2020 PUBLICATIONS
At the start of 2020, Alec Soth (with whom I’ve collaborated on this story) invited me to contribute an ongoing column to the Little Brown Mushroom Newsletter. I borrowed the title from a Buckminster Fuller quote.
It’s been a very welcome collaboration, especially during all the turns of this year. Among the people and things I’ve written about are Spalding Gray, Sam Shepard, Jake Skeets; ghost forests, a spirit phone, about in relation to the artists T.C. Cannon, Mary Frank, the sleeping psychic Edward Cayce, and on my hometown musicians Johnny Bristol and Etta Baker and Bob Dylan and the song collector Paul Clayton. At the end of 2020/start of 2021 I published a new column about time in the context of this year, Bernadette Mayer, and Charles Burchfield.
But back to January for a minute. I drove down to Norfolk, Virginia at the invitation of the MFA Creative Writing Program of Old Dominion University, where I had been awarded a guest professorship as the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing. This is where I was when the pandemic struck the U.S., and where I stayed through a semester that inevitably became me Zoom-teaching from my room in a converted beach motel.
I served as a judge in fiction for PEN America’s Prison Writing Awards.
I paid tribute to Charles Portis for the Oxford American. In late February for The Nation, I wrote about Andres Gonzalez’s photobook American Origami, a photobook and contemplation about mass school shootings, winner of the Paris Photo First PhotoBook Award in 2019
I contributed a short story, The Jeremys, to Aperture’s publication of the photographer Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures. Justine and I first met when she was still making that series (I’ve interviewed her for this and we worked together on a story about the Camp Fire in and around Paradise, California, for Vogue). The Jeremys is nominated for the Pushcart Prize in fiction.
I also collaborated intensively but remotely with the artist Carolyn Drake and the women in her pictures in the photobook Knit Club. An excerpt from my semifictional essay Sticks and Leaves, written for the book, was published by Contact Sheet. Knit Club was published by TBW Books at the end of 2020 and was a Paris Photo PhotoBook Award finalist.
I published three features in print editions of Aperture magazine. The artist Wendy Red Star guest-edited the Native America issue in Fall; it was an honor to write a feature about the photographers Richard Throssel and Horace Poolaw. For the Summer issue, Ballads, I wrote an essay about the imprint of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency on film and television (several years ago I interviewed Goldin for Vogue). For Winter’s Utopia issue, I spoke to Martin Bell, husband and collaborator of Mary Ellen Mark, about the making of a two-volume collection, published by Steidl, encompassing her life’s work.
What a lift it was to interview and write about the gospel musician Theotis Taylor about an album of his songs out from Mississippi Records, about growing up and raising a family and church in rural Georgia, singing with Sam Cooke, traveling to watch Martin Luther King Jr. speak, and working with the NAACP in its incipient days to protect and defend Black rights to vote. Story for The Guardian.
For the Criterion Collection’s beautiful box set of Agnes Varda’s films, I was invited to write an essay about Varda as a visual artist and photographer, work that predated her life as a filmmaker.
After the actress Linda Manz (Out of the Blue, Days of Heaven, Gummo) died, I wrote this essay Subvert Normality: The Streetwise Voice of Linda Manz, for the Criterion Collection’s The Daily. I’d interviewed Linda for T magazine several years ago and for a while we kept in touch; I had always hoped to meet her in person.
For HAOMA journal I wrote about the mycologist and musician William Padilla-Brown.
I had the honor of interviewing Garrett Bradley before the premiere of her tremendous documentary TIME and her Studio Museum of Harlem/MoMA exhibition; I also spoke with co-curators Thelma Golden and Legacy Russell, and RaMell Ross for the story, published in WSJ Magazine.
I published two essays, Desire Lines, about Alec Soth’s road trip photography, and Toward Transcendence, about Stephen Shore, for the Japanese print magazine IMA.
From just outside Tucson, where I wrote and worked in October, I contributed a piece to Aperture online about an exhibition at Etherton Gallery featuring Alejandro Cartegena’s transformations of vernacular photographs found in Mexico City and Tom Kiefer’s pictures of objects seized from people attempting to cross the border into the United States.
On the morning after Election Day, I visited the photographer Danny Lyon at home in New Mexico to talk about his new film SNCC, telling the story of the movement that also shaped his own life and his long friendship with John Lewis; a new edition of his photobook The Destruction of Lower Manhattan; and the forthcoming book of writings and photographs, American Blood. Story for The New York Times, Sunday Arts and Culture.
Some updates on past stories: Diana Markosian’s book Santa Barbara, the story of which was first unveiled in a feature I wrote for Aperture print, was published this year. Another wonderful book published by Aperture this year is Ming Smith’s monograph. I visited Smith at home in Harlem in 2018 for Cultured. Milford Graves, who I interviewed in his garden in Jamaica, Queens, for HAOMA, was the subject of a major retrospective at ICA Philadelphia.
And on July 6, in a rare bit of good news in 2020, a federal judge ordered the stoppage of work on the Dakota Access Pipeline. Read some of my reporting from Standing Rock here and here and here.