Kary Hess discusses her new book, interdisciplinary art making, and her experience as a current MFA@CIIS student.
Please introduce your new book and how it came to be.
The book is called 1912: Poems of Time, Place and Memory. It’s a book of poetry and drawings and organized into different sections according to different places where I have lived. They are ‘memory’ poems, exploring the idea of how we remember things and how our memories shift according to what we need them to be.
When I was looking through my old journals, I would find entries where I wrote about something that I remembered differently from what I had written down. I realized that how I remembered something right after it happened was different than how I remembered it twenty or thirty years later. And what really happened may even be different from both accounts. I mean, I don’t know. I explored that idea in my poems. Some of the poems are from my memory, some are from my journals, and some are from both. It was interesting to see how my memory had changed over time.
The poems are also about how we experience place. There is a section in the book from my childhood in Petaluma, a section about Utah, one from Paris where I lived for a while, and then back to Petaluma in the 1990’s. It ends with 9/11.
How did you incorporate the drawings?
Drawing and writing have always been one thing for me — they are intertwined. I didn’t create any new drawings for this book but curated them from old journals. Then I put them where I thought they should go. They don’t necessarily correlate with poems, but they correlate with the time, and the memory. So, they are like visual poems.
Do you believe that there is a thread that ties all your work together?
I would say it’s a sense of place. Some people have told me that they can recognize my writing because of the way I describe environments. With the paintings it is the same, I do a lot of landscape imagery from the area where I grew up. I grew up here in Petaluma and I am really embedded in this landscape. I love other places too but this one has this kind of resonance. The fiber art I was doing utilized natural dyes from plants from the area and it was as if they were speaking in their language of color. As the production designer for a new feature film I am working on in collaboration with my husband, I bring the visual sense of place to the project. Our last feature film, Pill Head, was set entirely in Petaluma and the town is definitely a character in that movie. In addition, a lot of my work is about memory and nostalgia.
As an artist with an established career, how has the MFA program at CIIS assisted you on your journey?
I love this program. It has been so helpful. Even though I know my artistic process I still need to practice it and refine it. And I love being around other practicing artists and seeing how they work. It gives me new ideas. In addition, our course assignments are extremely valuable to me; they contribute to how I see things and they have been useful by opening up new areas of inquiry. The program has helped me to focus on ideas that are important to me and find new ways of communicating them. For example, I recently made a few short films and a “poetry video” for class assignments. I had never thought of doing a visual film to go with my poetry before and now I’m excited to do more of them.
What projects are you working on now?
I usually choose one project to focus on at once. Right now, I am experimenting with doing two projects at the same time. I am working on a short story collection for my MFA project called Embedded: A Geography of Memory about how memory is embedded in people, places and things. I am also working on another feature film, called Wolftone. I’m writing and editing my book during the next year, and we are shooting our film this summer and editing it in the fall. So, I will be doing two big projects at once — that is my challenge!
Kary Hess is an artist, author and filmmaker. She has a BA in Art from Brigham Young University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at California Institute of Integral Studies. She is the creator and author of the SparkTarot® deck and guidebook, and 1912: Poetry of Time Place and Memory. Kary produces feature films with FMRL and writes for San Francisco Bay Area alternative newsweeklies and magazines. She lives with her family in Petaluma, California. To purchase her new book and find out more about Kary visit www.karyhess.com
