Collaborators’ Q&A: Artist Lauren Woods: I was really drawn to your poem because, first off, I didn’t know what “duende” meant or who Lorca was. But when I read the poem, I got this feeling of intangible, distant, deep sorrow that I could relate to but also felt intimate, so it was this push and pull feel, and I was really inspired by it. Poet Gibson Fay-LeBlanc: Sentences are very physical to me. But at the same time… I don’t understand how you translate feeling into physical anything. So I’m super curious like how a [dance] piece starts.

Lauren Woods is an artist whose practice and creative research explores concepts of mythic time. Artworks become a space to examine notions of nostalgia, desire, power, beauty, death, and embodied expression. Personal myth is developed visually across various mediums such as painting, video, and dance performances. Poet Gibson Fay-LeBlanc‘s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist won the Vassar Miller Prize and his second, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021. His poems have appeared in magazines including the New Republic, Tin House, jubilat, Poetry Northwest, and Orion. He serves as executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland.

Read the full Q&A and get the Broadside