Tiny Interview #6 - Cameron Finch
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 Cameron Finch, multi-disciplinary writer and editor, whose story “Greening” was published in Issue Six of Tiny Molecules. Most recently, Cameron appeared as Isele Magazine’s Featured Artist of the Month.
Image Credit: Wreath of Laurel, Palm, and Juniper with a Scroll inscribed Virtutem Forma Decorat, 1474/1478, Leonardo da Vinci
Q: What book(s) are you reading right now?
A: I love that this question assumes plurality, because that is always the case for me! I have many voices speaking to me at once.
I am reading Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch, Mothers of Our Own Little Love by Jesse Eagle, Generations by Lucille Clifton, One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank, The Secrets Between Us by Thrity Umrigar, and The Nouns by Quinn Gancedo.
And at any given time, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s audiobook of Braiding Sweetgrass – that restorative voice – is never far from me. A touchstone, really. She is always bringing me back to wonder, gratitude, and life. Braiding Sweetgrass is without a doubt a book that has changed the way I experience time, silence, language, and non-verbal communication between humans and non-humans.
Q: What are your current writing projects?
A: My writing tends towards the lyrical, the bodily, the ecological, the queer, the surreal: bodies sprout plant heads, cyclically shed skin as the snake or lobster, and transform into larger-than-life oxidized statues. I’ve been working on several pieces where the body is not just a grammar of social and cultural expectations and biases, but also has a horticultural language that’s able to convey what human tongues cannot. I’m working on a collection of perspectives about a garden attraction that cultivates and harvests human body parts as … Souvenirs? Spoils? Memories? For example, in one section, we follow one genderless child’s moral dilemma as they find themselves an unwilling participant in the systemic harvesting, and come into the possession of a human head whose eyes they can't bear to look at. And yet, thrust into the role of caretaker, the child attempts a friendship or camaraderie with this precious head in their hands. This project is still very much in its seedling stage, so ask me about this later, and it all might change!
I am also organizing a “poetry-in-public” community celebration for April Poetry Month in Ann Arbor where I live. Over 80 local poets, ranging in age from 6-70+ years, submitted poems to be printed and displayed in downtown business windows throughout the month of April. Some of the poets have even recorded themselves speaking their works, which adds an extra dimension to the immersive poetry experience. I see myself leaning toward collaborative and public displays of art and writing more and more these days. I am electrified by making things with many people for many people, with more than one voice, with more than two hands.
Q: Do you work in any other art forms yourself? If not, which would you like to?
A: Oh yes, my writing exists because of trees, the earth’s breathing sculptures. Because of the films I watch over and over, I call them my gyres – The Fall (Tarsem), The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice), Amélie (Jeunet), Neruda (Larraín), Harold and Maude (Ashby), Call Me By Your Name (Guadagnino). I have filled notebooks with minute-by-minute notes, disassembling these films, investigating how they tick, and restitching their patterns and parts. The gyres are the height of my obsessions. Music, of course. "Danzón No. 2" by Arturo Márquez dazzles me with its soul and groove.
I believe that everything I am proud to have written includes the weather and chaos and yearning found in Zoë Keating’s piece, “Exurgency.” I am fascinated by dance choreography, particularly the language and philosophies of Gaga (Naharin) and Butō (Hijikata & Ôno). What else? Font design. Forests. Colors. Tongue x-rays (particularly the MRI films of folks beatboxing). Linguistics and the actual mechanisms of a body creating sound.
Q: Do any other art forms influence your writing? If so, how?
A: I have an art project I’ve been adding to regularly called “Stemming” that may or may not include written flash companion pieces one day. I’m not sure. In “Stemming,” bodies emerge out of organic materials like grape stems, garden beans, lunaria seed pods, and feathers; bodies are turned inside-out. It is somewhat comical and, I hope, tender. Sometimes, shadows are visible, and always the anatomy is fluid and scarred. I don’t often see figures depicted in galleries with scars or damaged tissue. Why is this?
I have been taking tap dance lessons for several years now, which provides me great pleasure and further reminds me that the human body is an instrument, too. Though I admit that my favorite kind of dance is the idiosyncratic, the unchoreographed, the sporadic, the ugly, the raw, the unplanned. This kind of dance I will dance with all my life.
Q: Where is your favorite place to write, and do you have any writing rituals?
A: I’m surprising myself with this answer, but I think … my bed – the place where writing emerges on the brink of dreams, between dreams, in the soak of dream. It’s often quite physically uncomfortable to inhabit my current body day to day, and somehow, being in this bed-nestled state grants me a kind of security or permission for my body and mind to peacefully slip into some other elsewhere.
On the flip side, my most sacred writing ritual is to walk. Walking anywhere can revive me, but usually my walks take me on particular routes that deliver me to a favorite tree. A good day should always involve a tree visit, hand to bark contact and a hello in your language of choice. I need cold air in my lungs. Walking is when I feel most alive, most embodied, most at ease and at home with myself. Writing is then the processing (or the grasping towards processing) of that aliveness. Writing is the remembering, the settling of rearranged dust. It’s the aftermath of a movement; the translation of the walk.
Q: Who is a writer you wish more people were reading?
A: I’ve dreamed of becoming a literary busker. In one of these dreams, I stand in some public place - a street corner or park square - and have a bag of pages from books I would like everyone to know about. As folks walk by, a page is placed not in their hand, but somehow in their day, their inner hand. It is with them now and they will feel the page pulse in them many times throughout their life.
Some of these loose-leaf pages would be written by:
Living: [Sumana Roy, Renee Gladman, Jos Charles, Jesse Ball, Nona Fernández, Vi Khi Nao, Olivia Laing]
Passed away: [The poet Ai, Daša Drndić, Ikkyū, Chika Sagawa, Friederike Mayröcker]
If I put brackets around their names, perhaps they will merge into two writers – one living and one passed away – who have built me, taught me, fed me. But the brackets go on and on.
Stemming, 2023, Cameron Finch