Natalie
Hey Bec.

Rebecca
So what are we talking about today?

Natalie
Well, somebody asked me this week what I do for a living, and I didn’t just want to say teacher.

Rebecca
Because you’re more than one thing.

Natalie
Exactly. So that’s what we’re reframing today: being more than one thing, and then celebrating it.

Rebecca
Yes, we are all multi-hyphenate — and so is our guest, Jessica Hiemstra.

Natalie
Jessica Hiemstra is an artist. She writes poems and essays and children’s books. She draws, paints, animates, illustrates, and is a freelance designer. Her studio has a bright yellow door and her floor is usually dirty. She believes in everything, especially wonder and love.

Rebecca
I like that your floor is usually dirty.

Jessica
It is.

Rebecca
And would you bother to clean it? The reason I ask that is because I was just reading this morning some artist talking about how he likes the layers of dust — through every artwork that he creates, dust gets created, and he never wants to clean the dust because he just wants all the layers.

Jessica
Sounds beautiful, and true — like if a hair lands in a painting, sorry, I leave it. So I do love the layers of our humanity on things. And I do sweep and vacuum, but I don’t need it to be tidy.

Natalie
Or sterile.

Jessica
Definitely not sterile.

Rebecca
I love the messy desk, the fullness of a messy workspace, because it feels alive — although that is not true for you, Nat. Nat is looking at us.

Natalie
I’m looking at both of you going, “What the hell?!”

Jessica
Except it’s not — if I think about all the piles, it’s not mess. It is, to me, all different projects all beside each other that I need to be proximate to. So the things that are in my line of sight are things I’m thinking about, and so I like my work all around me, so I can reach for it as I need it. So I don’t want to hide it from myself, because then it disappears, if that makes any sense.

Rebecca
Yeah, so there’s order to it.

Jessica
There is order to it, and it changes all the time. Week to week, it might look like the same mess to some observers, but it’s just different stuff.

Natalie
You know, I can say that my desk, there’s literally one plant and my journal with a pen, and then my laptop — and that’s what I have. But it’s also a very small desk on purpose, because it fits in a window and it’s how I like that sort of optic for myself. It’s very clean and clear. But I have a series of tabs open — and remember, when we were getting ready to tape another episode, Bec, I was anxious because I was like, “I don’t want to close any of these tabs,” and Rebecca’s like, “You can always reopen them.” But that felt like those are all of my proximate points. It was interesting — I was marking a student’s discussion thread last night for a course that I teach for university in one spot. I had a book open for something I’m working on in a piece of writing, and I ended up pulling a quotation from that book to respond in the student’s thread because I saw that it was a moment of connection.

Rebecca
So you must be able to do that — draw from each project that’s open.

Jessica
I think so.

Rebecca
Yeah. This can feed this, maybe, in this moment.

Jessica
Yeah, and they all do just talk to each other.

Rebecca
One thing I have to say is, this is the first time we’ve recorded in person — ever. So you are our first guest in person. Very exciting.

Jessica
I am so honoured.

Natalie
It feels really lovely.

Rebecca
We have three chairs here, and we wanted to make sure you had the comfy one. We didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable.

Jessica
I feel so comfortable. I’m on a soft brown couch, beside a fiddle-leaf fig, and books all in reach — if we need them.

Natalie
Because you never know.

Rebecca
If we need something to talk to us.

Jessica
We’ve got Zadie Smith up there at the top, that’s good.

Rebecca
Ok, the other thing that I wanted to say is that we actually got to have an amazing pre-conversation. One thing that came out of it is you were saying you wanted to say something about chameleons — so talk to us about that.

Jessica
Well, I’ve become a big fan girl of you two. So, I listen to everything you’ve ever said.

Natalie
Oh, boy. All the things I’ve said.

Jessica
It’s really wonderful. I could spend a very long time going on about all that I’ve learned — even just about being human beings, and how you two are that together. I don’t know what episode it was you talked about being a chameleon, and Bec, you said you were not at ease with that, and felt like you’re a chameleon. I’ve had that same discomfort for most of my life, the feeling of being a chameleon being. I felt something derogatory towards myself about that, as if I become a different person with different people and in different places, and I got the sense you were talking about that as well. I shifted my thinking about that a few years ago — I’d researched chameleons, and one thing is: their mood is one of the big things that changes their colour. So they do camouflage and change, but it’s actually something from the inside that they’re expressing, so it’s really personal what a chameleon does with their colour — which I found really powerful, because they’re actually trying to show themselves by changing in different situations. A chameleon is working so hard to reflect the people and the places around them, which I think is a really beautiful thing. It’s somebody who’s able to really be where they are, and listen to everything around them, and actually change to fit. Maybe that’s actually a good thing. That was something I was thinking while I was listening to you guys talking about chameleons.

Rebecca
I really like that. I have to sit with that. So it’s about listening, deeply.

Jessica
You become where you are, and how you feel mingles with where you are — which I just think is amazing.

Rebecca
Right, as opposed to it being this negative thing where you don’t know yourself.

Jessica
Almost like a mask — we often think of being a chameleon as somebody who’s deceitful. Except that I think a chameleon is being incredibly present to their circumstances.

Natalie
That’s beautiful.

Rebecca
And a really excellent reframe.

Natalie
In that same thread that I was writing with that student, we were back and forth about the words ‘interpersonal’ versus ‘intrapersonal,’ and ‘inter’ meaning the actual human relation back and forth, the intrapersonal being what’s happening inside the self. I was connecting it back to the necessity for relationship in pedagogy and care and education. So that’s where I was going in my head, but I feel like there’s a pedagogy of care described in what you’re naming here about the chameleon-esque way of being in the world, because it is so much about checking in with the self, and then bringing that out into relationship with others. So it’s very much about other people, and not just about the self, which is what the rigidity of an ‘I know who I am’ naming of…

Rebecca
Feels like it can negate other people.

Natalie
Yeah, and I think that that can be a really dangerous way to be in the world. We’ve talked about this even with this podcast. One of our hashtags these days that we’re pushing out with all of our various posts is self-improvement, but it’s self-improvement with the focus of the lens not being so on the face, and self-care, and an internal work. It’s the internal work with the desire to make a better world. So I really think that that reframe is so necessary. What you just said there, I love it.

Jessica
Thanks.

Natalie
I’m going to steal it.

Jessica
You can have it.

Natalie
It’s yours, ours.

Rebecca
I’m not sure if it is related, but this idea that you seem like a person who doesn’t hold back. I feel like we’re kindred spirits in that way, because I think you even said to me when we were talking, “Tell me if I’m being too much.” Which breaks my heart, like literally breaks my own heart, because I am that way and I’ve said that so many times. “Am I being too much?” Anyway, so can you just talk about that? Where does it come from, that feeling? And how have you worked through it?

Jessica
I mean, I think I probably will work through it my whole life. I think it’s been a struggle since I was young. I have a loud laugh, I have big lips, I make tons of things — I’m big in the world. That is how I came into the world and how I am, and I don’t think of myself as big. So it’s actually about how I’m seen, rather than how I am, but I feel like when you take up space (even just metaphorical space), I don’t know what it is — other people are squeezed out, in a way, and I think that’s perception. But I’m so loving, and I never want to push anyone over, so the thought that my way of being and seeing and feeling pushes people out has always been really uncomfortable for me. I think there are wounds there.

Rebecca
You’ve had someone say, “That’s too much,” or, “You’re too much.”

Jessica
Yeah. I mean, maybe they’re scratches, not wounds.

Rebecca
But there’s some memory in you of that feeling.

Jessica
I mean, I think when you’re good at a lot of things, some people perceive that as them not being good, even though those two things are not in conflict.

Rebecca
Right. You can be good, too. You can be good at a lot. I don’t have to be good at less for you to…

Jessica
Yeah. I just feel like my stories are big, my work is big — everything is big.

Rebecca
Large-scale, even?

Jessica
Yeah, it’s large scale. It’s ambitious, in a way. It’s so terrible — I feel like I’m constantly inspired.

Rebecca
Damn you!

Jessica
Which you’re not even allowed to say right? Like that’s even too much. You’re not allowed to be really good and really inspired. Those things are too much. And then I just have a big personal story — all of it. And I just feel like I don’t want to take up that much space, but there’s hardly any way for me to be that doesn’t take up a lot of room. Does that make any sense?

Natalie
Totally, and thank you for naming it as something that you’ve navigated and are challenged by in terms of your own self-reflection, because I feel like that’s actually a lot of people — because so much of it is perception. I’m thinking right now of: I have one very specific relationship I’ve navigated in my life, where I was celebrated by this person for always lifting them up. I realized quite quickly that actually, this wasn’t about me and my successes — this was that person’s choice to downplay or to dismiss what I was doing. It was much more about their own need to negate immediately so as not to stick themselves in the story as less than. And I’ve heard people like that do that all the time, whether it’s teenagers in a class where they immediately downgrade the work of somebody else who is doing something amazing because it butts up against their own, you know… that they’re not being enough in the world. So it takes a real strength of character to actually not just take up the space, but be excited about that space — to be inspired in the world in the way that you’re naming that.

Rebecca
And to keep doing it. To say, “I hear that this upsets you. But I’m going to keep being this.”

Natalie
Yes. Oh my goodness, yes.

Rebecca
That’s what’s so hard, right? “I’m going to go back to my studio, and I’m going to keep going.”

Jessica
We talked about what do you want at arm’s length? What’s the work that’s around you? What are your tabs open? Those are your people, too. What is in reach? What’s healthy? What’s your habitat? What do you need to be nourished?

Rebecca
Think that’s an interesting way to think about the tabs that are open — the people in your life.

Jessica
That’s right. It’s health. I think that’s the other thing that’s so interesting about being a lot: if it’s just who you are, it’s not something you’re navigating, it’s something other people have to navigate. And so that’s the worry, you’re trying to think about, “How do other people navigate me just being me?” Which I think is why I have a studio, it’s why you have private space to work in. I have a safe place to work where I don’t have to think about how other people feel about what it is that I’m doing — which is just being me.

Natalie
I want to know more about what it is that you do in that studio, because you do a lot of different kinds of art. There’s poetry, and there’s painting, and so I want us to get to hear a little bit about what some of those ways of arting in the world are, and then how you choose your medium.

Jessica
It’s so interesting — you know when you notice what resistances you have? Like anytime I have to talk about what I do and what those things are, even naming it is very hard for me. I can say I’m an artist. I would probably even just say I’m a listener, and I make things — I respond to the world, and the language I have is art. I’m a poet, and an essayist, an illustrator. I also work as a freelance designer, and design home decor products. And I find that I still need the page. So I worked for a while only digitally, but I need accident to be part of my process. I work on the page, and then I scan it or photograph it and I bring it in, and then I work digitally. Right now I’m working on a children’s book for a local writer. It’s her first first book — Samantha Reynolds. I did a bunch of painting, and then I photographed those paintings, and then I work on a… I have a big beautiful drawing tablet where I can paint and stuff — so a combination of things.

Rebecca
For that children’s book you felt, “I need to paint.”

Jessica
Yes, right — and that’s the thing, how do you choose what medium? Am I allowed to say they choose me? I try to find the right tool for the job. So if there’s a certain kind of feeling, what’s the best way to express it? Is it in language, is it in paint? Also, what am I most adept at to answer the question or ask the question that I have to ask? Then I choose whether it’s words or paint or pencil. When I animate, which is something I only started doing recently, I do that all by hand on paper, and then my partner photographs every drawing. Right now we’re working on something that’s probably a thousand drawings, and he’ll photograph each one. I’m interested in time and how all of those drawings are going to talk to each other so it makes something emotionally… I wish I had better words. It’s just so intuitive.

Rebecca
Sometimes I wish I could draw, because sometimes I could understand, “This isn’t right for words. This is right for painting.”

Jessica
Well, you know, I think that’s the thing. I think that’s why it feels so lucky. I was talking to my sister in the car on the way here, and I was like, “I’m just so lucky that I can do these different things. I don’t know how to talk about it.” Then she was like, “You also have been practicing your whole life. You’re skilled at these things.” I started drawing when I was two or three years old, and I’ve been drawing for that long in my life, so my hand can do what my heart and mind want it to on a piece of paper. So if I’m upset and I need to draw, or feel joy and I need to draw, I’m not struggling with having my hand…

Natalie
Not listen.

Rebecca
But that’s important to not negate the discipline and the craft that you’ve continued to hone.

Natalie
Just to say, Rebecca, I do have one of your paintings on my wall, and I love it.

Rebecca
Oh, Nat.

Natalie
No, it’s not just loyalty.

Rebecca
She’s so loyal.

Natalie
I am a very low person, but I actually really love it because it signifies a specific time.

Rebecca
Yeah. I was living in Riverside, California with Simon, who was doing his PhD down there. We were really challenged by the people down there, because it was super conservative, but then we randomly met two artists. I think there must have been a lot more, but we only found two, and he introduced me to screenprinting.

Natalie
But I love it because there was a piece that you put in there, and it kind of looked like me — a little piece of a little something-or-other that you scanned into it. So it wasn’t even just screenprinting, it was collage, too. There was a whole bunch happening.

Rebecca
Yeah. It was cool, though. If I had maybe lived there, we would have kept going.

Natalie
Yeah. Anyways, I have that on my wall. So just to say it’s in you.

Rebecca
Ok, thanks Nat. Should we just clarify polymath and multi-hyphenate, and then maybe would you just speak to how you don’t even like that term? And how when we even mentioned the topic, you bristled a bit?

Jessica
Yeah. So polymath is somebody with knowledge in very many areas.

Rebecca
But multi-hyphenate…

Jessica
That’s like singer-songwriter-painter. It’s the hyphen between all the different things that you do, so I would be visual artist-writer-designer, I don’t know, animator?

Rebecca
Yeah. But you don’t love that way of looking at yourself. You’d used the idea of a beaver?

Jessica
Yeah. Here’s the thing: since being invited to talk about being a multi-hyphenate, just the fact that I bristled, I’ve really been thinking about why. Why do I not want to talk about who I am, in this way of talking about who I am? I think that it comes back to that being seen from the outside, rather than the inside. I think none of us are singular, but I think to name every single facet of somebody as if they’re different parts, like a flower and all the petals are a different thing — there’s something that actually makes me feel like I’m pulled apart in being named as being many. Maybe it’s that box, maybe it’s a rebellion against that — like, “Ok, this is so much, but how do we still contain it? How do we still make this manageable? How do we make sense of this?” So to be defined by how many things I do, instead of what I do, I think is what makes me uncomfortable. I want people to look at my work, I want people to read the things I’m doing, and then often because I do so many things, the thing that’s the most interesting is the fact that it’s so many things, rather than the things. So it’s often the question I get asked — “What’s the difference between all your mediums?” And it’s like, “Oh, shoot.”

Rebecca
“Can you just absorb what you see, and feel.”

Jessica
Yeah, or look at the work. I worked so hard on it, man, and now I just have to talk about how it’s all different? I think that’s the bristle for me — it’s just, “Ok, so I’m going to be defined by the fact that I’m hard to define.”

Natalie
It strikes me as the limitations of language. It’s funny because the philosopher Derrida, he’s so famous for the way that he played with language, and basically made up new words to define new things. I really like his play with language, that’s something that resonates for me. I think it’s like: what’s the word, if you had a choice, that you would use, if you could just make up a word that would then actually, in some beautiful way, signify or summarize what you put out in the world? All of the pieces of you?

Rebecca
Because it’s not multi-hyphenate.

Jessica
You’re absolutely right, and I think that’s so empowering. Ok, you can resist something, but then what? You have to offer something. I struggle titling my poems, I struggle titling my paintings, but they’re windows — you give somebody that, you’re inviting them in. It’s a place where you can say, “Start here.”

Rebecca
Is it also related to, whatever the work is… is there anything about it not being finished? Or if you had to title it…

Jessica
I struggle with language because it’s so… it’s the defining, which is so important and so necessary. So then how does language open, instead of close? I think it’s that. Especially I find that with my paintings, a title is hard for me, because I feel like a painting has a kind of openness to it — that I want the viewer to come to it as themselves and allow it to be a different language. As soon as you put words beside it, so many more people are more deft with language that it makes the painting smaller, if it feels like a key or it’s saying, “This is what this is.” Like, a sunset — call a painting ‘Sunset,’ sure, but all the things that might be happening in there. So it’s just a struggle.

Rebecca
Yeah. And I think we are a really reductive society, aren’t we?

Natalie
Well, and I guess I’m saying, because I want to push back against that idea. Because I think yes, we probably have a proclivity to reduction, but at the same time, you could even play with that word and go like: a reduction — a balsamic reduction, in cooking, ends up actually really distilling down the flavours that you want to use in that food.

Rebecca
And opening.

Natalie
So therefore, it actually opens up a whole new concoction of what’s on your plate. So I think that the beauty of playing with language in the way that we define ourselves is that the word might change, but it’s this living document of sorts that is summed up in letters, and not…

Jessica
I just love the invitation of thinking about this. A number of words popped into my mind right away — like, ok, what am I doing? Well, I’m responding. That’s what I’m doing in the world. Here I am, that incredible thing of existing — speaking of French philosophers, we find that we’re here, and what do we do with that? And this is what I do with that. I respond to the world, and that’s what my art is. I’m feeling, and these are the languages I use to feel and to listen and to be who I am in the world — which is the beaver thing. So I have had a lifetime of watching animals, and grew up in some different villages in different parts of the world. One of those villages was a place called Bobcaygeon, and we lived in a cabin at the end of a dirt road. I spent a lot of time watching beavers as a child — I was a very patient, observant child.

Beavers create these magnificent structures, and they change ecosystems, and they’re these keystone animals, and they are workers. They work. They hear the sound of water, and they go and they fix it. They need to change the landscape, and they do it. And they respond, they spend their lives responding to their environment and changing it and making the world more habitable for everyone — including we human beings. So when I think about, “What am I as an artist? What is that I’m doing?” I feel like that’s my instinct. I move in the world like that. I’m like, “Oh, I hear some water! Better rush over there and put some sticks there, make a house.” I think that’s what I do, and then it ends up like — where is it, in Manitoba somewhere, there’s a beaver dam you can see from outer space. Generations upon generations of beavers building and changing the landscape. So even in terms of how I feel about who I am in time and space, my endpoint and beginning point isn’t even that important. I’m just having a conversation, being a human being with other people and artists across time and space.

Rebecca
Oh yes, a little housekeeping. Don’t forget to rate, review, or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you like what we’re doing here on Sister On!, your feedback really supports this reframing project of ours. Also, sign up for our weekly newsletter, which comes with a free recipe from Nat. And we have a new segment for our Patreon subscribers: mini-episodes which we call Life-Hacks and Enhancers — our five best things in a week. Check us out over on our Patreon, and consider a donation if these reframing conversations have supported you or someone you know. All the links are in our show notes. Love, Sister On!

Is it the moment to talk about the dead animals? Because I was reading your essay, which is bringing words to Claire Wilks’s drawings.

Jessica
So I’m writing a book about a visual artist named Claire Wilks. She also was such a responder. She really uses the female form as language, is what I think — so there are nudes that are just so incredibly powerful and feminine.

Rebecca
Lots of babies.

Jessica
Babies. Her work, I’m so drawn to it. You know, there are all the issues around still female bodies and pleasure and power, and her work is the work that…

Rebecca
Because it’s a bit erotic, and there’s all the babies plus the eroticism.

Jessica
Yes.

Rebecca
Probably makes people…

Natalie
Wary.

Jessica
Yeah, and you have to be almost naked with her work. It strips you down, too, and so it cannot quietly sit in the corner. It changes a room.

Rebecca
In the essay I was reading, some pretty personal stories came up for you around animals, including the one you mentioned about dissecting cats.

Jessica
Yes.

Rebecca
So you had to do that?

Jessica
It’s true. In the 11th grade, we did not dissect frogs — we dissected cats. One of my classmates, Sarah was her name, opened her cat. I remember even then — this would have been in the 90s, and she was a vegetarian, and a very gentle-hearted person, and we were forced. A lot of students were on the verge of vomiting. It was just really uncomfortable, all these cats laid out on all these lab tables. And she opened her cat and it had nine kittens.

Natalie
Good lord.

Jessica
Isn’t that terrible?

Rebecca
You also had to drown a lot of kittens, or your dad did.

Jessica
Yeah. I did not, just for the record. I have not killed any cats.

Rebecca
But was that just part of farm life?

Jessica
It was. I mean, it’s so interesting — when I think about how to even talk about how much animal death there is in my childhood, there’s a question of, now that there’s a microphone here, who hears what, and what story is yours. And so I don’t mind talking about it at all. I’ve been writing a novel for 20 years trying to sort this stuff out. And until I can figure out that piece of it, the novel is not going to be finished. Hopefully it’s getting better?

Natalie
Is the idea though that there’s a geography to this kind of conversation? Is it about rural existence? Because I’m hearing you say the word ‘farm.’

Jessica
I want to answer this because I think it actually gets at the heart of even what it is to be so multiple in the way that I am — this multi-hyphenate idea. I was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and when I was two years old we moved to Sierra Leone, West Africa and lived in northern Sierra Leone in a village. I lived there till I was about five or six years old. I’ve been back several times in my life. How I came into being was in West Africa, in a village with hunters and monkeys being eaten, and crocodiles in the river. Animals were a big part of life. That was my first sense of how to be a person — I learned that there. Then we moved to Bobcaygeon, Ontario, like a good hippie family, and my parents built a log cabin in the woods with trees off the land. But my dad’s from New Jersey. I had a very adventurous father (and mother), and my dad didn’t really know how to farm. He also does have a farm now (he has an orchard), and he’s always had animals, but we fit somewhere between being farmers and being adventurers. When I think about what happened to all of the domesticated animals in our lives, the line was blurred between what the purpose of each animal was in our lives. So yes, at the time, people used to drown their kittens. That was a farm thing that happened.

Rebecca
That’s in every story. Little House on the Prairie. I’m sure they had kittens there to drown.

Jessica
Yes. So there were a lot of drowned kittens in my childhood, and it’s horrific — but also, as my grandmother used to say, “We did it that way then.” But also it means we had pigs, and we ate the pigs, but they were also pets — so we also rode the pigs. So there’s a lot of blurred lines.

Rebecca
Right — it made sense to eat the pig, but it also was your friend.

Jessica
Yes.

Rebecca
So there wasn’t that disconnect. Because I know my friend has a farm, they seem to treat their chickens — they disconnect from them a little bit, because they…

Jessica
Yeah, you have to have a remove. That’s the thing about this path: how far do I go down this road? I’m so shaped by constantly navigating who I am, and how to be there, and animals are a big part of that.

Rebecca
Are you always trying to just go, “Was it good or bad?” Or do you even try to avoid that language? But is that part of what you’re negotiating — “Do I like this? Didn’t I like this?”

Jessica
Actually, I think I didn’t like it. I was trying to like it my whole childhood. I was trying to be at ease with something that I wasn’t at ease with, and now I understand why I was not at ease with it. I’m a pretty carnivorous — it’s not about… I’m not sure. I think it’s like: how do we hunt? How do we eat? All of those questions are there, and we’re responsible to every other living creature. There are beautiful ways and horrific ways to treat other creatures, and our cats should have been spayed. We could have done that, and we didn’t.

Natalie
That’s helpful to place that story, because now I understand a bit more about why you wanted to talk about it. I’m now connecting it to my understanding of the larger narrative that is who Jessica is, and then I can now bring it into your art. Because again, it goes back to the relationality piece. You’re so in relation to the world, but that world includes all living creatures, so there’s just something that really shows up in that story. That’s so fascinating. I’m kind of hearing you as almost sounding like a mystic.

Jessica
Right.

Natalie
No, no, but for reals. So I’m learning that kind of language…

Rebecca
And maybe in a family — it sounds like your dad was just being very practical. “We can’t have these. This is too much.” But how that might interact with a child who’s very sensitive, and mystical even — that doesn’t feel like a practical, just a fine thing. You’re experiencing a whole earth-shattering… or something. I don’t know.

Jessica
I mean, again, that’s the thing where we dampen ourselves. I think I’ve done that my whole life — I was shattering, and I was just a very deeply-feeling, spiritual person. That was my experience, and is my experience moving around in the world. As an adult, I now know that I was trying to make significant things less significant in order to survive it. I now know how significant all the ruptures were, all of those things. I mean, even artistically, I think that way — I really do just respond to where I am in the world. I think the art is that, and that everything that has touched me or that I touch, I feel some kind of responsibility to.

Natalie
Maybe that mysticism makes its way into the language around how you create. Can you talk about creating out of love or joy, versus creating out of torment and pain?

Jessica
It was a big revelation for me maybe about ten years ago, when I had some ruptures in my life and realized that I thought that other people who are writing are writing for the same reason, or other people who were making art were making art for the same reason. And just as we’re all different in the rest of our lives, creation doesn’t come through everybody in the same way or for the same reasons. Somebody might need to really express their rage, like you said, or pain, or just find something beautiful and draw it to understand it. I think it is pretty mystical for me — I think that’s true. I don’t actually feel attached to my work. I never hang on to it. I’m always surprised when an idea arrives. I really just feel like things do actually pass through me — which is a bit of a taboo thing to say. It’s ok, but it’s a little uncool.

Rebecca
Although not if you’re Elizabeth Gilbert, in which case…

Jessica
It’s fine. Right, like her idea of the genius, if you’ve listened to that podcast — you know, you are not the genius, the genius visits you.

Rebecca
And that’s ok if it passes on, because a new genius…

Jessica
Yeah. That’s a new one, and that can go to someone else. I mean, that just makes sense to me. But I think I create out of a kind of radical generosity — I want to give, and I make things because I want to give, and I actually would love to be part of healing and bringing beauty into the world and questioning things and thinking about things deeply and making space for other people. I come from that. That’s where I come from. We don’t all have to come from the same place — I think some people might be making work to understand themselves better. I don’t know, why do you guys make things?

Natalie
That was good, Bec. See how she did that? She turned it around.

Rebecca
Yeah. We don’t like it when people do that. We like to control this!

Natalie
Because you did write in that one email (and I underlined it for myself in my brain) where you talked about the radical love thinking from a bell hooks sort of perspective. I was like, “Yeah!” because that is such a beautiful way of framing the world, and yet, I’m not sure that bell hooks would have been speaking to me — as a black woman, I don’t think that she was necessarily in any way concerned with my needs as a white woman in this space. But even as I create — and yet, I think that that’s what makes my connection to her work, for example, so powerful, because it can’t just be about me. It’s about the bigger picture, the bigger story of what is creation for? As in, what is art for? It’s a roundabout way of saying I think that I am writing and creating and participating in the world of meaning-making. Not visual art, but I’ve got ideas, and I look for people to make those ideas real, because I do feel that the art I want to put into the world will make it a better place for everyone. So that’s where the radical love thing, I think, shows up for me. So that’s my slightly oblique way of saying it, but I think that that’s what I could come to.

Rebecca
Meaning-making — that fits. I agree.

Natalie
Thanks, Bec. And you?

Rebecca
Great analysis.

Natalie
What do you got, bitch?

Rebecca
I think art, for me, comes out of a deep curiosity about people, and why we do the things we do, and why we feel the things we feel. I think it’s curiosity. I think I’m just crazy curious. I have to do something with it — that curiosity.

Natalie
But I think that what I’m hearing you say, in terms of that curiosity and the turning things on their head or the remixing, it’s like you’re an artistic DJ. Because you literally, in your remixing — sometimes I read your Observables, and I have been with you for how many of the moments that now show up in that piece, but the way that you remix in your very curious, observing way of the world, also makes me a little bit weepy. Because I’m just like, “What the?! I was there for that, and I didn’t see that.” And I love that — I love that you and your creative abilities can help me to see a side or a part or a segment or whatever it is of something that I didn’t in that moment. You never make it about what you’re giving to others. You never say that about yourself, and yet you are an inherently giving artist because of what you create. So, thanks for what you do.

Jessica
Well, yeah, and even the distilling, right? It’s distilling, it’s taking that, it’s offering it back, it’s reflecting. I feel like that’s deep listening. I feel like I create also out of a deep curiosity. I’m interested in something — I’m interested in the beaver, I go learn about the beaver. I’m interested in how a bird flies, I take all these photographs, and figure it out, and learn about a wing — and actually, something important happens when you are attentive like that, and then you offer it back. And I think that’s the big conversation that we’re having. There’s something about if we can see this beauty and specificity of the people and things around us, if we can see that, we can be kind to each other. I think artists know that. They know that if we look really deeply, and think really deeply, and listen really well, we see each other — and if we’re seen, something has to change. We cannot harm each other anymore in the ways that we do.

Natalie
Oh my gosh, I love it. I know we have a whole speed round here, but I’m like, “I don’t want to do the speed round. I want that beauty.”

Rebecca
I do. I like the speed round — I still like it!

Natalie
That was a really beautiful thesis ending.

Rebecca
It was, Nat — and then we have to go ‘zzzt.’

Natalie
Ok, fine, do the ‘zzzt.’ No, it’ll be really good. Ok, what’s a common myth or something that people misunderstand about your profession?

Jessica
That I’m talented. Often, people will say “You’re so talented. Thank you so much. Thank you for bringing your talents.” I think the reason I say that is because I wish I wasn’t so irritated by that. But it’s because I’m skilled, and so art is a gift. I think it’s true, we really treat art as gift — always as gift. So it’s like this thing that came to you that you got to receive, and then you pass it on — but not that you’re skilled, and you worked at it.

Rebecca
There’s something kind of diminishing about just being, “You’re talented.” So you just have to wake up and just…

Jessica
And also like, “You’ve got it, so you have to do something amazing with it,” — speaking of the mystical stuff, it’s like what you do is mystical in our culture, and so it’s not a skill. It’s capitalism and gift culture meeting each other, right?

Natalie
Oh my gosh, yeah. So good with words, this Jessica. That’s a really good one. I’m going to have to sit with that. Funnest thing you did today?

Jessica
This, obviously.

Rebecca
How would your sister describe you?

Jessica
I need her to tell me. You guys are so good at saying who each other is, and reflecting that back. I would like her right here to tell me. Honestly, I have no idea.

Rebecca
Ok, any close friend? What would Shannon say about you?

Jessica
Shannon calls me gentle and wild-hearted. The lover of the wild and gentle is how she describes me. It’s wonderful having a friend who sees that — sees my kindness and also my wildness, and that I’m really gentle and really wild. You can be all of those things. But I think it’s such a hard question, too — because again, it’s that multi-hyphenate thing.

Natalie
Ok, what do you need to be creative — like an actual need?

Rebecca
No, don’t explain it.

Natalie
It’s true, I know — then I mess it up.

Jessica
You know what, it’s so simple. It’s actually nourishment. It’s just the same as everything else in life. Be well, be nourished, go for a walk — tend to your soul. Just the well can’t be dry.

Rebecca
And last one… take a big pause: what’s for dinner tonight?

Jessica
I don’t know. This is so terrible. I am so lucky, my partner does the food.

Rebecca
So something is being prepared?

Jessica
Something will be prepared.

Rebecca
And it will be delicious.

Jessica
It will be delicious — or it will be pizza. He loves pizza.

Rebecca
But he makes it?

Jessica
No — he likes bad pizza. So it could be that.

Rebecca
Nat, what are you thinking right now?

Natalie
I’m making ceviche tonight, so… I’ve got big plans.

Jessica
That would be better. It’s better than Pizza Nova.

Natalie
I’m listening to this going, “No, there will be no pizza in the future.” Jessica, just thank you for this.

Rebecca
Yeah, such a good conversation. I can’t believe we repeated such a good conversation. I think that means we could repeat it again and again and again.

Jessica
Well, thank you so much for inviting me into the conversation.

Natalie
I think we love you. I think this is like a really big…

Rebecca
You’re an amazing person.

Natalie
You’ve just opened some stuff up here for us that is really wonderful. Again, we go back to why we do any of this — part of it (and I’ve said this on a few episodes) is to get to hang out with Bec, because we honestly have spent more time together since starting the podcast this past year, simply because of like doing the episodes per week, and it keeps this time together when life can get so busy. But then it’s also getting to now make new friends. I mean, making new friends in your forties is a bit of a task, right? Because you have to search people out in different spaces.

Jessica
Well, and it’s so wonderful to have exhilarating conversation. If you’re somebody who likes to think and feel a lot, to invite other people who want to think with you…

Rebecca
It is exhilarating.

Jessica
It’s way better than going to a pub, trying to listen through noise you wish wasn’t there — nothing against pubs. You actually really get to be focused, and that’s what we all are doing with our lives. We are curious, we are meaning-making. To do that together, that’s actually the thing we love.

Rebecca
And we’re allowed to be really intense.

Jessica
Yes. We can be a lot.

Natalie
We can be all the things.

Rebecca
We were a lot for an hour and ten minutes, and it was totally fine.

Natalie
Yeah. I loved it — so thank you.

Jessica
Thank you. Thank you both, too.

Natalie
Love you Bec.

Rebecca
Love you Nat.