Electric Literature publishes excerpt from The Mother Artist

Read in full here. “Our vision of the world is shaped by what we see. What an artist sees, therefore, shapes the world that she shows to others in her work. Again and again, I look at these frail, magnificent bodies. I look at them to be sure they’re safe. I look at them because they demand it of me: “Mama, look at me.” “Mama, come find me.” And I look at them because they are so beautiful that I can’t stop looking.

When I’m with them, I catch myself staring. When I leave them, I study their photographs. In all this looking, my view of the world is reframed by maternal humanism, composed of awe, curiosity, and adoration for the vulnerable ones of this world—which is to say, all of us.

Why persevere in making art? Because our communities need art made by those who can’t take their eyes off of the vulnerable ones of this world.”

"Death's Vision" wins Award of Excellence for Long Format Theological Reflection

(Source image: The Empyrean (highest heaven), by Gustave Doré from the illustrations for Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy)

My essay “Death’s Vision,” published in 2022 in The Christian Century, has won the Award of Excellence for Long Format Theological Reflection from the Associated Church Press.

“How is visual beauty related to the presence of God? What was that attending light, glossing the dahlias and opening my eyes to their happy faces? Did I glimpse the countenance of God? And if death is the opening through which divine beauty comes into focus, could proximity to death while we live be the beginning of the beatific vision?”

Read in full here.

"Weaning: Intimacy & Independence in Alice Neel's Mother Pictures" in Kenyon Review Onlin

“Weaning: Intimacy & Independence in Alice Neel’s Mother Pictures” appears in the latest edition of the Kenyon Review Online. In this essay, memoir is strung through a study of the life and work of Alice Neel to explore the competing desires for intimacy and independence in motherhood. An audio version is also available at the link above.

"Augustine as Literary Companion in Motherhood: A Confession" on the Ploughshares Blog

For the Ploughshares blog, I wrote a critical essay about Natalie Carnes’s memoir Motherhood: A Confession.

“For Augustine, as for most of the influential thinkers in the Christian tradition, the woman’s body is a site of temptation, to be renounced in favor of devotion to God. What do we lose in our understanding of human nature when we do not take the woman’s body—its loves and vices, its will—seriously as a site for theological inquiry? What if such a detailed exploration of human desire as the Confessions were rendered not by a man, but by a mother? This is the question that animates Natalie Carnes’s 2020 memoir Motherhood: A Confession.”⁠

Read in full here.

Letters on Sight: An Epistolary Essay with Annelise Jolley

Letters on Sight: Two writers reflect on landscape, neighbors, and artistic vision 

Around this time last year, my friend Annie asked me if I wanted to write a series of epistolary essays, passed back and forth with no real agenda. Because we live in opposite corners of the country—she’s on the West Coast, I’m on the East—I thought our respective landscapes might be a generative place to start. We wrote to each other through winter’s shortest days and continued as the light imperceptibly lengthened, as one year stepped aside for the next. What began as a correspondence about geography opened into meditations on vision, fear, and wonder. These letters ask different incarnations of the same question: “How do we behold and bear the world for all that it is, and all it is not?”

We’ll be publishing this essay, one letter at a time, throughout the month of November. You can read it here.

And listen to our introductory conversation about the form of letter-writing here.

"Interludes: A true story of grief and love at Free at Noon" at WXPN's The Key

Music helps me to hold love and sorrow in the same hand. In that spirit, I wrote for WXPN’s The Key about the concerts I attended the year my father was sick and I was falling in love. Read in full here, and check out this playlist for listening while you read.⁠⁠

“I am in love and in mourning, and I don’t want to let one eclipse the other — to miss the last moments of my father’s life because I’m falling in love, or to miss the bliss of new love because my father is dying. Music uniquely welcomes this simultaneity. Whereas in visual art, two colors layered become another color, in music, two notes sound at the same time and each maintains its distinctive pitch.” ⁠⁠

Pictured: St Vincent, photo by Megan Kelly for WXPN

"The Importance of Writing About Art" on the Ploughshares Blog

For the Ploughshares blog, I wrote about art, conversation, and social change in a study of Olivia Laing’s 2020 collection of art criticism Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency.

“When I read Laing on Georgia O’Keefe’s Black Place paintings, I notice her translation of color: ‘the serried hills smashed into shards of grey and puce, bifurcated by yolk-coloured cracks or spills of oily black.’ Though I’ve never seen these paintings, I can vividly imagine their tones, and the eggs and the oil feel to me earthy, elemental. Then there are Laing’s nouns and verbs—smashed, shards, crack—which evoke an emotional tenor of ruggedness and severity. Suddenly I’m not in an armchair in my living room; I’m with O’Keefe in the desert, and I’m awestruck. Seeing the world as O’Keefe sees it, I wonder what it means to be a woman in a man’s art world—what grit is required to be undaunted by giant desert skies and impossibly arid land.”

Read in full here.

The Christian Century: Encountering Alice Neel’s paintings of mothers while pregnant

I wrote for The Christian Century about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Alice Neel retrospective. The exhibition features over a dozen portraits of women and children, and I write about Neel’s place in the history of paintings of mothers:

“These paintings, rendered through a woman’s gaze, complicate and deepen the feminine ideal I observed in religious art, advocating for those doing mother work by painting maternal experience in all of its nuance and variety.”

Read in full here.

The Spanish Family (1943). Below: Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978). (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women / © The Estate of Alice Neel)

Music + Art: King Britt on his collaboration with Joshua Mays, Dreams, Diaspora, and Destiny

Over at WXPN’s The Key, I chat with the legendary DJ and producer King Britt about his collaboration with mural artist Joshua Mays, which is the first mural in Philly to incorporate augmented reality. We talk about AR's unique capacity to express Afrofuturist ideas, as it opens alternative worlds not plainly visible and expands our imagination for what's possible. It is always a joy to talk with King, and I'm glad to share our conversation with you here. 

King says, “Afrofuturism is the intersection of science fiction, technology, music, visual art, and literature, used to envision and empower the future of the Black community. What better way to educate people about this than through the medium of the iPhone? On top of the physical painting, there’s a whole other layer of information, a whole other world that you can access.”

Read in full at WXPN’s The Key.

King Britt, Image Courtesy of Artist.

"The Maternal Vision of Leslie Jamison and Marilynne Robinson" on the Ploughshares Blog

I’m beginning a project about the unique tensions and compatibilities between motherhood and artistic practice, and am grateful to find examples of women whose integration of these vocations is mutually enriching. Click the image to read my essay “The Maternal Vision of Leslie Jamison and Marilynne Robinson” on the Ploughshares Blog.

“When I have seen the world awhile through Ames’s eyes, I become newly aware of the light in my own world—its cheering presence, its variety of expression. Narrative vision shaped by maternal attention shows me more of the world than I had seen before.”

Music+Art: Karl Blau on Nomad

For a couple of years now, I’ve been taken with the street art project #trashiondolls, in which the musician Karl Blau turns Philly’s trash into tiny, elegant human figures. In this interview for WXPN’s The Key, I chat with Blau about his relationship to visual art and learn about his favorite artwork, by the Germantown graffiti artist Nomad. Click the image to read our conversation.

Karl Blau, image by Eddie E. Luks

Edible Sorrow: Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart reckons with grief through food

I was very glad to review Crying in H Mart, the debut memoir of musician Michelle Zauner. Read in full at WXPN’s The Key, and then get your copy of the book!

“Through vibrant, sensual prose, Crying in H Mart accompanies Japanese Breakfast's Michelle Zauner on savory adventures through fish markets in Seoul, the kitchens of Philly restaurants, and the author’s Greenpoint apartment where she learns to make the kimchi that had been a staple in her mother’s kitchen. Along the way, we learn all that food can mean to the bereaved.”

Music+Art: Carol Cleveland Sings on Eadweard Muybridge's Motion Studies

This was a very fun one! I chatted with Carol Cleveland Sings about their love for the motion studies of 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and the kinship between his work and the video loops that have become a signature of their creative work. Click the photo to read our conversation.

Carol Cleveland Sings | photo courtesy of the artist

IG Live Lullaby, Sundays & Thursdays at 9pm Eastern

As we wait out the last weeks of this quarantined winter, I’ve been hopping on Instagram Live every Sunday and Thursday at 9 eastern for a brief wind-down moment. Sometimes, friends join, and together, we share practices that help us ease into the night: a song, a poem, a memory or breath exercise. Join us live or watch the archived Lullabies here.

February 18 - Intro I

February 21 - Intro II

February 25 - ft writer Micha Boyett

February 28 - ft writer Annelise Jolley

March 4 - ft musician / artist / writer Birdie Busch

March 7 - ft musician / activist Candice Hoyes

March 11 - ft musician Joy Ike

March 14 - ft my brother: visual artist, DJ and producer Chris Prewitt

March 18 - ft writer Charlotte Donlon

March 21 - ft musician Shara Nova

March 25 - contemporary art curator Amanda Sroka

March 28 - ft multidisciplinary artist Sophia Cardillo

April 1 - ft writer Sarah Ngu

April 4 - break for Easter

April 8 - ft musician Suzanne Sheer

April 11 - singer/rapper Ivy Sole

April 15 - museum educator Leigh Dale

April 18 - writer Christina Miller

April 22 - art folk duo Lowland Hum

April 25 - actor & dancer Carolyn Hoehner

April 29 - break

May 2 - writer / podcaster Jamie-Lee Josselyn

May 6 - writer / podcaster Sarah Westfall

May 9 - writer Amy Peterson

May 13 - pastor Lindsay Beck

May 16 - musician AM Higgins

Music+Art: Kingsley Ibeneche on Meg Saligman’s "Philadelphia Muses"

I really enjoyed this conversation with musician and dancer Kingsley Ibeneche about how visual art informs his practice. A highlight: he spoke about how careful he is in developing every move of a performance. What a gift to an audience to watch an artist who so thoughtfully attends to every moment:

“I’m no photographer, but I can create moments that are everlasting. Before I create performances, rather than watching videos or listening to music, I go to still images. This helps me dwindle down my huge ideas into moments. These moments become the piece, as if we were moving with the click of a camera. I try to visualize everything I do like that. I never want to waste a moment.”

Kingsley Ibeneche | photo by Marcus Branch | courtesy of the artist

Music+Art: Suzanne Sheer on Kara Walker’s "the secret sharerer"

Over at WXPN’s The Key, I’m interviewing musicians about their favorite artworks in Philadelphia. Read the first installment here.

“Suzanne Sheer’s music is at once vulnerable and empowered. Her dreamy, melancholic pop anthems drop the veil to reveal the interiors of lust and love: indecision, motivation, self-worth. Her voice can be casual, almost reclined. But even in those moments it seems to possess a bridled power. At other times, its wild strength is freed…”

Those Who Leave: COVID prompts adventure and introspection for Martha Stuckey, Sonni Shine, and Mariah Del Rio

Mariah Del Rio | photo by Juli Wert | courtesy of the artist

In this feature at WXPN’s The Key, I write about musicians who have left Philadelphia due to Covid, and what the change in scenery means for their artistry. Click here to read.

Grieving Alone: Guest Contributor to A Curious Approach

Here’s an essay about rituals for grief in solitude, which I contributed to "A Curious Approach," the project of writer and spiritual director Charlotte Byrd Donlon. Read it here.

"My Brother Beside Me" Published in Image

In “My Brother Beside Me,” published in Issue 104 of Image, I wrestle with my brother’s death and questions about the afterlife. Read it here.

“Since Joe died, the binary of saved and unsaved, believer and nonbeliever, feels like child’s talk. When we teach toddlers about color, every apricot, rust, nectarine, and terra cotta is simply orange. Every navy, cerulean, jasmine, and steel is simply blue. As we grow, we come to see the difference between the hues. What language do we have for the spiritual shades between saved and unsaved?”

A New Essay at The Millions

“What I Saw When I Really Looked: My Late Brother, Heroin, and Grief” is published at The Millions. Read it in full here.

If perception was a camera, I captured what I found beautiful, and shaped a moral understanding of the world based on these scenes. The world I saw was loving and abundant, and surprises were good, coming from the sky like hot air balloons.