the artist interviews
and lightly re-evaluating Renaissance Queer
What is Renaissance Queer and what do I want it to be?
I started because I thought I wanted to offer virtual movement classes, like yoga and dance and shakes, so I could keep teaching to my Vermont people after I left Vermont. So I could teach (and hopefully make some money) from anywhere, dreaming as I was at the time of traveling studying dance and so and so.
I’ve offered a couple shake playlists and an audio score, but mostly I’ve shared my writing, often dumped out on a Friday night at 10pm, unedited, maybe proofread. I do like the challenge and consistency demanded from weekly posting. Increasingly I’ve doubted if I’m actually fulfilling my intentions for starting this thing.
I wrote on Dec 7:
“This is the point of Renaissance Queer. A place for the intersections of my/our multi-be-do-thing life. A place for curiosity to lead and art to wander. A home for the spaces between poems, dance, movement, playlists, stories, photographs, interviews, and conversations. A place where I and you and we aren't defined by one thing, but by many. At the same time, I am not, nor want to be, everything. Many of my interests (at least right now) stem from and return to two themes: body and art. Oh and queerness, if the name doesn’t make that obvious. Lastly, it’s an experiment. And many more things yet unknown.”
Where are the movement classes? Where is the podcast? Have I mentioned to you the artist podcast? The queer family podcast? Where is the interdisciplinary thinking? Maybe it’s fine if this is a public journal. What if reading an online post felt like discovering someone's flesh and blood paper journal, left behind on a coffee table in the neighborhood cafe, but it said “readers welcome.” Perhaps this is a public archive of my top of mind and a few layers deeper thoughts each week. Plus a lot of footnotes that end up in the body of the post because Substack doesn’t allow for footnotes…
I did a practice interview for the artist podcast concept a few weeks ago with Luna Shen. Laying on my camping pad bed will my period cramps to go away with Luna on speaker phone. I really want to know how to be an artist. Not creatively, not like the process or practice of creating art, but logistically. The life structures, decisions, concessions, utilization of time and money of being an artist. Like who makes the choice to be a full time artist in this capitalist country and how are they doing it.
The origin story for this Renaissance Queer podcast idea goes like this. I was riding shotgun…
oh how funny that sounds! oh how I remember when “shotgun” felt full of cool and we called dibs on it and ran out the door, barefoot on the stones and dirt and gravel, shoes could wait for the royal front seat to be put on. Ultimately my brothers always got shotgun anyways until they were gone anyways which was by the time I was 11 anyways.
Yesterday I learned about shotgun houses in New Orleans, their construction like jazz and displacement reconfigured socializations of Blackness, or something like that, listen to this interview with Ryan Clarke on The Nexus podcast. Wow Ryan Clarke, you make me want to be a geologist again. The things I study and love most — dance and rocks(?) I used to think dance and rocks are opposite ends of the spectrum of ephemeral. But no, rocks are always changing too, they just exist, relate to, understand, do, time differently, time does them differently, time is something to act on and be acted upon by?
It’s these kinds of ramblings, streams of consciousness associations that have mostly populated Renaissance Queer.
I was beginning to tell a story in which I rode in the passenger seat next to my mom down the straight paved road in southern (?) Ontario, flat in all directions, fields, bushes, forests, roads that look like they go nowhere because they just go straight and straight into flat looks like nowhere. Oh how I miss the mountains. My legs were elevated on the dashboard, not in the cool breezy way of feet on the dash, windows down, music blaring, hand riding the air stream, rather in anxious desperation to keep blood from pooling in my feet. Compression socks besieged/taken/asked for and given from my moms drawer, dark teal from toe to ankle, light teal from ankle to knee, and a yellow resistance band around my thighs, pulsing my legs out out out. Keep the blood flowing keep the blood flowing. A strategy to counteract the throbbing air filled dissociation migraine not POTS felt like every symptom of POTS, dysautonomic something that was happening and was reason I was, in late July, riding with my mom to Lake Erie to do nothing with my grandma rather than in rehearsal and tech for the tour of Subtle Rage which I’d been rehearsing since January. This is when, I found myself gazing out the car window, flat brush and field and occasional box store or lonely diner or farmhouse rushing wheezing breezing by, the same ones I’d passed annually since forever, which I mean to mean since I was not even one year old, which is not actually forever or anything near forever, as I thought: how the fuck does anyone be an artist in this world?
I’ve wondered for the past year ish if there are only dead ends ahead of me, two options it seems, become a professor of dance or become/accept some other profession that will be principle. I know this is false and yet I fear it’s true, mostly because these are the two options I see in close proximity to me. Because I want to refuse this, my logical next step, I thought, is mesearch. Okay, this is a term I heard Raina Cohen use when Ezra Klein (who’s podcast I never listen to, but this particular one several friends recommended) interviewed her about The Other Significant Others – which is relevant to the other subject of the Renaissance Queer podcast, Queer Family. Mesearch, according to google AI (because yes that AI summary is so convenient and it’s right there and I don’t even have to click anything, I’m sorry) mesearch, also known as autoethnography, is a research approach where researchers use their personal experiences to explore academic questions. When Raina said this, I was like, ‘OH! I’m doing that all the time!”
I want to be an artist. Daily I struggle with deciding how to use resources, especially what to do with my time and my thinking and my body, and especially how to make money. So I had this idea back in July as I rode shotgun on the flat roads of Ontario with my mamma that I’d interview artists about logistically how they do it.
I am now closer to July 2025 than July 2024. I’ve noticed that ideas I really want to pursue, pursue me, they stick around and gnaw. So, proceeding with the timing of rocks in mind, I’m considering these questions for this podcast you’ll listen to on Renaissance Queer at some point in the future (launch date goal is June 9).
GOAL
De-mystify the often fantasticized figure of the artist, especially in america, illuminate the many different ways to be an artist and the patterns of what choices it takes to be an artist. I’m getting at the everyday workings of being an artist.
Who I’m interviewing: Not hobbyist. Not mid career artists. Not well established or famous artists who are well funded. The in between. People who call themselves artists, who commit themselves to their craft but who are early on or who are hustling? or or or
Intro
Hi hi hi
Introduce yourself with any and every title, adjective, adverb you’d like (please note your art discipline)
Where are you right now, what are you seeing, what are you wearing, did you eat breakfast, what did you have?
What’s your internal weather system?
Get to know you & your art
Give us a little origin story to your artist self
What is one or a a few pivotal choices/junctures/people in you becoming the artist you are today?
there’s a quote somewhere about how an artist doesn’t choose to be an artist, it’s just what they must be because it’s what’s inside of them. And the more they don’t choose it the more they rot and feel distant from themselves. But I don’t think this means people who feel called to be artists will make that choice. I do still think it’s a choice. So why is it a choice you made?
Why do you make art?
What are you obsessed with right now?
What questions/ideas/images/stories are propelling your research and making right now?
The nitty gritty aka time & money
As the person living your first-person-narrative life, you know the details, the daily logistics, the choices, the material reality of the art you make and the life you live, but I don’t. Help me visualize what it’s like to be you when it comes to the materiality of how you’re an artist on a daily basis?
Do you have daily practices?
Tell me about your routines?
$$ How does your art and your money relate..
Do you make $ doing your art?
Do you want to make $ doing your art?
Do you want your art and $ to be totally separated?
Art, society and revolution
Okay, it’s maybe not exactly the topic of this podcast, but I feel remiss not to ask about the politics of making art
What do you think is the political power, potential and/or role of art in revolution (can I ask this without defining revolution? Without giving the Toni Cade Bombara quote in its full context?)
What do you see as your role as an artist?
Do you have hopes/dreams/goals for what your art does in the world? Who it reaches?
(idk where this fits)
Tell me about a time you failed or quite or almost quit.
Outro
If you weren’t an artist in this life, what might you be?
If you weren’t an artist in the discipline you’re in, what discipline would you want to do?
What art hobbies do you have/do? quote (ask C) about being an artists with multiple disciplines
Who do you want me to interview? Who would you want me to ask these questions?
