Good Hart Artist Residency

Her chapbook, Tree Surgeon, was a finalist for the New Women’s Voices Prize and was published by Finishing Line Press. During her MFA at Chatham University, she began teaching poetry at the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, PA with the Words Without Walls program. Her experience with Words Without Walls illuminated teaching for her, bringing her to teach a wide variety of poetic forms across secondary, higher education, and beyond school settings. She received her PhD in Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education from Michigan State University. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor – Educator in the Department of English at the University of Cincinnati. In her research and creative work, she is interested in ecopoetics, forms of attachment and intimacy, and the poetics of teaching.

Artist Statement

In my current work, I question and conjure notions of intimacy, closeness, distance, home, loss, and grief. How have I formed intimacies and what are those variations? How have I come to recognize connection across persons, places, and moments – where does the distance grow, where does it subside? The variations of intimacy and attachment and the ways we come to believe we connect are concepts that still falter through me. This redefining is compounded in the contemporary: the aftermath of a global pandemic (and its continuing), the death of my father from Covid-19, and the leaving of home and its reinvention through loss and return. I move with Lauren Berlant’s assertion that hidden in any form of intimacy is a version of disbelief and wondering: “I didn’t think it would turn out this way.” I’m interested in how the mundane envelopes us, how place remakes in us daily. The imagery in these poems is situated strongly in a sense of place – a small used-to-be steel town along the Ohio River, about 40 minutes outside of Pittsburgh. A place where factories are being built often and the continual and corrosive damage to the people and natural landscape is left in the interstices of the unspoken. How do I remain attached to the threads of intimacy with family and land as the distance grows in me and as the environment, in its many forms, slowly deteriorates? 

There is a layered grief to these poems, and they are the beginning of a larger manuscript. I feel I have been working on this collection for the entirety of my life, although I only started to hone in on attachment and intimacy recently. Living in Ohio now with a landscape so similar to my home, it is interesting to see how my description is resonant and evolving. I think with Calvino, “Every time I describe a city, I am saying something about Venice,” and feel this truth: I am describing home in every place I have lived. I imagine that my time spent in Harbor Springs, MI will create new patterns in the ways I see and understand place through imagery, details, and community-making. Every place I live, and visit finds its way into my construction of home and my creation of poems. I’m also intrigued by what Wittgenstein described as “The same – and yet not the same.” In my work, I call upon this as the symmetry of difference, which is not opposition, but a call to name the in-betweens, the particularities, the affective resistances and resonances. My poetry is an enactment of distance and a conjuring of closeness. It is about the self, the beholden I and the corresponding you. The intimacies and the intimations of intensities and the lackluster. The everyday, the mundanity of our noticing, and the peripheral pining of what continues to go unnoticed, undisclosed, undelivered. What is a theory of intimacies beset on when we feel distance sitting with the ones we are closest to? How do I account for the felt illusion of connection with a stranger – a person across from me in a coffee shop? 

During the Good Hart Artist Residency, I will spend time focusing on generating and revising poems toward a larger manuscript, sitting with these uncertainties and ruminating on how we might name the multiplicity of attachment and intimacy. The time, space, and collaborative atmosphere will invite me to explore more deeply the philosophical and theoretical understandings of attachment and intimacy through environmentalism, objects, places, and what is left behind when we leave this world. After my father passed away, he had very little that he kept within the small room he rented in a tiny town. However, he did keep storage units of stuff that mattered to him scattered in different parts of the county. In one of the units, my father had stored for 30-years everything that he could from the farm we lost. I went through everything in that unit – learning more about the people that lived a life I did not and learning more about the deep mourning I saw my family in as I was growing up. In this storage unit were the remnants and reminders of all they had lost and what it must have been like when my brothers and my parents were a family. At this residency, I will work on poems to capture this particular intensity; all an object might hold across memory and emotion.

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