Great Conversation With Stephanie Barber at BOMB
Over at BOMB Magazine, a conversation with Stephanie Barber. "[W]hether she is operating in film or installation or poetry or prose, she constructs worlds that are kinetic, strange, and stunningly beautiful, worlds that are wise and scary, that hit you in the head and in the heart," says Laura van den Burg. Barber's latest book, All the People, is just out from Baltimore's Ink Press, and is a collection of stories. Barber is known for her work across mediums. "Time—and how to organize it, and what happened to it, and what is going to happen in it—is one of the things I like to think about a lot." More:
[Laura van den Burg] One of the many things I so admire about your body of work is your ability to work in many different mediums and modes. Night Moves is a seventy-five-page poem constructed from YouTube comments on the Bob Seger song of the same tile. And you’ve done a lot of work with installation art and film. How do you know what shape a project will take, what medium to reach for? Is it largely intuitive?
[Stephanie Barber] I don’t like the word intuitive for a working method because it seems always to be set against a deliberation inseparable from a certain cogent approach necessary to making a piece of art—or rather, the way I make a piece of art. Intuitive sounds too effortless and stream-of-conscious-y.
Sorry, now all I want to do is think about why that word intuitive bugs me. Although, of course, I did own up to this already by saying I just sort of began writing these stories and then recognized their shape—morphological ghost stories.
But perhaps intuitive suggests something of a successful product soon to be discovered, and I guess I start a lot of things that do not take a shape I find pleasing, and if I start those intuitively, but then leave them by the side of the road, was my intuition off? Or did I not actually begin them intuitively at all? Another thing about intuition is that it seems to deny years and years of rigorous work and study of other‘s work, as if one were some sort of blithe and innocent child, stumbling through flowers.
I really don’t like this word, but I shouldn‘t be coy and deny it's role.
As far as what medium a something will take—this comes about in a number of ways. I always write and am usually working on a film or video, though my videos are often a lot more about the writing than the image.
The way these different media are received by audiences is so incredibly different. Their places in my imagination are firmly separated. I don’t think I’ve ever been working on a poem and thought: “Oh, this should be a film,” or vice versa. They stick to their corners and suggest themselves as films or poems or stories.
Read it all at BOMB.