soap-content
Phoebe Gloeckner
The following is an excerpt from Phoebe Gloeckner’s Mistake House Magazine interview that speaks directly to the creative process: Internalized censors are always the most dangerous impediments to genuine expression. Dangerous because they are the most difficult to resist. Censorship imposed from the outside is often invigorating. It’s different from having your work ignored or discounted, which …
Emilie Gossiaux
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
FLYING We arrived in the windy city thirty minutes ago, two hours delayed. No apologies. Many passengers are missing their connections, but I opted in for a sevem-hour layover to enjoy the midwestern feel, after all. Never seen a substitute plane in the US until today, a generic plane, with no United Airlines …
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
I have always loved writing poetry and short stories. Even as a child, I wrote poetry about everything from inspiration to my father’s admiration. Poetry comes to me naturally because I think in imagery and metaphors, in symbols, and juxtaposed realities. To me, everything can inspire a good poem. I can take a small thing …
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
Mistake House Magazine: Let’s begin by talking about a poem in your book When the Wanderers Come Home (University of Nebraska Press 2017), “What Took Us to War.” This poem, like so much of your poetry, contemplates the trauma of Liberia’s civil war, which you and your young family fled during the first cease fire …
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
Dr. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley immigrated to the United States with her family during the 14-year Liberian civil war, a war that has shaped her writing as an African Diaspora woman writer in the United States. For more than two decades, Wesley’s poetry has given voice to the voiceless, the hundreds of thousands of Liberian war …
Emilie Gossiaux
In my practice as a multidisciplinary artist who is also blind, the work that has fulfilled me the most has been translating my inner worlds into the physical realm through drawings, ceramics, and sculptural installations. Creating works based on my dreams, visual memories, and my sense of touch, my tactile drawings become meditations of these …
Emilie Gossiaux
Mistake House Magazine: As we write, your exhibition Other-Worlding is open at the Queens Museum, where you have been an artist-in-residence for the past year. In several perceptive reviews the installation and drawings have been characterized as buoyant and celebratory. Central to the exhibition is White Cane Maypole Dance, an installation in which three human-sized …
Emilie Gossiaux
Born in New Orleans, LA in 1989, Emilie Louise Gossiaux is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Gossiaux earned her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2014, and her MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2019. Her solo shows include “Other-Worlding” at the Queens Museum (2023); “Significant …
Phoebe Gloeckner
Carl Phillips
From the very first poem in my first book – “X” – I seem to have been concerned with the body, the conduct of it, the distinctions between what we do and what we intend, between what we are and what we wish we were, the complicated trio of intimacy, trust, and betrayal (of others …
Carl Phillips
For this Soap Bubble Set feature, Carl Phillips has curated a series of eight poems that span his career. These poems, from X to Of the Shining Underlife, appear in chronological order, providing a retrospective overview of the scope of Phillips’ vision and voice. X Several hours past that of knife and fork …
Carl Phillips
Mistake House: In a December 2016 article in Poetry Magazine, “A Politics of Mere Being,” you write about the question of the way a politicized self can be read into or seen within poetry that is written for or within a space of individual experience. In that article you wrote, “at no point did I …
Phoebe Gloeckner
Mistake House Magazine: One of the central concerns—and one of the lightning rods—in your work especially in The Diary of a Teenage Girl and A Child’s Life and Other Stories is a cultural dilemma regarding adolescent girls’ maturation and sexuality. On the one hand, girls are often considered to be “good” and “pure” only if …
Phoebe Gloeckner
Phoebe Gloeckner is a visual artist and graphic novelist who currently resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan where she is an Associate Professor at The University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design. Gloeckner experiments with forms of multimedia and current projects include audio, motion, and static images along with text. She attended undergraduate …
Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips is a prolific, highly lauded poet with a career spanning several decades. He has published sixteen books of poetry, two books of criticism, and one meditation on the writing process. Phillips earned a BA from Harvard, an MAT from the University of Massachusetts, and an MA in creative writing from Boston University. …
Benjamin Garcia
Averting the Gaze mom didn’t know I was gay because she chose not to see like the maidens of Pompeii that were instead two boys we’d now call gay we found in a last embrace his head on his chest we might change our minds about who can hug who and girls might be boys …
Benjamin Garcia
I don’t believe in muses, yet I believe in setting the table for your muse. That is, creating the right conditions for creativity. For me this tends to consist of four things: (1) consuming materials, (2) writing notes down, (3) setting aside time to write, (4) connecting with my poetry communities. Consuming materials for me …
Benjamin Garcia
Mistake House: In this world of busyness and hustle culture it has become more and more difficult to make space for writing. How do you protect your writing time, and do you have any rules for yourself to keep your writing process on track? Benjamin Garcia: Any amount of writing is considerably more than no …
Samira Yamin
My work aims to cultivate a critical and dynamic relationship to photographs of war, a practice of viewership with an eye toward the global, political contexts and ramifications of representation, while nurturing an affective, loving gaze toward the individual lives represented and at stake. I engage with appropriated materials to make sense of how political …
Samira Yamin
Mistake House: In this world of busyness and hustle culture making a space for creative work has become increasingly difficult. How do you protect your studio time, and do you have any rules for yourself to keep your generative process on track? Samira Yamin: I struggle very much in this area myself. I tend to …
Samira Yamin
Samira Yamin
Samira Yamin is a visual artist based in Los Angeles, CA. She is best known for her media constructions of a nebulous Middle East as a place of perpetual war, critique of representation and photojournalism, with an emphasis on the relationship between ethical care and viewership. Yamin received a B.A. in Studio Art and a …
Benjamin Garcia
Benjamin Garcia’s first collection, THROWN IN THE THROAT, won the National Poetry Series and the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, in addition to being a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He works as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in New York’s Finger Lakes region, where he received the Jill Gonzalez Health …
Sheila Pepe
Mistake House: Here at Mistake House Magazine, we are interested in the ways in which the creative practice intersects with a sense of place and home. You have cited your experience walking across the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn as having inspired your piece Redhook at Bedford Terrace. How does your work draw inspiration from the …
Sheila Pepe
For more than 30 years I’ve accumulated a family resemblance ( see Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations) of works in sculpture—installation—drawing and other hybrid forms. Some are drawings that are sculpture—or sculpture that is furniture, fiber works that appear as paintings, and table top objects that look like models for monuments. The cultural sources and the meanings …
Sheila Pepe
Sheila Pepe
Sheila Pepe is best known for her large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculpture made from domestic and industrial materials. Since the mid-1990s, Pepe has used feminist and craft traditions to investigate notions concerning the production of canonical artwork, as well as the artist’s relationship to museum display and the institution of art. Venues for Pepe’s many …
Yesenia Montilla
Mistake House: Here at Mistake House Magazine, we see home as multidimensional, not always confined to one location. A number of the poems in The Pink Box such as “Magnetic” and “Sappho in New York” place the reader in very specific locations within New York City. In “Raise” you write that “home and homeland are not …
Yesenia Montilla
Invasion Prevention The next time I let tongues roam my body whose ancestors never knew Lucumí Yoruba, Taino or another Arawakan spilling out their mouth …
Yesenia Montilla
My process changed a lot once I found community. The art of writing is so solitary; when you find a group of folks that have similar writing stamina to you, that you can share your work with and that give you honest feedback, the world seems less lonely. I’ve been so lucky to be friends …
Yesenia Montilla
Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet and a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in poetry and poetry in translation. She is a CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. Her work has been published in Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, Prairie Schooner, …
Rob Fraser
My work has necessarily and naturally evolved through a variety of fields, but the fundamentals have remained the same: press a shutter button, the reflected light from an object passes through a light-tight box and records on light-sensitive material. A fleeting moment frozen in time. In late 1990 I left the Royal Air Force (where …
Harriet Fraser
This is the first poem I wrote, connected with the Sense of Here project. It is composed from notes made on the day that Rob and I walked in a wide circuit around the central point of the whole project: a sycamore tree. The walk, which we did on December 9, 2018, took us around …
Harriet Fraser
Joint Interview with Harriet and Rob Fraser Through their poetry and photography Harriet Fraser and Rob Fraser explore individual and collective feelings about place. Their collaborative practice, called somewhere-nowhere, is based in Cumbria and focuses on their local landscape. Its guiding principles include journeying, reflecting, and responding, with an emphasis on connection. Many of their …
Rob Fraser
Rob Fraser
Joint Interview with Harriet and Rob Fraser Through their poetry and photography Harriet Fraser and Rob Fraser explore individual and collective feelings about place. Their collaborative practice, called somewhere-nowhere, is based in Cumbria and focuses on their local landscape. Its guiding principles include journeying, reflecting, and responding, with an emphasis on connection. Many of their …
Rob Fraser
Rob Fraser is a photographer who now lives in Cumbria, UK. Proudly Scottish born, he spent his early years in South West England, where he grew up with the plains and wetlands of the Somerset Levels as his backyard/playground. His young adult years were then spent in Pembrokeshire where he began his work as a …
Harriet Fraser
Harriet Fraser is a writer of poetry and prose from Kendal, UK. She received a degree in Comparative Religion from Manchester University, focusing on Indian Society, Religions, and Languages, and Buddhist philosophy. In 2017, she received an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Harriet began her career in 1992 as a writer …
Harriet Fraser
I can think of three distinct situations relevant to my practice. First, when I am simply overcome by the need to write, I will do that wherever I am, usually by typing notes into my smartphone. I then email these to myself, and they form the basis of future poems or essays. Sometimes it feels …
Stephen Vitiello
1. World Trade Center Recordings, 1999 Visual: Audio: 2. Yanomami Recordings, 2003 Visual: Audio: 3. Winds of Peters Mountain, 2018 4. Bell of Hope, A Bell for Every Minute, 2010 Visual: Audio: 5. Something Like Firework, Davis Museum, photos by Richard Howard, 2010 Visual: Audio: 6. Fear of High Places, Sculpture Center, NY, 2004 Visual: …
Sylva Fischerová
Let me begin with a quote by Stephen Spender, the American poet, which I found while writing an essay about inspiration in modern poetry (the essay is entitled “Raven in the Lead Mines of the World”; this statement is based heavily upon material I collected when writing the essay): “My own experience of inspiration is certainly that …
Sylva Fischerová
MISTAKE HOUSE: Although home, like our art forms, can be something we care for deeply and invest in, it can also be a location for pain and conflict, as you have witnessed and as you have examined in your poetry. In a 2010 interview with Czech Radio, you revealed you weren’t attempting to escape the questions, …
Sylva Fischerová
FAMILY HISTORIES ARE FULL OF HOLES Father is on the Gestapo list, they’re going to look for him in Řečkovice, Viola will be plagued with dreams about this for years to come. He leaves the country then and ends up in Holland, first with Bolenka, the wife of a sea captain, later with a rich …
Sylva Fischerová
Sylva Fischerová is a Prague-based Czech poet. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1963 during the Communist regime, Fischerová spent her childhood in the Moravian town of Olomouc. As a writer and scholar, she possesses a valuable ethical lens. She lived through historical periods in which literature (including the work of her father, philosopher Josef Ludvík Fischer) …
Stephen Vitiello
Sound artist and electronic musician Stephen Vitiello creates both an aural and a visual experience for viewers/listenters. Vitiello creates sound with analog and digital electronics, traditional and homemade instruments, and incorporates a variety of sounds from field recordings from urban and rural environments. As an installation artist and composer—as well as a prolific collaborator—his works …
Stephen Vitiello
MISTAKE HOUSE: Many people remain oblivious to the seemingly insignificant vibrations around them, yet you’ve developed a creative practice from these daily sounds. When did you first realize that the act of intentionally perceiving and interacting with vibrations was conducive to the act of creating? STEPHEN VITIELLO: I wish I could point to some childhood memory and there probably is one buried, …
Stephen Vitiello
As an artist whose primary focus is listening, field recording has been a central part of my own practice since the late 1990s. As a sound artist, I am interested in what is and what is not heard. This can include making sounds audible that we would never hear without specialized technologies. These are sounds that vibrate at frequencies …
Rudy Shepherd
Rudy Shepherd is a New York City-based artist who was represented by Mixed Greens Gallery for fourteen years until their closure in 2016. In addition to an upcoming solo exhibition at Goodyear Gallery (Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA), his work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions at Mixed Greens Gallery, Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, …
Rajiv Mohabir
These days poems come to me through image first. I notice small things: on the road a flattened bird flaps its wings as a car drives by, on the lake two herons trumpet and tangle their necks, a dog coughs up worms. For me this has been the hardest part, I mean the hardest part, …
Rajiv Mohabir
Forced Conversion beti linepath school jaye, kheti kaun kari beta christianwa bhaye, pani kaun charai Not by the sword’s nose, but with books and cash, to make an army in the colony with one aim, the English decreed: “Those wanting to letter their tongues must fetter their hearts by drinking blood and …
Rajiv Mohabir
Mistake House: Much of your writing is imbued with images of migration—images of displacement and replacement, origin and refuge. What is home to you? Rajiv Mohabir: I think home is a series of dislocations—I’ve learned that to claim a physical place in the United States or the Western Hemisphere as home is to participate …
Rajiv Mohabir
Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017). In 2015 he was a winner of the …
Rudy Shepherd
Over the past 10 years I have been making work that explores the nature of evil through the mediums of painting and sculpture. This exploration involves investigations into the lives of criminals and victims of crime. I am exploring the complexity of these stories and the grey areas between innocence and guilt in a series …
Rudy Shepherd
Mistake House: You titled your recent exhibition at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn Everything in the Universe is my Brother after the title of a poem by Sun Ra, an American writer and jazz musician who embodied the Afrofuturist movement in his work. You also captured his likeness in your series, The Healers. How does Sun Ra’s “otherworldliness” inspire your work and how do you engage with the movement of Afrofuturism in your practice? Rudy Shepherd: …
Rudy Shepherd
In the Summer 2017 issue of Art Papers Magazine, painter and critic Paul Ryan wrote: Recent tragic events and individuals on both sides concerning racial profiling and police brutality—such as Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, Darren Wilson, the Ferguson riot, Eric Garner—are common subjects for Shepherd…[He] works from a conscious position of neutrality and places his …
Aurora Robson
On Aurora’s website, her bio explains her work as “the founding artist of Project Vortex, an international collective of artists, designers and architects who also work with plastic debris. In addition she has been working on the development of a college course called “Sculpture + Intercepting the Waste Stream” designed to foster creative stewardship at …
Aurora Robson
Reviewing Aurora Robson’s work in the May 2015 issue of Sculpture Magazine, critic Barbara Schreiber writes, “[Robson] works with a global nightmare of a material—plastic. Robson was first motivated to work with salvaged material after learning about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. She has an oddly personal attachment to her plastic flotsam, anthropomorphizing it in …
Kristiana Kahakauwila
Mistake House: You explain in a Writer’s Digest interview with Chuck Sambuchino that you found your voice and your vision when you were finally “fearless in [your] writing.” In your own words: “I let my stories access all my anger, my sadness, my confusion, my hopefulness. My characters, if they are raw, are so because …
Kristiana Kahakauwila
For me, the creative process—the act of writing—begins before I’m ever in front of a computer screen. I was on Big Island once, up in paniolo country, and I noticed how the grass, windswept, grew in arches. I knew as soon as I saw that grass that I was going to have to write it …
Kristiana Kahakauwila
Writer Kristiana Kahakauwila is of kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiian), German and Norwegian descent. She earned her BA in comparative literature from Princeton University and her MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. In 2015-16 she was the Lisa Goldberg Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. Currently an Associate Professor …
Kristiana Kahakauwila
On the slopes of Haleakala, high above the health food store in Pā`ia and just below the paniolo town of Makawao, once stood the Wai`olu Girls Seminary, named for the stream than ran beneath the girls’ dormer windows, the water so cold they could keep a jar of milk beneath its surface for three days …
Aurora Robson
Aurora Robson is an artist-activist working in wide-ranging media, though she is best known for her work intercepting the waste steam. Robson demonstrates the power of transformation in her work, repurposing plastic debris to create aesthetically powerful sculptures that draw attention to the issue of plastic pollution. Born in Toronto, Robson moved to Maui, …
Aurora Robson
Mistake House: In your 2013 TedxPeachtree talk, Trash + Love, you explore the idea that every aspect of experience is worthy of appreciation, despite any perceived lack of value. First, will you speak broadly about this concept of “attentive appreciation”? What is required, for example, to appreciate what seems valueless? What do you see as the …
Amy Pleasant
Photo by Jason Wallis Photography Amy Pleasant earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the Tyler School of Art. She currently works from Birmingham, Alabama. Pleasant’s work has been widely exhibited and reviewed, including solo exhibitions at Jeff Bailey Gallery in NY, whitespace gallery in Atlanta, …
A.D. Carson
A.D. Carson earned his BA in Education and Creative Writing at Millikin University and his MA in English from the University of Illinois, Springfield. He went on to work as a high school teacher while serving as the Writer-In-Residence for Benedictine University. Currently, he is completing his PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design from …
Amy Pleasant
Mistake House: Your work incorporates many media, including drawing, painting, sculpture and cutouts. How does the variation in media correlate to your creative vision? Amy Pleasant: Exploring the work through different materials helps me to understand the work in a more expansive way. I recently started working with clay. I like giving myself a new …
A.D. Carson
Mistake House: You’re equally involved in music/performance and writing. What would you say are some of the biggest differences between writing for the page and writing music? In what ways are these artistic processes similar? Do you utilize each medium toward a different goal? What informs your choice? A.D. Carson: Each piece dictates its own …
A.D. Carson
Familiar Producer: Preme Additional vocals: N/A BPM: 60 [1] This one for the niggas, the ones that was called that descriptor when they was delivered out there in Virginia, the ones ever since who have taken the care to defend the people surrendered from coast to the coast to the cold and the whip of …
Amy Pleasant
Justin Quinn
MH: Let’s begin with a question you sometimes seem to balk at by suggesting that your path has evolved by chance and that at times you simply engage with what is at hand. Granted that chance operations—including certain aspects of our lives—become the basis of discovery and choice, nevertheless, will you tell us what sparked …
Buzz Spector
1. By way of introduction I offer as my own an explanation of my artistic methods provided by a student attending a lecture I’d just given about my work. “So,” he paused before asking his question, “your art is tearing stuff up or stacking things?” I paused myself before replying, “well . . . basically …
Buzz Spector
Buzz Spector
MH: You work through multiple media–drawing, painting, the sculptural construction of books and pages, collage, and sometimes end your process with photography. For example, your piece My Fiction begins with a sculptural process and ends in a photographic one. How does the procession of media filter the ideas you wish to convey? Does this metamorphosis …
Justin Quinn
WOOD SONG I remember the world in spring — those few weeks when the blooming trees let go their pollen for the breeze with unexpected force to swing sky-high, multitudes milling round at different speeds of draught and drift so many metres from the ground — a festival, a stunning airlift. Maple, walnut, beech, alder, …
Buzz Spector
Buzz Spector was born in Chicago and was educated at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and then the University of Chicago, where he received the master of fine arts from the Committee of Art and Design. Internationally recognized as an artist and critic, his work has been exhibited in museums throughout the United States and …
Justin Quinn
Justin Quinn was born in Dublin in 1968 and received a BA and PhD at Trinity College Dublin. He co-founded the Irish poetry magazine Metre, which ran for seventeen issues from 1995 until 2005. Quinn currently resides in a Soviet-era housing project on the outskirts of Prague in the Czech Republic. He lectures at Charles …