“Majestic Prayers of Bangor”
Collaborators’ Q&A: Poet Sean Prentiss: … What I love about this idea of pairing a writer and an artist is the way the two genres push against each other, talk to each other in unique and unexpected ways. It’s about receiving what I don’t expect. Receiving what I could never create alone. Artist Kate Baird: I was meaning to emphasize the grimness and dinginess of where she was coming from. Now that I see the poem and image together, I feel like the image underscores her energy and drive more than it does the lack of opportunity in the town. I think the poem/image ends up having a more positive sort of energy than I had envisioned, but I’m kind of glad about that. Because I’m rooting for the girl.
Poet Sean Prentiss was once a boy who after high school drove white-knuckled out of Bangor. He still returns some summer nights to its long wooden bars (and chilled bottles of Yuengling lager). He is also the editor of a forthcoming anthology on the craft of creative nonfiction, The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre. Artist Kate Baird lives in Springfield, MO. She is a painter and works as teaching artist with Placeworks, an arts outreach program for rural schools.