Category: Blog

Abbas Abidi received his MFA from the University of Alabama. His work has been featured in brightestyoungthings.com, The Bellevue Literary Review, and Hobo Pancakes.

Vincent A. Cellucci is a scofflaw shit shooter. He wrote An Easy Place / To Die (CityLit Press, 2011) and edited Fuck Poems an exceptional anthology (Lavender Ink, 2012). Come back river, a bilingual Bengali-English translation collaboration with the poet and artist Debangana Banerjee is available from Finishing Line Press. _A Ship on the Line, a battleship-collaboration with poet Christopher Shipman released by Unlikely Books in 2014, was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award.

Brianne M. Kohl’s short stories have appeared in several publications including The Masters Review, The Stoneslide Corrective, Literary Mama, The Bohemyth, Coup D’Etat and 94 Creations. She is currently hard at work on her first novel. In addition, she has published several articles at The Review Review. To see all of her publications and awards, visit her at www.briannekohl.com. Follow her on twitter: twitter.com/BrianneKohl

Dylan Krieger is a pile of false eyelashes growing algae in south Louisiana. She lives in a little cottage with a catfish and her demons and sunlights as a trade mag editor. Her poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Local Nomad, Deluge, Juked, Coup D’Etat, Small Po[r]tions, and Tenderloin, among others. Find her at www.dylankrieger.com

Jordan McNair is a twenty-three year old recent graduate of the University of Maine Farmington’s BFA in Creative Writing Program. She is someone who likes to turn over damp earth in her hand, and hold warm stones of citrine and obsidian in her palms. She also enjoys the quiet serenity of Sunday mornings.

John Pula lives and writes in South Florida where he works as a mechanical engineer. He makes a point of traveling back to his native Minnesota for an annual bout of shivering and is usually found holding whatever brewed beverage is socially acceptable at the given hour.

Kim Vodicka is the author of Aesthesia Balderdash (Trembling Pillow Press, 2012) and the Psychic Privates EP (forthcoming from TENDERLOIN, 2016). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Louisiana State University. Her poems, art, and other writings have appeared in Spork, RealPoetik, Cloudheavy Zine, Epiphany, Industrial Lunch, Smoking Glue Gun, Paper Darts, The Volta, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Makeout Creek, Luna Luna Magazine, Best American Experimental Writing (BAX) 2015, and other publications. Her poetry manuscript, Psychic Privates, was a 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize Finalist. Cruise more of her work atih8kimvodicka.tumblr.com.

 

Masthead:

Editor: Kayla Haas
Assistant Editor: Trevor Fuller
Fiction Editor: Benjamin Hojem
Poetry Editor: Taylor Gorman
Nonfiction Editor: Ciara Hespe
Web Editor: Monique Richardson
Public Relations Director: Shannon Nakai Wingert
Readers: Katie Amundsen, Nicole Byrne, Abe Fitzpatrick, Matt Garner, Toni Loeffler, Shannon Nakai, Kiley Porter, Jeremy Richard, Rhiannon Scharnhorst, Chance Swaim, Noah Trammell, Ellery Wadman-Goetch, Josh Zimmerer

Kimberly Ann Southwick is a feather not a flower. She is the founder and editor in chief of the literary arts journal Gigantic Sequins. Her poetry has been published in a variety of online and print journals. She has two recent chapbooks, every song By Patsy Cline (dancing girl press, February 2014) & efs & vees (Hyacinth Girl Press, October 2015). She lives in Breaux Bridge, LA, where she is pursuing her PhD in English/Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

 

Toni Loeffler: So you just moved to Louisiana?

K: I did! I guess I drove down the 17^th, and my orientation was the next morning.

T: Oh, wow. Did you have a place already, or?

K: Yah, we rented a place on Craigslist. We had someone check it out, to make sure it was real.

T: So, then you’re teaching, then, too, right?

K: Yeah.

T: What do you teach?

K: First year writing, which I’ve taught before. Eventually I’ll be able to teach some other courses, maybe even a creative writing class. I guess that just comes with time.

T: Nice. So you’re originally from Philly, right?

K: Yeah, I just moved here from Philly.

T: I know a little about Lafayette. It’s a French-Cajun area, right? What do you think about it? Has it been a huge change for you?

K: I’ve lived in cities for a really long time. I’ve lived in Boston for my undergrad and New York for my master’s program, and I adjuncted in Philly forever, so living in the suburbs is weird. Living down south, I’ve never lived down south before, so that’s different. I had to go to Walmart to pay a bill—that’s what they told me on the phone.

T: (Laughs) That would be culture shock, I would imagine. I’m originally from the South, so I…yeah. I got out. I moved to Oregon nine years ago.

K: There’s a big truck that comes, and it sprays bug spray throughout the air.

T: Oh, probably for mosquitos.

K: Yah, that was interesting. I never saw that before. But there’s culture down here. One of the reasons I thought that Lafayette was really neat when I was applying was the culture. I thought that maybe I’d move to the suburbs and hate my life. But there’s an art crawl this weekend, and there’s art and food and culture here that normally you would have to go to the cities for. Which, of course, Lafayette is the third largest city in Louisiana, but still.

T: So, why did you decide to go for your PhD?

K: As an undergrad, I always wanted to get my PhD. I had a really good advisor at Emerson, Maria Koundoura, and she saw me being a professor. She told me, “You should get your PhD,” and so straight out of undergrad I applied to PhD programs, which are impossible to get into, and I didn’t get into any of them. But luckily, at NYU you can apply to both the PhD program and your Master’s, so I went and got my Master’s in English. And then I adjuncted. For like five years. And that will really bring you down a notch and make you think about your life. And I just couldn’t do it anymore. So, I figured I’m either going to keep going and get to a point where I can apply for a full-time professor job somewhere, and have a chance, or I can do something else, like I could go down a different path. So I applied two years ago and didn’t get in anywhere, and then I went back and rethought my application and rethought what I was sending and where I was applying. And I applied and got into ULL. So I want to teach full-time as a profession. At the college level. I don’t know if I could…everyone says I’d make a good elementary school teacher. I think that’s a lie. I’m not an elementary school teacher. I couldn’t do it. Even high school. Unless they’re honors kids. And you’re not going to go in and punish all the kids all at once, so.

So, I figured I’m either going to keep going and get to a point where I can apply for a full-time professor job somewhere, and have a chance, or I can do something else, like I could go down a different path.

 

 

 

 

T: You have to pay your dues as an adjunct. I can see why that would be hard. It’s already disheartening to me. I mean, I just want to do what I love.

K: I was very upset with my Master’s program. They were like, Oh, don’t even bother getting your PhD, it’s not worth it. But all you can do with a Master’s degree is teach adjunct, that’s all you can do. And actually right now there’s a really good movement happening to unionize adjuncts as kind of a first step to getting better pay and better benefits. And specifically at Temple University, where I taught briefly. It’s really cool what’s happening there and also terrible at the same time. They’re trying to unionize, and the Temple administrators won’t let them. And they’ve gone as far as taking them to court a bunch of times because they’re trying to unionize and come together. And the Temple administrators have gone so far to say that adjuncts aren’t faculty. Which I’m not sure what I was when I was there if I wasn’t faculty. Considering over 50% of the people who are adjuncting there are their faculty. It’s this corrupt system where they keep offering less and less full-time positions or hiring adjuncts to do the labor. You’d think that our educational system wouldn’t be that way, but it is. It’s really interesting what’s happening there right now. I was sad to leave to be so far away from it, but I still forward all the petitions and everything, but I’m not really there. Not that we really have it that much better as grad students, but they pay my tuition. So, you know, not to complain. So don’t worry. The point being, I think that there’s good things happening right now.

T: It’s so refreshing to hear an optimistic voice.

K: Keep being involved, don’t keep your head down. If that’s your future, it’s important that you pay attention to what’s happening. Don’t feel discouraged by these people who say that the job market’s bad. Feel encouraged to make the world a better place.

If that’s your future, it’s important that you pay attention to what’s happening. Don’t feel discouraged by these people who say that the job market’s bad. Feel encouraged to make the world a better place.

 

 

 

 

T: Well, let’s talk about your upcoming chapbook. I have to tell you, my favorite poem is “Mortgage that Shit.” I love that poem. And I really enjoy your imagery throughout, too. I’m really curious to know the process of how your chapbook came into being and how you melded different themes and imagery together. I guess what I’d like to know is if your chapbook was something that came all at once or if it was something that you put together slowly over time?

K: This chapbook, specifically, is something that happened over time, for sure. It’s part of something larger that I was originally sending out as a larger manuscript, but that’s incredibly disheartening sometimes. If you’re going to send something out as a larger manuscript, they’re going to charge you a fee, and you don’t always get anything from that fee, so that limits what I would send. Like I would only send it to free open reading periods, which barely exist, or to somewhere that I would actually get something out of it. It’s really hard for me to just throw $20 at a publishing company. I like supporting them and everything, but you know, give me something. Give me a book! So, I had this large manuscript that was in three sections. So because it all came from a larger manuscript that I had been working on since, I would say, well… I had just left New York, so that would be like over the past five or six years. Maybe five years because I sent it to Margaret last summer.

Some of them were my Philly poems, and some were things I wrote my last couple of years in New York, and some of them were relatively new.

Specifically “Mortgage that Shit,” I can talk about that poem. That was before I was engaged, I think, when I was ready to be married. Before that, I had a different idea of it, and I was tired of everyone getting married, but not for any reason that made any sense to me. It was completely irrational. So it was kind of me just writing what I thought about it, me being irrational toward that idea. Where some of these poems are from before I was even in a relationship. I think I did “Mortgage that Shit” before I was even engaged. Well, you know, the beginning stanza I ended up cutting a bunch of times because I was writing “It’s raining outside,” and I’m just going to use this to start my poem. And the rest of it is just about, you know, being a boring adult. Our kids are going to be normal kids. And then just turning that on its head—no, they’re not going to be normal, but you know, they are, no matter what. So we’re just going to end up falling into line. But you’d like to think your experience in and of itself is special. So we’re going to listen to the Beach Boys, and we’re going to listen to an old record player, like we’re cool somehow. I guess the reason I put it last is because everything felt like it added up to that one. That one, and then there’s another one. I think it’s in this chapbook. The one about getting my hair done.

So we’re just going to end up falling into line. But you’d like to think your experience in and of itself is special. So we’re going to listen to the Beach Boys, and we’re going to listen to an old record player, like we’re cool somehow.

 

 

 

 

T: Oh, yeah, that one’s earlier on.

K: Yeah, “In 24 hours exactly you will be getting your hair done.” That’s about going to a wedding. I feel like all of my imagery for the whole chapbook kind of adds up in that poem, and then the last one culminates with, “Alright, we’re just going to…we’re going to do this thing.” Mortgage that shit.

T: Tell me about “Present and Preterit.” I really like that one a lot, too. I just thought the temporality was interesting and also the way the social commentary intermingles with the idea between the public and the private selves.

K: Yeah, I feel like the whole poem started because I wanted to say something about the private selves. That was the vehicle in writing it. And then everything else that came was like, well, in order to write this poem, you can’t just come out and talk about fidelity, and public and private selves, that wasn’t enough. You need something to like bolster the poem with. So I did. I guess I was thinking about them [Lancelot and Guinevere] in like a future context. I like their characters. I keep coming back to them a lot, again and again in my writing. I think this is the only time they end up in this chapbook, though. Which is interesting. I forgot about Guinevere and Lancelot and Arthur. I love The Once and Future King. I’ve read that at least twice. It’s one of those that I go back to and reread my favorite passages. I guess I just like that they can all be so friendly even though they were doing something shitty. So I kind of reimagined them in the now, and I had just started teaching a grammar course. One of the first courses that I ever taught as an adjunct was an upper-level grammar course at Rowan University that all English majors and Education majors had to pass. It really boggled my mind that there really is no future tense and just what that says about our life in general. We make the future tense just by throwing ‘will’ in front of the root word, so you know, ‘to go’ is ‘will go’. Or shall, you could also use shall. So, really, there’s no conjugation. It’s just there. So the idea that there’s no future. And I feel like my students never understood that there’s no future tense, no matter how many times I tried to explain it to them. We don’t conjugate it, so we can call it a tense, but it’s not really a tense. Which is subjective, and different grammarians probably think differently about that. But they just weren’t interested. So I imagined them hearing that there’s no future and them drifting off. So yeah, I intuited Gwen and Lance in this future and just went with it. So the title’s a grammatical reference. Preterit, I think, is simple past. So it’s all of this is all together. The idea that nothing ever changes. These tropes exist because they get replayed again and again and again. So as much as we feel as though we’re being progressive, are we really being progressive? I don’t know. I guess I just really like the idea of reimagining them [Guinevere and Lancelot] somewhere where there’s a video camera, where they’re nervous. Does Arthur know? I’m pretty sure he knew, and he was just like, Whatever, I’m just going to pretend like I don’t know that this happened. Maybe that’s how the future functions. We’re just like, hmmm, we’ll come out on the other side. Everything’s either going to be okay, or everything’s not going to be okay. And no matter what, you just have to be like, Alright, let’s deal with it.

Everything’s either going to be okay, or everything’s not going to be okay. And no matter what, you just have to be like, Alright, let’s deal with it.

 

 

 

T: Yeah, it doesn’t matter. You can get all worried, or you can just let it happen.

K: Yeah. I feel like so many things are getting better. Gay marriage, hooray! But all the bees are dying. Bad. I’m writing a series of poems right now. There’s seven of them, and they’re entitled, “The World’s Going to Be Okay.” I guess this is something I come back to again and again without realizing that I’m writing about it a lot.

T: Tell me more about those.

K: They’re all about me talking to my Nana. The “Dear Nana” poems, and she’s like, “The world’s so terrible.” And I tell her, “No, we have all these good things.” And I’m always trying to convince her that everything’s going to be okay. And in thinking of that and literally having these conversations with her, I’m just defending my generation, but at the same time, all these horrible things that are happening right now still haunt me as well, but I just don’t want her to think she did something wrong by having children and letting them have children and encouraging her grandchildren to have children. These [Efs and Vees] were the pre-marriage poems. Now that I’m married, I think, Do I have kids? Do I not have kids? I think that’s my big contemplation in my life, so these now are like Do I get married? Do I conform or do I do my own thing? Can I get married and not conform? Whereas the new ones are Do I have kids? Do I not have kids? I guess it’s like classic women’s poetry.

T: It’s very beautiful poetry, and I was very happy to get a chance to read it. Is there anything else you wanted to add or anything that we didn’t cover?

K: Yeah, working with Margaret at Hyacinth Girl Press has been awesome, and I’m not just saying that because she’s publishing me. I have a previous chapbook that I put out, which was fine. I don’t have anything bad to say about that experience. But specifically, working with Margaret at Hyacinth Girl Press—she’s great. She’s not just a selector, she’s an editor. She went through and really thought about everything that was going to be in my book and gave me a lot of input but also a lot help, such as with figuring out the cover. We organized a reading together in Pittsburgh, so I got to go hang out with her and do a reading for her press and Gigantic Sequins, which is the literary journal that I run. I don’t know if she knows how important she is to the feminist literary community she currently is, but she is doing a really good job. I wasn’t really paying much attention to that when I first submitted my manuscript, and now I’m really happy to have had the chance to work with her. It really feels like someone was there for me. She knows what she’s doing, and maybe she’s a little shy about that. One time she posted something on Facebook, where she was questioning being an editor, and I was just, “Yes, you’re doing a great job.”

I don’t know if she knows how important she is to the feminist literary community she currently is, but she is doing a really good job. I wasn’t really paying much attention to that when I first submitted my manuscript, and now I’m really happy to have had the chance to work with her. It really feels like someone was there for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

T: That’s awesome. It’s important to show gratitude to someone like that because not everybody is that caring.

K: Yeah. And she wasn’t just, “Hey, I want to publish this.” She was like, “Here is what I loved about this.” When the chapbooks were accepted, she did this whole ‘Chapbook Thunderdome’ thing, where she pitted the chapbooks against one another like it was March Madness and then revealed who made it to the next round. It was a really fun, interesting way to get excitement going over who she was going to publish over the next year. It was a cool thing to be a part of.

 

 

 

Toni Loeffler moved to Wichita from Eugene, Oregon, where she graduated at the University of Oregon with a BA in English. She is a first-year MFA at Wichita State and writes poetry. Some of Toni’s favorite poets include Sharon Olds, Philip Larkin, Cate Marvin, and John Donne. This is her first interview for mojo.

Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and the author of two memoirs. Washuta is a writer who challenges readers both on and beyond the page. Her first memoir, My Body is a Book of Rules (2014), explores the reconciliation of individual and cultural identity, bodily control and betrayal, trauma and memory. Starvation Mode: A Memoir of Food, Consumption, and Control is her second memoir, released this year. Her essays have also appeared on Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Weeklings, Filter Literary Journal, and Third Coast. She now teaches nonfiction for the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and serves as adviser from the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington.

 

Ciara Hespe: Right from the title of your first memoir, you establish the body as text, and your second memoir centers on the body as well. My Body is a Book of Rules follows a more modular structure that exemplifies the body-text relationship, while the use of lyricism grounds high-concept work in a visceral reading experience. What attracts you most to that body-text relationship, and at what point in your writing practice did you begin incorporating this into your craft?

Elissa Washuta: I’ve been using non-linear structures as long as I’ve been writing nonfiction. While I was in college, I wrote short fiction modeled upon the stories I’d been reading. Once I graduated and, shortly after, began my MFA, I quickly switched to writing nonfiction. From the outset, I experimented with form. Nonfiction writing offered me an opportunity to establish a practice in which every action felt new to me. Writing about myself was new, and using forms that I felt came from within my experience was new. When I dispensed with plot and temporal transitions, I was able to focus on language at the sentence level.

In Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, I write about attempts to master my own body using controlling behaviors as a response to feelings that I had no control over the external forces that were bearing down upon my body. In writing, I can’t help but attempt to exert that same control over memory and experience by translating them into manipulated representations using language I’ve worked over to the word.

Your work is widely described as “genre defying.” My Body is a Book of Rules is formally diverse and lyrically written, and Starvation Mode is also described as a “mini memoir.” Particularly when writing trauma, memory is often unreliable and can be considered a fiction of sorts, further blurring the lines of genre. As both a writer and teacher of nonfiction, what is your take on the classification of literature by genre? How do you approach building form during your own creative process, and how did working with David Shields affect that process?

David Shields helped me to see the possibilities in the lyric essay as a form that could draw from elements of fiction and poetry. So much of fiction writing was a struggle for me then and continues to be: I don’t really have the imaginative capacity to create enough interesting plot points to build compelling fiction. But I do think of the building of structural metaphors and the application of surprising textual forms to lived experience as imaginative acts. For me, the work of turning memory into nonfiction has necessarily been a sort of fictionalization process, because I’m creating a character from myself, shaping lived experience into incomplete representations of what happened, and leaving out more than I’m rendering. Writing nonfiction this way has also allowed me to use language in a way that I used to when I wrote poetry.

Still, I find genre distinctions (nonfiction/fiction/poetry) to be useful. I wouldn’t say that my books are works of fiction or poetry at all. I set out to create essays, attempting to interrogate my own experience on the page. Working this way allowed me to demand that my work be centered upon attempts, questions, and failures in ways that I had admired in essays I’d read. Essaying is the way I work. It’s a practice that allows me to focus on the drama of the narrator’s interpretation of experience rather than the construction of what happens (plot).

Although I’m not committed to maintaining genre distinctions at all, I do believe it’s helpful to use genre as a starting place when talking about how to revise work. Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have different conventions, and, although it’s exciting to see the ways in which writers work with and against those conventions, I find them useful as a starting point. Readers arrive at poems, essays, and short stories with different expectations of how they’ll work and how to learn the individual rules of piece, based on genre traditions and shared practices.

I set out to create essays, attempting to interrogate my own experience on the page. Working this way allowed me to demand that my work be centered upon attempts, questions, and failures in ways that I had admired in essays I’d read.

 

 

 

 

So far, your two main publications are a “book of rules” and “a series of rules to eat and live by.” My Body is a Book of Rules often mimics many prescriptive modes of writing. The satire in these examples is hard to miss, especially when contrasted with their application in the memoir’s narrative. Is this focus a critique of self-help and advice-obsessed culture?

In focusing upon rules from Cosmopolitan, YM Magazine, diet guides, The Catechism of the Catholic Church, and other sources that have influenced me, I didn’t really set out to create a cultural critique; I was constructing this narrator’s identity formation on the page, building the manifestations and roots of her anxieties, and showing what these anxieties caused her to cling to. This work begins, for me, as the creation of an individual. But that person is among people with shared anxieties. I think of this as not being so much an act of cultural criticism, but an acknowledgement of private worry that draws from some collective worry.

 

Many literary presses and programs are under scrutiny for the way they overlook writers of intersectional experience, marginalized voices, and marginalized bodies. As a writer who has published work concerning gendered violence, sexual violence, mental illness, issues specific to indigenous communities, and intersections of any or all of the above, do you see this issue being rectified at all through social media culture and the democratization of literary access through online journals?

I think that social media has created a new space for conversations about discriminatory publishing practices. Facebook and Twitter have allowed conversations to happen in a way that’s more visible to me, anyway, and allows writers and readers to more easily find themselves among others who share reactions, which can lead to collective engagement in actions to improve our reading and writing communities. I do think the ability to take literary magazines online has allowed for more work to be shared with a larger audience: the cost of publishing is lower, so the risk is lower. The cost of access is lower, so the potential audience is broader.

Facebook and Twitter have allowed conversations to happen in a way that’s more visible to me, anyway, and allows writers and readers to more easily find themselves among others who share reactions, which can lead to collective engagement in actions to improve our reading and writing communities.

 

 

 

 

 

Especially in MFA workshops, this fear of addressing intersectionality, and of straying from linear forms that most often coincide with heteronormative ideology, is glaringly apparent; many writers have left and are leaving MFA programs for this reason. How does this figure in your own workshop experience that you’ve either participated in or facilitated?

In my MFA experience, I was fortunate to work with peers and faculty members who immediately appreciated my vision for my work and never pushed me toward representations of my experience that relied on stereotypes. I felt supported in creating literary challenges to the prevailing cultural notions of what memoir could be, what self-exposing work could be, and what Native American literature could be. I know that many writers who have been through MFA programs have not had similar experiences.

In my undergraduate writing workshops, my work was sometimes subject to a different kind of scrutiny in which some peers would interrogate what they saw as cultural representations rather than focusing on craft critiques. I now teach in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and I’m conscious of the way work by Native writers has often been read for many years: for culture rather than for craft. This isn’t unique to Native literature, but it’s my starting place, and being conscious of this history allows me to be conscious of the ways in which identity and experience enter discussions of literature. In workshops, I set out to create spaces in which all work is approached as literary creation, and discussions center upon craft. None of us are there as cultural ambassadors who carry the burden of educating others; we’re there to become better writers.

In workshops, I set out to create spaces in which all work is approached as literary creation, and discussions center upon craft. None of us are there as cultural ambassadors who carry the burden of educating others; we’re there to become better writers.

 

 

 

 

Regarding current and upcoming projects: Would you consider Starvation Mode as an extension of My Body is a Book of Rules, or as more of an autonomous narrative? Do you have any other projects in the works for readers to look forward to?

Starvation Mode is an extension of some of the concerns present in My Body Is a Book of Rules, but I shifted in my approach, narrowing my focus upon a single slice of experience that had been represented among many others in my first book. I set out to create a deep exploration of my eating problems, and I assigned myself a new challenge in sticking with linear chronology. My failure to do so became a central component of the book’s structure and thrust.

I’m working on an essay collection now. The essays are primarily focused upon Cowlitz/Cascade identity, and I’m still working in nontraditional forms at times.

 

 

 

 

Ciara Hespe lives and writes in Kansas, where she is an MA candidate at Wichita State University. Her literary loves are Lidia Yuknavitch, Roxane Gay, Melissa Febos, Amy Hempel, Molly Giles, Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein, to name a few. As a former massage therapist and lifelong food enthusiast, she is happiest when talking bodily poetics, social justice, and her complex relationship with hot mustard.

In this mojo blog exclusive, Kayla Haas sits down with Ashley Schriefer, featured artist of mojo 7, to talk about her process and her interests in Biology.

Ashley Schriefer is a graduate of Flagler College, and she currently attends Long Island University-Post’s MFA program. She works with anatomical and biological forms that decay, invade, and also support the human form. This urge to explore the inner working of the human body through the language of painting was brought to light from a traumatic experience. Health is an aspect she feels could be predicted, but through this experience her sense of comfort was quickly deteriorated. Her work explores the interaction between the structural make up of the human form and its unpredictability. Incorporating portraiture alongside these cellular forms gives her imagery to explore the stages of grief. This constant conversation between these aspects of abnormalities and sickness and the emotions brought about with these encounters is what drives her to constantly explore new ways to display this constant internal battle.

 

HAAS: I saw that you work within many artistic mediums. Is there one you prefer?

SCHRIEFER: I was drawn to oil paint because of the many ways you can manipulate it but now I am moving into a sculptural direction that incorporates painting and drawing.

 

Do you choose your medium based on a concept in mind?

Not exactly. I do think about the final outcome but sometimes you just have to get to work. I don’t like to try and plan every aspect of a piece but it usually never ends up the way you predict.

 

Literary journals often choose art based on the aesthetic of the journal or seek to pair art with a piece of writing. Have you ever created art as a response to written work? How do you think art elevates a journal such as mojo?

No, I actually have not. I believe art helps the reader have a visual support system to compliment the writing. Both can be interpreted based upon the viewer or reader so it makes sense to pair the two together.

 

In your artist statement, you say the entire concept is never planned or sketched out. How do you go about translating your own raw emotions into something visual?

I start with a loose concept or idea. I then search to try and find images that convey that feeling or concept to me. I am never looking for a specific portrait or biological element. I play with layering the images on top of each other until I create a composition that I am interested in.

 

The images in mojo show a variety of faces, I was wondering where these come from? Is there a story behind them?

Not exactly. These portraits are not of family or friends. I try and create images that support my current concept or idea that I am trying to portray. Having the faces belong to no one I feel helps them connect to everyone.

 

Is there a shared narrative between the subjects of the paintings? Do you think they share the same universe and fantasy?

It is not a narrative, but there is a certain concentration that I believe they fall under.

 

Your images have a biological element to them—often they depict sickness, decay, and neurological conditions, is there an element of research that is required for finding images?

Yes. A lot of my time is spent researching carcinogenic cells, especially glioblastoma cells. Once I find images that I believe will work then the collaboration between the human emotion and human make up begins.

 

To see more of Ashley’s work, please visit ashleyjoan.com.