Jessica Hiemstra : Writing Day

I spend a lot of time in airports and on ladders. I’m a concept artist, a designer, a poet, a painter, a friend, a sister, a daughter and a fool.  I travel all over god’sgreenearth for work.  I make things full-time, but what those things are varies. What doesn’t vary is what I’ve come to think of as my approach to making things. So – what’s my writing day? I’m not sure, but these are my precepts:

*

Be kind. In a nutshell, this means saying sorry and thank you. It means being generous when I’ve got something to give. It means delighting in the successes of other people. I tell them I love their work when I love it. If I care, I say so.  I make sure I’m nice to bus drivers, neighbours, colleagues, people outside the liquor store with no teeth (and ones with teeth). I make sure to write thank you cards, give money to things I believe in. I make sure to write letters to other writers when I’ve been moved or changed by their writing.

*

Be honest: This is still hard for me. Some things are hard to tell the truth about. But I’m getting better at it.  This doesn’t mean saying everything that’s on my mind (Lord knows, I wish more people said less, including me). But it means that if something is hard, I say so. And if something hurts, I say so. And if I care, I say so.

*

Be curious. I place great faith in curiosity. Curiosity brings me where I need to go. By following my curiosity I grow. Recently I got a compliment – someone told me you’re willing to be lucky. I liked that compliment. When the road changes, when I’m lucky enough to be lucky, I follow the new bend. When I pursue what interests me it somehow all comes together. Curiosity never leads me away from writing and making art. It leads me to it. It’s meant I’ve ended up in Nepal learning how paper is made. It’s meant I’ve failed to get to the top of a mountain in New Zealand and succeeded in getting to the top of one in Sierra Leone. It means that yesterday I was sitting in the audience for a play about an octopus by Shannon Bramer for which I’d done the set design. It was curiosity that brought me to these places. As did my next rule:

*

Risk. I try to touch things I’m afraid of. I like that often quoted Beckett quote: fail, fail again, fail better. I remind myself that I learned to walk by falling. So when I want to make something and have no idea how, I set about to fail, fail again and fail better. When I get to my desk I don’t set about to succeed. I set about to try. I set about to play.

*

Be nourished. When I hit a wall, I take a hard look at my life. I usually hit a wall because my life has to change, not my work. I do my utmost to take care of my friendships, my body, my intellect, my art. I don’t think any of these things are separate from my life as an artist. I put my friendships ahead of deadlines. I full-hog buy into Leonard Cohen’s words: Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.  I try to burn well. And to stoke the fire. I go to what nourishes me. And that nourishes the work. I try to meet the work in good health so I can offer what is required to make it. Which is my entire self.

*

Find solitude. I guess like most of us I’ve learned that being an artist can be lonely. Or maybe just being human can be lonely. But I don’t create out of loneliness. I create out of solitude. It’s in solitude that I meet my own mind. Solitude is where we keep company with our selves, and history and hope. Other writers and artists. Dreams. In art we do this crazy thing – we desperately want to make what’s within us visible to others. That’s nearly impossible. But only nearly. If I can turn off all the things that intercede between my mind and my pen or brush, I can actually listen. I can have long thoughts. I can slow down and listen to my own heart and all the other artists who are also at it or have been at it, this thing we do. If I’m taking care of myself and my mind I can be ready for the right words or pencil marks or ideas when they arrive.

*

Listen:  To people who say something’s not right or fair.  To people who know more than me. To criticism. To editors. To readers. To viewers. To my mom. To good music.

*

Be sincere: I’ve learned, hard as it is sometimes, to accept how much I care. I don’t hide from it. I make art because I want our world to be more habitable. And I mean that. I take what I do very seriously.

Jessica Hiemstra makes things. She is a writer, painter, designer. She lives on the second story of a little beige house in Toronto where she is currently at work on a novel alongside several new poems, paintings and drawings. She is trying to figure out how to get all the neighbourhood cats to stop sleeping on her lounge chair. She’s losing the battle. She’s lived in beige houses all over the world – from Botswana to Sierra Leone to Australia to Toronto. She believes art gives us the courage to live.  And she’s found this is true from the porches of all her beige houses. Her third book of poetry, The Holy Nothing, was published in 2015 with Pedlar Press. You can learn more about Jessica online at jessicahiemstra.ca.