September Artist Spotlight: Architect of Sentences Morgan Grayce Willow

Hi Morgan, we appreciate you taking the time out of your day to tell us more you and your artist practice! Let’s start with what is your art form?

I identify as a poet, and poetry is what I did my graduate creative writing degree in at Colorado State University. I also write creative nonfiction – primarily essays. In recent years I have learned to enjoy the book arts and collage. In fact, one of my projects in classes at Minnesota Center for Books Arts is an accordion book entitled Collage for Mina Loy.

When did you first become interested in writing? How did it happen? Who were some of your influences?

Growing up on a small family farm, I didn’t know that being a writer was something that a person could be. The first step, though, was discovering the wonder of reading. We didn’t have many books in the house, so the first books that actually influenced me were Webster’s Dictionary and the family Bible. Long before I could actually read, I would climb on the sofa with one or another of these books and pretend to read. Luckily, my parents recognized my eagerness and sent me to the country school for kindergarten, even though I was still a little too young. There I read my way through Dick and Jane books, much to the consternation of Sister Ida at St. Mary’s Academy where I was transferred for first grade. The other students were just learning to read, so I tended to get a bit ahead in our little reading circles. When my turn came, I appeared to be off task, but actually I was a few pages further into the story.

Writing came along as reading’s sidekick. I remember being fascinated by language, even in the early days when the nuns taught us about nouns, verbs, direct objects, adjectives and so on. While most students hated it, I loved diagramming sentences. So, the architecture of sentences was an early influence. I even liked spelling. And learning the origins of words became a fascination once I discovered that each word has its own story.

Do you remember the first poem or story you wrote? What was it about?

I wasn’t introduced to poetry very early, although I do remember discovering a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems. I fell in love with the repetition, rhythm, and mystery in his poems. I recall writing a poem about spring in sophomore English – three stanzas of ABAB rhymed quatrains. Fortunately, that’s all I remember about it.

The poem I consider to be my first poem was an ekphrastic poem, though of course I didn’t have that name for it at the time. The summer after I graduated high school, I worked as a nanny in Chicago – a huge change for a farm girl like me. I spent my days off downtown at the Art Institute where there was a Picasso exhibition. I became enamored of “The Old Guitarist,” a painting from his blue period. I bought a poster of the painting to have in my dorm room at college in the fall. About midway through my first semester, for my weekly “reaction paper” assignment, instead of an essay, I wrote a piece with line breaks. It was a response to that painting. No rhyme, this time. Free verse. The instructor didn’t fail me; in fact, he encouraged me. So that set me on course to becoming a closet poet. I didn’t have the courage to share my writing with anyone for a very long time.

I have recently revisited that painting. I have a fresh response to it with both a poem and a collage, each entitled “Picasso’s Old Guitarist, Redux.”

What do you gain from teaching that you don’t get from producing your own work? What do you enjoy the most about each?

My favorite part about teaching is seeing students discover their own particular access to creativity through the language they already have and use. I enjoy guiding them through a creative process in the form of various exercises and experiments. Often, they will be surprised by the outcome – by a turn of phrase, an image, a rhythmic set of lines. Seeing their faces light up with discovery helps refresh my access to my own creativity. While I have been at this process of creating with words longer than they have, I still feel that I am a student of language. Their discovery nurtures and empowers my own creative process. I get to then take that feeling of renewal into the sacred space of solitude from which I write my own poems.

During this time of virtual and remote programming you helped reignite the Literary Post program in collaboration with clients at the Living at Home Block Nurse Program in Granite Falls. How was that project? What was that process like?

Reviving the Literary Post Program with clients at LAH/BNP Granite Falls was a very rewarding experience for me. We had a bit of a slow start getting the program up and running. However, once it was in progress, I looked forward to seeing what would come through the letter slot with each day’s mail delivery. I started out with the same prompt for everyone, but very soon my prompts and responses to their work became tailored to each specific writer. Some took off as though the program had unstopped a cork that had been holding their stories inside. Some revisited poems or memoirs they had been developing on their own and sent them to me for response and feedback, which they used for revision. One writer had a packet of writing she had been working on for years just waiting for a mentor’s response. Another wrote entirely fresh work using the prompts I sent her. Yet another, a poet, tried out my prompts and suggestions for exploring new forms, then in the end returned to the familiarity and comfort of the traditional style he had been using for years, with renewed vigor. Each writer contributed work to Make the Wind Sing, a COMPAS anthology. For one writer in particular, having memoir excerpts published in the chapbook were a lifelong dream come true. It was a privilege to serve as midwife to this re-birthing of Literary Post.

For more about the Literary Post program, see the April 2021 COMPAS blog.

Have you been working on any new projects lately?

To be honest, I have had difficulty writing in the midst of the pandemic and the upheavals in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. While on the surface, change in and to our lives and culture have been rapid and fluctuating, internally I have needed a much longer time to process and integrate all that change. What this has meant for my writing is that I’ve been writing tons in my journals – and keeping visual journals as well in which, often, collage has centered me. So while I have produced fewer finished poems, for example, I have been writing lots and usually every day (except Sunday). The new poems I’ve written have not yet coalesced into a “project” or collection. Meanwhile, I have been trying to place a collection I’d completed earlier entitled Oddly Enough with a publisher. And the publisher of my collection Dodge & Scramble has expressed interest in my essay collection A Matter of Translation. I am working on revisions and a couple fresh essays for that project.

During this time of great change in Minnesota and around the world with the uprising of anti-racism work and recognition of white supremacy, how do you see the arts as fitting into that story?

I see the arts as being at the very core of this transformation. It’s through the arts that we have access to avenues of expression for deep challenge and internal struggle. The arts – in all genres – provide both carrier and crucible for examining our deepest values and embodying expressions of our better selves. I think this is the case in both process and product. We can take risks and ask penetrating questions in our poems or collages, as well as try out our vision of a better, more equitable world. Especially if we support each other as artists through this transformation – have each other’s backs as we make mistakes and adjust from them – we can build, through artistic endeavor, greater community. In doing so, we have the power to create the more just world we want to live in and pass along to next generations. We need each other in and through the arts.

You have been a part of the COMPAS community for a long time and just recently rejoined the roster in 2020. What’s it like to be a part of COMPAS again?

It feels great to be part of the COMPAS community again. I would say the community as a whole – both teaching artists and staff – is much more diverse now than it was when I was first involved. This is true of individuals and also of artistic genres represented by artists. COMPAS is certainly more well-known now, especially among schools. If you say you’re with COMPAS, more people recognize immediately what that means. The advent of the internet and social media in the interim has a lot to do with the COMPAS name recognition. I think this is also true of the variety of programming and multiplicity of successful impacts COMPAS programs have in all of its communities and among the broad spectrum of populations COMPAS touches.

How do you practice creativity in your everyday life?

I’ve mentioned my journals. They are absolutely essential to my creativity – and to my everyday life. I don’t see the two as separate, although admittedly, making my time and schedule function to support my creative work is a daily challenge. A few years ago I sat in on a workshop with Naomi Shihab Nye. She encouraged us to go to our writing space and/or notebooks first thing in the morning (after grabbing a cup of coffee) and giving ourselves five to seven minutes there with language before other intrusive language of the day (e.g. news headlines) can get to us. I do try to practice this and, in fact, keep a designated notebook series that I fondly call my Five to Seven notebooks. I can linger longer if so inclined, and I have the time, but the minimum time, however small, helps me put creativity at the top of my day’s agenda. And any time spent writing – reading too – helps keep my language muscles nimble for poems. I also use my notebooks to jot down ideas, titles, images, turns of phrase that feel like they may have potential for poem jams. Having access to them means that on any given day, I have lots of self-generated prompts available for those moments when I have time but no immediate inspiration. I think of it as a daily practice of writer’s block prevention and creative self-care.