paper & ghosts
After a full and wonderful weekend in Kalamazoo, Michigan seeing my love, best friends, and paying tribute to my dearest Herbert Scott in a reading punctuated with tears and ending with PBR at The Corner Bar, I came back home to Chicago to my empty room. I spent Sunday reflecting on a lot of realizations I had on the streets in Kalamazoo, while swimming in the Kalamazoo Athletic Club’s wonderful pool, and seeing my dearest psychotherapist. Out of these reflections came a drive to create again.
Living the Life in the Air First by Carrie McGath, 2010
Sometimes, writing poetry comes out of creating visuals first. My favorite art media is working in paper and ghosts. So on Monday I walked to my local antique mall in Chicago, a place I frequent to sit on the floor and peruse drawer after drawer and box after box of old photographs of strangers looking happy. A glowing woman holding her new baby, a child beaming while he stands next to Mickey Mouse at Disney World, damage to a ceiling that was likely captured for insurance purposes after some disaster. I make three piles on the floor next to me: ones I cannot live without, ones that seem a bit haunted with emotion, ones I am inexplicably attracted to in their inherent weirdness. Then I choose the ones I will buy to use in my art-making or my poetry writing.
These pieces I created last night while I listened in the dark to sounds from the alley below me, and the barely-there howl of the El a block away from me, these were pieces that were to help me to understand the fears I have been experiencing in my new city. Thought I would have been over it all by now, but I am well on my way today.
The Struggle by Carrie McGath, 2010
When I moved to Chicago, everything new, tackling another Masters degree among people younger and seemingly happier than myself, I was experiencing odd and terrifying fears. I was becoming quickly reclusive and compulsive, feeling the door, the walls, and floor for signs of fire every night before I would go to sleep.
The last words from my psychotherapist in Kalamazoo was for me to do something “courageous.” With that, I went to bed last night without feeling for fires, instead listening to the night feeling satisfied and whole again in my Self from creating something. In the lakefront night, words and imagery rolled through my mind like ribbons.
