Artist Statement

Liminality and Transfiguration in Conventional & Monstrous Forms

My fiction revels in surreality and dissonance. I use metaphor and lyricism to peer down the throat of madness; to vindicate and upheave folk figures and archetypes; to explore mortification, transformation, rage, hostile mothers, apparitions, the innocent cruelties of children, and the mythologies we invent for ourselves. I tease out the strangeness in the mundane and trouble what we moralize, whom those morals serve. Fiction is sacred work, and when treated with due reverence it usually winks at you.

As for poetry, my obsession over sound sense and spiritual texts has led me to autopoems that meditate, frolic, experiment, nitpick, and examine conscience. I love the earth-and-spit sound of Anglo-Saxon words. I love pattern-making and -breaking and polyvocality. I’m a sucker for iambic pentameter. My poetic attempts to burst open a given word by its constellation among other words.

Fiction is my first love, my usual, my literary hearth. Poetry is the playground where I stretch, chase, watch beetles, light fires, throw tantrums, and jump off higher and higher branches. Let the impact rattle up my legs.

Words are social creatures, chemical agents. They morph and spit in combination. Think pheromones and mycorrhiza, signals pulsing from tree to tree.

Then there’s short prose, the monster between fiction and poetry. In a perfect equation of fiction and poetry skills, my short prose practice would be revelry + splashing, motifs + sonics, mixed metaphors + mixed metaphors (or mixed metaphors²?). But short prose is more than the sum of fiction and poetry. As a hybrid form that resists categorization and rules, equations no longer hold. The space around them does. Liminality does—that is, the mixture and malleability, of traditionally poetic and traditionally prose conventions.

While inspiring some jazzy new genre-deviant pieces, writing to the liminality of short prose has allowed me to better listen to the needs of each piece. Free from generic and formal necessities, I no longer force the work-in-progress to fit within conventional bounds. I co-author new bounds with the work-in-progress. Then, revising to the liminality of short prose, I adjust and even abandon those bounds. The work transforms in cross-genre translation, from flash fiction to concrete poem to mind map to song. I am not only reworking a piece; I’m studying it. I learn what it might be and what it wants to be, negotiating between versions—or, really, selves—of the piece. In the spirit of Emily Dickinson, I dwell in possibility.

This courtship of possible meanings, directions, and creative selves has changed the way I approach writing at large. Instead of pinning a work to a single form, I use different forms in drafting and revision to purify, trouble, and season it (make the reader salivate, sneeze). Liminality isn’t just an advantage of short prose; it’s a vehicle for more radical and deliberate, yet intuitive, creativity. A quantum physic for literary figuring-out. A summons for the subconscious. A permit for the work to sculpt itself. From draft to draft, form to form, the work loosens and rises like wax in a lava lamp.

Liminal writing is collaboration. It cultivates intuition, requires trust. When writing within certain genres, from now on, I want to use liminality as a creative lens through which to know and trust my work. To let it transform—and transform my praxis.

I want to continue radically revising and feeling out the boundaries of revision. When does transformation become departure or mere repackaging? When does it help and when does it hold up? The danger of perennial revision reminds me of interviews with translators. The quest for the perfect translation across linguistic and cultural boundaries can all too easily spiral into obsession. The translation-in-progress never settles, never breathes. With respect to short prose, how can we guard against the same misuse of liminality? How can we use it to combat rather than cause creative paralysis? How we use it to form meaningful partnership with our impulses, nightmares, ghosts, and past and future incarnations?

How can this kind of writing make us more whole?

I plan on using short forms as both creative end and rigorous practice: to strengthen the range, compression, and spontaneity of my craft; generate new work and revive my submission schedule; and refresh my writing around/while drafting longer-form projects. I’d like to delve deeper into tiny memoirs and braided essays, nurturing an authentic Katherine voice that doesn’t hide behind characters or personae, that speaks confidently from the first person and owns the dreaded conflation of speaker and writer, that means what she says and says who she is. I want to let myself be known.

In my statement title, I use the word ‘transfiguration’ to capture what the liminality of short prose makes possible. The etymology of ‘transfiguration’ is pretty straightforward: trans (across) + figurare (figure). I’m more interested in the word’s biblical valence and whimsical capabilities in Harry Potter. Transfiguration in this regard connotes not only change but movement, a shuttling from one material to another, from one dimension to another. While not all transfigurations result in progress as we might measure it, I think movement in any direction is a form of growth.

The work is growing. The writer is growing.

(Into what sort of figure?)