I’m in the middle of the slowest reading cycle I’ve ever been in, maybe in my life? Rereading a book that has deep meaning for me, noting all the parallels with the current news. It’s the only book I’m focusing on, when I can focus.
It occurs to me that you may not know about the mini-interviews that Mommy’s El Camino has curated in its brief history. It also occurs to me that when I feel hope ebb, it sometimes helps to read about other artists’ practices, obsessions, and daily lives. Enjoy a few from the archives.
A melody. A pause. A symphony. A new idea. A creative solution. A semblance of peace.
If ever I feel impossible to find, I come here. I sit with the pair of mourning doves that I swear are my grandparents, smoke through half a pack of cigarettes and talk of growing old. The persimmon tree and the pomegranate tree lean toward me like they’re listening, and all over again– I’m found.
I also got to name a really core principle of my artistic life in my Tarot Circle community that I had touched on in my academic work but could not fully access within the university, which is that many of us are sensitive in different ways and those sensitivities give us access to important but often discredited knowledge. Many of us suffer and hurt ourselves because of this. We can lose connection to important sources of power like community or our own intuition because of this. Naming and resisting the impulse and expectation to discredit feelings and sensed knowledge became the focus of my creative work. And it is something I am constantly trying to unlearn personally.
If you’d like to read more, search the Archives for “mini-interview.” May they be received as micro-doses of pleasure and hope.
"Wendy C. Ortiz is an essential chronicler of queer embodiment, dreams, and the ways that place and perspective create us. What a treasure to be gifted these bold and lyrical modern classics in updated form."
—Melissa Febos, national bestselling author of Girlhood, Body Work, and The Dry Season
Add a comment: