Howdy Internet,
We are back in Texas and honestly it feels good to be settled. To sit in one place long enough to find boredom, is a prerequisite for creativity and a life on the road is often too easily-entertained to ever quite get around to making the thing.
Being back is the perfect kinda boring.
More time, more space, more sweatshirts.
Almost as soon as we left, I started craving the one form of art-making that I couldn’t bring with me. So I have been sewing again and thinking about sewing a lot.
For the past year I have been working on a series of essays and the next one is about Sweatshirts - but really it is about sewing and making things, it is about fashion and family and self and body image.
Writing like this is not my natural tongue, and often I cannot turn off the Poet when I need to speak clearly. A lot of these essays settle into some middle space, some times direct and declarative, and others all mouthfeel and mystery. I really love the challenge of trying to turn poetry, back into English, but the double translation often leaves me with heaps of writing I do not know how to label.
Are you a poem pretending to be an essay? Are you a diary pretending to be a poem? Are you an essay pretending to be a diary?
Below are a few of these written heaps, these unlabeled excerpts from the essay on Sweatshirts.
I hope you enjoy it.
Thanks y’all,
Alex
Thrifting is a Family Tradition:
“I was a thrift store baby, born and raised on “1/2 of 1/2 of Name Brand Clothing”, known to me only as NBC, a store somewhere between a Ross and a Goodwill, filled with returns and rejections from all the stores where most suckers buy their name brand clothing full price.
This was my Grandma Jane’s favorite store, and as the matriarch to a family of 4 kids, 16 grandkids, raised right on Social Work and the Ford Union’s dime, we were all dressed head-to-toe in some Abercrombie and no button hole, jeans with non factory tears, and those white Addiddas shoes with more d’s than stripes, everything we owned had some stain or hole before Grandma got to it. I think getting dressed in this context of “good enough” and never-ending hand-me-downs, was an early blessing for me.
I grew accustomed to clothes I would grow into and guest room closets with limitless options - “just go pick someth’n out the closet” every time we were wet, dirty, or about to be. We spent a lot of time at my grandma’s house when I was younger and we all caught that frugal flu, like a family curse, we’ve all been sick since birth.“
Committing to the Bit:
“These days I think more about sweatshirts, than I make them. It has been a long two years, since I have shared anything that I have sewn, but my notes and my head are still full of goofy little twists on what sweats should be. I am sketching and collecting and willing my heart to this hobby, but still reluctant to do much sewing. I’m still not convinced this is a bit worth committing to and for some reason commitment is the cross I’m hung on.
This hobby is starting to feel like another “old self” to me, some manic moment I stumbled through, but could never roost in, not quite a calling, but still good practice in creative curiosity. It feels like a fading fabric fad, but I do not want sewing to become another poetry for me, another passion I let cool too long on the window sill of meaning to ever get around to making the thing. I took 10 years off writing and it has not been easy to feel out loud again.“
Thanks for reading! Lots more on “Sweatshirts” coming.
Sharing is Caring :)
Great out of the blue creative poems, works of art…a unique approach to spread your writings on the blank canvas of life…to share your passion is so worthy of great things! I look forward to the next installment of Sweatshirts 😊👍🏼
Grandma Jane taught well.
I enjoy your writing, style and vulnerability. The addition of the audio was fantastic.
Following your journey on Kelly’s YT, sores being healed and creative paths opening up. I look forward to more.