Press Play: An Interview with Kristen Leigh
Lately, I’ve been calling daily life my “field work.” Just being alive is doing field work.
Welcome to The Long Pause, a newsletter about being creative, being stuck, and what to do about it. I’m Erinn. I’m a writer and an artist in a long, long Pause.
Today’s post is part of the Press Play interview series, which asks creative folks to share the story of their Long Pause so we can all learn from each other and stop feeling so shitty and lonely. Today’s interview with Kristen Leigh explores a specific Long Pause, and the longer pause grief can introduce to creative life, and the constants of curiosity and movement that keep us going. 💖
Explain yourself. Who are you, how do you identify as an artist / creative?
Reader. Writer. Dancer. Mom. Clumsy, inarticulate pianist. Textiles artist. Dreamer. Intent listener for the pulse of divinity that exists in all things; often distracted by the pulse of the internet instead. Using mindfulness practices to reclaim my attention. Writing it all down.
Failed educator. After several attempts it was clear that I don’t belong in the university system. I don’t belong inside any system. I sit in the gutter to see clearly: where I’ve been, where I’m headed, what tools are in my travel bag and what tools must I acquire that will help me build the path. The gutter is the space between panels in a graphic novel where the reader must use her own imagination to build the story. The path we build for ourselves, for our lives, is the story. All of life is an exercise in imagining.
I’ve been living out of a suitcase since September 2021, so officially three years this month. These three years have been shaped by a trifecta of losses: university appointment to the pandemic, home to a hurricane, daughter to an accident. I write through each event, toward its meaning and black hole center. There is no other side, just a stretching of the moment. Maybe that’s one definition of grief.
Before university life I was a professional dancer and now try to hold onto that discipline by taking classes at a studio in New Haven, where I live some of the time. I study music theory through the box of strings and hammers called a piano. My upright sits on a furniture dolly in a friend’s garage but I have an electric keyboard which conveniently fits in the backseat of my car. I now spend two days a week helping my dad at his vintage lighting restoration and repair shop. He’s a master craftsman in this field and I’m grateful to be learning from him. Without all of the losses we wouldn’t be gifted this time to collaborate in this way. The paradox of loss is that there are good things that come to fill the void. The good things are not the same or even as good as what was lost. They’re a different kind of good. My new good things are illuminating the present.
You’re here because you’ve gone through a fallow period where you didn’t produce much work for an extended period of time. How did your Long Pause come about? How long did it last? OR are you still in it?
When I was invited to participate in The Long Pause, I spent a lot of time thinking through what periods of my life were quiet in terms of artistic practice. I’ve been actively keeping a journal since 1990 when I attended my first formal writing program, so I decided to review my archives to see which years were leanest in terms of creative thinking. What I found was that even when I wasn’t writing daily, I was able to pivot to another outlet to support that part of myself. However, there is a two-year span from 2011-2013 that my own creative work was inaccessible to me. I compensated for my lack of sparks by reading more and writing book reviews. Even though I was engaging with others’ creative projects and thinking deeply, critically, and constructively, my own ideas were quiet during that time.
Those are the two years immediately following the end of my formal relationship with my children’s father. My kids were really young (eight and six) and we were facing housing insecurity, so we moved in with my parents while I figured out what to do next. I was really heartbroken, though, so that figuring out took two years. I wasn’t writing but I was reading at least one novel a week. I let other people’s work soothe me and keep my imagination active. I think that’s the longest period of time during which I haven’t made anything.
Has anyone provided a model for you in terms of the ebbs and flows of a creative life? I’m interested in how your sense of identity as a creative was shaped, how (or if) making work consistently fit into it, and how that may have shifted in response to a Long Pause.
There are two women who come to mind in response to this question: Hildegard von Bingen and Rachel Bunny Mellon. Saint Hildegard was a German abbess born in the 11th century. As a young child she was tithed to the church by her parents and grew up in the convent she eventually came to lead. She was devout, yet experienced her relationship with the divine through studying the natural world. She was a healer, a composer, a poet. She was a painter and an orator. She was a creative powerhouse, developing her ideas and exploring her concepts through various artistic and scientific disciplines. She was a philosopher and theologian who was invited to lecture throughout Germany in her lifetime. It was the Middle Ages, however, and women weren’t allowed to read or write. After several attempts to silence her by bishops and cardinals in the church, she was given special permission to write by the Pope. She was curious and inspired, compelled to explore and realize her dreams and interests. I think about Hildegard when I’m in that delicate, sensitive stage of the creative process when an idea is taking shape yet it’s hard to see if it’s “any good” or not. She’s the foil to my inner critic, showing up to remind me that I should keep going with my ideas, see them through. Inspiration is a gift and what we learn during the process of cultivating our ideas will help others - help ourselves - see things in a new way.
The other woman I’m thinking of is Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon. A southern United Statesian socialite in the early 20th century, Bunny was also a woman deeply inspired by the natural world. She loved botany and garden design, yet had no formal education in either field. She learned how to read, speak, and write in French because many of the scientific texts in the field of botany at that time were written in French. She was then able to teach herself plant grafting techniques and propagation. She designed many beautiful gardens in her lifetime. Her homestead, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia, is now an institute for arts and sciences research. Her legacy supports the work of artists of all disciplines, as well as creates a place for people to learn about the arts and the natural world.
Both of these women seemed to fundamentally understand that everything that’s alive is connected, and by studying these connections new ideas will arise, new beauty will arise, that wonder is really what the connecting tissue is made of. I keep images of Hildegard and Bunny around my workspace. They help me to remember that as long as I’m paying attention then I am an open channel for wonder, that I will always have something to write about. Once you start thinking this way, understanding this about yourself as a human being that is part of the natural world - not a “steward” of or “caretaker” of or “landlord” because we are not above it hierarchically, we are part of it, equal to it - then you will find yourself with a whole new cache of information to write into, paint into, sing into, dream into. To harmonize with. My daughter was a prolific visual artist. I like to think that she is now in direct conversation with Bunny Mellon and Hildegard von Bingen, and they are waiting for me to join them, hoping that I get it right as I continue working in my clunky mortal form.
Did you attend any formal education to learn your craft? (BFA/MFA, college major, workshops or apprenticeships…etc) What, if anything, did you learn in that context about blocks or pauses? Did you have a mentor or teacher who addressed this possibility or modeled how to work with or through a pause?
I’m choosing this question because of what I’m doing now with my dad. It is an apprenticeship, of sorts, yet informal. My grieving brain and body don’t allow for a lot of focused energy, so I only spend two afternoons a week with him in his shop. I think most formal apprenticeships are close to full time hours, so I’m given a grief accommodation. The other part of this is that I need time to write, which I do every morning, although not everyday on my main project. My main project is about the first year of being alive without my daughter. I just drove back and forth from New York to Los Angeles for a full year, visiting many different ecosystems to volunteer, study, and write about. The caves and swamps and deserts and mountains and plains and phenomena like fugitive dust and atmospheric rivers and wildfires and floods and how we all survive so much loss. It’s intense. Life is intense. So I write in the morning and then work with my dad on these vintage lighting restoration projects, thinking about brass and copper and steel and glass and light. I am learning from him how to repair, rewire, and restore, yet we talk about the qualities of these materials. I can’t look at a pane of glass and not think about the millions of marine skeletons that make up grains of sand and how that sand is melted down into glass. And of course the history of these pieces, from whale oil lamps to gas to electricity. The time stamp of industry and work, class and race and gender intersections, the environmental impact of each iteration of lighting. What it means to illuminate a space. What it means to leave certain spaces dark. Who gets to flip the switch.
Formally, I have a BA in Creative Writing and an MFA in Fiction, also a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. I also did a domestic exchange as an undergrad at the University of Hawaii to study Marine Biology, a class and lab that continues to influence and inform my work almost three decades later. As I evaluate the many kinds of education I’ve had, both formally and informally, I see how all of it helps me to think and write and make and move.
I already mentioned that in my early adulthood I was a professional dancer, which required a fairly rigorous training program for teaching certification. I still study tap with a wonderful teacher in New Haven, and also took tap classes while traveling through South America at studios in Buenos Aires and Bogotá. From my relationship with dance, I developed a writing exercise of transliterating the patterns or rhythms of a specific dance into literary art. This exercise became the genesis of a writing project that landed me at a residency in Buenos Aires. Studying tap and tango in a country and a language that are not my own showed me how much dance is truly its own language system.
Also as an undergrad I participated in an internship in Public History, working in an archive in a museum in North Carolina. My project was to sort through a collection of materials belonging to a former slave church that had been taken (stolen?) and hidden in an attic for several decades. The home was about to be demolished when someone from the demo team went in for one last look and found boxes of documents, photographs, maps, artifacts stashed away and forgotten. I feel honored to have done that work, and learning archival practices helps me ask better questions and sort the information that arises in response to those questions.
I love the monkey-mind beginner-brain and have sat in this uncomfortable place when I decided to take piano lessons starting back in 2014. I was in my late 30s then, but music theory has become another tool to access writing. Just learning how information is organized to make sound, learning that sound is math, learning that math is the lingua franca of everything that’s alive, these are all lessons I learned from taking up an instrument in mid-life.
I guess what I’m saying by sharing all of this is that every time my life has opened to the possibility of a Long Pause, I’ve responded by seeking out training in a new-to-me-field. Lately, I’ve been calling daily life my “field work.” Just being alive is doing field work. What am I seeing today? Even if I’m so grief-stricken that I can’t get out of bed, there will be shadows on the wall or ceiling that give me something new to think about, to write about. I’ll add a photograph from a recent episode of this.
Define creativity– what do you feel are the necessary elements of creative work, or a creative life? How has this definition grown or changed as you moved through a Long Pause?
This is a big question. It scares me to think about trying to define creativity. It’s an impulse, a way of seeing, a way of thinking, a way of moving/using/carrying one’s body. Creativity is intuition with a message that’s meant to be externalized. Creativity is how you make it through this life without losing your damn mind. Creativity is a muscle that, like the heart, needs exercise if it’s to function properly. So, necessary elements are exercise, stimulation, a willingness to trust yourself - your whole self, I mean. Your mind, your heart, your spirit, your intellect, your physicality, your breath, your balance, your mistakes. Trust it all. Trust the gorgeous, violent world. It will always be gorgeous and it will always be violent.
Pay attention.
Think about what you see.
Ask good questions.
Talk to new people.
Leave home.
Get fired.
Go broke.
Say yes.
Don’t be afraid to empty yourself out, empty your life out. My life has been emptied out and I am telling you that more always comes. Something comes. More love, more ideas. It is not the same as what you had before - a home, a job you maybe loved, your precious and perfect child, your partner - but something will come that tethers you to this life. Even for just a bit of time. And you need your creativity to be in good shape if you are to survive any of that.
Get a library card.
See Shakespeare in the park in the summertime.
Watch PBS Newshour then turn off the t.v.
Talk a walk.
Write it down. Just write it all down. Creativity is the ability to stay alive and tell the story of what happened and how you survived it.
Kristen Leigh (b. 1976) is a multidisciplinary artist, whose primary medium is literary art. She writes nonfiction essays and poetry, often transliterating structures from other artistic disciplines into constraints for literary work. She was a professional dancer from 1999 through 2009 and continues to use dance patterns and body movement to inform her writing. She also uses the piano as an entry point for literary work, seeking ways to recreate musical patterns in literary texts, such as poems and lyric essays. Her work in textiles includes knitting and sewing by hand and machine, and paper making from organic materials such as cotton, flax, barley, and flowers. Thematically, she explores the relationships humans have with the natural world through travel and the lens of autoethnographic pedagogy. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Salem College, the oldest continuously run women's college in the United States with exchange programs in Marine Biology at the University of Hawai'i and Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford University. She holds an MFA in Fiction and a Graduate Certificate in Women's and Gender Studies from Southern Connecticut State University, where she was an adjunct professor and specialist in International Education. Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships throughout North and South America. Find Kristen online at:
Kristen Leigh website
LexisNonScripta Instagram
Kristen Leigh Blue Sky
Just stunning. Can’t wait to read your book. So proud of you, Kristen ❤️