Tiny Interview #14 - Dian Parker
Here we ask authors we admire to share their musings on art and writing, spill their current reading obsessions, and give us a tiny wedge into their creative life. In this Tiny Interview, meet Dian Parker, writer, painter, and Best of the Net-nominated contributor to Observations. Parker writes for Art & Object, among others, and most recently her work has appeared at After the Art. She is currently working on a book of non-fiction.
‘Water Lilies,' Mary Vaux Walcott , 1879
Q: What book(s) are you reading right now?
A: I just finished Hernan Diaz’s novel, In the Distance. A harrowing, haunting, heroic tale of endurance in the wilderness. A mindscape of aloneness in “the tyranny of the elements.” Also, When We Cease to Understand the World, by the Spanish writer, Benjamín Labatut. What I’d call a nonfiction novel, warping fact into fiction and vice versa. I keep dipping in and out of Clarice Lispector’s Selected Crônicas ‒ a dream job writing about anything, every day for a year, paid for and published in a city’s leading newspaper.
Q: What are your current writing projects?
A: I’m working on a nonfiction book that is part memoir, part essay, part research and thus is taking me a long time to tame into a form I can accept. Because I write for a number of art publications about art and artists, as well as a series of essays about color, this research seeps into everything I write.
A: The visual arts; painting and sculpture. Crafting words into a visual display; a still life, distance landscape, stagnant pool, the color of an emotion or an event. The sculptural form of a sentence, a paragraph. And music. My father was a jazz musician, played the drums, so I grew up with rhythm and hear the rhythm of words; how they bank into one another, round out, strike hard, soften. Repeats, accelerations, legatos, fermatas.
Q: Do any other art forms influence your writing? If so, how?
Q: Where is your favorite place to write, and do you have any writing rituals?
A: I love writing long hand into black Moleskine notebooks with a black Pilot G-TEC-C4 pen early in the morning in bed, beside my partner and our two cats. The view out the bedroom window right now is swathes of white lilies among pink and white flox and golden yellow coreopsis. The hummingbird feeder sits in their midst where a male and female dash about. Then I move into the study and onto my laptop where I get hung up constantly revising.
Q: Who is a writer you wish more people were reading?
A: The French writer, Jean Giono. Many years ago, his book, Joy of Man’s Desiring, sent me on the path to commit to writing. I then read everything he wrote that is in translation. His ability to give a river, hills, sky, stars, peasants a voice is unparalleled. I drop in awe into his writing like I drop when I watched, breathless, as an osprey flew close over me as one did a few days ago. The epic, deep sweep of nature in all its terrible, beautiful power is described by Giono without sentimentality. Also Camus’ lyric essays (hopefully people are still reading his work). And the poets, Adam Zagajewski and Wisława Szymborska. Reading poetry has always been my daily practice.
‘Untitled,’ by Dian Parker (Black Walnut ink and mixed media on monotype)