You’re Going To Change As You’re Doing It - On Art And Becoming
Tara McGowan-Ross is an urban Mi’kmaq multidisciplinary artist and writer living in Mooniyaang/Teionihtiohtiá:kon/Ville Marie/Montréal. She trained in philosophy at Concordia with a focus on Indigenous disruptions to Enlightenment-focused Western philosophy, ethics, and leftist political philosophy.
We met in November to discuss her books, Girth (Poetry, Insomniac Press, 2016); Scorpion Season (Poetry, Insomniac Press, 2019); and Nothing Will Be Different (Memoir, Dundurn Press, 2021). The following has been edited for length and clarity.
For the first half of our 30,000-word-long conversation, visit The Miramichi Reader.
Tara McGowan-Ross: My husband’s a painter.
Kevin Andrew Heslop: Mm.
And he talks about how a painting is not just a snapshot of where you are as an artist; it’s a record of you becoming a better artist—and that’s why you start with broad strokes and go down to details, basically, as you go through it. You’re not just Huzzah! Here I am! It’s like, You’re changing as you’re making it.
Mm.
And it’s like, I could just keep on writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting a book, and it would never feel finished because I’m changing as I do it. And so there’s a point where I have to be like, Honestly, just print it. And I’m radically different now than when I started it; and the goals I set out to accomplish I don’t even recognize anymore; and honestly, just print it. I feel like I would have the exact same problem if I worked on a book for ten years as if I worked on a book every three. And it would just have been a greater delay.
Mm.
I suspect I would have the same problem. I don’t know because I’ve never taken a long time to write a book; and I’ve been publishing quite prolifically since I was 24. So, I’m just like, Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go. And there’s something about the relative impermanence of even just the perspective, the me that’s writing. I’m not that person at all anymore. I remember her and I recognize her, but she’s gone. But I also felt this sense of that always being a possibility and something that I thought was going to happen while I was doing it; and it’s nice to be able to visit her sometimes; and also there’s this constant practice of trying to put some respect to her name because she got me to where I am now. So even if I do outgrow her work, I wouldn’t be me without her; so it’s like, I owe her everything.
Mm, mm.
And that keeps me from falling into a shame-pit about it because the whole thing is impermanent. The whole thing is just changing and moving and growing and I think the whole art practice is about the grit of being able to endure being embarrassed. Can you endure being able to go and just fall on your face? Or make art that’s bad? Because it’s inescapable: even your best work now is going to be embarrassing in comparison with your best work in ten years.
Mm.
So you can try to hone and make everything perfect now, but you’re still going to have that cringe moment, because you’re going to change as you’re doing it. And if you wait to be ready, you’re never going to do it.
So, a friend of mine says, Be crazy in public because it gives other people permission to be crazy in public.
Totally.
And as I studied your first book of poems, then the second book of poems, and then the memoir, I watched the accumulation of tools of self-care and stabilization—
Mm.
—And boundary-making. “I only read emails from noon to two o’clock on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,” reads the footer of your email signature—in public in a way that gives other people permission to take care of themselves.
And I don’t really believe in nouns, and there’s no such thing as a job, but to the extent that artists have jobs, I feel like it’s that: it’s readying the instrument—
Mm.
—For inspiration or something like this. And there’s no question here. Just a spaghetti of perambulation *laughs*.
Totally. Yeah. So, I think that this makes me think about how I think that there is—
—Also, the body is God.
The body is God. Okay. Cool. I love that. I think that there’s—For some reason the first thing that’s popping in my head is this idea that I’ve been playing with a lot recently, which is that there is a point at which every artist needs to contend with this very Simone de Beauvoir idea that all people are both subjects and objects. I am both this fundamentally irreducible eternity that goes on forever inside of myself, and also I am a thing. And I’m a body in space. I’m a thing that exists in the world. And that thing that I am that exists in the world has a bunch of meanings that I don’t necessarily get any say in constructing, you know?
Mm, mm, mm.
And also that other people are going to project whatever they want onto and I can’t control that and gender factors into this and then also that the artist—gender, race, et cetera factors into this—but also the artist as—The art that I make is both of me and really really not of me at all as soon as I let go of it. There’s kind of nothing that I can do to control how it’s going to be received or worked with or whatever; and it is the property of the reader in a very serious way. That is a sacred and important thing and that’s an agreement that I’ve made with the universe when I let go of it. It’s like, It’s mine, sure, but it’s also really not, you know? And that means that people get to hate it. They get to love it. They get to project onto it. They get to see themselves in it in a way that I would never see myself in it or I didn’t intend or whatever. And that’s allowed. That’s okay. That’s how it works. That is the work functioning properly.
Mm.
And then there’s always this little bit of—and sometimes I wonder if this is me being a narcissist who’s always a little bit wanted to be a celebrity—the artist is a person who is sovereign and deserves privacy and also is just a public good that people get to project onto and take away from and whatever. And I don’t think that I can get away from that. I can set boundaries, but a part of it is also just a fact; and I can’t—And if I try to avoid it completely I will be avoiding something that is just true of being an artist. So this makes me think about how—And then this leads into something that I noticed when I first started writing: I’ve always been interested in writing about myself, mostly because, when I was really young, I had a very hard time expressing myself in words. I think I really became an artist and a writer because I sucked at talking, you know? And this is another thing where people are just like, You’re so different in person than you are—And I’m just like, Yeah, yeah yeah! Because I’m not very good at being an in-person person—or if I am good at it, it’s a very hard-won skill that I’ve never been naturally talented at. And it’s like, Who becomes an artist because they’re amazing at being a person?
*laughs through nose*
It just seems weird to expect that I did this because I was just fantastic at being a person in real life. Because I’m not. I’m an artist because I’m a freak, you know? And so I kind of inevitably had to write about myself because my first practice writing was me being like, I am very upset about this thing; and if I say it in person I’m going to start crying and it’s going to be embarrassing. And that was the beginning of me learning how to write, was just learning how to express myself in a way that felt safe.
Ah.
And had enough distance that I could actually do it, so I could express complex thoughts and feelings, you know? So I was always really present in my writing practice, and then I’ve also been a very ambitious person. And I’ve always really liked myself. Even when I was going through a hard time mentally. I’ve recently been playing with this idea that I think a lot of my mental health issues was not born out of a fundamental sense of worthlessness—
Yep. Yep.
—That a lot of people talk about. It was in fact a weird kind of dysphoria where there is this internal world and self-hood that I experienced and I could not figure out how to make my actual self match that, you know?
Well put.
And that was frustrating and disappointing and made me mad at myself because I knew that the person I wanted to be was up here, but I didn’t have any of the skills that I needed to have to be her out here. And so I’m a bit of a late bloomer because a lot of those skills were complicated and took a long time to figure out how to do. And also I’m kinda lazy *laughs* and acquire skills slowly. So I’m ambitious and I’ve always considered myself to be kind of a smart person; and so I always had all these opinions; and my selfhood was really present in my writing, because I had to write because I couldn’t really talk very well. I didn’t have those skills. I got good at [writing] pretty early. And there’s a way that I almost wanted to be preachy really young. But people don’t like that. People don’t like when you’re preachy to them. And this is a thing that I’ve realized. People hate it when you take up the role of educator when they haven’t consented to that dynamic, you know? They really don’t like it if you sit down and explain something to them, they don’t like that—in a specifically education context, of course, if they ask you a specific question, they like it. But they don’t like being preached at. And I have so many opinions. And I want to mansplain so badly. And also, I wanted to do it in a way where people would actually listen to me. And the cool thing about talking about yourself—
Ahh. Cunning.
—Is that if you’re talking about yourself, and if you’re kind of making yourself into a bit of a jester, if you’re a goofy person in an infomercial who’s always spilling water on yourself, is that people will listen to you and ultimately kind of see themselves in you. And so I think about this post-war kind of thing where I really—A lot of those (mostly) women who were doing that confessional poetry were very much making themselves sacrificial lambs. They had to take on—I think they were doing something that was very good and very valuable that was about taking on this pain and expressing it in order to hold the reality of what society was actually like in dynamic tension with this Leave It To Beaver whatever.
Lovely. Because they weren’t provided with the platform from which to teach about anything other than their own experience. Oh, did you have a bad Thursday? You can tell us about it.
Exactly.
And then using the aperture of the self to talk about the world.
And somebody had to provide some alternative to everything’s fine and also women are things and what do you mean you don’t feel super fulfilled being a housewife and time for your lobotomy.
*chuckles, exhales sharply*
And somebody had to provide some alternative to that. And so I think that—
Jesus.
—Especially in my early work, I was like, If I can find out a way to get over how humiliating it can be to be seen as ridiculous and if I can figure out which things I’m comfortable exposing about myself and which things I’m okay with being like, There it is, then there’s a way that I can do this thing that I have always wanted to do, which is be kinda preachy, and speak my mind, in a way that people will actually listen to. My friend jokes that I have jester’s privilege, where I’m often like, If you say something kind of inappropriate, if you say it silly enough, if you say it funny enough, and you’re also like actually genuinely non-threatening and insightful enough and also you’re kind of making fun of yourself, then people can’t help but listen to you. And this has always been the strength of satire and the strength of the jester and the jester in the king’s court, is that that person can say things that other people are like, I literally can’t say that or there will be huge consequences. And I’m interested in doing that kind of work, which is also why I think about it as being protest art, as practicing the agitate part of agitate, educate, organize. And if I’m willing to talk about how I have been foolish and if the art is not a way of me just—and the same way that a painting is not just a snapshot of how good of a painter you were at that moment, but is in fact a record of you becoming a better painter, if the art is not just a snapshot of what a great person I am, and how awesome I am, but in fact a record of how I acquired the skills that I need to acquire in order to be a person that I really like being, and I show all of the ugly, ridiculous, absurd steps along the way, and I can make them funny and stupid, then that can actually be a helpful kind of mirror to hold up to people and be like, Are you ridiculous like me? Because I like myself and I’m doing great. If you see yourself in the way that I am foolish, then know that there’s hope for you too. If there’s hope for me, there’s definitely hope for you.
Please visit The Miramichi Reader for the full interview with Tara McGowan-Ross.