May 122011
 

Here is a question to gnaw your brains at night. Who is writing fiction and poetry and memoir about the Great Recession? Not about the migrant farm workers of the Great Depression (now the migrant day laborers and farm workers scattered across America), but the people going under water on their mortgages, families living in shelters, the middle class dropping off the edge. Is it because we’ve now managed to romanticize the Great Depression that we cannot find the literary fire in the meanness and terror of our current fate? Have we managed to convince ourselves that we need only write about the current chi-chi Cause of the Moment (immigrants, sex trafficking, genocide in Africa)? Who is going to catalogue the deep sadness, hopelessness of the present, and where are their stories?

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I can hear my screenwriter and novelist friends saying it is too soon for work reflecting the human cost of the downturn – the Lehman Brothers collapse was only three years ago.

“We writers need time to let these events percolate through our sub-conscious before we turn them into art,” they might argue.

I’m not sure about that. Three years into the Great Depression Steinbeck had already written Of Mice and Men, a tale of migrant farm workers, and had started on The Grapes of Wrath.

At the same time, Henry R Luce, founding editor of Time and Fortune, a right-wing Republican, sent writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans to the rural American South, to report on the Great Depression’s devastating effects.

Their report was so grim that Fortune declined to publish it. The pair published it as a book instead, the classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

I’m not certain that today’s editors at Fortune have sent top talent out into the field to document the slow-motion collapse of middle-class life in America.

via BBC News – Where are today’s Steinbecks?.

Mar 022011
 

Artist Paula Swisher (photo by Andrew Huth)

 

The Quirky Bird Art of Paula Swisher

text by Anna Maria Johnson, bird imagery by Paula Swisher



I was privileged to meet Paula Swisher in 1997 while she and I were both studying art at Houghton College in rural western New York.  Many late nights, we stayed up painting, drawing, and sharing our life stories.  Paula is probably the hardest-working visual artist that I’ve met, and in the past decade or so, has created a rich and wide-ranging body of work in a variety of media–painting, drawing, graphic design, web design, and most recently, interactive media.

In light of recent NC community posts about the relationship between text and images, notably Wendy Voorsanger’s “An Exploration of Poem Painting,” I thought it would be appropriate to share some of Paula’s images which she painted directly onto the pages of discarded business textbooks.  Many of her images are direct responses to the pre-existing graphs and phrases from these textbooks, but she re-interprets the business-speak through the lens of her personal experiences to say something entirely new and different.

For instance, Paula Swisher began this particular bird-and-text series during an extended bout of unemployment.

"Unemployment"

“Unemployment”

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