As a person interested, thoroughly, in making artist books, I often find myself using text in a lot of my work. I mean really, I love words. I love to read all sorts of things – fiction, non-fiction, poetry – and I oh so enjoy writing. However, before this semester, I had never taken a creative writing class, or really received any creative writing instruction at all. So, when I saw the class Text in the course catalog for this semester, I was so excited. It has turned out to be one of the best classes I have ever taken, and I look forward to it every week. It doesn’t hurt either that our class has one of those exceptional dynamics, where everyone is contributing, discussing, producing, all with equal enthusiasm.

So, I’ve decided to share some of the work that has been produced so far. Each week we bring in either new or revised material and spend the entire class in workshop mode discussing everyone’s work. In this post, I’m including a poem and a recording of that same poem by my classmate Krista Franklin. She wrote this poem on a bus on the way home to Chicago from Ohio. I found it stunning and hope you like it too.

Journey: Gem City
Krista Franklin

And I-70 with your offerings of carnage, slain
deer lain out in your ravines, your lone trees
and golden autumns, with boarded-up
windows and empty sidewalks, your crushing
silence and lonely hotel rooms. Ohio, crack
your knuckles against my treacherous nostalgia,
my rhuemy eyes, bloodshot from rum
and the open hearts of Garcia y Vegas I left
my life in an abandoned attic, Ohio, crack your
knuckles against my brutal nostalgia, your sidewinder
roads curvy as a cuckolding heart, coaxes
me back into the arms of old habits, into
the funky scent of your blue collar folding
neatly under my manicured memories, my wistful
indiscretions, Ohio, crack your knuckles against
my lightening nostalgia, my padlocked shed,
my razed field, my cutthroat tongue. Ohio,
with your side-streets of disasters, your newscasts
of mugshots, your department stores ambient with wails
of children, and the faint smell of cheap cologne,
Ohio, I sift you for eviscerated emotion in the bargain
basement of some self I left sitting curbside
at the entrance of a neighborhood
bar. Ohio, crack your knuckles against my nostalgia’s
dementia, against my seeping memories, against
my past gasping its last labored breath
on the worn pavement of your rearview highway.

You can listen to the mp3 here: Journey: Gem City

P.S. A note about the images: my writing this semester is based on a combination of sources including scientific text, letters from my grandfather and great uncle during WWII, and other family documents. My process has been to intentionally mix them all together and then combine them creating, through hours of revision and crafting, an entirely new piece. The images I used today are snapshots of that process.