I’d been dealing with pain on and off for 6 months but was avoiding medical care because I’d have to pay for it. During one flare, I went to my GP, and she wanted an ultrasound and labs. This was the right protocol and what I knew would most likely be the next step. Out of pocket, these simple items would be about $1,000. If they confirmed gallstones or wanted to remove my gallbladder, how many thousands would surgery be? For 6 months, I was saintly with my diet: No dairy, fatty food, fried food, alcohol, or meat. Small meal portions, lemon water, liver detox supplements, and regular saunas. My tactics may have reduced flares, but once a stone blocks a duct, it’s a medical emergency that requires intervention.

By the time I was in the hospital, I was inflamed, jaundiced, and probably infected. I was given mega-antibiotics while I waited for the results and doctor’s orders. At first, I felt relieved. I was getting care. The nurses were so kind and thorough and did the legwork of communicating with other departments to see if I’d be eligible for coverage. When they confirmed I wasn’t, the despair set in. I sat in my bed, behind a thin curtain, and the tears spilled. A nurse came in and looked concerned, and I told her I was upset because I’d have to pay for this stay. It wasn’t the pain, the upcoming procedure, my first multi-night hospital stay . . . it was, once again, money. She offered to send me a social worker.

Here, people couldn’t quite believe it or understand—and I understand why. I’ve lived in New Zealand for four years. I’m from the United States. I’m married to a citizen. I own a business here. However, previous financial struggles kept me from applying for residency earlier, when I could have. My gap in visas means I was illegal for a period in this country, a stain on my record.

Outside of here, people don’t realize how much Wellington is struggling economically. Small businesses are dying left and right, and mine almost went completely under just a few months before I entered the hospital. I applied to multiple jobs, intent on moving on as needed, but I didn’t get a single interview. I have more to say about being on a small, overpriced island, with a weak currency, far from everything, but I’ll save that for a different letter. After finally paying for my residency application in December ($5300), and the required medical exam and police records, we had to move in February. We lived down 70 stairs ($1000 for movers), and our new rental bond included a pet bond ($4000). Then the fuel crisis hit the area. Somehow, we made it through the beginning of 2026, but it was a lot.

The surgeons came to speak with me, and I kept having to repeat that if we could postpone anything non-urgent until post-residency, that would be great. I had a CT scan and an ultrasound, but an MRI would be an extra $3300. I’d have to get the endoscopy to remove the blockage, but the organ removal would need to be scheduled down the road. It’s humiliating to be a middle-aged woman whose risks haven’t “paid off,” who’s in a worse position than she was years ago, but now with less energy, more health issues, and less hope for significant change. In pajamas, looking up at doctors like a sad small girl, asking for delayed care.

There’s a line in Megan Daum’s essay about NYC, “My Misspent Youth,” that resonates: “I suppose that part of the city’s magical beastliness is the fact that you can show up with the best of intentions, do what’s considered to be all the right things, actually achieve some measure of success and still find yourself caught inside a financial emergency.” I felt this with my years in New York, but I feel it now, too. Leaving NYC used to be part of the solution to this, but now its scope is broader. I feel the sting of working hard, having integrity, earning degrees, being smart and multi-skilled, and yet, on the brink of disaster.

Finally, on my fourth morning, they did the necessary procedure. They were fantastic, and I left the same day since I was doing well, and they were trying to save me money (salute). After a few days of fatigue, I rebounded with energy. I forgot what it was like to feel good! I felt like a new, uninfected, less foggy, less inflamed, joyful person again. Being self-employed, I was excited to return to work because there’s no paid time off for me (plus, I do love work, when I’m well enough to be there).

My residency came through mere days after I left the hospital. What timing, what perfectly bad luck. I forwarded it to them before even telling my family I got approved, but they wouldn’t waver on their stance. A few weeks later, the invoice came in: $18,000. I don’t know how many years it will take me to pay that amount off, but many.

For 2 months, I’ve felt fantastic. Unfortunately, this weekend, I had my first flare. I’m meeting the doctor tomorrow to schedule my removal, but at least this next surgery will be covered.

Thank you to everyone who helped me or bought art when I was applying for residency. You are so appreciated.

A lovely client of mine got me this incredible birthday gift, so I did get a good little celebration in after the fact — A BRUCE TATTOO.

THE GOOD NEWS!

I’m publishing a book of essays in February 2027. RESTORATION. The launch will be here in Wellington at a lovely spot downtown, with a tattooer doing literary flash tattoos—it’s going to be a delight. I’m also kickstarting Jobstopper Press. My book will be me figuring out the nuts and bolts of everything, but I hope to publish more collections and books in the future.

The good news is art can’t wait. Not for me, not anymore. If you’d like to contribute to my endeavor, I’d be over the moon. I have a PATREON with monthly memberships, and a KO-FI for one-time donations.
Also, my new writing website.

Thank you, thank you.

Then, after decades of hypervigilance and hustle, I disassociated. Quietly, my visa expired, and I assumed I’d eventually get the needed money and work it out from there. Like most illegals, I’m sure, I didn’t feel illegal; I run a small business, lease an office space, and have to pay taxes. The local cafes know my coffee order. I spend my free time mostly at home with my husband, his kids, and my cat. I craft, watch design shows, and clean our overpriced but cozy little rental house. Also, I doomscroll and repost and rage against ICE and the casual cruelty with which people’s humanity is dismissed, and families are torn apart. I shudder at the citizens who comment flippantly: They should just do it legally. They must have done something wrong to deserve it. Go back to your own country. Their ignorance and privilege are on full display. Where you’re born is the luck of the draw, and the stakes for many are high and dire. Immigration is complicated and expensive—and I’m a white woman with a graduate degree whose first language is English, and I married a citizen of Aotearoa.

The first six months here, I wasn’t allowed to work. The partner sponsoring you needs to be able to provide, and you can work legally when the government officially grants you a working visa. Six months is the longest that I’ve been unemployed in my adult life, so I/we started at a deficit. I’d also spent plenty on immigration and worked at least six days a week leading up to my overseas move. I hired immigration advisors since I was navigating a pandemic and a shifting world with shifting rules. I estimate that between the advisors, work visa fees, plane ticket, and moving costs, I’ve spent about $7,000 already. This doesn’t include 95% of my belongings sold at a loss or given away, a solid clientele that took four years to build, relinquished, or the kickstart of a new business and a new life in a new place. Three years in, I’m still not where I was with my business in my last city.

Rising prices and shaky economies have made life a struggle in many places, but the cost of Wellington blindsided me. The cost of living seems comparable to cities like New York or Los Angeles, and most homes in Wellington sit around a million dollars. Many are also subpar with poor insulation, single-paned windows, or leaky walls. At first, I wondered why everyone put their laundry outside to dry on a line when the weather is often terrible. Then I saw our power bill after using the dryer and choked. The number quickly explained why the heater’s off, sweaters are on, and undies are flapping in the ferocious wind. Two supermarkets create a duopoly without competition to drive the food prices down. Far from everywhere, with a small population, most things are imported.

The currency isn’t strong, and things cost about double what I’m used to—a new iPhone that’s about $1,000 in the US will run about $2,000 here. The good news is if you make US money, your money will go farther (come visit!). However, for me, it means that now making NZ money makes it hard to think about traveling back to the US. There’s no trip home on my horizon even though I optimistically (delusionally) expected to come back after a year here. I spent the first year being asked if I’d been to this beautiful town or that great place and being told which spots I must go to immediately. The advice and enthusiasm were lovely and well-meaning, but it’s hard to tell people you can’t because you don’t have the funds and your priority is running a business, paying rent, and eating at home.

My first year was disorienting and my mental and physical health tanked (wrote about that here). I moved to a dreamy end-of-the-earth island with healthcare, and I had no access to it because I wasn’t yet a resident. So, I borrowed from kind friends to see doctors and seek help. I tried to intuit which labs were worth paying for (all blood work is covered if you’re a citizen). Fortunately, I’m much better than I was, although I’m not getting appropriately or regularly checked because I’d still have to pay out of pocket. Due to these issues, I’ve had to alter how much I work. My old solution was work harder, work more, work always. My body doesn’t allow for this solution now.

A quote by James Baldwin lives in my head 24/7: “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” You don’t see the dentist, you end up with root canals. You don’t pay a debt, you end up with interest and late fees. You buy cheap, you buy twice because the items don’t last as long. You don’t pay for residency, you pay double, you pay for healthcare, and maybe you get deported. You also need an FBI criminal-record check and a medical check as part of the immigration approval process. They aren’t valid after three years, so I have to redo these, as well.

So far, this sounds like all bad news, and the struggle is real, but it’s not the whole picture. I love my tranquil office space, my work, and my clients. I enjoy my editing side gig and doing craft markets or group art shows. I’ve discovered rest, television, and downtime. I’ve rediscovered an obsessive joy in crafts and artmaking. For the first time in my life, I feel settled, a happy homebody not striving for the next thing or some ambiguous “success.” My cat brings me more joy than seems possible. The pace is slower here, somehow, and I’ve slowed down immensely.

I was at a craft market with a friend, and I told her about my visa status. Her face dropped and her brow furrowed. “Kim, you’re in an overstay…for 6 months. What are you doing? You have to handle this. And be careful who you tell.” It shook me out of my stupor and disassociation and brought the issue squarely back to the forefront. I proceeded to have a panic attack. I’d spent months watching the immigration horrors unfold in the US, while back burnering the fact that I was in a similar boat. I wouldn’t be detained in a prison or deported to a country I’d never been to, so not the same boat, but I might have to leave the country. Where would I go? What would happen to my office lease and business? My family? When could I come back? What if they rejected a new visa? Would it stain their decision on my future residency? What would I do when I didn’t have money to fly to another country, leave my work, and pay for a new visa? That’s when you pray friends and strangers take pity on you.

I went for a free 15-minute consultation with the immigration advisors who a few years prior I’d paid to help me do everything correctly, obtain a visa, and forge a smooth path towards residency. The lady was lovely but had the same concerned look that my friend at the craft market had. She informed me that I couldn’t just apply for residency late. Now that I was in an overstay, I had to apply for a Section 61, appeal with evidence, and wait for a decision. A Senior Immigration Advisor had full discretion and would grant me a visa of their choice with the associated fee due—or if rejected, I’d have to leave the country immediately. They didn’t have to give a reason for their decision and there was no appeal process for this potential rejection. If rejected, I’d have to go elsewhere in the world and try to apply for a visa again from there. I sent the letter that evening with as much sincerity and attached evidence as I could gather. A few weeks later, I received an approval email granting me a six-month work visa. Relieved and utterly grateful, I paid the fee and I’m now legal, once again.

This is my last work visa, which ends in January, and the time has come to apply for residency. Oh, how I wanted to be the childfree middle-aged artist lady who helped young artists, but for now, I still need help myself.

If you are able help with this fee, I’d be appreciative beyond words.
Donate or Shop: Support K. Sheridan Art
Venmo: Kimberly-Sheridan
PayPal: ksheridanart@gmail.com

Thank you 💙
Kimberly

ksheridanart.com

Joseph Edwin Haeger lives in the Inland Pacific Northwest. He’s the author of the experimental memoir Learn to Swim (2015) from University of Hell. Haeger writes fiction, poetry, essays, screenplays, book reviews, and literary criticism.

It was a joy to connect with Joseph virtually where we discussed experimental forms, grief’s nonlinearity, hometown cringe, and using a song to drop into writing mode.

Your epigraph is from Roberto Bolano’s Antwerp. I haven’t read it, but I read that it’s short, loose, and fragmentary. It sounds similar to your novella in some ways, and I’d love to know more about the inspiration behind Bardo?

So, I feel like kind of a fraud with this one, actually. I’d known about Bolano’s books, but I’d never read them. Then I was listening to a podcast with guest Michael Kazepis, who ran King Shot Press, my favorite small press at the time. In the interview, he very casually mentioned how his favorite book is Antwerp and how if you’ve read all the King Shot Press books, you’d notice that they were all these loose retellings of Antwerp. I love their books, so I had to read Antwerp, and I really liked the chaotic and free-flowing nature of it.

I already had the idea for Bardo bouncing around in my head, but it seemed too simple, too easy, maybe too boring. As soon as I read Antwerp, I thought, Alright, this is the blueprint. I essentially copied the structure and took this pre-existing story and retrofitted it.

That sounds like a fun project, playing with form and mimicking somebody else’s structure to create something different yet inspired by them. And maybe forcing yourself out of your own writing boxes or formulas.

I feel like I also did that with Learn to Swim to an extent. When I first started writing it, I created all these little rules, like I could never use he or him unless it was referring to one specific person. So, I would have to use physical attributes for everybody else. And these vignettes where nothing could really be tied to one another. They had to be scattershot memories. So maybe that's just my thing. I kind of did the same thing here: there are all these ellipses, and that ties the dialogue together, and you rarely get who's talking. And chunks of text. That's all coming from Antwerp — that's me taking those confines and working within them.

It's cool because it’s what we’d call experimental, but it feels like it mimics life in a somewhat better way. Life isn't linear, healing isn't linear, dialogue isn't always clear, and yet we craft these perfect stories…

As you said, life isn't linear. When I originally wrote it, I did write it in sequential order, and I think that was my plan. By the end of it, the fear of it being too simple crept into the back of my head so I printed the whole thing out. I laid it out on my floor. I stood up on my trunk and I looked down on it and just shifted things around until it felt right.

Printing it out helped because if there were any holes in the sequential stuff, I could catch those, fill them in, and then mix it up. A big part of it was trying to reflect what going through grief is like, because you don't feel grief one time and then you're good to go. It’s chaotic, numbing, coming at you from all angles, at any time. That's in part why I shuffled it up and it's nonlinear.

The names of the two men are not written in the novella. It gives them both a kind of everyman quality and gives the sense that the reader or any human could be the falsely accused or the person seeking vengeance. This is heightened by the out-of-order chapters and switch of perspectives.

Early on, I knew there were going to be two perspectives, but I don't think I realized how much weight or how heavy the convicted killer's perspective was gonna be. It felt almost like context or these opportunities for me to throw in little musings or philosophical asides. For me, the meat of the story is the father character. But I think through editing, and now through talking to people who’ve read it, I'm starting to realize that the convicted killer and the backstory is an important thread that ties everything together. Did you think the killer was innocent or guilty? While I wrote it, I never had a clear idea of whether this guy had been wronged. I wanted it to be a bit more ambiguous, and I think because of that, I didn't ever follow that thread and try to figure it out myself.

I think that's part of the power too, though. Often with the justice system, or in life, there's not a clear answer. It's hard for me not to think of all the people who have been wrongfully put to death. We make a lot of assumptions, or we need closure or vengeance. And sometimes it doesn't even matter if it's correct or not. But the father was trying to find the right person and make sure that vengeance was dealt.

If he wanted, he could have had the closure, but his own grief kept him from it because he was still devastated that his son was dead. Everybody killed his son and nobody killed his son, because he was never going to feel better about it. Looking at it through his eyes, he'll never find the guy. Violence begets violence and it's just a never-ending cycle. Throwing himself into that world just continually perpetuates his own grief; it's a constant reminder, so he can never actually find closure.

You make some astute and beautiful points about grief and humanity through the characters: putting all your energy into one child and it goes awry anyway, wanting something tangible to destroy, the unraveling of time, and the “semblance of vengeance” being better than the “truth of vengeance.” Can you say more about your driving ideas and emotions?

When I wrote this book, it was shortly after I had gone to Germany. The reason I went to Germany is because one of my childhood friends was in this horrific climbing accident. He was in the hospital for 10 months and he eventually died. My friend and I went over to help take care of him. When we came back, I was angry and confused. I'd dealt with death before that, but it was always very definitive. I felt like with my friend in Germany, Derek, it was this weird in-between time. There were times that we could celebrate, and then he would backtrack. It was a battle for the whole 10 months. I got to a point where I was just very angry, and I was experiencing grief, but I didn't know to what extent I could experience grief because of the situation. And that's really where Bardo came from: this moment of intense anger at anything. I couldn't really point to one specific thing to be mad at.

That's maybe where a lot of the confusion from the father comes from. I knew the mindset I was in when I wrote it, but I didn't realize how many other little things wormed their way in until now as I'm talking to people about it. My older son was three years old when I wrote this, so there were a lot of parental fears and the fear of raising somebody that crept in. I think at the time we were deciding if we wanted to have a second kid or not. So that whole idea of, Do I want to focus on him, or do I want him to have a friend? There's not a right answer to that, but it's something that I was confused about and trying to figure out.

The theme of this issue is Abandon Earth. (Note: this interview was originally for Abandon Journal which isn’t currently operating.) I originally thought about climate change or earth’s inhabitability, but the bardo (liminal space between death and rebirth), death row, or life on this earth being unbearable due to loss are all incredibly fitting. How would you say Bardo relates to abandoning earth?

The father has this hope that he can find the person who killed his son and that by seeking vengeance, he'll feel better. But the fact is it doesn't really ever happen or it’s not even really possible. This idea of slowly losing hope. Like you said, my mind immediately goes to climate change and earth not being inhabitable. I think for him, it's kind of similar in a way … I feel like we already know what's going to be happening with Earth. I feel like we've already abandoned it, even though there are a lot of people who really want to save it. I feel like capitalism and the powers that be have already made up their minds, and they're just unwilling to make changes that would help save Earth. So, it's essentially holding these two truths at the same time. Basically, you're hoping for what's possible or what could be, but on the other hand, you already have the reality of the situation. I have this hope that it's going to be saved, and my kids will continue on and be happy — but I don't know if I can really, truthfully say that I think that's going to be the reality. At the same time, doesn’t every generation think their generation is going to be the last one?

I'm always saying the world is always ending. You look back and there's always been a war or a plague or something terrifying. I mean, I don't have high hopes for Earth either, or there's a point where there's no turning back — but it’s not anything new to think the world is ending. I also kept thinking that if you lose all hope or destroy your own life, you've kind of abandoned the earth and all possibility of being grounded or present in your life.

That's essentially what the dad does: he throws his life away and is forsaking any sort of job or anything that would make him get up in the morning. He even talks about how his wife is going to move on, but he'll just slowly plod behind her, and he'll just always be there. Even if she doesn't want him to be — either she has to disappear in the middle of the night or she needs to divorce him. His running down this line of vengeance is almost trying to save her too, because the way he views himself is that he's ruining her life. So, by abandoning everything on his own, in a way, he's trying to save her.

Does place influence your writing? Carla Crujido (see last interview) wrote her collection about Spokane, and you live in Spokane, so we have a bit of a Spokane theme!

When I think about Spokane and writing, of course my head goes right to Jess Walter. I'm a little jealous because it seems like he's very comfortable writing about Spokane and placing stories in Spokane. The Cold Millions is distinctly set here. Or if you read some of his short fiction, there's one story where these two guys steal a wheelbarrow to take to a pawn shop to try to pawn it. And as I'm reading that story, I'm like, this is the pawn shop at the bottom of the Monroe Street hill right by the Skippers. I knew exactly what location he was talking about, and he wasn't necessarily overt about it. But if you live in Spokane, you know exactly what he's talking about, and that’s the thing about always living here. But yeah, growing up here, I don't have anything to compare it against. So I guess it's a foggy setting for me. I can think of my own childhood, because the Spokane I grew up in feels a little different than the Spokane I live in now.

Spokane has the reputation of being like Seattle's little brother, or like the trailer-trash cousin to Seattle, right? That's not kind, but that's how it feels sometimes, especially talking to people who don't live in Spokane. I had a friend in high school who went to New York, and somebody asked him, Where are you from? He said Spokane and the reply was, Ah, Meth City. There's this reputation, but beyond that, I have my own insecurities about it. So, I've always avoided it, but I have gratitude for people like Jess Walter who unabashedly write about it and set stories here. I have tried to be better; I wrote a horror novel recently, and it's not set in Spokane by name, but it’s Spokane. I think if you've lived here, you can kind of put two and two together and realize, Oh, this is just a fictional Spokane.

As far as Bardo and place, because of the capital punishment, I couldn't set it in Washington because Washington abolished it a few years ago. Then I was thinking about Werner Herzog's Into the Abyss. It's all about the criminal justice system in Texas. Very uplifting, a laugh riot. It’s just this overwhelming, depressing depiction of the penal system and the death penalty. I saw it back in college, but when I start thinking about the death penalty, my mind tends to go straight to Texas and it's partly because of that movie. That's why I set the book there. I think there's only one or two chapters where it actually gets into specifics, but I'm not an expert so I didn't want to say anything that's gonna make me look like a total dummy.

My favorite question for an art extravaganza … What film, album, or artwork best pairs with Bardo?

Shortly before I wrote Bardo, I read this book by Jonathan Ames, You Were Never Really Here. It's 100 pages and it's this breakneck speed that kicks ass and it's very simple in a way that John Wick is simple. I really adored this book. Part of what I wanted to do was write something really simple and straightforward. Once I did that, I got scared and shuffled everything up and made it confusing. Then, Lynne Ramsay adapted You Were Never Really Here into a movie with Joaquin Phoenix. I didn't really like it, but it's really artsy. She took it in this direction that’s slow-moving and brooding and focused on character. I feel like Bardo is somewhere in between the two. It's not a breakneck entertaining thrill, but I don't think it's quite as contemplative as Ramsay's movie.

At the end of Bardo, I mentioned that I wrote it while listening exclusively to “Flashlight” by The Front Bottoms. I don't know if you've done this, or if you listen to anything when you write, but I picked this one song, and it almost acted like shorthand. I’d write in the morning while listening to “Flashlight” on YouTube on my phone. When the song ended, I would replay it. Then at night, even if I was in the middle of a thought or the whole day had gone by, I could turn that song back on and it just got me right back into it.

It was great to connect with Joseph and chat about his fantastic and thought-provoking book. Check out Bardo — and check out his latest novel, Strings.

Author Chelsea Hicks writes of The Strange Beautiful, “Carla Crujido conjures. With these dark, sexy, haunting modern fairy tales, she evokes and transcends West Coast nostalgia, glamor, and all the ways the past is never past. Crujido will leave you dreaming, craving more of her mesmerizing prose and her enchanted places, ghosts, and characters.”

Carla Crujido lives in the Pacific Northwest and was the Nonfiction Editor at River Styx Magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Also, she’s food-obsessed and when she’s not writing transportive fiction, you can find her writing culinary articles.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Carla virtually (2023) where we discussed Spokane’s magic, repetition of history, forgotten everyday women, and the divine combination of red wine and huckleberry chocolate.

You noted in an interview with Chin Music Press that The Strange Beautiful is a love letter to Spokane and an homage to places that no longer exist. Although every city changes with time, Spokane feels like an interesting and compelling choice — very different than if it was San Francisco or New York. Maybe because it doesn’t get much attention? What about Spokane captured your imagination?

I would not exist if not for Spokane. It’s where my mom and dad met (which is a fairy tale unto itself) in the very early ’60s. After they married and moved to California, we would still return every year to spend summers with my Grandma Blondie in Priest River, Idaho. These trips included days spent in Spokane: Auntie’s Books, ice cream at the once-upon-time shop in the Parkade, errands down Division, burgers at Steer Inn, sometimes lunch at Cyrus O’Leary’s. My father was a nuclear engineer and we power plant-hopped all over the country, but Spokane and Priest River were a constant for me. They always felt like home. Beyond that, I love the history, both remembered and forgotten, of Spokane. If I never wrote about another city, I’d never run out of stories.

Disappearance, reappearance, nostalgia, an inevitable interconnectedness . . . It’s also notable that the first few stories take place in 1918 during the Spanish Flu epidemic. The isolation and rules that come with an epidemic or pandemic are now intimately familiar for us. I believe you started writing these stories prior to Covid. What did that trajectory look like?

Disappearance, reappearance, nostalgia, and inevitable interconnectedness speak to everything that I and my work represent in life and on the page. One of my best friends, Richard, says he never knows when I will disappear or reappear (and sometimes he means it quite literally). I am also one who gets lost in the past. That is not to say, I pine for my own past (I don’t); I pine for what has been lost to me that I never knew — history, stories, people. It’s why I write the stories I do. To capture those lost people and moments of time.

I did start writing three of the ten stories before Covid, including the first story “The Songbird.” It was born purely from history and not experience. Thomas’ story came to me while watching Richard’s storyline in Boardwalk Empire, although in my mind my Thomas looked and acted more like Thomas in Downton Abbey. Once a character introduces him or herself to me, I open the door and welcome them in. Thomas started talking and I started taking notes. Then I did a deep dive into researching Spokane during the Spanish Flu, and after that I started writing. “The Tower” which was also set in 1918, was written at the height of our own pandemic, but I didn’t want to write a 2020 pandemic story. We were living it; it felt too depressing.

However, I was astounded by the similarities and also by the differences, because people had such good manners for the most part back then. If you spat on the street, you got in trouble. You didn't get arrested but you did get a ticket for spitting. You got a ticket for not being masked. People still snuck out and did things that they weren't supposed to do (human nature), but still, people respected the rules a lot more than they did this time around. I thought that was fascinating.

Originally “The Songbird” was supposed to be the first story and “The Tower” the last. I wanted to make the point that history is cyclical and forever repeating. However, the collection had its own ideas about how it wanted to be read.

The fairy tale elements work beautifully. The stories are a perfect mix of the everyday, the human, and the magical. The surreal elements are never jarring and it all feels gorgeously natural and nuanced. In “The Bear” Boris the bear says, “Being seen is its own kind of magic” and this line feels like a driving theme or a poetic summary of the collection. Do you often infuse your fiction with fairy tales? Or was this a choice that felt necessary for this collection and the work it’s doing?

Thank you! I think all of us really want it to be seen and so often we aren’t. For some of us that means being seen on social media, but for most of us it’s about being seen offline, in a real way.

I didn’t even think of infusing my fiction with the surreal or fairy tale elements until my then mentor, now friend, Toni Jensen was reading a chapter for a back-burnered historical novel I was working on and she read the almost imperceptible nod I made to the surreal and she suggested I write into it.

Later, a friend of mine gave me a copy of Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin and told me it reminded him of me. After I read it, my writing changed completely. Prior to reading that book, I was writing about Mount Vernon in Spokane, but it was a historical novel. It was a fast and intuitive change of direction and led to the stories in the collection. As soon as I delved into the surreal, it just broke apart, and I was so in love with my characters in the research and the writing. I haven't been able to get back to that.

Writing in that manner also freed me from myself. It allowed me to get to the truth of the story, to muddy up my characters, to be real. Metaphor goes a long way in allowing me to write what otherwise feels impossible.

You render a variety of characters flawlessly, but I was moved by your repressed or “erased women.” Along with Spokane, it seemed like perhaps you were trying to keep some women’s stories alive: neglected wives, unseen women, women who want to fly away, men who try to keep “a woman without a suitcase of broken emotions,” a mannequin who learns that being a woman is a lot of “do not’s.” Can you say more about your century of fascinating women?

I love that you got all of that. It was my intention to make sure that I conveyed how the stories of everyday women are erased or forgotten or never even told. It hit me extra hard when I lost my Auntie Helen last summer. She lived a life worthy of a novel, but if I didn’t tell her story who would? Ditto, one of the characters in the book who was based on a real woman who lived at Mt. Vernon. She’s been erased with the passing of time. Until now. Although I didn’t write a novel about her, as originally planned, she still appears in two of my stories (and on the cover of my book), so she will never be forgotten. It also felt important to shine a spotlight on the fact that women have never been treated as equals.

This collection is very autobiographical. I write about women in my family or experiences that women had. I think about my mom, who's now 83, and when she lived in Spokane in her 20s she couldn’t have her own credit card. She could get her own apartment there (she lived in Mount Vernon), but she couldn't get a bank loan. It wasn't polite for women to smoke. It wasn't polite for women to drink beer, definitely not out of a bottle. And, my mom's a tavern owner's daughter. My grandpa owned taverns in Sandpoint and Priest River. But there were just so many things even in the ’60s — then you take it back to the time of my grandma and great-grandma … I still think about the things they weren't allowed to do as women.

I think of the stories of the women within my own family and how society didn’t think their stories were worth remembering. Those are the stories that I feel need to be told — quiet stories of quiet women, men, and . . . animals. Love you, Boris!

You hold an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. How was that education formative or supportive in creating this debut collection? What path led you to IAIA?

It’s a funny story: My sister-in-law, Laurelle, invited me to attend an Indigenous Writers Conference with her in Flagstaff back in 2017, and then she ditched me (but opened a door to my future). I decided to go alone. I was late and asked to share the only table I saw with an empty chair. My table mates, Manny Loley and Brendan Basham, were both students at IAIA. Sherwin Bitsui, Joan Kane, and Kristiana Kahakauwila were on the first panel representing IAIA, and before the day was over, I knew it was where I was supposed to be. During my time there, I studied with Marie Helene Bertino, Ramona Ausubel, Derek Palacio, Toni Jensen, and Pam Houston. Talk about a rare constellation of mentors!

Also, if it weren’t for IAIA, I’m not sure The Strange Beautiful would have been published. I shopped it around to agents and indie publishers and no one was interested. I heard, “beautiful writing, but we can’t sell it” over and over and over again. When I was ready to give up, I got an email from IAIA saying Chin Music was seeking submissions. Justine Chan pulled my manuscript out of the pile and emailed me and here we are.

Beautiful. What role does abandon play in your writing? Do you write hot, edit cold? Tell me a bit about your writing life and creative process.

I live and write in organized chaos and always with abandon. The closest I get to a writing ritual is pouring a small glass of red wine, putting on my headphones, and tuning into something that’s going to set the mood for my work. It also has to be dark outside. I cannot write during the day. I absolutely write hot and edit cold! I am not one who has a daily practice. I can only write when inspired and then I write with a sense of mad abandon. I love the journal’s theme and I thought it was very fitting to me and to my work, because I write very intuitively. I’m not a linear writer. I'm not a linear human being.

Also, music is everything to me. I can’t write without it. It’s my constant. The soundtrack for the writing of The Strange Beautiful was super eclectic (Pete Yorn to Waylon Jennings to Macklemore) but leaned heavily on Nick Drake and Lana Del Rey. I also read for inspiration (mostly nonfiction for research), but I did go back again and again, while writing, to the poetry of Joy Harjo and the lyrical essays of Toni Jensen. May I say, there is no one who writes nonfiction as beautifully as Toni!

I hear you’re food obsessed. So, what dish, cocktail, and/or dessert pairs most scrumptiously with The Strange Beautiful?

If I were feeling fancy, I’d say a glass of Saviah Cabernet Franc and a slice of Torta Caprese; however, the most perfect pairing for reading The Strange Beautiful is a glass of Walla Walla red and dark chocolate huckleberry truffles from Montana. I spent many evenings staring out the window of my south-facing room of the Davenport Tower Hotel — while drinking a glass of Washington red, eating huckleberry chocolates, and writing in my mind.

Note: This interview was originally for Abandon Journal, but they aren’t currently operating. I’m very glad I connected with Carla though, read her beautiful collection, and learned more about our beloved Spokane. It’s an honor to share our chat with you. Do buy her fantastic book and enjoy it (preferably with some huckleberry chocolates).

Art: the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

Hobby: an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure.

Trade: a job requiring manual skills and special training.

Apprentice: a person who is learning a trade from a skilled employer, having agreed to work for a fixed period at low wages.

Lowbrow: not highly intellectual or cultured.

Highbrow: intellectual or rarefied in taste.

Rebel: a person who resists authority, control, or convention.

Sell-out: a betrayal of one's principles for reasons of expedience.

Survival: the state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically in spite of an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances.

Success: the accomplishment of an aim or purpose / the attainment of fame, wealth, or social status. (Oxford definitions)

This past year, I fell in love with crafting. It started with a Christmas gift of a miniature model library. I got lost in gluing these small pieces together and spent hours at the desk in a meditative state. Then I tried punch needling, needle felting, and embroidery. I loved them all, although I knew quickly that embroidery would be the one I’d continue doing; I had a flood of exciting ideas and future projects that I couldn’t get to fast enough. At 42, it felt like a twenty-year journey to get back to this kind of creative state.

It was the first time since I was a teenager that creating felt like compulsion, play, discovery, and joy. Back then, I had no notions of genres or perfection or permissions, just an innate and voracious need to create. I loved all arts, all crafts, and didn’t think much about delineations of art forms or staying in a lane or finding a niche. I hand-made or collected sketchbooks and filled them with magazine cutouts of inspiration: I had one for fashion, one for interiors, one for poems and quotes. I altered clothing and turned jeans into bell bottoms by hand-sewing in colorful 70s fabrics. I glued cheap gems onto big white sunglasses. I decorated my ’88 Hyundai Excel with leopard seat covers, bumper stickers, fabric butterflies that hung from the roof, a blow-up doll of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” in the back window, and a Barbie head impaled on the antenna with her sleek blonde ponytail flapping in the wind (feminist commentary? yes).

I started strongly identifying with being an artist and even asked fellow students to vote for me as “best artist” for our senior yearbook (cringe). I had very little attachment to my high school or my town, but art was the most important thing to me. The pressure to be exceptional kicked in. If I was going to do four years of art school in New York City, if we were going to pay an unreasonable tuition, I must succeed. I must be an outlier. There’s a danger in exerting immense pressure, especially on an art, and I’d come to suffer from perfectionism, paralysis, and disenchantment. Although I had thought myself skilled in high school, I looked at other artists around me at School of Visual Arts and wished I operated more like them. I had a talented friend Alex, and I always thought: Now he’s a great artist; he’s always sketching in his sketchbook, even on the subway; he doesn’t even need to use reference images; his style is so unique; he’s always on and always brilliant. I loved being around him and my other brilliant friends but often felt like they were light years ahead of me.

There’s a certain specific horror in not being able to do the thing that’s supposedly the most important thing to do. However, that thing shapeshifts under the lenses of criticism and commerce. I read that more writers with book coaches have had books published than those with master’s degrees in creative writing. I wasn’t too surprised by this since I knew what education could potentially do to a passion. You have multiple voices and points of view in your ear, higher standards for the art form, a tougher inner critic, awards and rejections, and considerations about how to make a living off of these skills. There’s also so much noise: illustration isn’t as respected as fine art; if you do art on the side, it’s a hobby; if you make money, you’re a sellout; if you’re too trained, the work is pretentious; if you’re under-trained, it’s naive or mediocre.

Resistance is a persistent phenomenon for artists. The number of memes about writers cleaning the house instead of writing proves this point. We have well-used terms like writer's block and artist’s block because being stuck is common. Steven Pressfield writes in The War of Art, “The more you love your art/ calling/ enterprise, the more important its accomplishment to the evolution of your soul, the more you will fear it and the more Resistance you will experience facing it.”

Overall, I didn’t dislike or regret my art education. Our dean said from the start that we’d forget or dismiss many things down the road and only keep what served us. There needs to be trust in the integration and process over the span of years. The nature of art also makes it subjective: this teacher thought the work was too feminine, that one thought it was too political, and the literature and philosophy teachers were wondering why I didn’t major in humanities. My intuitive professor saw me painting realistically and wondered if that was true to me — not because I was bad at it, but because it didn’t feel like my style. He was right. It pushed me to experiment with mediums besides oil on canvas again. I still felt lost, but I did make braille out of hot glue dots, had interactive work like pulling a letter out of an envelope, painted on a wood log I pulled off the street, and hand-sewed a collection of weird creatures. One of my projects spurred this professor to tell me that I was “a good shopper.” This small insight stayed with me and felt like a warm hug. I was a collector, a crow scavenging for shiny things, bits of interesting paper, thrifted and found items.

Long after my college days were over, I think success felt elusive because my goals were murky. It also depends how you define success: Is it an art-related career? Is it enjoying the process of making art? Is it gallery shows, commercial projects, fame? I fell into interesting gigs in New York with my skills; I painted hardwood floors and walls in upscale apartments, worked in fashion illustration and production, and was a sculpture technician in the factory of Jeff Koons. Nothing felt like a passionate long-term creative fit, and dissatisfied, I’d hop on to the next opportunity. But it also wasn’t these jobs that made me feel like I had failed — It was the deep discomfort of losing the important thing, of no longer making work for myself, of not knowing where art and I stood.

I loved the “lowbrow” art movement and felt drawn to illustrations, T-shirts, skateboards, stickers, graffiti, Californian and Mexican influences, and tattoo art. As I got more into tattoos, it felt like a divine clarity and a welcome relief. At almost 30, I thought I’d found my path. I managed the front desk of a tattoo shop and waited for the gatekeepers to grant me permission to become an apprentice. There were more mixed messages than ever: It’s not an art, it’s a trade. Art school is a hindrance because you think you know what you’re doing but you don’t. We’re a bunch of outlaws but follow this long list of unspoken rules. Draw more, want it more, but don’t take it on yourself and become a scratcher or a nuisance. Tattooing was a notoriously hard industry to break into, but I knew it was meant for me. It wasn’t. It didn't work out. There was a combination of factors, some outside of my control and some due to my approach, but I was baffled and defeated. I didn't break through. I was not an outlier or a success, and this was the last time I’d attempt to make art a career path.

In my final throes of tattoo defiance, I took the bus to Montreal to go to a tattoo convention, even though I’d felt sick all week. I stayed with Alex, my brilliant friend from art school, who was living there and working on stop-motion characters for The Little Prince. Before my illness fully consumed me, we had a lovely lunch, and I saw his studio space and his latest creations. I never made it to the convention. I spent the rest of the weekend trip with Alex’s sweet girlfriend, on the couch under a blanket, drinking hot toddies and watching television. Feverish and pathetically sick, I slept the nine-hour bus ride back to New York. Make plans, God laughs, all that.

It’s been 11 years and three cities later. I’ve slowed down, I’m a lot more tired, but I’ve regained the fierce drive to create in my free time, late at night, and in between clients. This is what I had once, long ago, and the spark I saw in people like Alex. This is the real success, the return of the important thing. It’s not an identity and it’s not granted merit by gatekeepers; it's the beast in the belly that wants to unleash its tentacles and wrap them around everything. It’s uninterested in labels and definitions and institutions and hierarchies. It just wants to come out and play. I finally understand rest as rebellion. I make for the sake of making. I was lost and now I’m found.

ksheridanart.com ♡

The fatigue was almost unbearable, and I went straight to bed. I was nauseous and my head and body ached, but it mainly felt like shutting down. I couldn’t form words. I tried to sit up and go to the bathroom; I got dizzy, my vision blurred, and I laid back down. My heart raced, I was covered in sweat, saw stars, and almost blacked out. I scared my husband, and we were minutes away from calling for an ambulance. He held my hands, put my legs up on his shoulders, said nice things I can’t remember, and I held his arm like it was the only thing tethering me to the earth. 

I had felt more coherent after shattering my heel, and after a few minutes of shock, hopping out of the room on one foot to seek help. I had felt more coherent after being knocked out for wisdom teeth removal, where I walked into the dentist’s lobby and whipped out my phone to check work emails before I was out the door. 

I focused only on deep breathing. After a few minutes, it passed. This wasn’t the kind of deep vulnerable connection with a new husband I was hoping for. 

About eight months prior, I’d moved to New Zealand from the USA. Through a stressful and uncertain pandemic, all I wanted was to get into this country and start a life with my partner. Then when I finally did, I fell apart, although the unraveling was likely a long time coming. Successes aren’t overnight, and neither are breakdowns.

For art school in New York City, I commuted from my hometown in New Jersey. I’d ride the train for an hour and a half, do the same after my classes, and then go work at a local ice rink. I didn’t take education for granted, and despite my commute, I won awards for attendance. I moved out on my first-ever full-time paycheck while working at a gym. With no financial help and a fluctuating income in NYC, I ran up survival credit-card debt on uninteresting things like toiletries and groceries. I went through debt settlement in my late 20s at the advice of an accountant and rid myself of $20,000 worth of debt. Four years later, I’d default on credit cards again after breaking my heel. I’d also keep working at a gym and finish a mural project on crutches and lose my apartment anyway and move in with a friend. I’d limp around a restaurant in a French green dress and serve avocado toast to West Village customers once I could walk again. Then, I moved to Los Angeles with $400 to my name. I stopped in Portland for 5 weeks first to cat sit for a friend. I knew I wouldn’t make it to LA without additional income, so I snagged two temp jobs within 5 weeks; I worked some black-tie catering gigs and promoted raw energy bars at a Whole Foods. In LA, I stayed on a friend’s couch and got a job at a gym within 6 days of being there. Then, I’d soon add on managing a restaurant. When I took my first international vacation to New Zealand in 2015 I counted 47 days of consecutive work in a row, weekends included, and slept 17 hours straight on the flight over.

After a few years, knowing that the pace and cost of LA wasn’t sustainable as I burned out and my health started to decline, I made an escape plan for graduate school in Spokane, Washington. This was a hilarious “solution.” Spokane was a smaller, quieter, and more affordable city that I adored, but the hustle didn’t end for me as I tried to balance master’s-level work with graduate assistantships with side jobs with starting over. I wrangled a gig with the university’s football team before my writing program even started. The assumption that I’d take two years to only write and gain this creative freedom I hadn’t known since being a teenager proved to be an unrealistic one. I’m not sure if I was an optimistic dreamer or too thick-skulled to learn life lessons from recurring hardships. I had a near-delusional faith in myself. Success was always just around the next corner—although it was also a shifting mirage that I hadn't clearly defined for myself. By the time I owned a used car, graduated, found good friends, and had a steady clientele in Spokane, I was going to leave it all behind to embark on the next journey.

I wanted the opposite of what my mother wanted and had. She married young, became a stay-at-home mom in an unhappy marriage, lived in the same house in a lackluster suburb for 20+ years, and mourned the picture-perfect family life we didn’t have. I saw her as perpetually stuck. She also had health problems in my youth that I equated with stress: chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, heart arrhythmias, and others I don’t recall. Through my 20s and 30s, I would take a path far away from that life: big cities, art degrees, activism, nonstop change, hyper-independence, an array of careers, apartments, and roommates—and definitely no kids to slow me down or, God forbid, tie me to any person or place. I didn’t expect to repeat my mother’s history, and as I sat on a dingy floral couch in a doctor’s office 7,000 miles away from my homeland and everything I’d known, I wondered if an alternate life path had somehow led me to the same broken end point.

I’d also started talking with a wise and experienced psychotherapist since my mental health was tanking as quickly as my physical health. Even he seemed a bit baffled as I’d done endless work on myself and had clarity around past and present circumstances. I expressed my concern that it might be hormonal dysregulation or something that needed to be medically cared for, not therapized. He replied, “Definitely get everything tested; you’re so used to bootstrapping but you can’t bootstrap your way out of a health problem.” My new GP, who seemed to understand I’d withstood some major upheavals, noted, “You know, depression and anxiety can be a normal response to abnormal circumstances.” I knew this and I was trying to grant myself endless compassion (and regularly curse our failed capitalist systems), but I felt exasperated because I also needed to function. I needed and wanted to work and pay bills and build a life. 

The specter of necessity kept me powering through all along. Symptoms of severe burnout had started in Los Angeles 5 years prior. It’s why I left. I needed to slow down but I couldn’t seem to find a way out as long as I was self-sufficient, in survival mode, and starting over. A few overwhelmed and depressed times, I told my ex-partner that I’d move to his parents’ house in middle America in a heartbeat to just stop struggling for a bit. He kindly shrugged off this dramatic proclamation because of course we weren’t going to live with his parents in our late 30s. I knew it wasn’t a viable option, but it was my subdued version of a last-straw cry for help.

The author and spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson says, “When 60% of our population lives paycheck to paycheck, that means 60% of our people are living with chronic economic anxiety. It’s a rolling form of PTSD; not post but rather present traumatic stress disorder. This isn’t a mental health crisis; it’s an economic justice crisis.” Since reading those words, I often think about rolling forms of PTSD, like financial anxiety, war-stricken populations, and an ongoing pandemic. Healing from a past traumatic event can be hard enough, but what if it’s ongoing? How do you heal from trauma you’re still actively enduring? 

Not yet a resident of my new country, I paid money I didn’t have (borrowed from good friends) to test my hormones, cortisol, thyroid, and various other markers. My cortisol levels were in the gutter, and I had nonexistent levels of dopamine. I research-spiraled in an attempt to connect dots and find possible causes and solutions. High estrogen leads to rage; low levels of dopamine present as ADHD; low progesterone means poor sleep, high anxiety, might be the onset of perimenopause, and can lead to Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD). Chronic allergies, horrendous in my new environment, affect adrenal glands and increase inflammation. Maybe it was all nervous system dysregulation, complex PTSD, and the oft-dismissed adrenal fatigue? Mind messing up the body, body messing up the mind, chicken or egg . . . did it matter anyway? It was all connected.

I had spent almost a year in freeze mode, a dazed paralysis that left me disoriented and confused by things like crossing the street or absorbing new information. I told my naturopath that it wasn’t like me to not learn the bus system, explore a new city, and try to make friends. I lamented that this move would have looked so different at 30 than 40, that it would have been a grand adventure. She looked at me with such compassion and said, “Kim, you don’t have the energy. You’re scraping the edges for every last bit of energy just to function.” In some ways, seeing lines and numbers on a chart and hearing her words was a validating relief. It was also in this office where I was listened to, and my symptoms were believed that I recalled my mom’s chronic fatigue syndrome and her bedridden moments of my childhood. Maybe I had the same affliction, but frustratingly many ailments have no easy diagnosis, no pill, and no cure. They require lifestyle changes, time, and hope.

How do you explain invisible all-consuming exhaustion? Anne Boyer writes about it profoundly in The Undying although her worn-down was from the incomparable calamity of cancer and chemotherapy: “The exhausted are always trying even when they don’t want to, even when they are too exhausted to name trying as trying or to think about it like that. The trying of the exhausted is fuel for the machine that keeps running them over in the first place.” My symptoms had moved beyond exhaustion and included brain fog, nausea, headaches, body aches, numbness, panic attacks, acne, heart palpitations, and inflammation. Life-interrupting and worrisome but still vague enough to be practically anything. 

The scariest part was that I felt myself slipping away, the self who made me who I was: I was who I had always relied on. I trusted myself almost completely. What would I have if I no longer had my self? My skin’s adorned with tattoos that say Action is Eloquence and Born Ready and NOW. This situation was challenging all my previous self-identifiers (or coping mechanisms). The dissolution was amplified by being in a new place where no one knew me or could champion the Kim they long knew and loved. Instead of the fruits of labor being inevitable success, maybe I was burning the last of my wick and on way to becoming a ghost of ashes.

“Sometimes we don’t need to be pushed outside our comfort zone because we’ve never been inside of one,” writes the chiropractor and nervous system expert Dr. Scherina Alli. She notes that healthy comfort zones can provide space for growth and can provide safety, support, softness, and regulation. After a lifetime of taking leaps and weathering discomfort, my nervous system was desperate for security and regulation—which meant it was time to do the opposite of almost all of what I had a habit of doing.

It was time to enter an era of slowness, boredom, patience, surrender, unlearning, and reframing. When my system started to calm, freedom from ambition was an unexpected liberation. On the other side, although I no longer had the ability to imagine it, would be doing creative projects for the joy of it, watching hours of design shows without guilt, crafting and being completely present, taking naps, spending beautiful hours of down time with my husband, saying no to events, working less hours than ever before, and feeling my former symptoms subside as I succumbed to deep rest. This would be an ongoing practice, but maybe it would also become the new normal. Maybe I hadn’t clearly defined the success I devoted my energy and years of life to, but maybe I found it. Maybe it looked nothing like I thought it would.

The name of your solo show at Roq La Rue in Seattle is Undercurrent and your gorgeous pieces have more ocean- and water-themed work. Can you tell me more about the title and the move in this direction?

My art underwent a natural progression during the pandemic due to my growing obsession with weather. I’ve been drawn to shifting skies, sudden changes, drops in pressure, and precipitation in particular. The water in this show is about energy and its transference on both an emotional and molecular level. Emotions meaning trauma, generational trauma, joy and ecstasy: the releasing and ultimately recycling of this energy and the impact it has as it ripples outward. It’s a continually painful and beautiful process. The undercurrent acts as a bridge, from the gravity of the moon’s pull affecting tides, rivers running into oceans, the salt from our tears mirroring the salt in the sea. The hardening of a pearl, like a memory, illustrates the passing of time. Pearls strung together can encompass lifetimes.

I've been honored to watch your evolution over the years and witness your hard work and constant learning, but there seems to have been a huge leap from 2022 to 2023 in terms of style. It seems as though you've really stepped into your full power and voice as an artist. Can you say more about this evolution?

To be honest, it's something I'm hesitant to admit but I was growing tired of, if not uninspired by, my own work. Tired in the sense of my own rules that I had constructed or had been taught to follow. I realized that I didn't have to follow these constructs; there is no set formula. The animals and landscape do not need to be represented accurately in order to be understood. In turn, I wanted to make work that could be felt without being fully seen. I no longer cared about rules in trying to paint a variety of subjects and felt the freedom in exploration of whatever/whoever it is I am currently fixated on. I am grateful to those creatures, so dear to me as the ones who deliver my messages and help me deliver theirs.

You also had a wonderful business called Welcome to the Doghouse . . .

For many years I painted custom pet portraits, mostly dogs. I enjoyed it for some time but being a fine artist and making my own work from my heart was truly my calling. When I was able to steer away from that, my personal work deepened. Now, my absolute love and devotion for dogs come through in a different manner as I’ve had the freedom to re-contextualize them in my own way. They have become a very tangible conduit of language, emotion, and expression for me.

I know many artists are now incorporating AI into their work or using AI as a means to plan their painting and then painting the image on a canvas. Can you tell more about your processes and your views on AI?

Every generation has their major advances but I think with AI, the world will be changed so drastically it will be difficult to experience anything that hasn't been affected by it. There’s definitely a trend of artists plugging in their own images and adding the necessary prompts to create weirder, more rendered, and highly polished versions of their work, and then reproducing it in a painting. I struggle to see if painting these images adds anything beyond just viewing the constructed image itself. What added value does it have as a painting? What value does the original concept retain once entered into AI? That opens a floodgate of thought.

One thing I do know is that its formulas have become easier to spot, at least to me. I think there’s something about AI images that register in our subconscious as oversaturated and hollow, if not soulless. Lacking that imperceptible thing that humans have and machines don't (yet): emotion. Maybe we can't register it with our eyes but we can feel it (or not feel, rather) in our hearts. A sort of false beauty, similar to plastic surgery and appearance-altering trends where people are now starting to look homogeneous. You can't quite tell what's off but I think it registers somewhere, deep inside, a feeling of subtle unknown discomfort. Perhaps eventually there will be a turn back towards unadulterated art in the future. Or maybe we will all become so desensitized we will grow to love it, just like any new unattainable addiction.

What do you see as coming up next for you, or what's your dream project?

I am realizing I may be moving into the world of multidisciplinary artists. For my recent solo Undercurrent, I included a series of vintage oyster shells which I painted in a scrimshaw style, using various tools to carve out the paint. I also created handmade candles from shells and beeswax. They played into the setting and environment of the overall exhibit. Originally, I had started painting shells as candles in my work and decided it would be fun to make one for reference. I fell in love with the process and wanted to make a batch of them to include in the ambiance of the exhibit. One of those instances of life imitating art and vice versa. I would relish the opportunity to create a fully immersive installation with free range of all of the space, implementing different mediums, techniques, and settings. I also would love to paint life-size subjects without the confines of space. 

What food or meal would you pair with your stunning solo show?

For a more minimalist setting, decadent hors d’oeuvres of petite platters of fresh oysters topped with yuzu vinaigrette, just-caught sardines flash fried in chili oil, and crème fraîche dolloped with caviar atop endive leaves. Or an elaborate seafood tower, cascades of dripping fresh bivalves piled high on beds of crushed ice and crisp green leaves. Bright yellow wedges of lemon peeking through. Melting ice turning into streams of water spilling over the sides. Divine gifts of the sea!

Find Alexis online at alexistrice.com and on Instagram 🦪

The first hip hop crew, and one of the first to rap in Arabic, is DAM. From Lydd, they saw parallels between their neighborhood and Tupac’s video, “Holla If You Hear Me.” Palestinians in Lydd were resettled from Jaffa in 1948 when 80% became refugees; they suffer from discrimination and their communities are often plagued by crime, violence, and poverty. According to a 2021 article in Al Jazeera, “Despite holding Israeli citizenship, rights groups have documented several dozen Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens across a wide spectrum of issues, including education, housing, political participation and due process. They are treated as second- and third-class citizens.” 

DAM volunteers with kids and gives them role models to look up to. Singer Tamer notes that most will become drug dealers, go to prison, or die. One kid doesn’t know he’s Palestinian, because they only learn Zionist history. He only knows he’s Arab. DAM wants success so they can do more, like start an art school and teach kids about Palestinian artists. Tamer says to the young group sitting cross-legged on the floor, “You’re not animals; you’re human beings.” How can a nine-year-old be considered an animal? It’s shocking, and also, it’s the same old story: Colonizers oppress, impoverish, and strip people of their humanity, education, and opportunities. Then, they point the finger back at them and shame them for being animals. 

DAM quotes Chuck D’s line: “Hip Hop is our CNN.” The footage of the rappers and their neighborhoods wouldn’t be shown to us on most media channels: Mahmoud gets stopped by Israeli police and asked for his ID just because he’s speaking Arabic on the street. He rarely takes the bus because when he does, he gets stared at the whole time. Abeer gets fired after three years at McDonald’s for speaking Arabic (she sues them and actually wins). A library’s removed from a school and a police station is put in its place. Building permits are denied. Olive trees are destroyed. Two teen boys are arrested and imprisoned on the claim that they threw rocks in a protest two years prior—they’ve been waiting in prison for eight months with no trial. In Gaza, Mohammed has to leave five hours to get from Khan Yunis to Gaza City because of police checkpoints, even though the distance is only 14 miles. Sometimes they’re told no and have to turn around anyway. He and his friends mourn because they can’t leave this small strip of occupied land and all they want is to see their own country and meet the rappers in the West Bank. Then, there’s the massive wall. 

By ’08, DAM’s song “Min Imhabi” (“Who’s the Terrorist?”) had been downloaded over a million times:
You’re killing us like you’ve killed our ancestors
You want me to go to the law? What for?
You’re the witness, the lawyer, and the judge!
If you’re my judge, I’ll be sentenced to death!
Who’s the terrorist? I’m the terrorist?!

It’s been said that there are two motivating forces, fear and love. Fear is a dangerous one and often used as a political tool to gather support for heinous wars. I lived through 9/11 in New York City and in the aftermath, emotions were high: Some despair and fear and anger and desire for revenge. Also, compassion and community and respect for first responders and pride. I sent an email to my friends and family and noted for the first time I felt proud to be American. My high school friend called me out on it, and he was right. It still stands as one of the most embarrassing things I’ve said. Even though I was only 19, I knew enough to know I wasn’t proud of our country’s blood-soaked history, here or abroad. One of my favorite lines from Oscar Wilde is “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.” Where we’re born is a cosmic gamble and doesn't make us better than anyone else. I understood that I was lucky to live in a place where I didn’t worry daily about bombs, but proud of America was decidedly not the right term. 

If anything, it was a love for the New York community, the everyday humans who pulled together and helped each other through. Civilians (American, Israeli, Palestinian, or otherwise) don’t deserve to pay for the crimes of the government—and corrupt governments are hardly representative of average people. They take tragedies and politicize, monetize, propagandize, and weaponize them. So America wielded its ‘righteous’ hammer of rage, and went on to kill over 430,000 civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan. It wasn’t about spreading democracy or fighting terrorism. According to a 2023 report by Brown University, at least 4.5 million people have died in post-9/11 war zones, often children, accredited to “indirect deaths” or things like malnutrition and disease. The report is titled, “How Death Outlives War.” Tragic events also can’t live outside of world history and context or we’re doomed to repeat awful cycles. As scarred as many of us in New York were, most of us knew our country’s sordid history, we knew war and Islamophobia were not solutions, we didn’t support Bush and his crew, and we knew military action would only perpetuate violence and anti-American sentiment.

In Gaza, Mohammed has even more challenges than DAM does in Lydd. He was shot in the arm when he was just a teen by Israeli soldiers with silencers on their guns. Demoralized and hopeless, he started breaking things in the house. Pre-internet, it was hard to access things but he managed to get an Eminem tape from Canada. Hip hop is what keeps him and his group, Palestinian Rapperz, going. It gives them something to live for. They dress differently, the only people in Gaza that wear baggy clothes and dress like rappers. Mohammed’s lovely dad supports him and says, “Art is more effective than violence. Violence only breeds more violence and destruction.” This is the power of art. Instead of propaganda, great art gives us humanity. Mohammed’s a guest on a local radio show, and someone calls in to say, “We know how foreigners are…when there’s singing and dancing, they’ll memorize it. Soon the Americans will be singing our words!” They all laugh. It’s funny and heartbreaking. What will it take to get Americans to see the Gazan plight? Not only were they rendered invisible, but the US has continuously funded their oppression and annihilation. 

Slingshot Hip Hop premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah in 2008 and received a standing ovation. A team fighting the good fight for every win, it was such a joy to see Mohammed make it to the US, and to see all of the rappers unite and feel heard and supported. The Graffiti Research Lab lasered art on buildings and snow banks that spelled out Slingshot Hip Hop and Free Palestine and End the Occupation. It felt like hope.

Later that year, I clocked out of work and took the subway to Wall Street to protest the bailout with consumer advocate and independent presidential candidate, Ralph Nader. With a keffiyeh around my neck, I nodded while he and other speakers preached to our small choir about bankers’ greed and two-party corruption. There was a sign that read, “Socialism Saves Capitalism.” I remember seeing two businessmen in black suits, coffees in hand, smugly laughing at us. It was the laughter of impunity, of knowing that either political party would ensure there’d be minimal consequences, and that the taxpayers would bail out their crimes. 

Slingshot was also screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was the closest I’d come to having my art in a major museum, which wasn’t lost on me, but I was mainly happy to help bring light to this important message. I attended every screening and event in the area. If only enough people could see this film, hear this music, meet these people, maybe there could be change . . . Fifteen years later, not much has changed, except that things are worse. My heart shatters to see the staggering number of casualties and the destruction in Gaza, and to see the US ignore the public demand for a permanent ceasefire. My only hope is in the solidarity and raised voices of many good people waking up to the atrocities of The Empire and saying, Never again, Not in our name, Never again, Not in our name. 

Free Palestine.

This theater-opera performance at the Park Avenue Armory was directed by Robert Wilson, who reimagined performance artist Marina Abramović’s life. It starred Abramović herself, actor Willem Dafoe, and singer Antony Hegarty (now known as Anohni). Abramović is a Serbian performance artist who has been pushing the limits of the body and endurance art for fifty years. She’s perhaps now most well-known for her collaborative performances with her former partner Ulay, which included walking the Great Wall of China in 1988 for three months to meet in the middle, end their 12-year union, and say goodbye — and for her 2010 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, The Artist is Present, where she sat eight hours a day for three months in a simple chair and museum visitors could sit across from her and meet her steady gaze. The exhibit drew 850,000 visitors. In the documentary about this exhibit, of the same name, it’s noted that people spend an average of only 30 seconds in front of artistic masterpieces. However, people spent hours and whole days watching Abramović with her long black braid and her long white, black, or blood-red dresses gaze at someone, drop her head and clear her energy, and look up for the next participant with full presence. Much of her work is brutal, violent even, and demands physical stamina and mental strength, but in this film she notes that “the hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing.” I found this to be true in life as well as performance art; when my broken heel forced me to stop and when the pandemic halted things, all I wanted to do was move and take action. 

The difference is art is self-inflicted with self-imposed deadlines and life is dictated by external forces and hardships have no clear end date, tidy wrap-up, or exhibition catalog. Abramović touches on this in an interview with The New Yorker. She says, “All the aggressive actions I do to myself I would never dream of doing in my own life — I am not this kind of person. I cry if I cut myself peeling potatoes. I am taking the plane, there is turbulence, I am shaking. In performance, I become, somehow, like not a mortal.” It’s galvanizing to find these portals where pain is overcome, a broken body has meaning, and suffering is alchemized. Abramović was the perfect artist to revel in at a point in life when it felt like a great test of my fortitude and endurance was possibly nearing its end. 

I was a fan of Abramović but my enthusiasm to get tickets was in part because the director was Robert Wilson. The tickets were pricey but a small you-only-live-once price to pay after a string of bad luck. Eleven years prior, in 2002, Alexis and I saw Wilson’s art-musical interpretation of Woyzeck at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was based on a German play from the 1800s about Franz Woyzeck, a soldier who signs up as a subject of human experiments, gets abused, hallucinates, and eventually kills his wife for infidelity. We were in our third year at the School of Visual Arts and our illustration professor took our class to see it. The theme for our projects that year was American Gothic and we were steeping ourselves in the dark and bizarre.

The gritty, carnivalesque soundtrack was created by the gravel-voiced singer Tom Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan. Our class was enamored with the production and even more so with the music. Blood Money, the Waits album, became our art studio anthem and we chanted along while we painted to the despairing, repetitive, catchy lyrics of songs like “God’s Away on Business” and “Misery is the River of the World”: If there’s one thing you can say about mankind / There’s nothing kind about man / You can drive out nature with a pitchfork / But it will always come roaring back again / Misery’s the river of the world, Misery’s the river of the world. Misery’s the river of the world. We were the New York millennials who had lived through 9/11 a year earlier and decided to stay. Many of us had been through a lot already, but still had hope and optimism for future success. I’m glad Alexis and I didn't know how many challenges we’d face in the next ten years, then twenty. By The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, we’d had a few wins but accumulated plenty of artistic failures, health issues, and financial struggles. 

Even outside of performance art, the body seems unavoidable in creation. When I started art school, I had just finished my black belt training and had a leg bruised black and dark purple from my knee to my foot from getting kicked. It solidified a reputation. Abramović wants to be called a warrior, not a ‘grandmother’ or ‘godmother’ of performance art. She rarely backs out of a performance or ends it early, although once she fell unconscious in a wooden star on fire and the audience pulled her out and saved her. I got strep throat at training camp and had to be taken out of the woods and to a hospital for antibiotics. They proposed that I wait until the next year to test for my black belt and I refused; I wasn’t backing out and I wasn’t waiting. These things are badges of honor, things conquered, things our minds and wills could get our bodies through. 

I felt less like a warrior with my broken foot. Mostly, I felt shattered and vulnerable. Even though conscious choices still carry risks, the lack of choice in the accident and the ensuing fallout made it harrowing and traumatizing. It wasn’t lost on me that I was a casualty of art since I was restoring a Keith Haring mural, but I didn’t know what to make of it other than to survive it. Often, artists make something of an experience many years after it happens. The poet Louise Gluck notes, “Nothing should be wasted…writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance.” It’s become a mantra.

The Lovers, the Great Wall walk that Abramović and Ulay undertook is mythic in its epic ending of a great love story and an example of life and art happening at the same time. What I didn’t know until recently was that the walk took eight years to gain approval from China and it was originally supposed to be their marriage. By the time they got approval, they were splitting up instead. Ulay also had a baby with their Chinese translator . . . The reality of life at the time was probably painful and anything but romantic, but Abramović’s commitment to art even in those moments is formidable. For her, life is art and art is life. I admire her incessant lifelong determination. She chose not to have kids; she could have died in some of her performances; she lived in a van for a long time with Ulay and fought for 40 years to have performance art recognized as legitimate. She eventually became famous, successful, and opened a nonprofit for performance art and long-durational works, the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI).

Multiple reviewers of The Life and Death of Marina Abramović note her narcissism, her concern with her legacy, and her self-aggrandizement. Immediately, I lost interest in their reviews. Is a legacy by having children noble, but not by making art? Is it noble to live and breathe for kids, but not for your art? Is it narcissistic to preserve and maintain fifty years of the innovative work and endurance tactics you’ve devoted yourself to that changed the landscape of art?

I had tickets for this Friday in December that I was hoping to be back in shoes. I was. I’d gone to the doctor earlier that day and had gotten clearance and a simple ankle brace. I put on lace-up brown boots for the first time in nine weeks and got on the subway. Also, I was leaving the art life behind — if such a thing is possible. I’d been working at a gym as a personal trainer again, with a new commitment to the body and helping other bodies. While still casted, I had trained people sitting on a box. I had spent ten minutes scaling four flights of stairs on crutches to get to the top-floor gym in midtown Manhattan. I had done one-legged burpees and anything I could push myself to do. Mostly, nobody saw this forced long-durational recovery performance, and it didn’t get accolades or a title.

Back to walking, it was time for a new chapter, and I didn’t know on that Friday that life was going to hurl new obstacles at me fast. After our fun evening at The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, Alexis and I met up with my gym colleagues at a nearby bar. Not only did I walk around with this swollen, traumatized, and changed foot, but I danced. God’s away on business. I danced. Misery’s the river of the world. I danced.

From Marina Abramović’s An Artist’s Life Manifesto:

An artist’s relation to suffering:

– An artist should suffer

– From the suffering comes the best work

– Suffering brings transformation

– Through the suffering an artist transcends their spirit

– Through the suffering an artist transcends their spirit

– Through the suffering an artist transcends their spirit

You have the first and only mobile tattoo facility in Joshua Tree. Tell me more about how and why you started doing this with "Lazorbeam Roadkilla" during the COVID days?

The tattoo shop I worked at in Joshua Tree closed down during the COVID pandemic. I already had the RV so I decided to see if I would be able to jump through all the county and state law hoops to comply converting it into a mobile shop of my own. I worked closely with the county, helping them develop some of their own specific policies since no business, other than Lazorbeam, had ever managed to pass the regulations already established. They used other California county regulations as overarching templates as we honed in on details together. I enjoyed the challenge of even attempting to achieve the goal of owning not only my own tattoo business, but the first and only in the county of San Bernardino, much less succeeding.

You're a highly-trained visual artist and you seem to incorporate the body into your work and performances. Maybe tattooing is a natural progression but how did you move in this direction and get started with body art?

I always enjoyed tattoos and wanted to have more, but was unable to afford getting them as often as I might otherwise have liked. In about 2013, living in downtown LA, I approached another art friend of mine, Phil Kim, who was spending more time giving tattoos than painting in his studio. He showed me the ropes: told me which machine, inks, etcetera to buy, while also showing me some basic techniques before I began attacking my own legs with needles. 

Phil and I collaborated on a performance together at Western Project. I presented myself as a morphing-gender mermaid caught inside a net/hammock while simultaneously receiving knuckle tattoos (HEAD and TAIL) and a nail-extensions manicure (administered by another artist friend, Catherine Kim).

I often have ideas about incorporating tattoo further into my performance work. 

What kind of tattoos do you love to do? What inspires you?

In no way do I consider myself a seasoned tattooist, meaning that I have never attempted photo-realism on the skin, as one example. I am most interested in designing and tapping in tattoos with a heavy concentration on line work. I've enjoyed attempting to translate my canvas artwork onto the skin and vice versa by tattooing on rubber and foam-core for exhibitions. My artwork and tattoos are most often heightened sexually, also incorporating a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor. I enjoy seeing loose "cartoonish" or "sketchy" tattoos—especially ones that disregard sanctity of the body and tradition bring me the most pleasure. (I saw the other day that David Shrigley, the fine artist, was drawing tattoos and it’s a similar aesthetic that I adore.) 

What was your first tattoo?

I believe I was 17, perhaps 18, had just moved from Nebraska to Washington DC to study art at the Corcoran. My part-time job was working at the American Bar Association, where I met an intern attorney who let me take her out on a date one night. I drew two different fish on bar napkins, one with an overbite, the other with an underbite, both of them blowing out heart bubbles. Immediately after the bar, we went to get each of the fish tattooed on our right hip/groin region—very small, perhaps only the size of a quarter (I ended up with the overbite). Our intent was to have the fishes meet up, yet it wasn't until later that night in the sack that we realized too late that our fish would not be flopping around onto one another without reorganizing or strategy to involve awkward and drunken acrobatic maneuvers.

What's next for you? What's on your tattooing and artistic horizons?

I continue to gratefully exhibit my artwork in each and all of its manifested glories, with writing being an added concentration since the pandemic...However, I am making it a focus, beginning in 2023, to REALLY DO SOMETHING with my tattoo business, Lazorbeam. It has been legal and legit for over one year now but I gotta get more business by promoting it and hitting up festivals and desert weddings. I really don't want to sell the RV as a business package at this point so I better find something that works better lucratively. (Perhaps I can make a business out of converting and legalizing mobile units, as I obviously know how to make that work somehow.)

I'd also like to have more tattoos on me, myself. I don't have more tattoos because THEY HURT! I know, I know, it sounds stupid for me to say, but it's true that I'm a bit of a lightweight when it comes to extended sessions of pain. I could be covered from head to toe! For a time there I was trying to give myself at least one new tattoo each week. I must remember that along with the pain comes fantastic euphoria. As with many tattooists, I'm part sadist and part masochist having tattooed sensitive parts of my own body many times (foot, nipples, penis, nutsack, taint), yet it's the big time-investment tattoos that I'd like to also explore next year. Who knows, maybe I'll meet another local tattooist on Tinder who would be willing to tattoo the backside of my body to balance out all the ink I've put on my reachable front.

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