Today’s contributors are Poet Joanna Lee, based in Richmond, Virginia and Artist Portia Snow, based in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Joanna Lee: It is National Poetry Month! So I am part of a couple cohorts doing a poem every day in April. (It's something I attempt every year but rarely make it through due to everything else going on... so this is actually a plus side to the slow-down for me.) I really believe in writing as a tool to sublimate some of the trauma we are all feeling these days. Here's a haiku from a prompt a couple days ago:
planted years ago,
why do the white irises
first bloom in this fear?
...true story, as the iris bulbs from a friend I planted 3 years ago do have blooms for the first time. :)
As far as inspirational settings, it's all about the growing things! These are morning-coffee shots of the 2-year-old lemon trees I grew from seeds, and one of my cat, Max, helping me with poems at night!
Portia Snow: I have been in my studio working with a new medium. I was prompted by Liza Lou and her #aparttogether_art project. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/arts/design/liza-lou.html
I have been patching together parts of my daughters old clothing in order to make a quilt. She is off to college in the fall. The process has been quite extraordinary. First, the experience of going through all of her baby clothes (all the feels), then choosing the pieces to use. Second, patching them together to form a comfort blanket sounds simple in theory if you are at all familiar with sewing or quilt-making, which I am not. Or, was not. I just began stitching things together and it seems to be working. It’s coming along. It has been a very cool project, very much about connection, about comfort and about moving past my idea that I don’t have the skills to create something like this. I have gone in and out of moments of wanting to completely light everything on fire to being really thrilled about the outcome. So goes the making of art.
