Sara Biggs Chaney and Michael Chaney
Sara Biggs Chaney and Michael Chaney teach at Dartmouth College. Michael is a Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing and Sara is a Lecturer in the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric and the Associate Coordinator of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program. Sara and Michael have published creative non-fiction in Hotel Amerika and Sycamore Review. Their visual poetry has recently appeared in Redivider, Puerto Del Sol, and Quarterly West.
I had the opportunity to chat with husband and wife collaborators Sara and Michael Chaney. In this delightful conversation we discuss the process of collaborating, power dynamics, visual art, and poetry. Michael and Sara have a lot of knowledge to share and their devotion to their craft was palpable throughout the conversation.
I would love to hear from both of you about your backgrounds in art and poetry and how it contributes to the work you do.
Michael: My background in terms of art training, my mother was an artist and my brother is as well. We came up in a very artistic family. My brother and I learned how to mix oil paint and clean the brushes before most kids know how to make sandwiches for themselves for lunch, and that’s a true statement right there. In terms of poetry, Sara and I are both probably more educated and trained in poetry than any human being ought to ever say out loud to another in public. So I’ll stop there and let her answer.
Sara: I’ll mention that we met in our PHD program in English at Indiana University. Training in critical English is something that has brought us together. In addition to that we both, are practicing creative writers. Myself in written poetry before this collaboration and Michael in flash fiction and creative non-fiction. I can’t say that I have a background in visual art prior to this collaboration because it would be a tall-tale, however, when I started my PhD program a long time ago now, and I was taking in what the PhD was like and wondering if I really wanted to do it, to blow off steam, I thought a good thing to do was to make collages of canonical British poetry. I’ve always had an interest or inclination to adapt or re-present poetry in a visual form or collage form.
And Michael didn’t say, so I will say that he is a practicing oil painter and has been for far more than twenty years. He is a gallery showing awarded artist and he was doing that before he went back to graduate school. So unlike me he has been in this a long time in terms of the visual art component of what we do.
I would love to hear where the inspiration for this project came from and the process of creating the project.
Sara: This project began as a written poem which I had already written and it was part of a short series of A Biography of a Girl poems. The full title was originally: The Biography of a Girl Whose Heart was an Inadvertent Beacon for Birds Formerly Thought to be Extinct. It was a page poem, generally I would say, not very successful one, or that’s the way I felt about it because I was circulating a lot of my poetry for submission at the time and I had some good success with a lot of pieces but not with these. There’s another one called Biography of a Girl with a Blade in Her Back, components of which were recently published as collages in Redivider and New Delta Review. The print version and the verbal version of those poems got no traction at all, I have to tell you. Nobody liked them.
Michael: I did!
Sara: I think it’s interesting that the impetus for a cross media collaboration came from at least a felt failure, as if the words were not quite delivering on what I’d hope for in them.
Michael: Why don’t I take over. I was on a sabbatical and Sara would teach in the morning and we really enjoy each other’s company a lot. When she teaches I want to hang out with her as soon as she’s done and we get lunch and things like that together.
When she was gone I’d look at some of these poems and just figure out ways that I would imagine them on the page as visual narratives. I also study visual narratives as a scholar, I’ve become a scholar of sequential narrative art. So I’ve theorized it and thought about it a lot and I do it in my own art practice. It was something I wanted to do and had a lot of practice doing, visualizing the lines and images of the poems as scenes or tableaus.
As soon as I started to do that, well if anyone were to do that, you immediately see the redundancy in some of the words because if you are going to visualize some of the things on the page then some words are no longer needed like color words. If something is said to be purple or very purple, no problem, I’ll make that happen, you don’t have to say it. The lyrical constriction we normally associate with poetry became all the more intensified for us when we turned the language into pictures.
Sara: Yes, I’ll say a little bit just about the process of making the series you are going to be publishing parts of. As he indicated Michael began by laying out the lines of the scenes of the poem in kind of a graphic narrative. It was initially a drawing with brush pen or pencil. He did a whole series of drawings like a graphic poem and then it was a couple years later we decided to use the drawings as the basis of collage. The drawings provided the scaffolding for the figures and movement for the piece and then we selected materials we wanted to use for the collage to create some constraints and in this case these collages were made using only issues of Life Magazine from 1958-1960 and bird guides, field guides for birds.
Michael: There’s a gender dynamic in the poem that as a man I’m sort of watching. There’s a fear I have that I’m making that an object even while just imagining sketches. I think early on I became a little weary of a standard mode of collaborating that I see in business, in a children’s’ book illustration you see it a lot. Where the page reveals that there has been some sort of partnership between an artist and a poet. But the process doesn’t reveal that at all, the process reveals some guy in New York and some other guy in La and they are faxing things back and forth and they’ve never met you know? I think I started to feel that in coffee houses looking at Sara’s poems and my sketches, I needed, I wanted her beside me to picture it and that we would picture it together made us both think of a way we could do that so we could meet at the scene of art making as equals in a way. Not even as equals, where she is kind of in control, in terms of being the author of the poems and having an authority of experience with respect to the gender implications and experience in the poem. That was really a shift away from isolated or siloed forms of collaborating right to where we got the same glue on our hands. We are at the same table she’s on one side of the table and I’m on the other. We rearranged our dining room in order to do this. It was wonderful, it was definitely the two of us, not just one at a time kind of stuff.
Sara: Yes, we do our work at the dining room table. It makes a huge mess. Collage makes a really big mess. We combed through these couple of issues of Life magazine over and over and over again because we had the under sketches to give us a sense of the forms but then we had to go into these life magazines and find things that would suit the forms. Sometimes that was really hard because as it turns out, they really didn’t use very much color in Life Magazine in 1958, which we didn’t know until after we had already settled on that source. We had to get really inventive about what we were using to create the images because there were sometimes not that wide of variety of options.
I’m enchanted hearing about this collaboration, not just between husband and wife but also two different genders working together. It seems like in any collaboration there could be power dynamics at play and I’m so interested in how you evened the playing field, if you will, to work on this project.
Sara: We also started to do academic research and collaboration because we are doing it a lot and we are very interested in it. At one point I was looking at what collaboration means, the different things it has meant, now and in history. It has a lot of nice warm and fuzzy meanings and you hear people talking about it a lot in business, as Michael mentioned, like let’s all collaborate, it’s a great thing to do. But then you think about something like collaborators in war. Like we are the French collaborators with the Nazi’s in WW2. That’s a not so good meaning of collaboration that suggests there is some kind of betrayal of the ego going on in collaborations. A discomfort with the feeling that something might be lost or some power might be lost in partnership. That can be especially real if it crosses boundaries of gender or race or any place where there is a cultural and political power dynamic. It’s been interesting for us to think about that while we are doing this work.
What went into the choice of 1950’s Life Magazine Bird guides?
Michael: We’re moving onto the 3rd poem in the series and in the beginning of an endeavor like this we have several meetings where we brainstorm ideas and try to connect our feelings, experiences, and ideas about the poem to particular materials that will convey those same feelings. I almost don’t remember The Blade in her Back session because it was a couple months ago and this one was so exciting. We risked changing the whole premise in order to clarify what we are up to with the materials. We’re trying to say a lot with the materials we are using. It was very important that we choose a medium that is associated with looking and spectacle and the rise in American popular culture of looking and browsing at pictures that really culminates in Life Magaxine. It’s an object in American culture. We were also thinking of precious things we could acquire and cut up. We’ve been working with historical newspapers a lot. We were cutting up newspapers form the 1700’s. I think we were headed towards magazines in the 50’s.
Sara: While I think we are sometimes really deliberate in selecting our materials in the case of these images there was some happenstance, chance involved. As I recall we went to a nearby antique mall that we really enjoy browsing around. It’s half antique mall half flee market. We knew we wanted to use bird guides. We were looking for antique bird guides and we found them. But we also found a wall of life magazines there. All of them in little plastic sieves. Hundreds and hundreds of them. I think we just decided on the spot, it’s going to be this. Just look at all of them! It seemed to make sense. And the materials brought with them a new lens.
When I wrote this poem I was just staring out the window and noticing how many birds were on the front lawn. And thinking in terms of the fairy tale. I sort of fancily thought, what if I am drawing these birds here and I don’t even know it. I have a bird magnet. I just loved the idea and so I wrote about it. When we started to remake this poem using the materials of 1950s Life magazine it became kind of metaphoric of gender in 1950’s which is really bizarre and absorbing topic to engage with if you are looking at it in advertising. An example of this, is there are so many images directly addressing women as consumer, specifically I should say addressing white women of a purchasing class as a consumer. The magazine is suggesting to the white woman consumer in the ads, hey ladies there are all kinds of stuff you can buy. You can buy cars, you can buy cigarettes, you can buy medicines. It’s sort of the age of Betty Friedan, first wave feminism, an idea of freedom through purchasing. This whole idea, the fantasy of the woman becoming a bird, that intersects with the idea of the woman becoming free through purchasing. When the magazine is your primary material. I didn’t know that was going to be the case until I started doing it. I guess you could say the collage is an occasion which you are re-writing or re-signifying your poem in new ways. You are also expanding the breadth of what it can mean and making it more open to cultural meanings and more accessible to other people.
Michael: I think it’s important as artists or makers, as creative people that we try to find things out as we articulate or express. It’s almost like an ethics we have with any other person who may encounter something we made. I like to convey that even with something like the cut that is associated with collage. Because we are cutting a material that means we’ve figured stuff out about the material, we know the material. Anything we cut is something we’ve looked at and loved and looked and dwelled on it a lot. Even though we’ve cut this thing up it doesn’t mean we are discarding it or that we are discounting it or that it didn’t mean anything to us. Because we cut it up it is like a marking in the language of collage that means this is significant because it’s been gutted, perforated, in-sized, cut, ripped open.
So you had the work Sara had written, then you find the magazine. How did you go from there? How did you decide the layout from there?
Sara: We decide a lot of it through conversation. We might be looking at a large pieces of paper that is the same size that the collage is going to be and it has the underdrawings that Michael has made. In the case of these we did the backgrounds first. There were five of them. We decided we wanted to think about the sequencing of different colors across the background and different materials and textures. We just talked about it and decided, okay the first one is just going to be blank paper cut in different textures. The last one is going to be bright red, it’ll give it a lot of emphasis. The ones in the middle should be other things, what should they be? And we’d talk it out and figure it out. Then after we knew generally what we wanted, there was a lot of searching and cutting, like go look for red things and cut them with these scissors and that’ll take however long it’s going to take. I’d say the same is true for the images if we know we’re going to have a scene in the middle with a woman who is flying or a road and mountains we might talk about what color do these need to be to contrast with the background. Okay they need to be light but we want them to be recognizable as objects. Let’s go in and look for things that are light and recognizable as objects and the looking begins. It’s talking, looking, cutting, gluing.
Michael: Our method comes out of comparing. If we make a mark to start with, any sort of mark at all, that determines what will come next. Just looking at the Life Magazine sitting on a table or a bench or a floor, you can’t help but notice the incredible vivid nature of that red cover and how that’s very different from anything else inside the magazine. Nothing else is quite so starkly red as the cover. So I was thinking early on we are going to have to do something with all that red. If we were going to do that than the other images leading up to it were determined by that red, and I thought according to a principle of contrast and balance that what would lead up to it would be colorless. It drove us to have conversations about what was colorless and we alighted upon the margins of the page. We worked in other artforms before other collages to capture the beautiful nuance of just blank pages of the past so our eyes and fingers were keen on those nuances and I think we replayed them in this piece as well.
Sara: I was going to add that although we do have a map and a plan. Somethings are serendipitous. Sometimes we will flip through a bird guide or another source and we’ll find something so weird and wonderful we know it just must appear somewhere. That’s kind of the part of collage that is artifact finding. I’m looking at the page right now that is primarily red and there is a lady with a jaunty umbrella, we put a tv on top of her head. We found that lady and I think we had cut her out for something else. And then she and her jaunty insouciant attitude just has to fit in here somewhere. We have to stick her in here. We didn’t want to participate in the unthinking commodification of white female faces in life magazine as a product so in a lot of cases we’re covering the faces or changing them. There’s a tv over one and I think a pineapple ring over the other. We felt like if we left her face exposed then the focus of the entire collage would be on her face. And that was not what we had in mind.
How long do you think this project took start to finish?
Sara: Years if we really were to go start to finish.
Michael: How many years Sara?
Sara: 4 years start to finish. You made the drawings for this the fall of 2017 and it took a long time of concentrated work for the drawings that are under this collage. And then we started the process of collaging over it maybe 2018 to 2019 and that was a period of months just to make the 5 collages.
I would love for you to let us know what you are working on now.
Sara: We are planning a new collage poem, it is tentatively called, Biography of a Girl who Became the Music of the Spheres, actually we are thinking of changing it to The Biography of the Girl Who Became the Noise of Everything. Who became music? Which one should we go with? Maybe you should just say they are working on a new series title to be determined. It’s going to deal with a lot of musical materials, we’re excited about that.
We also have a visual poetry project that we’ve been working on intensively in quarantine that we call Our Month of Sundays project. It is a project that has also been going on for years where we sit down together in front of a window in our house every Sunday. Michael draws with pastels what he sees out the window and I write about what I see out the window. We then present the poems and drawings together on one page. We’ve been doing this since 2018. So three years. we’ve done it many times. We are just starting to finish a lot of these and starting to send them out to share with people and potential publications.
What is inspiring you right now?
Michael: That’s easy for me. My inspiration is Sara. She’s an amazing poet and it was an honor to help bring some of her images to life. And Continues to be.
Sara: We inspire each other I think, a lot. I’ve learned a lot through the course of these projects on how to think visually and how to compose visually. I think the nice things about working in a collaboration, especially now, the artist or the writers project might feel empty, it might feel selfish, it might feel lonely. But I am not ever lonely in my artistic pursuit. And I feel very lucky for that. Artists and writers have to face a lot of rejection and I’ll sometimes say to Michael, do you like what we did? And he’ll say yes. And I’ll say well then that’s good enough then. We can be audience to each other. That’s very inspiring to me as well.
Also, I will add, we’ve become the keepers of chickens during the quarantine. I’ve been getting a lot of artistic inspiration from our chickens watching their lives. They are much more full of personality than I ever imagined not having known any chickens before. We’ve been growing up with them and lost two of them in very different ways, seen a chicken molt, it’s given me a lot of ideas for poems and ways of thinking, especially now in Covid, about what makes for a good life. We are pretty much in our home but our home contains multitudes. We have humans and animals. Earth and sky. I can say we haven’t been bored.
I think our readers will really appreciate that sentiment, especially knowing that if you like your work and are proud of it then that is enough.
Sara: I think especially for students of writing, there’s a lot of competition, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we want there to be or not. There’s an emphasis on critique in the writing community, which of course is necessary and good. I think it’s also good to remember we can also be just deeply appreciate audience to each other. We can do that and in doing that we’re doing a lot.
