some beginnings + some endings

This book was a project I did for a graduate poetry workshop with Stephanie Young and 11 other amazing poets. For anyone who hasn’t ever been a workshop type situation, it’s an intense space sometimes. It’s the place you go to workshop and talk about your writing every week with people in what is supposed to be a safe place. Writing in this kind of formal capacity is new for me in that the visual world has been the one I have been immersed in all my life. Workshops like this have been an amazing part of this new process of me embracing writer as part of my life’s work.

The purpose of making this book was an attempt to relinquish control of sequence and “story” and to initiate a space to encourage participation by the reader. I wrote the content over the course of the 2 semesters in workshop. It is bound on both sides, some pages are opaque, some are translucent and some are in the middle. You can read this book in many orders, getting different experience with each reading. At least i hope so.

The title of this one is called some beginnings + some endings which was suggested by one of my friends in the class BR. I liked it so much it stuck because i loved this idea of having all the beginnings and all the endings but the middle being up for grabs. This is a tough one to photograph because the whole point is in the movement, the transparency and the participation. Some things aren’t meant for the screen but alas, I try…Hope you like.