People like to look back and find meaning after the fact about how they got here, some of this is true and some is storytelling. Storytelling is meaning-making, I understand, but I don’t always trust it. This distrust works well in essays as it creates a constant need for questioning and rethinking.
Someone I know only from the internet sent this interview to me as a link, mostly because Oeding lived and worked as a writer and artist in Houston. I'd never heard of Oeding before today, but I read through the interview with delight, mostly because 1) I like her tone, and I'm very picky when it comes to tone and, 2) I'm a hound for reading about other people's inspirations. I don't receive a lot of book/art/movie/etc suggestions, so these snippets are suggestions I always take. I don't know them; they don't know me; therefore, there's an equivalency between the relationship of sharing that tickles my fancy.
There is another part of the interview I like. Paragraphs after she distinguishes between the past and the stories we concoct to Tell/Make Sense about the past, she states that she admires Henry Darger (yes, that was the sound of my heart beating more quickly, simply from typing his name) for there being
no line between [his] artistic and personal biograph[y].
It's hard to end an interview well. There's a string that you're supposed to tie around the end as if the entire conversation were a bundle to be shipped. It's hard to refute that bundle, hard to not fiddle with the string, hard not to tie it into a bow. But if you have to end with an Advice Round-Up, her's is pretty good:
Be humble. Don’t romanticize being humble. Don’t be so easily impressed.
Now that I've told you (via Oeding) not to be impressed, how about a bunch of photos of leaves and trees?
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| Two Days Ago, afternoon |
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| Two Days Ago, afternoon |
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| Two Days Ago, morning |
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