October 6, 2018
Once again, Yaddo has offered Fellowship support when I’m finalizing my Creative Capital Fellowship project – a memoir in prose, poetry, performance, video, and photography about my life in femicide and gender violence called OUT HERE DEATH IS NO BIG DEAL. The project has been searing to work on, and it’s my first memoir about my own decades of gender violence from age 15-45 surrounding my personal life and my work on the US Mexico border and my own survival of a kidnapping and rape and other battles in the war on women, which at times has been rather touch-and-go. For these and other reasons, Yaddo has as always been a sanctuary and an incitement for me. Words and actions are a complex dance, and it’s always an honor to be the recipient of Yaddo’s commitment to aesthetic daring, social egalitarianism, and internationalism, and the support of artists at political risk.
learn more about OUT HERE DEATH IS NO BIG DEAL here in this article in Hyperallergic, this essay in Guernica, this video with Creative Capital, and this video installation with Theo Westenberger Estate. Texts from the project/book are forthcoming in various magazines throughout the autumn and spring including Conjunctions:71 and many others.
Yaddo in deep winter is a place of witchery and communion, whose kinetic silence incubates and disturbs in proportions that always lead me down the paths my projects need. I am always indebted to them for their hospitality and generosity, and can’t wait to burrow in with my manuscript for a winter of thick snow and unwieldy ideas and challenging, rewarding camaraderie of both the living and the dead, both of whom urge ever onwards. The profusion of modifiers apply equally to all parts of speech…and I’m always humbled to be in the shadows of James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, Aaron Copland, Patricia Highsmith, Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Martin Puryear, Katherine Anne Porter, Amy Sillman, Clyfford Still, and David Foster Wallace, Terry Adkins, Laurie Anderson, Jeffrey Eugenides, Sheri Fink, and many more artists I have come to know as fellow travelers.
Learn more about YADDO here at www.yaddo.org