You mentioned the prison project and you're working
on that with Deborah Luster?
[NODS]
Could you tell us a little bit about how
working in a partnership with an artist in another medium kind
of affects the way you shape your book?
Well, that probably is also a little bit related
to your question that when you step outside your own media
and your own ego.
And stepping outside your own medium
is one way to get outside your own ego.
You engage somebody else and their sensibility.
Deborah Luster's and mine seem to dovetail,
and so I'm not sure that I'm great for collaboration
with any number of other people, including my husband
and I have never collaborated.
We talked about it and then thought,
oh, better leave that alone.
And then you know that it works.
It just, we have a good time and we work really hard,
very intensely, and then it's lots of aerobic laughter
at the end of the day.
And lots of driving, both of us like road trips.
And lots of things to talk about and think about
since projects are usually fairly interesting to both
of us from to get go.
And so we are able to sort of feed --
feedback for each other.
So if it's a nice way to work, I think.
And, you know, poetry is lonely.
So [INAUDIBLE] is a temporary fix for that.
[CHUCKLE]
What's the project?
Well, it's called One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana,
and she's been photographed -- taking portraits,
very formal portraits in the prisons for about a year
and a half at three prisons.
And some of them are environmental, and most of them
are, we set up a makeshift studio a little quickly.
And she prints them on aluminum, and treats the --
[INAUDIBLE] them and everything.
So they look like old tin types.
Not daguerreotypes, it's more like tin types.
And I'm writing the text for them.
And so I'm informing myself with visits and correspondence,
and reading and movies, and looking at her pictures.
And it's been a steady diet of prison stuff for awhile.
I'm almost topped off, but and so I've been writing it.
I'm just formally I'm nowhere near
satisfied with what I've gotten down.
The material is just there.
And politically, it's tricky, just not to screw it up,
you know.