Journal of Creative Arts & Minds, Vol. 4 Nos. 3 & 4 – October 2018 by Jumbo Arts International

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Journal of Creative Arts and Minds Published by

Margie Labadie, President  John Antoine Labadie, Senior Editor & Chief Graphic Designer  Larry Arnold, Board Member

Electronic Links  https://www.facebook.com/JournalofCreativeArtsandMinds http://www.jumboartsinternational.org  jcam.jal@gmail.com

Jumbo Arts International Contact Information 217 South Edinborough St.  Red Springs, North Carolina USA 28377-1233   01.910.734.3223 Editorial – John Antoine Labadie & Margie Labadie  Design – The JCAM Team of Jumbo Arts International

The Journal of Creative Arts and Minds is a publication of Jumbo Arts International. This electronic publication is free. The views and opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the publisher.

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January 2018 – Vol. 4, No.2    An Original Publication of Jumbo Arts International  Red Springs, North Carolina, USA

ISBN: 978-0-9965432-7-9 / ISSN: Pending  Jumbo Arts International 2018

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October 2018 – Vol. 4, Nos. 3 & 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS President’s Message – 7 Editor’s Message – 9 VISUAL ARTISTS Essediya Halloâ – 14 Izak Matatya – 25 Michael Holroyd – 37 Sajal Sasanka Sarkar – 45 Suman Kabiraj – 61 CREATIVE WRITERS Gitanjali Kolanad – 73  Robin Rosen Chang – 90 REVIEWS  Nancy Palm Puchner - 100 FINAL WORD – 116 INFORMATION FOR SUBMITTERS – 117

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President's Message

Welcome to the Journal of Creative Arts and Minds. This Fall 2018 issue marks a milestone in JCAM history. As of this issue, we will have published the creative works of 100 artists & writers from 31 countries. We are extremely proud to have attained this goal with our very small team of curators and editors. As we move forward, we hope to see the journal grow in depth and scope while still maintaining our central goals to let artists and writers speak for themselves.

Always wanting to expand our literary oﬀerings, two wonderful writers grace our pages in this issue. We know you will enjoy reading the article and short story by Ms. Gitanjali Kolanad, a well know writer and dancer who has spent many creative years traveling and working in India and Canada. We also wholeheartedly welcome the poetry of Robin Rosen Chang. Having traveled and lived around the world, Robin now calls New Jersey home. I know her poetry will stir your soul as it did mine!

In this issue we have included our first exhibition review written by a Contemporary Art Historian. Nancy Palm Puchner, PhD critiques, “Remains” an art exhibition by Gina Marie Gibson, whose art and poetry have been featured in previous issues of the JCAM. We also have included a previously unpublished essay on the artwork of Mr. Sajal Sasanka Sarkar by Indian scholar Dr. Balamani Malladi.   This issue of the JCAM is published as we in the United States of America go to the polls for our mid-term elections. We go to voice our opinions and to elect those who we think will best represent our core values as free citizens. But we at the JCAM recognize that we are living in a time and place in history when some of our citizens feel empowered to belittle, curse, hurt, and defame others. We are living in a time when “truth” is distorted into vitriolic hate speech. But we will vote, and we encourage others to cast their ballots, and try to restore the faith we artists, we dreamers, have in our country.  And this is why we publish the JCAM. We want to reach around the world to our fellow humans, our fellow artists, to set an example of the best we can be. And perhaps our international journal will take you, our readers on a journey around the world through our pages. As Mark Twain once said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” We must all do our part to make space in the world for ART and for PEACE.

Margie Labadie JCAM Publisher & President, Jumbo Arts International

Red Springs, North Carolina, USA  jumboartsinternational@gmail.com

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Margie Labadie “A Time 2 Vote” / Digital Artwork / October 2018

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October 2018 A Message from the Senior Editor

With every new issue of the JCAM we learn many new things. Some of our learnings are worth passing along to readers. For example, it may be elucidating for potential submitters to understand what we see as the most common issue with submissions. But first let’s look at the process we go through with each submitter.   Most often when we receive a request to submit visual art or creative writing it is when we have been put in contact with an individual through a reference by a previously published artist/writer, or through a connection with a trusted colleague. At other times one of the editorial staff or an advisor to Jumbo Arts International provides a reference.  However this initial contact is made, one of our staff will reach out with information about the JCAM and our editorial process. We have a series of documents which outlines the steps which all submitters are asked to follow. Most of these conversations are through either email or social media. This can be clumsy, but we can almost always work out some way to communicate effectively. Finally, here is the #1 reason we end up not publishing a submission: The poor quality of image files. Although one of our documents for submitters carefully details what is needed to assure a quality image in our online publication, we cannot control the digital files sent to us. We hope all future submitters will heed our advice in this regard, as one of our goals is to have everyone we work with look as good as possible in each of our publications. Please let us know what we can to to assist. Best, John Antoine Labadie

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John Antoine Labadie / “Chimera” / Tradigital image / 2018

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Vi s ual Ar t i s t s Oc t ober201 8/Vol .4, Nos .3& 4

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Essediya Halloâ My professional name is Essediya Halloâ. I am a self-taught artist. I work in my studio at my home, the first spectators of my designs are my family. I live in Agadir, Morocco. It is a beautiful city known for its Argan products and a big wonderful beach. I was born in Safi, a city in my home country Morocco. My hometown is a beautiful coastal city known for pottery and sea fishing. It is very old with Portuguese monuments; I loved pottery with blue colors. From my childhood I liked drawing, in elementary school I was fascinated by the images of reading books, I was trying to draw them with passion. After middle-high school I wanted to enter the school of arts but the only institution of art was in Rabat far from my city. As I was very young my parents did not accept me going to study far from them, I didn't even dare to ask them. I studied scientific subjects in college, and then I continued in economics where I got my degree. After my marriage I came to live in the city of Agadir. Back then I knew nobody in Agadir except relatives of my husband. Because of this situation I have suffered a little bit being lonely. Back then I did some modeling courses, also cutting and sewing, and I also attended a ceramic workshop. One day I felt a great need to paint. Perhaps I had something heavy in my heart that I want to externalize for others to see. So one morning I woke up at 3:00am and I just started painting. Then I started to do research in the internet about painting and about the laws of drawing. The information available on the Internet really helped me.   I was in my forties when I met an old friend from the ceramics workshop who told me

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that he was now painting in an art club in their neighborhood. I immediately joined them. The teacher of this art club told me that I was an artist, and that I needed to come out of my shell. It was the first time I had seen someone making paintings. I saw his process. I discovered how to handle a brush, how to mix water colors, I learned very quickly.

I joined the women’s artist's association in Agadir. There I met women like me who love painting. We organized a collective exhibition where we analyzed the works of each artist and discussed them. Once I began developing my personal style of painting I focused on doing figurative works. After the first work that I made in this style I have since called it the “three hands.” Every time I changed a shape or a color, I ask my family for their opinion and they loved it. They told I have to join social media to share my art. I was afraid of the reaction of friends, but fortunately I have received many likes and encouraging comments from people in the field of art. After creating others works I felt like iIve found my path. I also began to receive invitations to participate in exhibitions in different regions.

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With my art I try to say the things I can not say with words, I express my feelings, my opinions, my joy and sadness. My paintings show the situation of the Arab woman in my country.

I have some rituals about my painting. For example, in order to begin to paint I also choose calm and quiet times. I also have to be all alone in my corner to begin working. Before starting to paint I make sure my workplace is clean and everything is in its place: brushes, tubes of paint, etc. I also need to be where where I'm at ease with the light, since lightening is very important to me. Then, I put my tea or coffee … and I begin. The final stage of painting a canvas is where I feel as if I have more fun. I like working with oil paints because it does not dry right away and it allows me to make modifications if I want to. Sometimes is difficult to know when a painting is finished. When I see that my painting is beautiful I know it is finished. The first work that I have sold is a figurative canvas representing a Berber town of Kalaa. I miss that painting so much. But it is important to share my work with others too. Right now I do not live from my art. My dream is to do a lot of group and individual exhibitions in several countries across the world and especially in America. Inspiration is important to be as an artist too. I’m inspired by my feelings, things that I hide in my heart. My subjects are very much about my own life experiences; I present my life and my childhood.

As for how I get ideas from my creations, I translate what I think and what I feel into shapes and colors. In my art I’m trying to make visible precise ideas I want to make into a painting. To me this is being an artist; this is being creative. Being creative is making the art in my way and with my own opinions. Essediya Halloâ Phone: 212672902369 Esediya Halloâ Email : Essediya.artiste@gmail.com

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Essediya Halloâ “The Mom and Daughter” / Oil on canvas

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Essediya Halloâ “The Three Hands” / Oil on canvas

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Essediya Halloâ “The Amputated” / Oil on canvas

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Essediya Halloâ “The Boastful” / Oil on canvas

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Essediya Halloâ “The Young Mother” / Oil on canvas

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Essediya Halloâ “The Puppet” / Oil on canvas

Essediya Halloâ “The Puppet 1” / Oil on canvas

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Essediya Halloâ “The Resistant” / Oil on canvas

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Essediya Halloâ “Untitled #2” / Oil on canvas

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Izak Matatya JCAM: What is your professional name? IM: I use my own name: Izak Matatya. As per title, I am a contemporary digital artist. I’m an electronics and telecommunications engineer by profession; never studied art. Over time, I’ve developed an artistic taste by admiring wonderful works of all artists of all eras. JCAM: Where were you born and does that place still influence you? IM: I was born in Edirne, Turkey. I’m a bit nostalgic of that place, but doesn’t influence me artistically. JCAM: Where do you live now and how does that place influence you? IM: Presently, I live in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The places I live do not really influence my artistic work. I’m influenced by all beauty on earth and wonderful people I met, wherever I lived. JCAM: Do you have family, friends, or fellow artists who support you in your work, life and art making and how do they make a difference in your life? IM: My cousin supported me greatly and provided funds for my exhibitions. My wife is the best judge of my works as she has excellent taste in everything, whether music, clothes, fashion and art. JCAM: When and how did you start making art? IM: At a very young age, I was already doing graphics and drawing manually.

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JCAM: Can you describe the time when you first realized that creating was something you absolutely had to do? IM: Ever since the very first personal computers came out, as my art is pure digital and based on mathematical algorithms.

JCAM: Why do you make art now? IM: I feel the need to create an additional universe based on pure beauty, either earthly inspired by nature or what we would say: “out of this world.”

JCAM: How has your work changed or developed over time? IM: Absolutely, I feel I matured a lot and my digital paintings became more elaborate. JCAM: What are you trying to communicate with your art? IM: Any kind of esthetic beauty found in nature or in my fantasy. JCAM: Do you have any creative patterns, routines or rituals associated with your art making? IM: All shapes and curves and colors are generated with my mathematical functions routines. JCAM: What element(s) of art making do you enjoy the most and why? IM: I enjoy mostly geometrical and nature based images because beauty all around me inspires me.

JCAM: What is your most important artist tool(s) and why? IM: In the last 30 years, it has been my computer. I was very good in math and I found beauty in the type of graphics it could generate.

JCAM: How do you know when a work is finished? IM: I simply know it.

JCAM: What are the art making tools you use now? IM: A personal computer with my own developed software over the last 30 years.

JCAM: What new creative medium would you love to pursue?

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IM: Contemporary digital art is what I would continue to pursue. JCAM: What's the first artwork you ever sold? IM: It was already a digital art work printed and framed after my first exhibition at Images du Future in 1987 in the old port of Montreal.

JCAM: Do you make a living from your art? IM: It’s an additional income to my other business ventures and consulting in the IT field.

JCAM: What strategies could you share with other artists on how to become successful professionally? IM: One needs to be very social and friendly with customers who are interested in your work. I use social media greatly to advertise and sell my works. One needs to find the right circle to advertise and reach interested people. One should know in the artistic world that the price of an art work does not necessarily depend on the quality of the work, but on the kind of name one has established in this field. It takes a long path from being an emerging artist to reach the status of a well-known artist. Numerous exhibitions, publications, and interventions with artists and art lovers are important. Most institutions do not deal with artists themselves but with agents who have a collection of artists and portfolios in their files. So, it’s important to find a good agent who is willing to represent the artist. JCAM: What are your goals for the future, for both work and life? IM: I’m very self motivated. I’m very happy with my life with my family, which counts the most. My work inspires me and I’m willing to put many hours for as long as I can.   JCAM: What interesting project are you working on at the moment? IM: I have in mind to decorate large architectural sites, including hotels, their lobbies, rooms. I have sufficient works to decorate entire such places. JCAM: What or who inspires you? IM: As mentioned, beautiful people and beautiful nature inspire me including all micro and macro patterns formed by nature.

JCAM: Do you have a favorite – or influential – living artist? IM: My favorite artist was Victor Vasarely. Unfortunately he’s no longer alive. A currently living artist I admire is Ruy Vital from Cuba.

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JCAM: What work of art do you wish you owned and why? IM: As much as I’m futuristic, I have always admired the Impressionistic period. I would love to own a Monet or a Renoir. But I can dream, can’t I. JCAM: Where do you find ideas for your creative work? IM: They simply come to me. One day it can be a geometrical pattern, another day a beautiful flower, etc.

JCAM: What does “being creative” mean to you? IM: Being creative to me, as the word implies, is to be able to come up with works that no one else may have thought of, out of this world and still esthetically beautiful.

JCAM: What is the best advice you ever had about how to be more creative? IM: I think one is born with a creative talent. Otherwise, one can develop this talent, by keep observing the art of artist colleagues either contemporaries or in the past, and try to understand and enjoy art from all categories and keep trying to develop one’s own style. JCAM Editors note: When reviewing the artwork of Izak Matatya on the following pages readers should know that his works all have unique numbers rather than titles. Please see the example below.

Izak Matatya “Image13090” / Digital artwork

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Izak Matatya “Image13031” / Digital artwork

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Izak Matatya “Image13029” / Digital artwork

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Izak Matatya “Image13036” / Digital artwork

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Izak Matatya “Image13123” / Digital artwork

Izak Matatya “Image13133” / Digital artwork

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Izak Matatya “Image13069” / Digital artwork

Izak Matatya “Image13115” / Digital artwork

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Izak Matatya “Image12241” / Digital artwork

Izak Matatya “Image12429” / Digital artwork

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Izak Matatya “Image12926” / Digital artwork

Izak Matatya “Image12880” / Digital artwork

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Izak Matatya “Image12967” / Digital artwork

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Michael Holroyd JCAM: We are fortunate to be able to bring the creative work of Canadian artist Michael Holroyd to our readers. The photography made available to us by Mr. Holroyd presents a unique view of the natural world. â&#x20AC;¨ MH: I was born and raised in Calgary Alberta Canada, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It was here that my love of rocks must have started. I went on frequent trips to the mountains and always enjoyed the trips. My education is a bit of a mixed bag. After High School I went in and did a diploma in Consumer Marketing at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. I then went to London England and went to a number of Galleries there. I began to wonder what made a painting good? To curb my interest I began an Art History degree at the University of Calgary. This degree required studio courses and the more of the studio classes I took the more making art grabbed me. So at the end, I ended up with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree major in ceramics. Out of school I moved to Saskatchewan and got a job as an Artist in Residence in a small community of Outlook, Saskatchewan. This position required me to spend a portion of my time teaching and a portion for my own work. The position lasted 1 year. I then stayed in Outlook for a while where I became involved with the Prairie Sculptors Association and partook in 2 international sculpture symposia. After the last symposium my new wife and I left for Nova Scotia, Canada. In Nova Scotia, I became involved with the Nova Scotia Designer Crafts Council and ran their craft markets. I then eventually began my Raku Pottery (Art Monque Pottery). Here I was managing a living selling at craft markets, wholesale markets and gallery shows. When my first child came along we decided to move back west to Manitoba, Canada. I gave up the pottery business and became a Red Seal Carpenter.

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In my position as a Red Seal Carpenter I got to travel a majority of Canada. It was my travels in the Arctic that got my artistic side excited again. I was in a place (Pond Inlet, Nunavut) that was closer to the North Pole than the Arctic Circle at spring time. It was a magical experience, after a long dark winter things suddenly came to life and hidden colors and textures suddenly appeared. I began taking photographs in Pond Inlet and it has inspired me ever since. In my work I endeavor to work with an eye that I have developed through working in sculptural ceramics and a gut reaction to the images I see in my viewfinder. Immanuel Kant said, “art or beauty must be approached with disinterest.” The best way to explain it is walking along and something catches your eye. It is in that split second that beauty is because the image has touched you. In the sculptural side of ceramics it is form, texture and color are what is important. This combination of disinterest, form, texture and color is what I try and capture in each of my photographs.

Michael Holroyd  “Monet's Sunset”  Photograph

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Michael Holroyd  “Chetwyn 19” / Photograph

Michael Holroyd “Cross” / Photograph

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Michael Holroyd  “Memories of Lascaux” / Photograph

Michael Holroyd “Woodblock Mountain Mist” / Photograph

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Michael Holroyd  “Fire in the Sky” / Photograph

Michael Holroyd “It’s Coming” / Photograph

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Michael Holroyd  “Just Hanging There” / Photograph

Michael Holroyd “Night Sky” / Photograph

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Michael Holroyd  “Running Polar Bear” / Photograph

Michael Holroyd “Windy Day” / Photograph

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Michael Holroyd  “Planes” / Photograph

Michael Holroyd “Reflections” / Photograph

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Sajal Sasanka Sarkar

JCAM: The JCAM staff is proud to present the creative visuals of contemporary Indian artist Sajal Sasanka Sarkar. His artwork varies in subject matter and technique and focuses various aspects of Indian culture, and of his personal and family history.  Additionally we are fortunate to have an original, and previously unpublished, essay on the work of Mr. Sarkar by Indian scholar Dr. Balamani Malladi. With the exception of some light editing, we have published her essay as it was received so that her thoughts on this artist’s works and art practice can speak for themselves. ______________________________________________________________________ Earthy-Peotic Reality-Technically Meaningful (of Sajal Sasanka Sarkar Art Works) Dr. Balamani Malladi  PhD in Art History And Aesthetics  Hyderabad, Telangana, India  “I remained within the four walls of my studio for four years, reading, surfing information, experimenting to make pulp with paper, jute, cotton for using pulp as art material and

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checking it’s permutations and combinations. My studio is nothing less than a research lab.” says Sajal Sasanka Sarkar. Ohh …. His studio is filled with tins and jars storing the dry, wet paper pulp, and some lumps are in the process of drying under the Sun and few more thin wet, colored pulp layers are on the sieves ready to undergo the process of composing on the canvasses. He uses Vinyl eco-friendly industrial colors, colors made by a France company for the last 50 years and easily available now. They are water based and durable colors. He uses sometimes acrylic colors and yet another times tea and coffee stains, iron and rust stains also.   There are many objects spread throughout his studio space, wet paper pulp blocks compressed under screw press, dry lumps of pulp, pulp colored in many shades are stored in different bottles, washing machine for processing the pulp, canvases stacked on one side, a shallow dome made of pulp with embossed figures spread over it is hung on the wall for the last 2 years it seems to check it’s biodegradability, color permanency, fungus free durability. Three dimensional sculpted figures are kept for testing are waiting at a corner, the other corner of the studio has print making press and screw press machine. Technical excellency - Conceptual meanings There is a contemplating question in the field of Contemporary art whether technique can be listed for creativity? Sajal spends months and long years finding different textures of pulp made of paper/jute/cotton etc. Most of his themes and concepts are associated with the technical experimentation of pulp he processes. He paints, sculpts and makes prints with pulp. His method of making painting with pulp is like a relief work over the canvas. He applies layer over the layer of wet thin small sheets of pulp on the canvas as per the requirement of the figure. He keeps the wet pulp of various colors on a plate and spreads on wet canvas accordingly. Similarly if he wants to mix the color for color shading, he overlaps different color pulp layers while fixing on canvas. When the figure on the canvas is completed it does not look like a relief work. Pulp sheets are so thin that looks part of the canvas figure. He prepares pulp in many stages of processing. He collects industrial pulp, cotton pulp, old clothes processes and beats them, dehydrates in washing machine and dries them. He uses banana pulp, jute pulp, etc. Once the soft virgin pulp is ready he mixes with different colors before allowing it for drying. He stores dry pulp. Sometimes they are colored and yet another times as white and colorless and stored in bottles. When he starts painting on a canvas he wets the required colored pulp and spreads on his plate for use. He picks up small or big strips of wet pulp spreads over the wet canvas as required. Sometimes he uses the tools like spatula or needles to spread the pulp fine lines on the figures.   Layer after layer pulp is spread but in between it is kept for drying too. Whole

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composition is filled this way on wet canvas. This is something like low relief work but the pulp strips are so fine and thin spread on the canvas one cannot make out whether it is a color layer or pulp layer on photography. For a naked eye the transparency of the layers certainly adds another aesthetic to the composition. Shades of color hues are brought out by the layers of wet pulp paper. He uses the pulp wet sheets the way one squeezes colors out of the tubes. This is not collage. It is like color spread out of pulp texture. He uses pulp for print making methods also. He makes wet pulp blocks compressed under screw press and does beautiful embossing over the pulp blocks with the etching and lithograph print making methods. Difference in the technique brings different sensitivities to the image. He is presently looking forward for sculpting too by keeping the sample pieces for testing for it’s unbreakable, fire proof and for longevity. I understand how paper pulp is used by the artists to make objects of art, but I found it interesting how Sajal experiments painting on canvases with pulp, makes prints also and sculpts. On the whole whatever the art work he does, he does with pulp only. Most of his themes and meanings of compositions are associated with the materials he experiments, pulp he processes. Sajal does another gimmick. He etches the PVC plate and does dry point etching over it. He makes a registration over the pulp block of that plate and transfers the figure to the pulp block from the PVC plate under the press in the negative printing method. It is similar to taking prints in print making process that gets the negative picture over the pulp base. But he seldom applies ink colors for prints. It is simply an embossed figure gets impression over the pulp plate. Sajal incorporates this process in his compositions meaningfully. All his work whether it is for print making, sculpting or painting his basic material is pulp. He makes eco friendly, bio degradable, fire proof, fungus free and longevity experimented. One of the pulp block was under the process while keeping leaf shaped brown paper stenciled over the pulp and pressed under screw press. He left the brown paper stencils on that wet pulp so that impressions also receive the color of that brown when pulp is getting dried. Image of the PVC plate or stenciled paper is transferred to the pulp block. He can take 20 to 30” prints as per his press size. He wants to use lots of organic pulp with various other materials in the future. Themes and Compositions “Cinema” One of his series is painted during the ‘100 years of Indian cinema celebration’. Cinema posters were printed on litho prints previously and at present it is taken over by the digital prints. He made a composition on 100 years of cinema celebration compiling many heroes of cinema entertainment industry. The centre of attraction is about name and fame of Amitabh Bachhan mega star who has taken over the minds and viewership. Many hero characters like Rajkapoor or Rajnikanth of Indian cinema are placed at the periphery of this composition. His composition on 100 years of cinema reveals many

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symbolic meanings. Amitabh’a picture is taken from that poster of his hit movie, ‘Coolie’ [Porter].   The urban working class is well represented in that character role of that movie, and Amitabh fulfilled the role to make it a big success. Metro cities working class are the big patrons of cinema and success stories of 100 years of cinema. The posture of Amitabh has portrayed on the canvas reveals more than the entertainment of that movie. He was a male icon of the period. That cinema had a mass attraction. Sajal painted that hero poster with red colored pulp and the matt finish absolutely highlighted the feel of a mass hero and a hard working and the self respect of that character in that cinema. Paper pulp is an indigenous material and Sajal created a parallel with it’s texture meaningfully. Certainly the finish what Sajal achieved of his choice cannot be brought in by the readily available oil or acrylic colors finish to the canvas. Sajal worked earlier in a media advertisement organization. That had brought different understanding onto his work. He worked with Lithopress for making the prints of advertisement. Litho is a different technical feel on earlier times’ posters. That was the time posters and hoardings were mainly done with hand paints or litho prints. He tried to indulge that effect to the image of this super hero. This hero represents the 100 years cinema celebration in Sajal’s themes. And representing that litho effect is also necessary that is different from the digital prints of today. “PL 480” PL 480 is Sajal’s another composition on a social problem. Red wheat was imported from America and Late.Sri. Lal Bahadur Sastry’s then Prime Minister moved against it as Green Revolution. This composition is a narration of history, a real story, speaks about the success story of Late. Sri.Lalbahadur Sastry. Sastry looks like Gandhi in this composition with folded hands. Gandhi protested in Quit India movements with the idea of ‘Satyagraha’ and the PL 480 law- was about the red wheat protested by Late Sri. Lalbahadur Shastry. The feel of thin layers of pulp spread over Mr. Shastry’s figure has layers of meanings. One is about the matt finish and intrigued with red wheat stories. There is a repressive protest involved in that overall feel of the composition of yellow and black color and pulp aesthetic. What other readily available colors can get better than this feel! “Trying to Fly” One of his recent series is about an ambitious young man who is ‘Trying to Fly’ looking ahead of his village, surroundings and high above in the sky. A young boy is trying to energize his body in various postures to fly, sitting, bending back and forth, etc. for gaining the flight. Finally he could fly with jubilant moods and looks down from the sky, in sitting and hands spread flying postures. Young boy appears eerily looking around and down, flying in the sky with wings. There is a parody too there in the composition. Series has certain points to note. All the compositions before the flight has deeply engraved hallow blocks around him and most of them are colorless impressions. These

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engravings are made with PVC embossing of negative print making methods as we already discussed. Whereas while gaining the flight the birds engraved around the flying boy are colorful. Birds represented in the composition are symbolic. That is adding a different aesthetic and meanings to the composition. In this way if techniques are adding further to the meanings and if materials meanings are adding to the conceptual meanings, then contemporary art concepts should accept the technique and material meanings as one of the important aspects of creativity. “Unpublished Poetry” Sajal’s another series is “Unpublished Poetry.” His father in Law was a poet who published books of poetry. One of his collections is unpublished by the time he left this world and Sajal wanted to visualize those unpublished poems in his own way as a token of respect paying to his father in law. He painted some of the poems in watercolors and few in book format with paper pulp. He made a open book of three dimensional form and one side is poem written and the other is the figures of his visualization painted of that poem.   That book has a little bend also to bring an old and used look. While on his experimentation Sajal found a material that can keep the book format in the same posture the way he bends it. Krishnokali is one of the poems about a young cowherd girl who is very dark. Her eyes, hair, hands are darker than one over the other and darker than the deer’ eyes. Dark complexion, dark hair suits her name, Krishnokali. She is in the fields along with her cows. This poem combines landscape and the feminine beauty and visualization. Sajal made this composition in such a way that resembles Rabindranath Tagore style. Tagore of course wrote many poems combining the landscape meanings and the feminine beauty. Tagore followed the style of joining the doodles to get a form and figure. Sajal says when he was in school from 1st to 4th standard they were to read ‘Sahajpaath”- natural reading. It is a writing and a visualization and a combination and essence of Nandlala Bose and Rabindranath Tagore’ work. He followed that format as paying Homage to two legendaries of Bengal. “Hungry Bengal” is Sajal’s other visualization of the unpublished poems. He says Tagore and Legendary artist Nandlal Bose had shown us the Sonar Bangla-beautiful Bengal picture. Sajal feels that Bengal has deteriorated and the picture now is Hungry Bengal. Hungry Bengal composition display a tiger’s upside down position symbolizing the ecological imbalance as well imbalance of the social peace and coexistence. He feels that Sonar Bangla is a blurred picture at the moment. What the culture of previous days was unique to Bengal, there is a change in the present times with changed multicultural practices. He feels this is Hungry Bengal devoid of peace. He painted water color landscape paintings also in this series. He made the base paper out of pulp. The figures of birds and animals flowers and fruits are depicted with very pleasant tones of water colors. They are not usual landscape of recognizable realistic forms. They are the overlap of all such parts of nature and the essence is represented but not the form alone. Very poetic way of representing the essence of land, as if a peacock’ dance is tuned or springs’ floral flavors are smelt in the compositions.

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All his work and themes come from his daily life only. What he observes or comes across in the society enters his compositions. He made a name stamp on papers and he sketches or draws with water colors directly over those papers like sketch books. His sketches are another set of color compositions ready for the viewer’ aesthetic savor. His other compositions are on social problems and individual’s identity struggles. Beautiful girls like ‘Bondana’ are thrown for girl’s trade. He symbolized the trade with barcode. Fatemah’s photo album is his another composition. Muslim girls are under the black costume fully covered is symbolically representing the suppression of desires. Clown series taken from Circus theme are loaded meaningfully and the fineness of drawing skills. He incorporated stenciled designs in this series. Entry into Art Field Sajal Sashanka Sarkar is from Kolkatta lives and works in Baroda. In a way he had a smooth entry into Art field though struggled to sustain. He did not have seen anyone in the family with drawing or art background, except his mother drawing traditional Alpanafloor designs of festivals and rituals. Looking at his good drawing skills his teacher advised him for attending the drawing classes. His main inspiration came from the Navaratri- huge celebration of Goddess Durga worship Pandal decorators. He tried to draw the similar way the background scenes of those decorations and backdrops scenes. Bengal’s Durga worship is obvious to influence many in many ways because it’s scale is such. He came to know about Art College only later. 2 of his villagers were studying in Art College. Sajal joined Indian Art College Kolkatta and completed graduation in 1995. My conversation with Sajal went on interestingly for long hours suddenly he got up and put a break to the conversation. I did not understand because I was trying to guess that time of what he was speaking about his college days. He got up swiftly to close all the doors and windows of his studio because it started raining. Sajal’s studio is full of water based colors and drying pulp. Even a small rain drop may spoil his hours long efforts. When he closed the room it was suffocating. He understood me, smiled and said, “this is what it is, when I work in my studio as a research lab I cannot even switch on the fan to protect the thin layers of pulp. I spend day and night in this studio.” I smiled trying to understand his passion with hardship. After his graduation family wanted him in their family business of textiles. But he worked for a while in advertising agency, and earned for the expenses to study at Baroda Fine Arts College. He says he all most ran away from home without informing the family till the last moment of leaving. Baroda gave him a good place to study and to settle. He is a qualified Post Graduate from Print making Department of Baroda Fine Arts Faculty in 2000. He had a fascination for paper pulp since he studied his Masters degree, but left at that time to meet the curriculum requirements. He wants to experiment and work in pulp alone now. Sajal has re-organized, while adding layers of fine paper pulp to print making process and explored techniques to suit his work. Print making technique wore a fresh costume due to his efforts. To develop the methods and medium to go well with one’s own

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contemporary requirements through such traditional techniques is a meditative act, paying homage to traditional art practices. Contemporary art reinvents and reinvests traditional methods and techniques as a strategy and methodology. Exploring such methods to the required results is adding another feather in the artists’ works like Sajal’s and a viewing feast for the viewer. What is pleasant in his work that persuades the viewer is, poetic elements giving a thrust to the visual imaginations, themes reflecting on changing society, living styles, illustrious personalities, history incidents. Many such elements mix on visual senses within the pleasing idioms. He takes a poetic pleasure in a visual expression. He signs his canvasses with a stamp printing his name the typical way Chinese paintings and Durer’s prints are stamped. Such stamping was seen earlier on postal letters. Those were the important and effective communications at one point of time before emails and the electronic communications entered. Letters of that days’ communication carried such stamping. It could be a memory of that practice too which carried forward the relations and emotions. That practice remained as a History now. Aesthetic Conclusion Sajal’s work is like candid photography catching people on camera. His attention catches the day to day life, activities and down to earth requirements of common people’s life, problems, entertainments, changing society and existential problems. Technique of paper pulp is adding more meanings to his compositions. His works whether they are paintings on canvases or prints, aesthetic of the works is slightly different than the usual. They look very earthy, robust too, neither have watercolor softness, transparency, nor opaque and glossy like oils and acrylics. They have a handmade paper like feel, seeing that on canvas and prints is a strange sensibility.

Dr. Balamani Malladi  18th October 2018

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Sajal Sasanka Sarkar  “Bird forms” / Cast paper pulp

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Sajal Sasanka Sarkar  “Bandona” / Modified cotton pulp with vinyl ink on canvas

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Sajal Sasanka Sarkar  “Circus people” / Modified paper pulp and vinyl color on canvas

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Sajal Sasanka Sarkar  “PL-480” / Paper pulp on board

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Sajal Sasanka Sarkar  “Trying to fly” / Tempera on embossed paper

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Sajal Sasanka Sarkar  “Trying to fly” / Tempera on embossed paper

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Sajal Sasanka Sarkar  “Hollwood-Bollywood-Mollywood-Tollywood (The ever-changing reality)  Paper pulp on canvas

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Sajal Sasanka Sarkar  “Want to fly” / Modified cotton pulp with acrylic on canvas

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Sajal Sasanka Sarkar  “Fatemah’s photo album” / Modified paper pulp and vinyl color on canvas

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Suman Kabiraj

JCAM: It gives the JCAM staff great pleasure to bring the diverse works of Suman Kabiraj to our readership. Suman Kabiraj is a contemporary artist from West Bengal, India. Mr. Kabiraj is a multidisciplinary artist who has has done his Masters in visual arts in painting and drawing with 1st class 1st from Govt. College of Art and Craft, Calcutta University in 2006. Today he lives and works in Kolkata. â&#x20AC;¨ Kabirajâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s works have been exhibited in several national and international galleries, festivals and events including: Streaming Festival for Audio Visual Art in The Netherlands; Summer Show 2014 at the Centre of International Modern Art (CIMA) in Kolkata in 2014; Liquid Cities & Temporary Identities international exhibition in Espoo, Finland in 2013; Catalyst Arts Belfast International Festival in the United Kingdom in 2013; Stigmart /10 Europe International Annual Previews in London in 2012; and the All India Fine Arts & Crafts Society Annual Exhibition ( AIFACS) in New Delhi. Kabiraj has been honored with several awards and scholarships including the Governors Gold Medal, Gaganendranath Tagore Memorial Award, Camlin Euro Professional Visit Scholarship, Rashbehari Dutta Memorial Award, Sunil Das

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Scholarship, Gopen Roy Memorial Award, and the Mukul Dey Graphics Award. JCAM: Below, in his own words, Suman Kabiraj describes his art and art practice. SK: Born in a semi-urban area, very close to villages, I had the fortune of getting in close contact with the rural area and nature – both spatially and psycho-spatially. Then I moved to Kolkata for my art education in 1999. Since then I’ve been into the entrails of this megapolis. Such a geographical binary, and the tension within, have contributed largely to my imagination. For example, this situation has allowed me to perceive human bodies and nature in different settings, in different postures and hence, with different nuances. In my recent works, I have used satire to enable comparison, understanding and insight to hold up the flaws in our institutions, our nations, our species and, indeed, ourselves. The works combine history, politics and current events with levity and witty irreverence. In my ongoing projects I have chosen to use pen and ink, videos and sculpture. In this way the work is subversive and a comment on the human condition itself offering the viewer a behind-the-scenes look at the heroic and the rational. Most of my subjects are familiar but recontextualized. In what they encompass or allude to, these works transcend the merely comically grotesque or the quest for objectivity. Assessing these works in terms of their insight, interest, coherence, complexity, depth or intelligibility involves a cluster of notions which are interdependent. The grotesque element in my art greatly adds to its value. It does not, however, descend into perverse nihilism which is not an artistically legitimate instance of the grotesque. With my art I am trying to point out the deficiencies in certain human institutions and the social issues which result from them in such a way that they become absurd, even hilarious, which is therefore both entertaining and accessible. It aims to keep collective conscience alert, it exposes absurdity for what it is and makes those inclined to adopt foolish or tasteless fashions aware that what they espouse is ridiculous. It shows society its own features and makes it odious to the sentient. So often satire in the visual arts is portrayed as anti-progressive, yet its ability to offer cutting critique is a positive when aimed at the right targets as I demonstrate.  Images that I create, or seek to create, and the images that are constantly being created in and around me, thanks to the great image journey called life. So, the things I paint, draw, install, make video, do photography or sculpt, originate from my everyday engagement with Reality. This is a Reality which, for me, is made of mundane happenings and uncanny images which penetrate into each other regularly, often unexpectedly, leaving me bewildered. My forthcoming project is on the theme of Reconstruction of History. I have planned to remake the old master’s in different settings in order to issues of time and content.

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Suman Kabiraj October 2018

Suman Kabiraj “Dreaming a New World” / Watercolor on handmade paper

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Suman Kabiraj  The artist with his work / Photograph

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Suman Kabiraj  “Dream Tree” / Installation

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Suman Kabiraj  “A New Day” / Acrylic and graphite on paper

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Suman Kabiraj  “Skabiraj 8” /Pen and ink on paper

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Suman Kabiraj  “City Story” / Pen and ink on paper

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Suman Kabiraj  “Morning Glow” / Watercolor on paper

Suman Kabiraj  The artist in a gallery with his work / Photograph

Jour nalofCr eat i veAr t s& Mi nds

Cr eat i ve Wr i t er s Oc t ober201 8/Vol .4, Nos .3& 4

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Gitanjali Kolanad Ms. Gitanjali Kolanad is a well know writer and dancer. JCAM is fortunate to engage   Ms. Kolanad in an interview where she speaks about her career as a dancer and her practice as a writer as well.   Additionally, on the pages following this interview JCAM readers will find Ms. Kolanad’s short story “Sleeping with Movie Stars”  JCAM: Where were you born, and does that place still influence you? Where do you live now, and how does that place influence you? Do you have family, friends, or fellow artists who support you in life and creative work? If so, how do they make a difference in your life and creative work? GK: I was born in a small village in Kerala and lived in South India until, when I was six, my parents emigrated to Canada. I returned to South India at sixteen and began my study of bharata natyam at the dance school Kalakshetra almost by accident. The place and the dance style seemed to fit together and neither seemed strange. I'd taken ballet and other dance classes while I grew up in Winnipeg and Thunder Bay, the way kids do, but that kind of dance didn't attract my sustained and focussed interest the way bharata natyam did, as being an art form I wanted to grapple with. I still have no explanation for the way the form attracted me: it felt like falling in love. I was sixteen, and doing that pretty regularly, so I think I'm being accurate when I express it that way. I spent four years at the dance school, and then returned to Canada. That wasn't jarring either but for me the dance form and the place were interwoven so I kept going back. Bharata natyam needed Madras - the music, the audience that knows what it's watching, the particularities of the trees and the flowers - to sustain itself as a living

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vibrant art form, and Madras needed bharata natyam - it's not such an attractive city in other respects. I am grateful that the time and circumstances allowed me to live this way, going back and forth. Both places influenced my path as an artist. I'm not sure I would have experimented with choreography and collaboration in the radical ways I did had I lived only in Madras. But if I had lived only in Canada, I don't think I would have had the immersion and integration into the tradition to use it freely as my medium of expression. So I continue to find ways to live for a while here, for a while there. I taught for three years at an Indian university. I've just moved to London, traveling to India when I can. London is an incredible city. The British Library, the British Museum, the V and A, are resources for research and inspiration. They are free, so I can wander around a gallery, or sit in the reading room with a book. I have two sons. Both of them are involved in creative work, so being on the periphery of their projects brings mixed emotions - heartache and pride. When I discuss my projects with them, I can be more honest - they already know my failings and have no hesitations in telling me where I'm going wrong. My friends and collaborators are crucial to my process. I'm very fortunate to be able to turn to them for feedback or to be able to work with them on projects. I've had intense collaborations with artists from other mediums. Phillip Zarrilli, in theatre. Ray Langenbach, video, installation and performance artist. Valsan Kolleri, sculptor. Natesh Muthuswamy, painter. Parmela Attariwala, violinist. Brandy Leary, dancer and choreographer. VAK Ranga Rao, dancer and writer. Each collaboration has resulted in my attaining new skills, new ways of approaching a subject, new attitudes. I don't think I would have amounted to much without these people, and there are others too. JCAM: When and how did you start writing? Can you describe the time when you first realized that being an author was something you absolutely had to do? Why do you write now? How has your writing changed or developed over time? What in particular are you trying to communicate through your writing? Of the works submitted to JCAM this issue, is there one piece of which you are most proud? If so, why? GK: I'd kept a journal starting from the time I went to Kalakshetra at sixteen. But I didn't think of that as 'writing'. It was purely personal, a way to process whatever might be happening in my day-to-day life. I remember consciously remaining silent in my journals about dancing though. I had a suspicion it was important to remain as inarticulate as possible, so that nothing would interfere with the body in action. That is, right from the start, I could feel how words got in the way, in between, creating a division between me and the experience. So while I might want that distance in a problem with my boyfriend, it was exactly what I didn't want in this other aspect of my life. Whatever was happening to me through my dancing body was so mysterious, and not knowing how to reliably access its power

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made me very wary of what I did or didn't do. Dancing was painful, repetitive, rigorous most of the time, and every once in a while, without discernible cause, it was something else that I didn't dare look at too closely in case it disappeared; while writing was just writing, mundane, like peeling garlic or washing my dance practice sari. I started to write about dance out of anger. I had attended a seminar in Delhi in the eighties, and the level of discourse about my dance form was so infuriatingly banal that I went home and stayed up all night tearing apart the event with my words. Most of my early writing about dance was in that vain. Somebody had gotten something wrong about bharata natyam and I took to the page to try and set the record straight. Right from the start, I encountered the unequal power dynamic - the scholar and theorists had platforms and podiums and journals to which the practitioner was not given access. There were very few forums that wanted to hear my actual voice, they preferred to get it filtered through someone with a Phd. Luckily, there was a journal called Sruti, devoted to South Indian dance and music that published that first rant and subsequent ones as well. It was only towards the end of my dancing career that I began to try to write about my dance experience. The short story form had always appealed to me and it also seemed accessible to my resources which I recognized as being limited, so that's what I tried. I realized very quickly that writing is as mysterious a process as dancing and so I approached it in the same way, through the same kinds of rituals that had worked for me as a dancer. Now I write to access the same state of being that I used to access through dance. So growing old, not being able to dance, has not been as painful or wrenching as I thought it would be. Having danced for almost fifty years I still didn't figure it all out, so through my writing life I better understand my dancing life. At the beginning my writing was very autobiographical. Now I use fictional characters and situations, but my real subject remains this dance form bharata natyam and what it means to be a dancer. It's hard to articulate the body, smells, tastes, moods, so I know I'll be struggling for a long time. When I wrote the stories in my collection 'Sleeping with Movie Stars', I consciously structured each piece to in some way reflect or refer to the pieces in a bharata natyam performance, a sequence of dances called a 'margam'. I am most pleased with how I accomplished that task in the short story 'A Year in Delhi'. It is my attempt to render the emotion of the dance called 'padam' in short story form. A padam usually involves transgressive sex, and the female character is drawn from a set repertoire of types. The most evocative padams leave the heroine yearning, unsatisfied. I think I managed to get this story to do what a padam does, with all the essential elements in place, without being too clever. JCAM: What kind of creative patterns, routines or rituals do you have? What element of writing do you enjoy the most and why? What is your most important writing tool(s) and why? How do you know when a work is finished? What are the writing tools you use now? What writing genre would you love to pursue?

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GK: I have never been able to work on several projects at once. I need time empty of obligations, about six hours in order to get about three hours of actual writing done. If I can't walk for at least an hour or two before I start writing, aimlessly, no place to get to, nothing I'm obliged to do, then I may as well not write. So actually I need space as well as time. These are great luxuries, and to be able to have that kind of life is difficult to arrange. Now that my boys are grown up, and I'm single, it is easier; I've reverted to my essentially solitary nature. Beyond that sense of time stretching out so I can patiently wait for the writing to break away from me, and pleasant places where I can wander in the meantime, I have to have a particular kind of notebook, a particular kind of pen.

Even though logically I know such mundane objects can't be where the inspiration resides, I'm hesitant to stray too far from the formula that worked for me first: a notebook that opens flat, with squared paper, A4 size beside my bed, A5 in my bag, a fountain pen or a Pilot V5 Hitech-point with black ink. Since I have to be comfortable with 80% of what I write being garbage, notebooks can't be expensive, so Moleskins and such are out. There's a Muji notebook that's perfect for my bag, and I always try to keep about 10 extra in case they stop making the one I like. Good cheap notebooks with hard plain covers containing about 100 sheets of squared paper that ink doesn't bleed through are surprisingly rare. I found the perfect A4 notebooks in Portugal two years ago, and I'm still kicking myself that I bought only two. I'm aware of two distinct and separate processes at work when I write. First, after walking until I feel the urge to do so, I write by hand, unplanned, uncensored and as freely and unselfconsciously as I can. I usually set myself a minimum number of pages to write in this way, because during this phase, a little voice in my head is saying, 'This is stupid.' And it is stupid, so it's crucial to not let that stop me. I keep writing garbage until for some reason beyond my control or my understanding the voice stops and I'm just writing, the writing itself creating its own momentum. I don't even know what the words say until I read them.

During this first phase, I slowly begin to figure out what my story is about. Once I have an inkling of that, I can direct my writing to some extent. When I've written until the story and characters have a distinct shape, I feel a moment when I can switch to the computer. I start transcribing my writing into the order I've started to sense. I can see the structure emerge on the screen - the font, the sentences in neat type are necessary for that. I work until my eyes hurt from staring at the screen. This is a different kind of activity, a bit like putting a jigsaw puzzle together without an image to follow. I know that the pieces I need are somewhere in the pages and pages of hand writing, not always that easy to read, and in several different notebooks. But that's when I fully realize how out of my control this all is: I find paragraphs and sentences I've written early on that fit into the story that I've only now figured out I'm writing. How is that possible? It's out of helplessness, then, that I obsess over the pens and the notebooks.

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At some point towards the end of the first phase, I write a sentence and think, 'that's the end of the story'. Usually I'm right. Sometimes it's not so simple, and I write the ending again and again. But the trajectory is never in doubt, otherwise, I go back to writing by hand in my notebook. When the story is published, I'm done. Later on, when I read it again, I can see errors, ways it might have been better, but it's a detached criticality, almost as if it's not even mine. The work doesn't really interest me any further. I'm struggling with something else, if I'm lucky, that fully occupies my critical faculties. This is only true of the mistakes I made though - if the editing process with the publisher introduces errors, I never forgive or forget those. They rankle to this day and I would give a lot to set them right. Now I'm working on a novel. This is very difficult for me, because the hand-writing process doesn't reveal the structure as a gestalt the way I'm used to in a short story. The novel's scope is too expansive to keep in my head. The puzzle, to go back to that metaphor, has too many pieces. So I've tried to construct frameworks, diagrams, maps, trees from the outside and then try to write around those. I'm still blindly feeling my way for this kind of writing, so I'm still not sure what's working, what's not. This particular novel involves a lot of research as it is set in a historical period with which I needed to make myself familiar. Research is another kind of process, which can become procrastination. The British Library fuels the inclination to read just one more book, one more journal article, one more pamphlet. I can order six books at a time, and sit in the reading rooms until 8 pm and thus put off writing altogether, because the truth is, I'll never know enough. At some point I'll have to accept that and get back to the real work, which is the writing. JCAM: What's the first work you ever published? Do you make a living from your writing?â&#x20AC;&#x20AC;What are your goals for the future, both in work and life? What are you working on at the moment? GK: All the early writing I did was about dance and published in Sruti or other similar magazines. Of course, none of it paid. But when I was living in Singapore, I was approached by a publishing company to write a book for travelers to India, not tourists, but students, diplomats, business people, anyone who might need to hire servants, find schools for their children, throw parties, dress appropriately in different situations and in general understand the history, customs and etiquette of this astounding, confounding country. That became Culture Shock: India, part of a series of Culture Shock books. It actually sold and earned royalties every year, for almost twenty years. But I didn't think of any of that as 'creative'; it seemed qualitatively different from the way I engaged with dance. It was only when I began to write short stories, and had to struggle to figure out what each story was about that it seemed creative in the same way that dancing was. I used to think that it was a distinction between non-fiction and fiction, but I've realized I was wrong. It is more that in some kinds of writing I already know what I want to say, and in other kinds, I find that out through the process of writing itself.

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Dancing and writing are very different disciplines, obviously. A performance must be repeated and each time repetition becomes a fresh performance, while a story, once done, remains static, and only the reader can make it new, without my further involvement. And because the performance has no meaning without an audience, there was always that very high bar - I had to find a place to dance, and tempt someone to sit and watch me. Writing is not like that, requiring only the paper and pen, and even if no one reads it the story exists outside of me. It can survive and wait, collecting an audience over time, centuries maybe. While that immediate audience response can become an addiction, the non-response that writing generates discourages such distractions. And yet having one reader seems important. When I finish a short story, I never can tell myself if it's any good. I have a friend who reads it and tells me, with great generosity and openness. Then I know I can send it out for publication. The first story I published like that was 'Sleeping with Movie Stars' for an online magazine called Drill Press. That was so thrilling. A stranger had read my story and liked it enough to put it online. They are the same in that it is as difficult to call oneself a writer as a dancer. It feels good to get paid for my writing, but since that's not why I do it, not getting paid doesn't stop me. The word amateur now has a pejorative sense, of not being as skilled as the professional, with the defining characteristic being the transaction, the exchange of money. But the word's root and its older meaning is one who does something out of love for it. Many writers had some other means of earning a living while pursuing their art. T. S. Elliot worked as a bank clerk while he wrote The Wasteland. George Orwell was a police officer and Chekov was a doctor. So I accept being an amateur. I am not capable of writing in some more organized fashion to turn it into a profession like any other. Throughout my dance career, I looked ahead only as far as the next project. If, nearing the end of one dance production or choreography, I didn't have another to work towards, I became anxious, but as soon as the next project presented itself, I could relax and immerse myself in it. No future existed beyond that. I'm the same way with writing. As I got to the end of the novel I've been working on for about 7 years now, I felt a twinge of that same anxiety, but the idea for the next book appeared just in time, and now as I finish the editing on the first one, it's there in my mind, waiting to take over. I live with another kind of apprehension now, that I should be able to finish it. Death used to be only a speck on the horizon and now I can almost make out some features. JCAM: What are your goals for the future, both in work and life? What are you working on at the moment? What or who inspires you? Do you have a favorite living author? Which author do you wish you could speak to and why? When addressing a particular work to be published in this interview: Can you explain what inspired this particular piece or idea? Where do you find ideas for your creative work? What does â&#x20AC;&#x153;being creativeâ&#x20AC;? mean to you? What is the best advice you ever had about how to be more creative?

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GK: I don't seem to have separate goals - my goals for work and life are simply that as I finish one project, the next one suggests itself, engages me as completely as previous ones and I have the time and space to surrender myself to that engagement. The ultimate goal is easily stated, but in the day-to-day, I have to apply for grants and send stories out to journals and look for publishers, and do all the mundane tasks that anyone does. Though I no longer dance, it is the art form that most inspires me. When I watched, for example, La La La Human Steps, a Canadian modern dance company, I'd come away just buzzing. Cognitive scientists say that watching a dance is akin to actually dancing oneself; that must be why I feel so alive, so fully myself. At the moment I'm startled and amazed and left pondering for days and days over the work of Dimitris Papaioannou. My own style, bharata natyam, has become almost exclusively a vehicle for Hindu religiousity, so given the present climate of Hindu fundamentalism I can hardly bear to watch it, a beautiful form weighed down by its content. I read all the time, and there are so many books I love, it's too hard to pick a favorite. George Saunders, who won the Booker Prize this year, wrote an essay in the Guardian, "What Writers Really Do When They Write" that I read over and over again to remind myself. I attend writing workshops and writer's festivals and conferences and many of my friends are writers. I spend so much time talking to writers that if I could choose someone to speak to, it would likely be some other kind of artist. A gardener probably. There is nothing so wonderful as to wander around someone's beautiful garden while they tell you about the plants. Or Leonard Cohen, someone more than a writer. Perhaps, if it had to be a writer, I could have a conversation with the poet Mary Oliver. All the stories in 'Sleeping with Movie Stars' were my attempt to figure out how to write by using dance, something I already knew how to do. The padam, in the bharata natyam repertoire, is usually about that 'unbearable lightness of being' that comes from betrayal, lies, infidelity, transgression. Ironically, it is the padam that is supposed to bring one closest to experiencing the divine, as it is likened to entering the sanctum sanctorum of the temple. So when I started writing 'A Year in Delhi' the intention that carried me towards completion was to make it like a padam. The way a dancer works with the words of the poem is to let each line suggest embellishments and digressions: if the words say 'at twilight' then the dancer enacts, 'when the lamps are lit', 'when pigeons roost' 'when women go in groups to bathe' and so on, wherever the imagination takes her. I let incidents in my life turn into a story by that process of elaboration. I don't have ideas so much as I have an inkling that there are some questions I need to answer: What was she like? What did she do? How did it make her feel? Then what happened? First the dancing, now the writing, comes out of an instinct to poke around, dig, when nothing much is showing. Or something appears in my line of vision and I turn toward it instinctively. It's just a flash, so I have to go after it, figure out what it is, and what it means. I try not to think about creativity at all, because it's too scary; what if I don't have any? So I involve myself in the feeling of the ink gliding over the paper. If nothing happens, I walk. Walking seems to shake the words loose, and after a while I

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can write again. I don't remember that anyone ever told me about walking as a stimulus of creativity, I discovered that for myself, out of restlessness and impatience. Then I read about all the other writers and thinkers who'd discovered it long before me: Darwin, Thoreau, Whitman, Baudelaire. Dorothea Brande recommends walking as a writing tool in her excellent book, 'Becoming a Writer'. Or I impose some constraint, such as making my story like a padam. This is a common strategy that dancers use: the strict rhythmic pattern of a thirmanam for example is such a tight structure that the dancer is forced to find imaginative ways to move within it. If these tricks work and I'm in the throes of writing, I feel a physical sensation, a tense excitement, when the words start falling into place. That must be somehow tied up with creativity, but since I've found no reliable way to make it happen other than this daily recreating of the conditions under which it happened before, that's all I can do. There are only a few pieces of advice I've read or heard over the years, not particularly profound or quotable, that I've found to be both true and useful: 1) As soon as a word or a sentence or a thought occurs to you write it down. Don't think to yourself, I'll remember it, because you won't. 2) Don't talk about whatever it is you're writing. 3) Pay attention, to the world and to your state of being, so that you always have something to write about. My mind at least never stops so if I can't come up with anything else, I can just write down the flow of my own thoughts.

A photograph of Ms. Gitanjali Kolanad performing â&#x20AC;&#x153;Flowering Treeâ&#x20AC;?

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Sleeping with Movie Stars © Gitanjali Kolanad 2006 Two boys on a motorcycle rode past the bus stop one way, then the other way, then back again as I waited for the 23A to take me to Kalakshetra. Finally they pulled up at the tea shop, as if to buy cigarettes. But I was the one who made the decisive move: in Madras, circa 1970, I’d already learned, if they were nice guys, then they didn’t have a clue. I went over and bummed a smoke. It ended up that the boy with the wild Bob Dylan hair stayed there while I rode back to the hostel behind the boy with the long long eyelashes.  I was seventeen. My parents had sent me from Canada all the way back to India to get me away from the corrupting influences of the West. At Kalakshetra, the rules for dress and behaviour were very strict. Not two braids - "it looks like a girl standing baaah" and the teacher demonstrated, standing with her legs apart, like John Wayne - but one chaste legs-together braid. Not bangles on one wrist, but equal numbers of bangles on each wrist, because "you don’t have both eyes on one side of your face, do you?" When I dressed in a sari, with my long wavy hair in a thick plait with jasmine flowers, little gold earrings and bangles on each wrist, I looked like a good South Indian girl. You couldn’t tell that I was ‘spoiled’, the word my grandmother, who knew the truth, used for me, as in, "Who will marry her now that she has been spoiled?"  In the hostel, I shared a room with two other dance students. I had a shelf to put my things, a bed, and a suitcase with clothes pushed under it. There was a corridor with a fretted wall, through which the sea breeze blew, for we were near the sea. Down the hall was the bathroom where I learned to bathe with water poured from a bucket, and the toilets, where I learned to squat, and wash myself instead of using toilet paper. When, late at night under our mosquito nets, my roommates and I talked of boys and what it might feel like to lie with them, I thought it best to keep my knowledge of those matters to myself. At Kalakshetra, we were not supposed to even talk to the boys. In the hostel dining room, we sat cross-legged on the floor, girls on one side of the long hall, boys on the opposite side, kept apart as if we were magnets and iron filings. Nevertheless, hot glances were regularly exchanged. My roommate, in love with one of the senior boys, would not eat until he sat down with his stainless steel plate and their eyes met.

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Sometimes, if he was with his friends, joking and pushing and laughing, he wouldn’t look; my friend would get up and walk away, leaving her food untouched. And yet, I had sexual encounters, of a kind. The Kama Sutra, in the list of eight kinds of embrace, states that the first four occur between couples who do not know each other. I participated, unwillingly, in some of these. On the one Sunday of the month when I was allowed out of the hostel to go to my guardian’s place, and took the bus, the bus conductor rubbed his forearm across my breast as he passed coins to the person beside me - Spristakam. A fellow passenger pressed his crotch up against my shoulder as I sat in the aisle seat Udhgristakam. It was rare that the walk from the bus stop to the Kalakshetra gate did not yield at least one glimpse of male genitalia, given the ease of whipping open the lungi, that perfect flasher’s garment; but I could find no Sanskrit name for that. The drummer at Kalakshetra, who we addressed as ‘sir’, as we did all the male teachers, was very good-looking - his black hair worn long and slicked back, his lips always red with paan. He was a brilliant drummer, inventive, playful and insouciant, as if he hardly noticed what his hands were doing as the complex patterns of rhythm unfurled from the mridangam. He looked out over the audience, his lip curled to hold the paan, with the sexy self-confindence of a rock star. He whispered to me behind the bouganvillea, "I’ll talk to you later," touching my breasts with only the merest pretence of accident. He didn’t speak English very well. "I will help you," he whispered, but I didn’t know what he meant. "Sir! Don’t do that!" I said, but I wasn’t really angry. "What? What I shouldn’t do?” I tried to figure out what it felt like to touch my breast, from the man’s side of the bargain; not what the breast felt, but what the forearm felt on contact with the breast, and not a bare breast, mind you, but the breast felt through bra, choli blouse and the numerous folds of the sari draped over it. I could achieve no frisson. The boys on the motorcycle came one day to the Kalakshetra office and claimed to be my cousins. I was allowed to walk with them around the grounds, on the sandy paths between the simple thatched huts where the dance and music classes were held, while everyone else was resting in the afternoon heat. Trees spilled papery yellow flowers on the red earth. We shared a cigarette when no one was looking. They told me they were from the Madras College of Architecture. Did I go to discos? "Yes." Did I go to the cinema? "Movies, you mean? Yes." What was my favourite ‘film’? "2001: A Space Odyssey." That hadn’t been shown in India as yet. We

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shared our tastes in music, and here we were in perfect agreement: The Cream, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors. At Kalakshetra we were taught that everything great in music, literature, poetry, dance had already come and gone, and the best we could do was try to recreate it. Bharata Natyam was taught as an axiomatic system: Let the legs form a square. Let the shoulders, elbows and wrists share the same plane; as if by adhering to the rules, just as surely as the square of the hypotenuse would equal the sum of the squares of the other two sides, beauty would result. But aramandi, ‘half-sitting,’ is a difficult first proposition. Heels together, toes apart, so that the feet make a straight line. Bend at the knees so that the thighs and calves form a square. Don’t bend forward at the waist or stick your bum out at the back. Relax! Stay in that position until the quadriceps burn. Raise the right foot and stamp it, but without shifting the weight to the left, without moving the hips, without coming up out of the aramandi position. Raise the left foot and stamp it. Continue stamping in the first, slow speed while clapping out the rhythm. Don’t stop. Shift into second speed, two stamps for every beat of the time cycle. Don’t stop, no matter how much it burns, because if anyone stops, the whole class must start over again from first speed. The teacher sits in front of us and beats out the “thai ya thai” with a stick. "Sit more! Sit more! Have you come all the way from Canada to make me suffer? You look like a hunchback!" Shift into third speed – four stamps for every beat. After many tries, starting over from the beginning no matter how close to the end we were when someone stopped, we finally as a class finish one whole step to the teacher’s grudging satisfaction. At first it seems as if we have accomplished a near impossible task, but after a few months, we are doing not one but eight ‘that adavus’ in three speeds without stopping in a way that doesn’t incite the teacher to wrath and lacerating sarcasm. In theory class we were taught this history of bharata natyam: once, the Gods were bored, so they asked Bramha to create an entertainment for them. Bramha passed the job on to Bharata Muni, telling him to take something from each of the four Vedas and make something new. He created a performance using the Apsaras, the celestial dancers, showing the episode of the churning of the ocean, when Amrita, the nectar of immortality, had risen like butter on the surface of the sea. The Gods were so pleased that they asked Shiva to teach Bharatha Muni his vigourous Tandava dance, and Parvathi to teach him the graceful Lasya. Bharatha Muni in turn imparted this knowledge to his hundred sons, and so it came to human beings as the Natya Shastra. Then, the devadasis (I understood these to be a kind of dancing nun) performed it in the

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great temples of India for the Gods. The British, Victorian after all, and therefore prudish, banned the dancing in the temple, and the devadasis were flung out on the streets, where they had no choice but to become prostitutes. The dance became very degraded. Luckily, Rukmini Devi came on the scene. She studied ballet with Anna Pavlova, who said to her, "Go and study your own dance," not in a peremptory way, but in a prophetic ‘Go forth and multiply’ way. So Rukmini Devi did just that, refining the dance form, removing all that could be considered crude or vulgar and returning it to the state of purity that it had had in the temples. Despite the inconsistencies, it was a compelling narrative. The pain of the aramandi was the means by which we kept faith with those ancient temple dancers. In theory class, we were then taught the hand gestures that we could use to create the rasas that, we were told, were the whole point. The pataka hasta, the simplest one, all the fingers held together, could be used to "a forest, saying ‘no’, the night, a river, the heavens." It could also be used to show "seven case endings" which looked like patting seven little ones on their heads. I wondered what kind of dance it was that required showing seven case endings. I hadn’t even seen a bharata natyam performance at that point in my life. In December, the dance festival started. We dressed in our finest, walked to the theatre built according to the precepts of the Natya Shastra, sat on the floor right in front of the stage while the rest of the world sat in comfortable cane chairs behind us and watched what Rukmini Devi had wrought. I was enthralled, by the colour, the patterns, the rightness of every movement, every gesture. When Rama was sent away to the forest I was sad.  One evening, I came to the theatre with my long hair loose. Kalidasa might have compared my thick wavy black mane to a peacock’s tail, or the night. But Rukmini Devi was there, not Kalidasa. She scolded me, "What do you think, you are just a dancer in the dance class? You are always a dancer. Go back to the hostel and tie your hair properly!" I had an inkling even then of what she meant, but the effect of that truth was the opposite of what she intended. I was not an obedient girl. I snuck in through another door. But I never forgot her words, and later, many years later, I understood them. In my second year, my father rented a house for me, just outside the Kalakshetra grounds, which I shared with an American student of the veena and a Sri Lankan girl who was biding her time until marriage. Every morning I wrapped my dance sari and rode my bicycle along a sandy, packedearth road past little thatched huts and a row of naked babies squatting with their heart shaped bottoms over little piles of turds. They waved to me and called out, "Vellakarchi, vellakarchi" (white girl, white girl) even though I was as dark as they were. Slightly older children in neat bright uniforms ran along beside my bicycle and one, or even two

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hopped on the back carrier for a ride part way to their school. Every afternoon, I rode back, drenched with sweat. I was not beautiful in India, though I had been considered so in the West. I was too thin, too dark, for Indian tastes. My grandmother, whenever she saw me, said, "You used to be like gold, now you have gone black," using a word that suggested metal rusting. I had breasts that Goldilocks might have approved of, neither too big nor too small, but a more buxom build was admired in those days. The long wavy black hair and big black eyes which in Canada had been distinctive, were here as common as dirt. But I had my charms, and there were always boys hanging around the house. Those first two boys, and all their friends, and their friend’s friends came by and drank cheap Indian gin and local arrack in our front room, and smoked beedis and grass on our terrace. There were, as far as I could tell, no other young girls living on their own in Madras at the time. The people in the nearby village didn’t know what to make of us, with young men coming and going at all times of the day and night. Sometimes we were woken by the sound of banging on the gate, and drunken voices shouted in Tamil, "Hey let me in. What I have between my legs is just as good as what those pants-wearing boys have." Sometimes they called for me by name. But though I drank with the boys, smoked grass with them, and rode everywhere on the backs of their motorbikes, my long hair whipped by the wind behind me, no bodily fluids were being exchanged, not even saliva. We were like pups from the same litter, or the Three Musketeers – one for all and all for one. They took good care of me. When I said, quite stoned, "Look at the moonlight. Lets go swimming," whichever boy was there came with me, right into the waves glowing with phosphorescence, even if, as I discovered later, he couldn’t swim. On the other hand, if two girls and I were with three boys on the backs of their bikes, and we went somewhere, the boys would drop one girl home, then the other girl, before stopping at the side of the road to unzip their pants and pee, saying "Thank god its just you." Anyway, I had a crush on the young man who played Lakshmana in the dance dramas: impetuous fiery Lakshmana, short-tempered, easily angered in his brother’s defense. Lakshmana is the one who cuts off Surpanaka’s nose and ears when she comes to him aroused and lustful, who leaves Sita alone only after she hurts him to the quick by accusing him of desiring her, and wanting Rama out of the way. This dancer depicted all that perfectly on stage, and even in real life had a haughty way of holding his head, as if he really was an arrogant prince of some ancient lineage. The way he tied his veshti for

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dance showed off his shapely calves and his big high-arched feet. Everything about him said ‘noli me tangere’ thus making him even more desirable. One afternoon, after many speaking glances had been exchanged, he cycled to my house. I served him tea. "Very good place." "Yes, I love it here. You can see the ocean from the terrace." It was clear he didn’t understand a word I said. He smiled. I smiled. Suddenly, he said exactly these words, "Let us have fun" and leaped on me, pressing his lips hard against mine, and molding one breast in his large hand. I wasn’t averse; only, after some intense pressing that seemed to be going nowhere, I attempted to change the nationality of the kiss, that is, to make it ‘French.’ He leapt away from me as if my tongue was a snake that had just bitten him, ran out the door, jumped on his bicycle and rode furiously away.  I too, when I was ten or so, had thought the idea of someone else’s tongue in my mouth disgusting, like eating worms. But to be labeled a bad kisser was a fate worse than death in Grade Seven, so I had practiced in our basement rec room with a skinny Italian boy who played the guitar, and thankfully didn’t wear braces. We took our lessons from the movies, figured out how to negotiate the hazards of nose and teeth; we learned that it is best to close the eyes, because if you keep them open, what on earth do you look at? By the time the hormones kicked in, I was well rehearsed. Living outside of Kalakshetra gave me a chance to see other dancers. I saw Yamini Krishnamurthi. In one dance, she sat on the floor, soles of the feet together, knees apart, and enticed Krishna, her lover, in one way after the other. She called him sweetly, coyly, suggestively, pretending to be angry, getting really angry, laughingly, with sandalwood paste, with paan. If he stayed away, surely it was only to have her call him more. At the end, she looked at him directly to call him, and then remembered suddenly what she was calling him for – to make love to her after all – and transparent desire flitted across her face as if she was all alone with her lover instead of in front of an audience of thousands. I loved that look. Sometimes, I went with the American girl to the bar of the Connemara, ordered rum and coke, pulled out a Charminar and practised that look on the middle-aged businessmen who frequented the place. It was easy enough to get them to buy our drinks, light our cigarettes. I thought it was ‘the look’, but it was pretty dark in there. If one offered, we let him drive us home, fueling

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his erotic fantasies. On the road to Besant Nagar, we said, "Here, this is where we live," at the gates of the Theosophical Society, where the guard knew our trick. When the car turned around and drove away, we walked the rest of the way home along the lonely road in the moonlight, talking about how repulsive he was with his jowly face, his movie villain moustache, his yellow teeth, his pot belly, his too-tight shirt with the wet patches at the armpits and how ridiculous he was to think that he had any other purpose in our lives but to serve our needs. But one evening the man who lit my cigarette was not middle-aged. He was young and about as good-looking as any man had the right to be. We let him drive us all the way home. The next day his car came to pick me up, and I changed out of my dance sari and went where the driver took me without asking any questions. He had a house in Sterling Gardens, a colonial mansion with columns at the entrance, a garden of mature trees, and cool tiled floors. The high-ceilinged rooms with barred and shuttered windows had very little furniture, which made the place seem at once elegant and bohemian. On the stereo, someone sang, "…in the summer time, when the weather’s fine, you got women, you got women on your mind…." We went out for dinner with a few of his friends, all men. He hardly talked to me, but he and his friends engaged in a kind of sophisticated banter, switching fluently between Hindi and English, whichever better suited what it was they wanted to say. It made me feel very grown up just to sit there and listen. They made jokes and compliments at my expense in about equal measure, but I didn’t understand most of the conversation. We went back to his place. He took me into his large, elegantly proportioned bedroom, sparsely furnished like the rest of the house with just a tall rosewood cupboard in the corner and a mattress on the floor. He closed the double doors, and then began to take off his clothes, looking at me all the while with his dark poet’s eyes. Now, I wonder whether it was a technique on his part, something that had worked for him in the past, or if it was something he recognized in me, that if he led the horse to water, she would drink. His look said, "Who are you?" and that was what I wondered myself. I didn’t know what I would do. I stood there for a moment, and discovered that I was the kind of girl, who, when alone in a room with a man, unbuttons her blouse as if she’s done it a hundred times before.

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In the morning, cool green light streamed in through the barred windows. On the mattress, the sheets were flung everywhere. Our legs were entwined; mine were the colour of strong coffee, his a perfect crème caramel, cream made golden with egg yolks and burnt sugar. I was a hungry young animal. Nothing could have been more delicious. At Kalakshetra, we were learning Alaripu, which is the perfect expression of the principles that the adavus set out, unfolding with a pure conceptual clarity that is as pleasing as (insert here a mathematical proof). I was having trouble with the rhythm. In the simple alaripu that we were learning, the underlying rhythm is of three beats, like waltz time. But at times the persistent foundation of threes is overlaid by patterns of fours. I couldn’t seem to hold both rhythms in my head at the same time. The other students got it right away and the teacher mocked me. I didn’t care. I discovered a truth about art - that ineptitude doesn’t in any way lessen the pleasure, and I enjoyed the dance just as much as the girls who could do it well. They flew like birds; I flew like Icarus. I hadn’t figured out yet why people had sex. Given the additional worry of pregnancy, it seemed like a step backwards rather than forwards in the pursuit of pleasure. In Canada, the prevailing wisdom among my peers was that we should be fucking by our age. I had approached it in the spirit of a collector – a short one, a tall one, a white one, a black one; I was already seventeen in years, but only five in lovers. I slept with them once; then they were out of my life, but on my list. Until now. When the car came for me I went to Sterling Gardens. We had very little in the way of conversation. He wasn’t interested in my dance and I certainly wasn’t interested in his work for some advertising agency. Nor did we ever discuss our relationship such as it was. But I had begun to feel something worth pursuing. I breathed heavily and moaned as I had been taught to by the movies, and at the same time I tried to pay attention to what I was really feeling; that heat, first at the surface and then deep inside. When the car came for me, I went. He invited me to a party in honour of a friend of his, an up-and-coming movie star from Bombay. I had seen only one Hindi movie, with Rajesh Khanna and an elephant, and a few Tamil movies, in which the girls who had sex always ended up dead. All the things that I loved in the Kalakshetra dance dramas – the action interrupted by song and dance, the extreme stylized depiction of emotion, the archetypal heroes and villains, the plot conventions in which fate and separations at birth and deus ex machina are constantly invoked – I found laughable on the big screen. The aggressive jiggling of the hero and heroine in the too-tight costumes seemed more obscene to me, and more embarrassing to watch, than the scenes of sex with Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour, where she plays a housewife with a secret life as a prostitute. I went to the party wearing a very short white dress. There were advantageously cantilevered bosoms, and fleshy expanses of midriff and back, but I was the only one showing thigh. The movie star also stood out: every other man was in pants and a shirt,

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but he was elegant in a pale silk kurta and pyjama. I was introduced to him. He pretended to speak no English, and so my lover translated, but I knew that the things they were saying and what they told me they were saying were quite different. The movie star and I danced. I whispered in his ear, "It’s too bad you don’t speak English. I want to tell you what I would do to you if we were alone in your room right now." His instant mastery of that language was gratifying. I told him. Then I went and danced with other men. The next day my lover took me to his suites at the Connemara. They ordered room service. The movie star’s brother and my lover played chess. The movie star and I watched them, and flirted. I wanted to sleep with a movie star, and even though he wasn’t a really big movie star, like Rajesh Khanna, he might be the only one I ever met. I told him all these things, so when we could we made our exit. He promised to be quick, but he wasn’t, and by the time we got back, my lover had gone. The movie star and his brother drove me home, and we laughed and joked all the way. I told them about how I had almost slept with the brother of Country Joe, of the band Country Joe and the Fish, and though they’d never heard of Country Joe and the Fish, it was a good story and they laughed. He said that this had never happened to him before, and I said, "Don’t worry. It will." It was funny to see the way his eyes lit up at that, the thought of the women in his future, and we laughed about that too.  I got up the next morning and went to Sterling Gardens. It was early. He was still in bed. I tried to get in next to him but he turned away, saying in a hard whisper, "I’m not your pimp." I ran outside and climbed into a ficus tree in his compound and sat there on the smooth round branch in the green, swinging my legs. The sensation his words had evoked was so new to me that I didn’t know what it was. I needed to be alone so that I could get used to the sudden heaviness in my chest. He didn’t come out and I finally went home.

Even now I remember his words, though the hurt is only the memory of a hurt. But that was my first heartache, and I tested all the rest against that: this is not as bad, this is nearly as bad; until eventually there was one that was worse. I heard that he got involved with the beautiful model who showered ecstatically under a waterfall with green soap in the posters of the time. The movie star became very famous, but I couldn’t tell anyone in Kalakshetra, and back in Canada, nobody had heard of him. © Gitanjali Kolanad 2006

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Robin Rosen Chang The JCAM staff is delighted to introduce our readers to the poetry of Robin Rosen Chang.  Our interview with will provide insight into her writing and background. We know you will enjoy her work.   JCAM: What is your professional name? Where were you born, and does that place influence your writing? RRC: Robin Rosen Chang is my real and professional name. Born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I am from a large family and was the last child living at home with a divorced, complicated mother.   My first poetry manuscript, My Mother Was Water, deals a lot with her, and the importance of place is quite evident in it as well as in other poems I’ve written. JCAM: Where do you live now, and what role, if any, does it have in your poetry? RRC: Though I’ve resided in a commuter town in Northern New Jersey for eighteen years, I’ve also lived in New York City, Atlanta, Fort Collins, Colorado, and Madison, Wisconsin as well as overseas in Spain, Colombia, Egypt, and Israel. Each place has left a mark on me. There are cities I have loved and others I’ve struggled with, some that I felt at home in and others I could never quite break into, but my experiences in all of these different parts of the U.S. and overseas impacts how I see the world and my position in it. This in turn manifests itself in my poetry. If there is a downside of moving and having wanderlust, it is never being sure where I truly want to be and where I most belong. JCAM: When and how did you start writing? Do you recall when you first realized that being an author was something you absolutely had to do?

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RRC: While my undergraduate degree was ultimately in history, my first college major was journalism, so writing was clearly an early interest. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until I was in my forties and had attended the Dodge Poetry Festival that I began writing poetry. I then attended two writers’ conferences— Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Both deepened my love of poetry and commitment to writing, but the single most important leap I took was getting my MFA in Poetry at The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. There I learned a lot about the craft of writing poetry and what it means to be a writer. JCAM: What compels you to write? RRC: I love language and find that writing is a way for me to be creative and playful while also helping me process the world. By manipulating language—fooling around and making sonic, lexical, and visual associations as well as metaphors—I often stumble upon something larger and more meaningful than I was originally aware of. In this way, I learn about myself. Additionally, I believe that through poetry, I discover a lot about humanity. Writing allows us to shed our exterior selves and reveal truths—not objective “Truths,” of course, but the subjective truth of what makes us who we are. Ironically, when we bare ourselves, we also forge more meaningful connections with others. This is essential for me. But again, there is also the simple joy of tinkering with words and ideas. JCAM: What or who inspires you? RRC: I’m moved by what I don’t understand, be it beauty, adversity, or anything I find in science, art, and nature. I’m also inspired by people I love, especially my husband and two children, as well as other members of my immediate family, though that doesn’t mean I write about all of them. Not directly, anyway. JCAM: What in particular are you trying to communicate through your writing? RRC: I write a lot about life, relationships, and love as well as about loss and grief, but I believe that poems are organic and don’t have one fixed message or meaning. Readers bring their own experiences, aesthetics, and biases to what they read, and to any art form, so they can end up with very different interpretations of the same poem. That said, I hope my poems help my readers see through a new lens and with nuance. I would like to believe that my poetry increases people’s understanding of distinct ways of thinking. I would also like readers to connect with my poems at a certain level and be provoked to feel something that they hadn’t before. JCAM: What does “being creative” mean to you and what is the best advice you got about being creative? RRC: For me, creativity is about using my imagination to communicate in a way that is honest, unique, and generates complex emotional responses from my readers. By

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complex, I mean that my readers’ reactions are not a simple oh, that’s interesting or that’s about x, but that they are thoughtful and characterized by subtlety. Among the best writing advice I’ve received is not to worry about what I’m trying to write and not to censor myself. This means trusting myself and not being afraid to go wherever the writing leads me. I also appreciate knowing that what is unusual and odd is often what is most vivid and alive. I urge students who are writing poetry to allow themselves to get weird on the page. That’s when the work gets really good! JCAM: What are your most important writing tools and why? RRC: My senses. Of these, sight, feel, and sound are particularly critical for me. Also an open mind that is free of preconceived notions or agendas. Material tools I rely on are books and literary magazines because they inspire and teach me. I relish pens that roll effortlessly over smooth, heavy paper, but that’s not how I draft. I use a computer because I can write faster, less self-consciously and with less attachment to my drafts. I also need access to the Internet so I can look up synonyms, etymologies, odd facts about what is known about things—like the burial rites of ancient man, the anatomy of a jacaranda flower, the lifespan of an ant, or whatever. JCAM: Do you think your writing has changed over time, and if so, how? RRC: A very significant change has been in my writing process. I’m willing to be much more spontaneous than I was in the past, and I now resist having preconceived notions of what I want or expect from my work. I also postpone editing until after I have a full first draft. Basically, I try to get out of the way and let the poem reveal itself to me. I try not to be afraid to write whatever thoughts or ideas I have. I think this has made my writing more honest and more real. JCAM: What element of writing do you enjoy the most and why? RRC: I relish those rare instances when a poem writes itself—that is, it just delivers itself almost whole and without a lot of toil involved. But that almost never happens. Reading a first draft and finding its hot spots, the moments where the writing really resonates, is exciting. Conversely, discovering where the piece is trying to go and figuring out how to help get it there can be painfully difficult. The moment when a poem I’ve been struggling with suddenly becomes clear, however, is mind blowing.

JCAM: How do you know when a work is finished? RRC: Paul Valéry, a French symbolist poet, said, “A poem is never finished; it's only abandoned.” I abandon mine when I simply can’t stand to work on a piece any longer or when I believe that further revisions will yield a new poem rather than an improved version of the poem I’m trying to write. JCAM: Do you write for a living? If not, what do you do?

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RRC: I don’t write for a living. I’m an educator with close to twenty years of experience teaching college-level English as a Second Language as well as introductory research classes. I’m also a private English tutor. JCAM: What writing projects are you currently working on? RRC: I’m polishing my first full-length manuscript, My Mother Was Water, and my next step is to focus on getting it published. Additionally, I’m working on a collaborative project with my sister, Cynthia Rosen, who is a plein air painter, to put together a chapbook of her paintings and my poems from a recent two-week road trip we took through Utah. JCAM: Do you have a favorite poet? RRC: There are too many incredible poets for me to choose just one. I love Tomas Tranströmer, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, James Wright, Lucille Clifton, and Theodore Roethke. Living poets whose work amazes me include W.S. Merwin, Natasha Trethewey, Louise Glück, Robin Coste Lewis, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bob Hicok, and Mary Ruefle. Layli Long Soldier’s debut collection Whereas is also spectacular. These poets differ from each other in many ways, but their work draws me in due to some combination of their stunning imaginative qualities, powerful imagery, pleasing sonic elements, intense lyricism, compelling narrative threads, and other characteristics. JCAM: What author(s) do you wish you could speak to and why? RRC: Though they are no longer with us, I’d love to have been able to share a bottle of wine with Tomas Tranströmer or Brigit Pegeen Kelly. I’d want to know what made their minds tick. Tranströmer’s writing is so atmospheric. The details are rich, and I feel I can practically see, smell, touch and be right there in his poems, which feel surreal and real at the same time. Kelly had an imagination unlike anyone else. I’d like to know how she allowed herself to go where it did. She was a very brave writer! JCAM: What work have you chosen to share in this issue of JCAM? RRC: You asked about the impact of place in my work, so I’ve decided to share a few poems where setting has a clear impact. The first is “A Woman in the A&P Asks Me Where I Got My Baby,” a poem that was originally published by Vinyl Poetry and Prose. The next two, tonally quite different from “A Woman in the A&P,” are “Indian Creek,” which has been published in the magazine Philadelphia Stories, and “Sublime,” which is newer and hasn’t been published before. Both of these are loosely in the tradition of ekphrasis, which is poetry that is very descriptive and based on a piece of art or a specific scene. Place is not, however, as marked in the final work I decided to include, “Photo with Mom.” This poem from my manuscript has not been previously published.

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A Woman in the A&P Asks Me Where I Got My Baby He was dropped off, aisle 9, International Foods, eye level on a shelf between Goya and La Choy. How funny, but really? Somewhere murky and lightless, the bottom of the Pacific, Mariana Trench, prehistoric hinge-jawed fish idling blindly by. He couldn’t breathe, his lungs suspended in his tiny chest waiting for oxygen to ignite them. [rolls her eyes] I thought maybe you’d been on a waiting list. No wait, I found him at the Laundromat, naked on top of towels, towels still dryer hot, so hot they hatched him because he was an egg, a cracked egg, and they were 100 percent pima stacked to where absence turns blue. Don’t be a bitch. You know what I mean. Fine. The truth is he straddled the red band of my aurora borealis, the reddest band, above the neon greens. He surfed the wind, rode vaporous waves. A trail of sepia clouds flowed behind him.

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Sublime my husband says, eyeing the art deco landmark, its iconic eagle gargoyles and silver spire. I say it pales compared to cows in clover fields, their round eyes spinning like planets in white-sea galaxies. The way they languidly chew for hours, no, entire days while their calves insistently nurse, yanking teats, their heads butting udders as they try to suck every drop. And how they seem so perfectly indifferent to the nearby long-horned goats with their low-pitched brass bells clanging in the valley glaciers slid through like giant snails smoothing the ground. Such an amazing feat, he adds concerning the skyscraper. But I know those fields and animals are more urgent than metal raptors and that needle poking the sky as if wanting to make it bleed. I worried such differences would destroy us.

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Indian Creek When we were kids, we explored the creek, meandered with it through our yards and beyond as if we had discovered it ourselves. We’d wander along its bed, navigating its twists and turns until we learned where the water moved fastest, where it trickled, where its stones jutted out forming steps for us to cross from one side to the other. When we knew the creek perfectly, we’d roll our pants, toss our dirty socks and damp sneakers and wade through it, lifting rocks to catch crayfish and scooping up salamanders shrouded in the cool mud. In winters, we stomped along its frozen gray surface like giants, cracking the ice with our heavy steps, or slid clumsily on the thicker patches behind the McCabe’s house. One day, you fell through, shattering it. When you got up, dripping wet, tears streaming down your chubby child cheeks, you turned to me, claimed it was my fault— a true friend wouldn’t just stand there. To ease your pain, I lay in the frigid creek, in the exact spot where you had fallen.

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Photograph with Mom After she passes, we spread her collection of photographs across the floor. There’s only one of her holding me. I’m swathed in a towel. She is dressed to go out. Hair coiffed, big, and 60s, she looks right at the camera with a smile I just can’t recall. On the back of the photo, Robin, 1 year— her left-handed writing, so slanted, it’s on the brink of collapsing. Like a premonition— her future. The ink bleeds through the picture. Backward letters sprawl across my arm.

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Gina Gibson’s Remains Review by Nancy Palm Puchner Ruddell Gallery, Black Hills State University August 21 through September 29, 2017 Contemporary art has evolved significantly over the course of recent decades. Art no longer offers transcendence, but instead serves to ground the viewer and offers the opportunity for critical awareness. Art no longer lifts the viewer out of the present, but is intended to inspire reflection and psychological change; it compels the viewer to question his or her place in the world by engaging with the everyday in meaningful ways. Boundaries are blurred between the point where art ends and where the world around it begins. Gina Gibson’s exhibition, Remains, participates in and reflects these contemporary developments in profound and compelling ways. The exhibition consists of a series of individual pieces constructed from found objects, of both natural and manufactured materials, each work evoking powerful connections between nature, human relationships, place, and spirit. Remains derives from, takes part in, and gives back to the experience of everyday life through objects that at once both clash and coalesce. The individual works in Remains, and the exhibition as a whole, do not necessarily encompass a definitive beginning or end. Gibson works with found objects—some from thrift stores, some from nature, some found by the artist, some given to her. She arranges these objects in ways that bring the viewer to consider a broad network of connections between the objects, the lives they once touched, and the paths on which they continue today. For example, With Open Wings (2017) is an approximately footand-a-half wide open wooden cabinet that holds a pine cone, a spool of thread, a fishing lure, a painted rock, a velvet ring box and a small wishbone. Atop the cabinet, a pair of duck wings are attached to two chunks of asphalt. The viewer can appreciate these objects together as an aesthetic whole. The work comprises a range of texture, color, and line that work together to create a balanced and unified space. But the objects also function on an individual level, bringing the viewer to consider the stories they hold on their own, independent of the artwork or exhibition in which they now participate. Who fished with that lure? Who sewed with that thread? Who painted that rock and why? Questioning the paths and former lives of once functional, now aestheticized objects brings the viewer to also consider his or her own position and path as well. This is the type of critical awareness that effective and meaningful contemporary art inspires Remains offers the opportunity to meditate on relationships, whether they be compositional, material, or something deeper, and those relationships create a profound interaction, one that extends through the entire space of the show and down to the smallest of its specific objects. In With Open Wings, the velvet ring box and the delicate wishbone it cradles juxtapose one another on multiple levels. The tiny box was 101

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designed to protect, to hold precious personal objects in a lasting manner, while the wish bone enters the human world with the very intention of being destroyed—split apart in a traditional, holiday act. Each object contributes to a person’s sense of hope, but in quite different ways. One is precious, or holds that which is precious, the things one desires to keep for posterity, and the other is a disposable token that symbolizes the future through its own quasi-ceremonial destruction.   Gibson consistently creates this type of push-pull between opposing sensations, experiences, objects, and textures, yet at the same time she generates harmony between them. In Red Thread (2016), a stone sits motionless in a wooden frame, evoking solidity and time immemorial, while a hanging feather above it shifts and spins ever so slightly in the breeze created by the viewer’s presence, reminding us of constant change and motion. Gibson’s art exists in this place of tension and ease— between old and new, natural and artificial, hard and soft, static and motion, hidden and seen, the art world and the everyday. Her art is forceful, and it is quiet. And this duality and fluidity are what make Gibson’s art so effectual and relatable. Dr. Nancy Palm Puchner October 2018  Nancy Palm Puchner is an Assistant Professor of Art History in the Art Department at the University of North Carolina Pembroke, in Pembroke, North Carolina USA. At UNCP, Dr. Puchner teaches a range of art history courses, both face-to-face and online. Her courses include contemporary art, art of the United States, twentieth-century art, and Native American art. She teaches Survey of Art: Renaissance to Modern in the Maynor Honors College, and she teaches both writing enriched and writing-in-the-discipline courses in the Art Department. Puchner maintains a global focus in all of her curriculum and exposes students to a range of theoretical perspectives and critical approaches to the study of art and its histories. She also extends her teaching beyond the classroom to include visits to local and regional art museums, like the A.D. Gallery, the Museum of the Southeastern American Indian, and the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. Dr. Puchner has received multiple grants and fellowships, including a 2018 UNCP Faculty Research and Development Grant to support her current research. She has also given numerous presentations at conferences and symposia on topics as diverse as American landscape painting, feminist voices in the visual arts, contemporary Indigenous art, Art Deco, and Andy Warhol’s screen prints.

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Gina Gibson “Something to Chew On”  Mixed media

Gina Gibson “Stone Bone”  Mixed media

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Gina Gibson “Just a scratch”  Mixed media

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Gina Gibson “Red Ladder”  Mixed media

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Gina Gibson “Sting”  Mixed media

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Gina Gibson “Tradition”  Mixed media

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Gina Gibson “Red Chair”  Mixed media

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Gina Gibson “Swept Up”  Mixed media

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Gina Gibson “Young Sacrum”  Mixed media

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Gina Gibson “Jack Back”  Mixed media

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Gina Gibson “With Open Wings”  Mixed media

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Ms. Gina Gibson is currently an Associate Professor of Fine Arts Graphic Media at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota USA. At BHSU Professor Gibson, has earned the Outstanding Teaching Award. Gibson brings enthusiasm and expertise to the classroom and is known for her interactive teaching approach, which includes the mastering of technology within the graphic design field, but also the effective use of social media. She not only inspires her students, but engages them outside of the classroom. A number of her students received awards from the American Advertising Federation and participated in a local design jam. Gibson also dedicates her time in admissions, speaking to prospective students and their families.  From her “bio” Ms. Gibson shares this about her life and background: I was born and raised in North Carolina. I grew up enjoying quick trips to the beach and afternoons to movies and malls. I moved to South Dakota about six years ago to teach at a university in a small, beautiful town in the Black Hills. The transition was startling. There were no malls to frequent or an ocean near by. But I have found a place in the hills. I have learned to love hiking, biking and snowshoeing. The hills have invaded my artwork and writing. I have also traveled abroad to places in Europe and Asia. In particular, Japan has found a way into my artwork as well. Elements such as water, hills, valleys, and architecture are a part of my work. I never really feel like a work is “finished.” It’s just finished for now. At some point a piece is in a place where it just feels right. It’s unspoken. Maybe there is a rhythm or the colors work in a way that is new and enjoyable for me. I try to stop whenever I think I want to keep looking at the piece. If it causes me to pause, I stop. I am inspired by nature and the Black Hills of South Dakota where I live. Sometimes I will think a door or the corner of a roof is beautiful and worthy of a longer look. I try to take the time to ponder and really see things rather than just look at them casually. It’s hard to slow down but slowing down helps me as an artist and as a person.

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October 2018 – Vol. 4, Nos. 3 & 4 “The Final Word” As with all previous JCAM publications, this final combined edition of 2018 has been a significant learning experience. As our essays in the front of this issue have suggested, we could never have foreseen the variety and breadth of our interactions with those who have reached out to us to discuss the JCAM.   We began this publication with the idea that we could, without significant funding or a large staff, reach out online, through mostly no-cost tools, to connect with creative writers and visual artists internationally. This has come to pass in ways that we never would have believed when our developmental efforts first began in 2014. For example, in the JCAM Facebook page we regularly see interactions among international artists whose work has been published in the journal: a photographer from New Mexico in the USA comments on the work of a painter in Germany; a Taiwanese performance artists responds to a comment by a graphic designer in Dubai; and a Spanish ceramicist is in a dialogue with a Russian multimedia artist.   We regularly hear from JCAM artists who have begun to collaborate in some creative way. On a weekly basis we receive updates from previously published artists and writers whose work has been presented in another exhibition or a journal some place on planet earth. This is very gratifying indeed. It is wonderful to see a plan be put into action and then produce such positive results.  JCAM wants to ask our readership how we might betters serve the online art and writing community. For example: What other kinds of features would you like to see in future JCAMS? What are the contacts to whom you might direct us? Let us hear from you.

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Information for Submitters for the 2019 Issues JCAM is a unique project of Jumbo Arts International which holds all rights exclusively. JCAM is a juried publication. All submissions are reviewed by a panel of experts assembled by the JCAM editors. JCAM publications focus is on artistic creativity. We publish original visual artworks, articles on the visual arts, crafts, creative writing, poetry, performing arts, interviews, reviews, and columns on subjects appropriate to the focus of the journal.  JCAM submissions: On request, interested parties will be sent the information and documents required for the formal submission of work to JCAM editors. JCAM publishes in English. Are non-English submissions possible? Yes, in certain cases JCAM editors will work with artists to translate into English text documents that are directly related to visuals that have already been accepted for publication. JCAM publication schedule: In 2019 JCAM will publish 2 issues. The publication schedule is April & September. Submitters should contact the JCAM editorial team well in advance of these publication dates for information and guidance.   Current JCAM information is available on our Facebook page:  https://www.facebook.com/JournalofCreativeArtsandMinds Previously published issues of the JCAM are available online:  https://issuu.com/jumboartsinternational Information about the JCAM publisher Jumbo Arts International is available online:  http://jumboartsinternational.org/  All questions regarding the JCAM should be sent to: jcam.jal@gmail.com

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