When I was in high school, I thought I might become a writer, perhaps a journalist. I worked as a reporter for a small daily newspaper for four summers. But then I decided (rather simplistically) that I didn’t want to write about what other people do, I wanted to do something myself. I made a couple of attempts to write a short story but all that came out were flying elephants and other such nonsense (at least that’s what I thought at the time). In 1991, as my visual art work became more narrative, I took a short story writing class at NYU taught by Carol Emshwiller (a great writer of speculative fiction and the perfect first teacher for me), and found that after fifteen additional years of living, the stories were pouring out of me. (I credit my sculptural work for unlocking and freeing up my imagination, piece by piece by piece.)

It wasn’t until 1995, after an intense run of one-person-shows and after completing my video called “The Surgery” that I seriously focused in on writing. I wanted to let my imagination loose, unencumbered by the material world. In 1997 I was accepted into the low-residency graduate school program for creative writing at Vermont College (which I highly recommend).

Like my visual art work, my stories tend to straddle the realm between the real and the fantastic. My characters live real lives in the real world but odd things happen to them. They live in trees, spend the day killing aphids, have friends who claim to possess talking flowers. They wake up in a different body each morning, remain vibrantly alive when submerged in water, and meet eccentric artists who yank them out of their hum-drum lives.

So far writing and sculpture have remained largely distinct activities for me, but each medium informs and revitalizes the other. After a year of writing, there’s nothing better than getting up from my desk, putting on my tattered jeans, cranking up the tunes and letting the sawdust fly (into the dust collector). Similarly, after a year of cutting, sanding, grinding, filing, gluing and fussing about with the intractable details of constructing an object in wood, I am ready to go back to writing where in one sentence, I can place my protagonist at the helm of an old sloop sailing on a field of tall summer hay with a sail that is made from Grandma’s old dresses.*

(*From my story “The Boat” as yet unpublished)

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