constraint, and this is alluring to both writers and publishers. I’m inspired by the obsessives, the writer who construct difficult mazes they must compose their way out of. Christian Bök spent seven years writing Eunoia, a book composed of chapters written entirely of words with single vowels. Doug Nufer wrote a 200 page novel, Never Again, where he never repeats a single word. I admire that kind of focus, that singular pursuit.

I’m also very interested in how writers are leveraging the Internet to do new things with their work. I love the poetry bots, the hypertexts. Look at the companion website to Collier Nogues’ The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground. Cool, right? I want to do more in this space.  

 What’s the story behind “Year of Glad?” How did it originate and what did the creative process look like for each of you?

JENNI: I began work on Erasing Infinite in late 2013 as an act of homage to Wallace, posting the poems as I completed them on the project’s website. All along, I hoped the project would have additional incarnations – I could see, for example, a book length manuscript, a gallery exhibit of selected prints, and erasure poetry workshops. I can truthfully say that the idea of a musical interpretation of the work never crossed my mind! In early 2015, I received an email from Patrick, proposing the idea, and I loved it from the beginning. My job at that point was to just say “yes,” and step back to allow Patrick the space for his own creative work and interpretation.  

PATRICK: Joelle mentioned that she’d like me to compose something for her recital, and I immediately said “yes” – she’s a dear friend and a terrific artist, and this project would give me a great excuse to visit Chicago. We agreed to keep our eyes open for texts to set.

Then, a few months later (March 2015, I believe), one of the DFW websites I frequent (The Howling Fantods) posted one of Jenni’s poems (“No More,” from p. 222) to Facebook. It was perfect. It “worked” as a poem on its own merits, and yet it refracted the text of this book that’d meant so much to me for so many years and afforded me the rare opportunity to look at it from a different angle. I contacted Jenni, who was extremely nice about the whole thing; ran it by Joelle, who was game enough to literally read the whole novel before her recital; and set about developing a form that I thought would work.

I think I’m inherently a narrative-driven artist, for better or worse. Even if the story isn’t immediately graspable to the audience – even if it’s just something implicit, something only I know about it – it helps me to channel my ideas and energies in the direction of communicating something. Since there’s this grand tradition of soprano-and-piano song cycles (epitomized by the German lieder of the nineteenth century), I thought it’d be fun to take this thoroughly modern material (new poetry from a relatively new work of literature set to music written in 2015-16) and stretch it over a traditional framework. So then the challenge was culling down the, like, 150 poems that I wanted to set to a manageable assemblage that’d fit into the fifteen minutes allotted to the project in Joelle’s recital.

Then it became a matter of following the flows of the poems and seeing what they wanted to sound like as music. I looked for moments of thematic crossovers and elisions, and tied them together with motivic tools that served to make the whole thing feel like a single, unified piece.

Joelle was instrumental in all of this, of course; she was workshopping much of it as I was writing it, so I was able to guide the piece based on her (very helpful) feedback.

JOELLE: I met Patrick through his wife Micah several years ago when we were auditioning and performing together in Boston – I was actually one of their bridesmaids and now I am proud to call myself the crazy spinster aunt of their son Jude, who is the coolest 2-year-old in the world. I’ve always loved Patrick’s compositions, especially his vocal writing. As I was starting my grad program I asked him if he’d be interested in composing something for my masters recital. A few months later, I got an excited 6 a.m. text from him – he had found Jenni’s poems and wanted to set them! I immediately started reading Infinite Jest with the hope of actually finishing it before the recital, and I’m proud to say I finished it just two weeks ago!

Since I sing a lot of music that was written about 150 to 300 years ago, having the chance to be involved in the actual creation of a work, as opposed to more the interpretation of it, was really exciting. Patrick knows me the person and me the voice (as a singer, it is often extremely difficult to separate the two!) really well. Then we were also in pretty constant communication about how the work was shaping up – from basic things like how long it needed to be to satisfy the recital requirement, or how tired I was going to be by the time I sing it, to more exciting discussions about finding the musical and dramatic arcs. He also asked me to pick one of Jenni’s poems for one of the central movements. And then as I worked on it, primarily with my coach, then voice teacher, then recital accompanist, I would circle back with Patrick about things like an easier way to set the text or a better place to breathe.

I find it funny to think about how music scholarship and research will change as the technology of primary sources changes. Like someday on the music library shelf next to “Collected Letters of Strauss and Hofmannsthal 1900-1916” or whatever, you’ll see “Selected Emails, Texts, and Blog Posts of Patrick Greene”. But that’s how this piece was created!

In an interview with Larry McCaffery in the “Review of Contemporary Fiction” (and as Jenni points out in an interview), David Foster Wallace says, “Fiction’s about what it is to be fucking human.” Is there an aspect of being human that you especially connect with in Infinite Jest? Do you believe that what Wallace says about fiction here applies to your own practice of art?

JOELLE: Absolutely. I was on a train on Christmas Day when I read the passage about American society treating anhedonia as “hip and cool,” in opposition and in fear of and in secret longing for the messiness of actually being human. I gasped and flailed at my boyfriend next to me and made him take out his earbuds and read it too. I think Wallace got it absolutely right, and I love that Patrick has updated the emotional arc of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -Leben to include some more of that messiness. It’s one of the things I love about being a musician and a singer specifically – the human voice moves people in such a unique way among the instruments. I always try to honor the very human impulse to connect and tell stories when I sing, and not just stand onstage and make pretty sounds.

PATRICK: Going off of what Joelle said: DFW’s greatest influence on me, personally, is his taking a very strong stand against the very dark, anhedonic forces that are constantly beckoning to us. It’s so much easier to just not give a shit, you know? It’s so much simpler to live stuck in your “default settings” (as DFW beautifully articulated in This Is Water); it’s a lot easier – and sometimes a lot sexier – to just sort of assume you’re right, and that the world’s actually a pretty simple place. And the path to that sort of mindset is paved in denying yourself human, deep experiences. In Infinite Jest specifically, every one of the main (and semi-main) characters is a fully fleshed-out person. They are complex and mercurial, and they aren’t what they appear to be on their surfaces. And that’s the way we all are, right? And if we’re aware of each other’s complexities, we’re suddenly treating each other like human beings. We’re a little bit less alone.

JENNI: At the root of Wallace’s comment about “what it is to be a fucking human being” is this understanding that we are all multidimensional and complex human beings. Infinite Jest is a book about the search for happiness, and all of the sadness and self-questioning that goes along with that quest. It follows characters who alternately embrace and reject the entertainments and addictions (and addictions to entertainment) that promise relief from that sadness and self-questioning.

I think the people who really connect to Wallace (myself included) do so because they recognize these struggles in themselves. Which is not to say we’re all sad, depressed people – there’s a difference between realizing your struggles and being consumed by them. When I’m sad or anxious, I can spend an entire day sitting in the movie theater or lying on the couch binge watching entire series of shows on Netflix. Now, I’m self-aware enough to know these activities are distractions, attempts to deactivate the think, but I can still connect with the characters in the book who lack that awareness and take their entertainments too far.

Some of my poetry certainly addresses human emotions and experiences, though I wouldn’t necessarily call that my purpose or aim. If something I write makes someone think, “Yes! I feel that way too!,” that’s certainly great. But I also embrace the practice playing with language and form for its own sake. Maybe Wallace would say I’m not creating real “art,” but I’m okay with that.  

Especially for our readers who don’t know the work of David Foster Wallace or Infinite Jest, could you share the reason you chose the title “Year of Glad?”

JENNI: In Infinite Jest, Wallace conceives of a future with “subsidized time,” where corporations sponsor the year. Gone is our numerical way of numbering the years, and instead we get years like “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment” and “Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken.” Each year, the Statue of Liberty gets new accoutrements to reflect that year’s sponsor (including a giant diaper in YDAU). In the book, “Year of Glad” literally refers to the year subsidized by Glad, maker of sandwich and trash bags. It’s the first chapter of Infinite Jest and the last, sequentially, in the novel’s timeline. But it has a nice figurative ring to it, doesn’t it? A “year of glad” — who doesn’t want one of those?

PATRICK:  Exactly! I’ve always found the idea of “subsidized time” sort of hilarious, and Year of Glad in Infinite Jest is something of an annus mirabilis. Also, I’m just immensely grateful this whole shebang materialized in the first place.

JOELLE: I was just sort of along for the ride on this one! I didn’t address it in my program notes either. I kind of like that the title will mean different things to my audience whether or not they are familiar with the novel.

In “Year of Glad,” each of you has worked within a set of constraints as an artist—not just because it’s a collaboration but also because the nature of the work is cumulative. Each artist works within the framework(s) provided by the artist(s) before. How did you negotiate artistic freedom and creativity in relationship to the project?

JENNI: Every piece of creative work has its influences, its inspirations. With “Year of Glad,” our lineages and connections are just more exposed. I go back to what I said earlier about finding creativity in constraint – that’s so clear here with this collaboration. We were each handed something to work with, and used our own talents (writing, composing and performing) to interpret it and make it new.

Turning Infinite Jest into poetry is both an easy and challenging task. It’s easy in that the book contains a plethora of characters and voices to work with. It contains great varieties of of dialogue and description. The palette is large, so to speak. At the same time, David Foster Wallace is “Saint Dave” for many, and Infinite Jest a holy text. If I’m going to create poetry from it — an act in and of itself that some see as sacrilege — it can’t just be a poetic retelling of the book. Nobody wants to read that. So there’s a challenge to do something that’s more authentic to my experience and my voice as a poet.

As far as our “Year of Glad” work goes, I trusted Patrick to incorporate the poems into his composition as he saw fit and didn’t try to exact any influence that front. To put it another way: I wouldn’t have wanted Wallace (if he were alive) to be directing or setting parameters on what I create from Infinite Jest. So I wanted to extend Patrick that same freedom and courtesy.

PATRICK: I’m definitely in the Jenni camp on this front: I really love working within very specific constraints. Knowing there’s a “before” – Jenni’s poetry – and an “after” – Joelle’s premiere – took a ton of pressure off. I knew exactly where I fit in, and I felt relatively free to take my portion of things in whatever direction it wanted to go. I just knew that I had to completely respect two things: the words and the performance needs.

JOELLE: Being a singer and an actor for me can sometimes feel a little divorced from the creative process – I’m not actually writing the words or the music, or even with some directors, really creating my own physical or vocal interpretation of a character (I do not like those directors). As I’ve prepared this piece, and all the other music on my recital, I’ve tried to keep in mind that the singer’s interpretation is the extra dimension that gets the words and music off the page. Patrick’s score is beautifully designed, but this piece wants to be heard! It also feels empowering to know that Patrick trusts me as an artist and supports the interpretive choices I’ve made. And though he wrote it with my voice in mind, the next person who sings it will create an entirely different performance, because she will connect with it in her own unique way.

“Year of Glad” originated with Jenni’s erasure poetry, which was meant to be a celebration and tribute to the life of David Foster Wallace in the wake of his death. The structure of “Year of Glad” mirrors Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und –leben, a song cycle about love that ends with death and mourning. Do you believe “Year of Glad” as a whole is one of both love and mourning? Can creativity function as a practice of both?

PATRICK: Year of Glad is an ode to living life boldly and bravely. The final movement – which took literally, like, four times as long to compose as any of the others – is an exhortation of sorts: she is telling the audience, as an old woman (the piece progresses chronologically, a la Frauenliebe), what she’s learned. And what she’s learned is that a loss can be a beautiful thing, because it means you’ve found something in the first place. She’s saying we should get off our asses and trust that we’ll figure it out.

JOELLE: I think both love and mourning, which really is another form of love, are so central to the human experience that it’s tough to create something that is not related in some way to one or the other. When I think about my whole recital program, which is 60 minutes of music by six composers in four languages spanning four centuries, it’s all there – love of God, a lament for a departed loved one, maternal love, love of nature, nostalgia for a lost homeland, and above all, love of love itself. And while Schumann’s cycle ends in mourning, Patrick’s final movement pretty joyfully transcends it and celebrates a love that was worth it.

JENNI: I think Joelle has it right when she says that mourning is another form of love.  After Wallace’s passing, McSweeney’s put together a collection of reflections from those who knew him and who were impacted by his work, called “Memories of David Foster Wallace.” Read through that page: it’s all love. Also, isn’t the majority of art — in all its iterations —  about either loving a person, place or thing, or missing that person, place or thing? You love somebody, you miss somebody. You love that mountain outside your window, you reminisce about the time when you had a mountain outside your window. (You get the point.)  Indifference and ambivalence aren’t very good instigators for art.  

Do you have any words of wisdom for artists who want to collaborate?

JOELLE: I don’t think you can be an artist and not collaborate. The 19th century Romantic solitary genius Artist, if it ever really was a thing, is over. Contemporary lives are so connected. I think it’s really important to know yourself first – how you like to work, what you bring to the table and what your weaknesses are. Then try to find other artists who complement that, figure out what you want to say, and do it! I also have to echo Jenni’s sentiment of saying yes. Since moving to Chicago I’ve really tried to embrace the pervasive “yes and” spirit that comes from the huge improv scene here. I’ve found it a really fulfilling way to make art and to live in general.

JENNI: You’ve got to find your creative kindred. Find the people who want to make cool stuff more than they want to make money. If someone wants to charge you to use their work, or you’re charging someone to use theirs, it’s not a collaboration – it’s a business transaction.

Good collaborations should raise all boats, with everyone involved standing to benefit equally from the exchange. Patrick, Joelle and I are at relatively similar points in our respective careers, which helps. Nobody is in a position of power over another. Everybody’s intentions are good. We share in any publicity and, most of all, get to put something new out into the world. It works from all angles.

Ultimately, if you want to collaborate with people, ask. How many awesome projects go undone because one party was afraid to ask the other? Oh, and if people ask you to collaborate, say yes.

PATRICK: My best piece of advice is just do it. There is nothing to be lost in trying. If you stumble across something on the internet that hits you the right way, send that email. The worst thing that can happen – and I really mean this – is that the person who’s inspired you can’t take on the project, but is left knowing that his or her work touched somebody. The best thing that can happen is Year of Glad.

The creative world is simultaneously larger and smaller than it’s ever been. There are more artists alive and working today than have ever existed at any point in time in the history of our species, and yet we’re all just a few keystrokes away from each other. It’s amazing! And we can all complain endlessly about how the system isn’t set up to support us, but in some very tangible ways we’re actually more empowered than we’ve ever been to create awesome, lasting, relevant, multivariate art that can come together to change the world.

But these things don’t happen unless we harness the fact that we’re all out there to begin with. So just ask. Reach across that electronic threshold and make a human connection.

Thank you so much, Jenni, Patrick, and Joelle! 

Jenni B. Baker is a poet and editor based in Bethesda, MD. She is the founder and editor-in-chief ofThe Found Poetry Review, a literary journal that publishes experimental forms of poetry including found, erasure, constraint-based and conceptual pieces. In her multi-year project, Erasing Infinite, she creates poems via erasure from David Foster Wallace’s 1,076-page text, Infinite Jest, one page at a time. Her chapbook, Comings / Goings, a collection of poems generated by applying Oulipian constrained writing techniques to Washington Post articles, was released in 2015. Her poetry has been featured in journals such as DIAGRAM, BOAAT, Quarterly West, Washington Square andLunch Ticket. For more information, stop by her website or follow her on Twitter.

A composer, singer, and sound designer, Patrick Greene (b. 1985) is a rising artist in the world of contemporary art music.

Hailed by The New York Times as a composer of “enticing” works, Mr. Greene’s music has been described as “shimmering” (New Music Box), “unearthly” (The New York Times), and constructed with “true musicality” (Boston Musical Intelligencer). Recent engagements include performances by Boston Musica Viva, the Atlanta Chamber Players, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, loadbang ensemble, Christopher Houlihan, Transient Canvas, Balletik Duo, and many others.

His theatrical sound design has been called “disturbingly real” and “memorable” (ArtsImpulse). Recent design projects include the Boston premiere of Cassie Seinuk’s Eyes Shut. Door Open. (Wax Wings Productions) and D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls (Flat Earth Theatre).

Patrick’s abstractEXTRACTION won the 2010 Rapido! New England Competition (and took the Audience Prize at National Finals in 2011). In 2014, he was Guest Composer at the inaugural Birmingham New Music Festival, and, in 2015, his My Dearest Friend earned a C7Prize as a “Recommended Work.” Most recently, the St. Botolph Club Foundation selected Patrick for the 2015 Emerging Artist Award.

Mr. Greene earned his MM degree in Composition from The Boston Conservatory in May 2010, where he studied with Andy Vores and Dalit Warshaw. He graduated with a BA in Music from Trinity College in 2007, as a student of Gerald Moshell, Douglas Bruce Johnson, and John Rose.

Patrick is a member of the Society for Music Theory, the American Composers’ Forum, CompositionToday.com, and the Society of Composers, Inc. He is also a founding member of the Fifth Floor Collective and the Equilibrium Concert Series.

He lives with his wife (the actress Micah Greene) and son in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where he serves on the town’s Cultural Council.

by Daniel Boscaljon
Image by Melissa D. Johnston

“XX x” is the last letter in a series of posts called Letters to You written by Daniel Boscaljon with images by Melissa D. Johnston (from one of her ongoing projects). Letters to You began last July with “everytime i write i feel myself disintegrate.”

i see that you are hurting and in so much pain and i want to carry it for you so that you no longer have to, and so i take it from you and put your burden on my own shoulders but it truly is heavy and i decide that i simply want to cross it out and eliminate it all so that it simply doesn’t exist any more and that way we will both be relieved.  because afterall we’re friends and this is what a good friend would do.  and so i stretch inside to your pain that has become my pain and i cross it out and when i do it also crosses out all of my pain and it all is gone and disappears and all that’s left in its place is an X where the pain used to be and it is kind of like a scar but it doesn’t hurt.  and then i look at you and look at us and we can be happy together because our burden is eased and we are joined by the same X which unites us together. and then i look at the world and i see the suffering of so many others, the sadness in the eyes of the mothers with their hungry children, and the sadness of those who no longer believe in love and the sadness of the old women who pine for yesterdays which even they have forgotten and the suffering of those who require their daily bread and the sufferings of those from whom so much has been stolen, and i want to help them too and so i attempt to relieve them, too, from their burdens of sadness.  and i take it all up and i want to cross it out with a big X, the kind that they used to show the kitties in kiddy cartoons were dead, all the dying characters with Xs…i want to X out suffering.  and so i take it all into me and i become a gaping mouth opening to swallow all of the pains of the world and i do it and then i X it all out. and then i see so much injustice in the world, and so many lies and so much deceit and i want to X that out, too.  if i could croxx out all of the lies then everyone could know the truth of reality, and then there would be lexx suffering than what i see all before me now.  and then if that didn’t work then i could XX out my own eyes and so i couldn’t see it that way and then i could go to the whole world and i could xx it all out and XX out everything and anyxhing and then there would be peace. but i need to sxart with you because the firxt time didn’t work as well and so i move to x out all your pain and i try to take it from you and then i realize there’s so much txat’s rooted in your past and so i feel bad but i decide to xx out all of your paxt and all your painxul memories and take them all and x them out.  and then you lxxk at me with sadxess in your eyxs and i realize that you lost something with that but there’s always a saxrifixe and we both know that and then because we’re friends and i want to show you that you are not alone i x out my past too. and then we’re the same and it’s okay, and so i keep xing out the world bexause there’s a joy in annihilation and yxu and i are all turning into Xs and i see the sadness of the youxg bxys but with an XXXXXXX then all becxmes okay and they’re nxt sad anyxore and there where sxdness was is just more xXXXXXXXX and noboxy gets sad with XXXXXXXXX. and i see the whole world before me and i have the power to XXXX and my blood bxrns with the xXXs and then more and mxre and mxrx then there’s nothing but the xXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXx
and mxxx and xxxx and then i realize that i’ve just XXXXXXXXXXXXX oxer sxmxne’s hapxy mxmory and then i laxgh so they can laxgh to and then they cxn stxrt to x it all out and fill the wxrld with the xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx bxt thxn i see that the xxxxxxxxxx is just a cover too and thxt if pxxple see xxxx thxy cxn rxmxmbxr thx pxin bxt i knxw thxt i cxn jxst         the wxrld and thxt     blxnks and thxt       cxn fxrget if thxre’s no x to mxrk thx spxt and so thxn     axd i go

Daniel Boscaljon has Ph.D.s in Modern Religious Thought and 19th-century American Literature, both from the University of Iowa. His interest is in the fragility and liminality of human experiences. His first book, Vigilant Faith: Passionate Agnosticism in the Secular World was published by the University of Virginia Press this past August.

By Daniel Boscaljon
Images by Melissa D. Johnston

“everytime i write i feel myself disintegrate” is the first letter in a series of posts called Letters to You written by Daniel Boscaljon. His writing is joined by images from an ongoing project by Melissa D. Johnston that incorporates similar themes from a different perspective. We hope the two create an interesting dialogue for the reader/viewer.

i write to you here partly because i know that you will not read it.  you do not have the time to drown in my oceans of words, to work through the sentences and sentiments that i wish to put forth.  i write, nonetheless, in the hopes that perhaps others will benefit from the words meant for you.  these words are all my flesh made text: each time i think about you it is almost always in the words i wish i was speaking or writing, words that i want for you to hear or see or feel.  i want my words, like my hands, to be able to touch you: i write despite knowing that they do not and cannot.  i open my veins and watch the words spilling out onto the screen, pouring from my heart, pumping outward, showing up in so many fragments.  words and spaces, black pixels separated by white spaces all so someday when you have the time and emotional energy i can attest to the fact that i never left you behind but was waiting to do anything i could.  everytime i write i feel myself disintegrate from an illusory whole to a mass of differences and separations.  a text is not any sort of unity.  the words and worlds swirl out of me and i lose myself in them to find myself out of them, to show you who i am through them.  this is all that i can do.  i write my flesh made words: each is an opportunity for a certain sort of consummation, a meditating mastication, thoughts for you to chew through, food for thought.i want you to devour each of these as a message for you, to taste me through the bland universal medium of language, to see my fingerprints in the phrasing of every sentence and the choice of every word.  when you miss me, i want these here for you to find, to take comfort in, to relish, and to remember the times when conversations could be held face to face.  these words are mirrors: when empty, they reflect the emptiness within me.  when exhortations, they reflect the strength in which i long to hold you.  when full of laughter, they reflect the echoes of the joy you once introduced into my life–for nothing inside of me can any longer be separated from whom you have let me be.  these words and letters are my own private army, and i am their general: i command them and send them forth into the world on a mission to convey the message of love able to be seen and heard throughout the world.  their failure is a reflection of my failure.  it is possible that these words unread merely lie dormant, as a spy in an enemy nation, waiting for the right time to take charge and complete the message.  it is equally possible, however, that they are an army which will expire without the resources that you would bring to them, that unread they will be squandered, and that the corpses of the words will be found too late becoming only a curiosity to be enshrined for tourists within a museum.  every series of words and letters are an attempt to form a bridge to you: they are my workers which move from me into the abyss of silence, working their ways to find you in the hopes that they will connect.  i am rooted to a million bridges, spanning from my soul into nothing.  the bridges never close: my heart continues to love through them, despite the fact that they lead nowhere and into nothing, in the hope that someday all of the bridges will once more connect to you and we will once again become one.  what else can i do? i write here in a space that you cannot see, in a medium that can be destroyed, with anonymous words that can be lost and misconstrued.  i write for a you who does not currently exist: each message is a message from who i was in the past to someone i hope to find again in the future.  will you read this tomorrow?  next month?  in ten years?  when you read, will the bridges still return to me, or will they be magnificent edifices cutting through the nothing, supported by nothing on either side, hanging silently and orbiting in the vast void which has become our lives?  i cannot know.  i merely trust, and write. i am the words that i write, and i can do nothing else.  this is all i have.  you read all that i am, stripped naked before.  vulnerable.  and now what will you do?

Daniel Boscaljon has Ph.D.s in Modern Religious Thought and 19th-century American Literature, both from the University of Iowa. His interest is in the fragility and liminality of human experiences. His first book, Vigilant Faith: Passionate Agnosticism in the Secular World will be published by the University of Virginia Press this August.

by Melissa D. Johnston

November 16, 1992. Clemson University. I am flying. My new blue and white running shoes pound orange clouds from the ground. The clouds multiply, leaving a trail as distinct as any fighter pilot’s. I rewind and play the intro to Tori Amos’s “Precious Things” for the fourth time, fine-tuning the details of the video I’m directing in my head: A lone girl sits on an underground train. Successive light and shadow flash through the windows, illuminating and darkening her face. The alternation syncs simultaneously and steadily with the music and implied speed of the train. Slowly the changing of light and dark lose their rhythmic cadence until there is no discernible pattern and the scene becomes a rapid chaotic flash of light and dark that ends abruptly. Complete blackness. First line: “So I ran faster…” Cut to—

He comes from nowhere.

“And it brought me here—”

A slam so hard my tailbone cracks. I see nothing but his lips. And something shiny. So shiny, catching the mid-day sun.

“If you scream I’ll kill you.” His eyes. Hard. Polished black marble occluding blue-sky iris. I open my mouth and the shiny object takes shape. “C’mon!” he jerks my arm and pushes me into the only wooded section of Clemson’s perimeter loop.

I remember the sun. Through barren trees. Black flat human shadow with liquidly muted colors.  Moving. Back. Forth. Backforthbackforthbackforth. Back. Sweat drips. Mine? His? The crunch of leaves. Reaching. His. My limbs are rock, legs endlessly falling.  He picks up the knife. Holds it, suspended, under my right eye.

“You’ll never forget me, sweetie.”

**

I wake up screaming. Again. My face chasms, splitting the bed. Far away voice. An arm reaches across the divide. “Annie?” I stone, protecting my side. Again.

In the morning light I can barely see it. A nearly four inch rough-edged, floss-sized scar below my right eye, running nose to ear. Eric always says he can’t see it. He wraps his arms around me and smiles into the mirror, meeting my eyes. I brush his arms aside. “I need to go,” I say, picking up the carryall.

“No human being should be reduced to a thing,” my philosophy professor had said my junior year. “Human beings are always ends in themselves, never simply means.” I raise my hand. “What happens if someone treats someone else as means alone?” He pauses for a moment. “I believe the act of treating someone else as a thing—no matter how small or brief—is an act of force. It cuts both ways. Both people lose their humanity in the interaction.” After class I cry in the third floor bathroom in a puke green stall.

“Are you okay?” a strange voice asks.

“I’m fine.” I wipe my tears, blow my nose, and walk calmly out the door.

**

“Annie?”

My mind somersaults the dusk-colored shapes of Willow Street in an elaborate water ballet.

“You’ve hardly touched your food.” His words float with street shapes, freely and indistinctly.

“Annie!” I startle and turn from the window, in shame. It’s our first anniversary.

“Why don’t we go?”

I grab my coat.

Outside, Eric takes my hand.  Stopping in front of a metal bench, he says, “Let’s sit here for a minute.”

We are silent, our faces mirror. “I’ve been thinking,” he says, nervously spinning his wedding ring. He pauses. “I need to say something to you.”

The bench begins to split.

“I do see it.” He raises his finger against the glare of streetlight and places it gently on my face, tracing the entire length of the scar. My body shakes. I need to leave. Now. I stand up.

“No, you’re not leaving this time.” He tugs my arm downward. My eyes narrow. I will not be forced.

He lets go. “Please.” I sit down. “Please talk to me. I’m so tired of this coming between us.” His eyes graze my scar. “Tell me the story. All of it.”

I turn away. “It’s not a pretty story.”

“Sometimes we don’t need pretty stories. We need true ones.” Time suspends for one brief moment. He holds me. We both cry together in the middle of the bench, for all the world to see.

by Melissa D. Johnston

Onomatopoeia

Happy Holidays from Creative Thresholds. May the new year be the year you dream big…and watch those dreams come true! 

by Melissa D. Johnston

de-centering

refuse from the machine

fragmentation and compression

self-other arithmetic

identity in time

by Melissa D. Johnston

What is encounter?

by Melissa D. Johnston

Boredom.

A point and shoot camera.

A sunny November day.

The air grille of a whirring heatpump.

Click.

by Melissa D. Johnston

“It’s a giant, juicy, pink worm tied down by Lilliputians.” This was the answer to my friends, post-surgery, of what my scar looked like. To my parents it appeared that my neck had been clotheslined—not metaphorically, but with actual clothesline wire. This belief persisted long after the stitches came out and persists to this day, echoed in the surreptitious glances of strangers who may or may not wonder if I’d once had a particularly unfortunate day playing Red Rover.

In reality, the pink worm was born as the result of a partial thyroidectomy, a procedure in which a surgeon and his team removed part of my thyroid through a 2 ½ inch horizontal incision in order to whisk away a microcarcinoma (a nice, mellifluous word for a small thyroid cancer) and banish it, after much study, into the biohazard waste basket.

And so they did, and now my worm has advanced to middle-aged skin at the height of a dry winter, where moisture must regularly be applied to keep that plump, pink, youthful appearance. The rumor is that he’ll disintegrate to a ripe, flat old age and then into a grave marked by a bright, thin, barely-there line—where I’ll have to be the one to point him out if I want others to make his post mortem acquaintance. That’s the story according to my surgeon, anyway.

I still have a special fondness for his preteen years, though. The awkward stage where he still struggled with wire braces, the stitches that had to set while he lay inflamed but protected by daily swabs of hydrogen peroxide and generous amounts of petroleum jelly. A time when I made my first public appearance after surgery and couldn’t cover his raw body with a scarf because it was still too sensitive—no small deal since I’d known others with thyroidectomies who’d been asked, in all seriousness, “Did you try to slit your throat?” I didn’t fancy appearing extremely qualified as a candidate for Remedial Suicide Methods 101.

Most folks in the southern U.S. are polite. If they did think I qualified for Remedial Methods, I never knew it. That first day out, in fact, I got plenty of furtive glances, but only one direct stare, from a man whose wife tapped his arm and said, “Honey, Honey—Look!” When I turned my head, she immediately averted her eyes but her husband continued to stare until I wondered whether I’d lost a standoff when I looked away.

One person that day hadn’t seemed to notice at all. She took my order at one of my favorite local New York style delis and looked directly into my eyes, as she seemed to do with all the customers. It was only when I was getting my soft drink that she came over and said, “Do you mind my asking—what surgery did you just have?”

“I had a thyroidectomy.”

“What was it for?”

“I had thyroid cancer.”

“Oh.” She looked down and paused for a second. “I could tell it was fresh…” She finally looked back up and into my eyes. “My son was just diagnosed with leukemia.”

We talked for the next several minutes about her son, cancer, and how crazy life can be with kids. We talked about what we both had been through in the past couple of months and how the cancer diagnoses had affected our families. I walked out of the shop feeling support from someone who one hour before had been a total stranger. I hope she felt the same.

That conversation changed how I viewed my scar. These two digital pieces, which are chronicles of my wrestling with what thyroid cancer means for me, feature my preteen worm in all his pinked, stitched glory.

** 11/19/12  Update:  Alas, my worm never made it to old age. He was whipped out mid-life during a second surgery, where the surgeons, due to finding cancer in my lymph nodes, needed to complete the thyroidectomy and perform a central compartment neck dissection.  New skin puckers where he’d  been, forming glued bumpy borders I’ve yet to explore…**

**7/27/14 Update: My worm rode the wheel of life one more time. As much as he loves me and I him, we both hope it’s his last incarnation. After a third surgery and radiation, I’m hoping to get the all-clear (and it looks good!) to be able to say that I’m a one-year cancer survivor. I’ll know in a few weeks….

Dive I: The Journey Within

Dive II: The Journey Expands

by Melissa D. Johnston

I remember the first time I saw Atlanta-based Monica Arrington, who performs under the name nerdkween, play. Two of the friends accompanying me, both musicians who had seen her before, were already giddy and starstruck. They had good right to be. Monica is a rarity. She is a classically-trained singer/songwriter/composer who freely experiments in both songwriting and performance, blending multiple styles effortlessly and elegantly into a spare and stunning lo-fi sound. Nerdkween released her debut full-length recording, Synergy, in 2008 with Stickfigure Records, which puts out recordings of acts such as Snowden, Deerhunter and Xiu Xiu.  She released a second CD called Profitandloss in November 2010 with Fieldhouse Recordings , a branch of Stickfigure. I got an opportunity recently to ask her a few questions about music and life as an artist.

Even before I heard your music, I was already in love with the name nerdkween. Is there a story behind the name? 

It goes back to high school for me. In school I associated with the smart kids and I guess secretly to myself, I imagined myself the “queen”.  As I started in college, I wanted to start my own label and I was going to call it  Nerd Queen Records.  The lettering has evolved over the years  into the official  (nerdkween)* .

Your music pulls from multiple influences and musical styles. Among your influences you’ve mentioned P.J. Harvey, Sonic Youth, Lisa Germano, The Sundays, Mazzy Star, Low, Cranes, and the early Liz Phair among others. Which were your earliest influences? In general, which do you think have proven or will be proven to be the most enduring in their effect on your writing and performing?

I love noise.  I think I will always find inspiration in it. I love vibrations and it recharges me.  I feel as though the music is born out of that haziness as in from chaos comes order and understanding. I also find the light airy and smothering  voices of Hope Sandoval and Lisa Germano to be  feminine yet strong all at once. My voice is similar and I also find the lyrics from them resonate with me. They celebrate their pensive and uncertain natures which I can also relate to.  It inspires me to dig deeper and not to be so afraid to express myself.

You’ve called your music postmodern pop. One of the interesting characteristics of postmodern music to me is that it can challenge barriers between “low” and “high” styles of music as well as “elitist” and “populist” values. You are a classically trained vocalist with a degree in musical composition. Do you see yourself as purposely playing with the cultural boundaries of pop and classical training either in attitude and/or in the actual creation of music?

Oh yes, my interests in music crosses over to many genres and it continues to grow. I think any creator or performer does themselves a disservice by not exploring  all there is in the world.  And with technology our world is becoming smaller and we can reach out to anyone anywhere. The cultural exchange is amazing for personal growth for anyone.  Yet, people would be surprised how much and often pop music “borrows” from  classical music.

What musical project or projects are you working on now? What most excites you about it? How does it relate to the work you’ve done in the past, particularly that in your last album Profitandloss?

Right now I’m in writing mode, I want to see what I can create just for the sake of writing. I would like to release another recording but I want to make certain I have good material and the best resources  to release under. I am listening to more world music and roots music and I want to find ways to incorporate it into my sound.  Simply songwriting can be very exciting if you are struck with inspiration.  So I’m kind of just enjoying the process without a clear agenda  or goal.  The last album I recorded and released something  within the year and it was a  great growth lesson for me.  At the time I needed to do it. Now, I want to take a bit more time and better myself.

You’ve been very candid about your struggle to live the dream of being an artist. Recently you’ve been putting your gifts and training to “practical” use by teaching music and voice lessons. About that you’ve said, “I have been fearful that finding a practical outlet for my craft equals failure of childhood fantasies” but also “Now, as an adult, I am working on helping my dream to also grow up.” Could you say a bit more about this journey? 

I think I actually surprised myself once I started teaching and coaching.  I am reminded that we as artist ARE teachers  even if we don’t have students. I love  being involved with music so that is what I have come to understand , not just the pursue of  being a so called recognized artist.

The craft of singing is something very dear to me so I don’t mind sharing what I know and experienced over the years.  In fact, I’m very excited when a have a student who displays a yearning to learn as much as possible about music and singing.

Recently you wrote, “I think it’s the ultimate role of an artist: to guide oneself and others through the process of living, to make connections with our ideals and the real world, and to find beauty and peace in conflict.” Do you have some hard-won advice to give to other artists aspiring (but also struggling) to live this role? 

It’s important to listen to your heart., and realize there are many avenues to take your dreams.  Life can get into the way but you can use it to challenge yourself and learn more about who you really are.  Just know that there are other people going through similar struggles in life, your art can help them cope.  Don’t stop creating, you never know who is paying attention. You never know you will need your art.

Thank you, Monica!