Jenna Marie Fletcher will be reading at DTN in Portland, OR this Wednesday, August 9
I loved your Web Safe 2k16 essay. At first it felt like a great essay and then excellent poetry and back again. How do you know which type of writing will work for different pieces?
Thank you! I am not sure that I DO know, or at least consciously make that decision, to be honest. I like feeling things out during the process and, running the risk of sounding very ~woo woo~, I think the the art usually tells me what it wants to be if I can figure out how to listen well enough. The listening is still something I’m practicing.
The diary section of your website is this really arresting mix of photographs and other visuals. How did the process of putting that together get started?
I think the idea of “dabbling” isn’t taken very seriously as art practice, but that’s where I’ve always found myself. My writing, I think, can tend towards the confessional but I’m interested in secrets, ephemera, map- and mark-making. They may not be my primary mediums anymore but I think those scraps, images, scribbles are something that inform most of my writing. I’ve been interested in what that less literal communication looks like and think that it’s important context for the rest of my work even if you can’t draw clean lines between it all of the time. Some sort of breadcrumb trail.
What can people expect from your reading?
Poetry readings can be pretty fucking boring! I used to be very nervous about being “polished” or “getting it right” but I am trying, trying, trying to continue to cut myself away from those politics of respectability. I’m interested in the intersections of performance and humor and rawness and discomfort and playing. You can expect things to always get a liiiiiittle bit weird.