Blog Post #1. Reframing the Grimm—January 8, 2024

This morning I woke at 4:15 with a massive case of Imposter Syndrome. I blame it on reading Tom Hanks’ book, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece and the beginning of a three-month-residency at the AAMP (Association for the Arts in Mount Pearl) Annex. For frig sake, I don’t even live in Mount Pearl.

This project is clearly outside my area of expertise. I am not a performer. Coaching high school drama without any training or experience, doesn’t make me eligible, in fact quite the opposite. As Mark Twain said “if you can’t do something, you can criticize” and my father would add “and if you can’t criticize, you can teach.”

In Hanks’ novel, a writer-director at the top of his game chooses to work for a franchise (which he hates) to create a comic book motion picture (a genre which he dismisses). In his novel (which I thoroughly enjoyed) Hanks takes us through every step of making a movie, from Source Material to Post Production. I believe that Tom Hanks does not intend to make an unknown Newfoundland visual artist wake up in the early morning with Imposter Syndrome. In fact, most of his many point-of-view characters enter “the Cardboard Carnival” with little or no formal theatre arts training. So, I shouldn’t feel unqualified…especially since I’m not making a movie.

Meanwhile, in a large empty room with theatre lighting in a bedroom suburb outside North America’s most easterly city, a letterpress artist has decided to create an Immersive Book. She doesn’t know what an Immersive Book is. When explaining it, she references haunted houses, although she has only ever walked through one haunted house in her life. There are a lot of things she doesn’t know.

There is, apparently, a Thing called Immersive Theatre. The fact that I didn’t know this, and that I had to have another artist explain it to me, only exacerbates my insecurities. Plus, after reading Tom Hank’s novel, I realized that theatre arts is a Real Thing, and there are Important People who are Paid a Lot of Money to Work Hard in this Multimillion Dollar Industry. And then, at the other end of the spectrum, there is Jennifer Morgan who, ever since she was a child wanted to make a book that you walked into. (Thought to self: Why do I keep falling into the second-person in this diary entry? And is it true that only homicidal narcissists talk about themselves in the second-person? She wonders.)

In Creativity Inc. Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull writes that creative people, like the Roadrunner cartoon, are laying down the train tracks, while driving the train. In order to create new things, we have to figure out the engineering required to meet our goals. I had no idea that my childhood goal of creating an immersive book, would lead my visual art to intersect with theatre. Dramatists are the engineers that have already figured out how to lay down the train tracks I need.

So, members of the ArtsNL jury, I stand before you, a lowly visual artist, alone in a large empty room, which I am filling with artwork that I am completing even as I write my next grant application. And no, I am not trying to mislead you by applying for a visual arts grant, when it is clear that 3/4ths of my budget will pay theatre arts professionals to animate my art installation. Yes I have a script (which badly needs dramaturgy—a fancy word I learned that means editing for stage) and yes I want to mount this play, but that doesn’t make my artwork a set, or me a playwright. Well, maybe the latter, because the existence of a play implies a playwright, but still, believe me when I say, this is Visual Art, just not mind-numbingly obscure, because, why can’t visual art be fun also?

(At this point the artist notes that it is twelve hours since she woke up in the early hours or this morning, and she has not had the nap she promised herself, ergo she is not thinking as coherently as she should be.)

On my first week of residence at the Annex, I brought a bunch of second-hand books that came from the Friends of the Library. I’m not supposed to tell you this, but libraries throw away a lot of books all the time. Books are donated. Some the library already has, some are added to their collection, and some they sell at fundraising book sales. They only have so much room for the leftovers. So I got a random collection of books to use as ballast for my Immersive Book.

Last week, moving the books into the Annex, I started reading the titles. And then I started sorting them according to interesting titles that related to the subject of my Immersive Book. And then I created the Book Title Poem in the photograph at the top of this blog. I’ve typed it out and pasted it below.

To me this poem is talking about the abuse that is subtext, and the child murder that is in the text of the Grimm’s fairytale, “The Juniper Tree.” I’m not sure if “Book Title Poems” are a thing or not. I know that I’m not a poet. I just want to turn this story around in my head, look at it from different directions, using different media, and then I want to illustrate it, or to comment on it. Because that’s my job as a visual artist. I create art that makes you look at the world differently, that helps you see things you didn’t see before. And that’s what I’m doing in this residency, with my Immersive Book.

–Jennifer Morgan

The Case of the Kidnapped Angel

I.

One winter in Eden,
When God doesn’t make sense,
The Good Mother
Alone in the classroom,
Surrender
Multiple blessings
In the strong woods.
“If you want to see your wife again…
Walk gently this good earth,
Dragon and Phoenix.”

Kisses of the Enemy,
Another part of the wood,
Rich men, single women,
Too much too soon.
Portrait of a married woman:
The home front flowers of evil
And Baby will fall.
An irrelevant woman,
Damned,
Twisted until the End.

One hour to kill
Fire from Heaven.

II. Obit.

First star I see tonight,
Dark Prince,
The second son of Heaven.
The danger
When maidens mourn
For the love of a child.
The Devil’s cure,
The heart of justice,
Judas child,
Dying breath.

A scream of murder,
Murder on location.

The immigrant’s daughter,
As empty as hate,
Kiss the boys goodbye.
A nice class of corpse,
Sheila O’Flanagan,
All for you,
Golden Girl,
Witness to Evil.
No greater love
People like us,
(Savages.)