During 2016, we will shine the spotlight of our public esteem & rapt attention on two poets per month. We are excited to have an extra installment of our Spotlight Series during the month of February, featuring the collaborative poetry-visual art hybrid work of Sally Deskins and Laura Madeline Wiseman.
Fox Frazier-Foley: How did you two come to work together? I know you’ve collaborated on other books/projects in the past. How would you describe your collaborative dynamic? What’s it like working together?
Sally Deskins: We met a few years ago via a poetry/exhibition event I produced in Omaha and thereafter did several events together until our first formal collaboration Intimates and Fools.
Laura Madeline Wiseman: We’ve luckily been able to participate in a few gallery shows and readings. Sally is a fantastic curator of exhibits of artwork by women. Our collaborative working relationship takes place online or over the phone. Though we once lived in the same state, now one of us lives on the east coast and the other in the Midwest.
SD: I moved to West Virginia where I’m currently in graduate school in art history. We worked remotely via email and phone conversations on our second collaboration that is just out, Leaves of Absence, and another that is in process! Thus far we have worked with Madeline’s writing first, then my reading and creating various drawings and body prints. I usually like to get ideas and feedback from her while I’m making it, so I’ll send her sketches and ideas. Once I have enough images with which to work and the writing is finalized, we work to find a home for the book.
FFF: What are your influences, respectively—and I mean “influences” in terms of creative influences such as art/literature that inspires you or that you find yourselves drawn into conversation with—but also influences you may have personally, and socially/politically that shape your art?
LMW: As a gift, I received National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees. I’d always wanted to learn about trees. I wanted to be able to name them—those in my yard, neighborhood, and city. I gave myself a writing and research assignment. I decided to learn to identify trees by the book and write poems about them, using the historical information and tree identification cues to inform the poems I wrote. I wrote dozens and dozens and let the story that became Leaves of Absence emerge. One morning as I explored a nearby city park looking for a tree that I could identify and write about, I thought about Sally’s art. She had recently sent images of new work—a watercolor illustration of a forest line of trees with women’s bodies within the darkened hues of old growth trunks. Along the trail in the park, a line of cypress followed a set of newly constructed houses, each back porch like the back porch beside it, but the trees’ trunks had shape, curve, lush evocative bodies.
SD: Most directly with these projects are the luscious words by Madeline of course! I read them over and over, together, in bits and I’ll pull sections or words that grab me, and create an image from there. I never thought about integrating nature with my body work until reading Madeline’s words which made it seem so natural to do! Of course I’m also constantly inspired by feminist artists from past and present, and this varies from day to day. I love artists who also collaborate and work with text like Judy Chicago, who has included either her own journaling, or words by other writers she admired like Anais Nin. Such collaborations and artwork inspires me greatly.
FFF: How would you describe the aesthetic of your work? What do you value—what, to you, makes cool art/literature? (I realize this question is a broad one, but I like it that the answers can be limitless!)
LMW: My aesthetic is eclectic. I am deeply honored to work with an artist as talented as Sally. She is the editor, publisher, and curator of Les Femmes Folles, that has published over 500 interviews with local and national writers and artists. It has released four anthologies, one for each year of LFF’s running. They each anthologize artwork, writing, and interview excerpts published during the year. I was lucky enough to have my work featured in the first anthology. I distinctly remember receiving the anthology, one I took with me as I was traveling to a Minnesota gallery exhibition of my collaborative work with another artist. As I read the anthology, I was astounded to see so many women presented with such care, thoughtfulness, and inclusion. It made me feel part of a powerful movement. Having the opportunity to create books with a woman who is doing such good work is a gift in and of itself.
SD: My personal artist aesthetic is feminist in intent, stylistically raw, bright and fun, and hopefully a bit unnerving. Madeline’s writing is feminist and often really subtle and surreal which I love. LFF’s aesthetic is broad, open, expressive—some with intentional feminism, some not.
LFF is inclusive and seeks to feature women featured and the anthologies who are passionate about their work, whether they are at a major point in their career, or just getting back into art, writing, acting, etc. I’m in my second year of graduate school for art history where I’m finalizing my thesis on the curative work of Judy Chicago and such study has helped crystalize the work that I find most provocative and necessary. For me,I like work with a feminist intent that has a broad reach makes the best literature and art.
FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something—an experience, a piece of art, anything really—that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?
LMW: I loved one tree in college. Fall semester senior year in ecofeminism, we were asked to keep a tree journal—pick a tree and journal about it weekly. My tree stood outside my window, the only tree on a block of homes remade into student-apartments. It hid the alley and parking lot. It made a canopy of dinner-plate sized, like yellow-green hands. I once hoped to kiss another under that tree, but I never did. One day I heard chainsaws. When I turned the corner I saw them talking, cutting it down. My memory fails me here—did I gape, dash unseeing through the curling bark and brittle twigs or did I speak to them or did I stand with others to watch? Later, after they were gone, I foraged outside and grabbed a limb within my arms and took it inside. I propped it beside my desk. When I told my teachers, they said, “Pick another tree,” but I couldn’t, not for years, not until Sally and I began collaborating on Leaves.
SD: It’s hard to pick one. Many moments through books and art have inspired me—discovering Dada in high school, Valerie Solanas in college, The Yellow Wallpaper as a new parent, Wanda Ewing’s fearless figurative artwork, Judy Chicago’s autobiographies as a grad student and visiting Chicago’s The Dinner Party. I found common ground with all of these—and a sobering irony of women’s situation, women’s representation in art, and the high/low gendered value placed on art–that some things are still the same. But hopefully in making my art and doing LFF, raising my kids/having family along the way (not one or the other), I can make a difference.
FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read and/or some visual art that everyone should experience, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.
LMW: I’ve mentioned National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees. Learning about trees, learning to name them, learning about their uses and history, I found fascinating and richly entertaining. It changed the way I approached exploring my city.
SD: Besides Intimates and Fools and Leaves of Absence and all of Madeline’s other books and LFF anthologies :), everything I mentioned in the last answer—SCUM Manifesto (Valerie Solanas); The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman), Judy Chicago’s Through the Flower (1972), definitely an exhibition of Wanda Ewing’s artwork (pin up girls, video grrrlzzz, her dresses, any and all of it). And of course, visiting The Dinner Party will change your life—experiencing a history of Western women is mind-blowing, after a life of being the same old HIStory. And of course it’s gorgeous.
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Sally Deskins is an artist and writer who examines womanhood, motherhood, and the body in her work and others. She’s exhibited in galleries nationally and published her art and writing internationally. She is founding editor of Les Femmes Folles and illustrated Intimates and Fools (poetry by Laura Madeline Wiseman, Les Femmes Folles Books, 2014).
Laura Madeline Wiseman is the author of the full-length poetry collections American Galactic (Martian Lit, 2014), Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience (Lavender Ink, 2014), Queen of the Platform (Anaphora Literary Press, 2013), and Sprung (San Francisco Bay Press, 2012). Her dime novel is The Bottle Opener (Red Dashboard, 2014). She is also the author of two letterpress books, nine chapbooks, and the collaborative book Intimates and Fools (Les Femmes Folles Books, 2014) with artist Sally Deskins. She is the editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). Her newest book is the collaborative collection of short stories The Hunger of the Cheeky Sisters: Ten Tales (Les Femmes Folles Books, 2015) with artist Lauren Rinaldi.
Fox Frazier-Foley is author of two prize-winning poetry collections, Exodus in X Minor (Sundress Publications, 2014) and The Hydromantic Histories (Bright Hill Press, 2015), and editor of two anthologies, Political Punch: Contemporary Poetry on the Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) and Among Margins: Critical and Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (Ricochet Editions, 2016). She is founding EIC of .
