Creative Vulnerability

Art as an invitation to intimacy

I have a lot of questions.

I was one of those dreamy-eyes kids who tirelessly asked questions, then devoured books looking for answers. I loved college and grad school because they offered some answers and raised new questions, and they also provided me with a context and community to discuss and argue and dream.

Questions inspire me to write.

With my novel, The Silence of Trees, I wondered about the nature of evil. I wanted to know what made people react so differently to a horrible experience like war. There were other things too: questions about identity, roots, sacrifice, love.

There’s a word in Ukrainian, one of my favorite words: rozdoomlyna. It translates roughly to “lost in thought,” but it always feels heavier and more substantial than that, as if the thoughts themselves are concrete and engulfing like fog.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been rozdoomlyna–mulling something over, rolling it around: the idea of creative vulnerability.

The words came out of a conversation last year at the Everleigh Club, where I was an Artist in Residence. Founders Franky Vivid and Michelle L’Amour invited me to participate after I was chosen as one of the finalists for their Naked Girls…