Interview with Janée J. Baugher, author of The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction

This is an interview with Janée J. Baugher, author of The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020) conducted by Griffin Reed, Boulevard Assistant Managing Editor, in July 2020.

GRIFFIN REED: First I wanted to ask you a bit about the background for this book. You mention in your introduction that you wanted to create the guide to ekphrastic writing that you wish you’d had as a young person, and as a teacher. Can you speak on your motivation for producing this guide, and the value for writers in learning the ekphrastic process?

JANÉE J. BAUGHER: I never had any intention on writing a guidebook, mainly because I was in awe with titles such as Julia Cameron’s 1992 The Artist’s Way and Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux’s 1997 The Poet’s Companion, and I couldn’t imagine that I could contribute to the conversation in a substantial way. However, once I learned the term ekphrasis in 2004, I began collecting every article and book that I could get my hands on. As I myself was learning about how engaging with the visual arts was meaningful to my own writing, I began using images in the classroom as an easy way to help catapult students to the page. Though, the lack of material on ekphrasis as a process was problematic. So, I considered what could I do to attend to the multiplicity of art-engagement from the perspective of my field, both as a ekphrasist and as a teacher.

 The value for writers in learning the ekphrastic process is infinite. My first (volunteer) teaching position was on a psychiatric ward at Eastern State Hospital. For the second class, I brought in postcards from my travels in the hopes that my institutionalized students would relish looking at the images and imagining themselves elsewhere. That assignment was such a success that I’ve never taught another class since without introducing students to imagery and helping them to look deeply beyond what they see. Furthermore, if you look at description (i.e. “ekphrasis”) as a rhetorical mode, it’s a complex exercise that benefits us all. In the book’s chapter on technology and ekphrasis, I project that the need for verbal description exactitude will become more important as both programmers and laypeople rely on computers for tasks.

REED: In the preface of the book, you expand on an essay that you first published in 2009 in Boulevard. I really loved the paragraphs of this essay where you discuss the critical tension between visual art and ekphrasis, which adapts visual art in words—as you put it, “the premise that ekphrasists seek to upstage visual art with verbal interpretation.” If not a combative one, what do you see as the relationship between the two disciplines?

BAUGHER: What I know to be true is that engaging with the visual arts can be a portal to your own creativity. Yet, the volumes of scholarly work on the criticism of responding to visual representation is disheartening, especially when I myself have seen two decades of students finding their creative voices byway of art-engagement. As this book’s midwife, I hope to shift the discussion from “why do it” to “why not do it.” I wish to set the movement on fire, to extinguish the critics’ voices who rail against creative writers who find fodder in the visual arts. In so far as the relationship between the two disciplines is concerned, an artist before a blank canvas and a writer before a blank page are no different. Artists of all types are curious about the world and are open to creative possibilities. In this book I demystify the visual artists’ work so that the creative writer can align with artists, as opposed to feeling stifled by the critics’ adversarial construct.

REED: I’ve recently started to consider food writing an example of nontraditional ekphrastic writing—it doesn’t translate a visual artwork, but it does conjure a sensory experience through evocative language. Do you touch on any ekphrastic inspirations or applications in your work that might surprise the reader?

BAUGHER: It wasn’t until I met Judith Kitchen at a writers’ conference in 2012 where she presented her memoir, Half in Shade that I realized that ekphrasis was a mode not simply for poetry. So, in conceiving my book, I knew it was important to tout ekphrasis across the genres—a notion that might surprise people who’ve only considered ekphrastic poetry. Hence, I present numerous excerpts of ekphrastic nonfiction and ekphrastic fiction. Additionally, since I began my career in the sciences, it was important for me to offer instruction on how teachers might teach S.T.E.M., with the starting point of an image. For instance, beyond studying Alexander Calder’s mobiles in an engineering course, there are visual artists worldwide who explore and utilize science, technology, and mathematics in their artwork. Given this current age of image-inundation and the popularity of interdisciplinary studies, in my book I make a case for beginning with art to start the learning process of any subject.

REED: I see that in your book, you provide many examples of ekphrastic writing, including new works by thirty poets and prose writers. What can the reader expect from this collection of work debuting in The Ekphrastic Writer?

BAUGHER: My first notion for the presentation of ekphrastic writing was to reprint previously published work. I quickly realized that there were at least two issues with that approach: First, recycling the “greatest hits” meant giving more press to the elderly (white) men who’d mostly written to artwork by (white) men. Secondly, the cost involved with acquiring reprint permissions was astronomical. So, I took a teacherly approach. After I had settled on global art across the ages and in which women were fairly represented, and for which I could afford the rights for reproducing, I reached out to writers (some friends, some strangers). The key to writing ekphrastically is choice: It’s the freedom to choose the image that leads to successful ekphrasis. While some writers opted out because my art selection didn’t resonate for them aesthetically, there were thirty stellar writers who selected an image and wrote freely, for I had given them no constraints (aside from length). It’s no surprise, then, that their approach to art-engagement ran the gamut—from metaekphrasis (using artwork as influence but dispensing with description altogether), to formal verse; from a writer who was “haunted” by a landscape and wrote two different poems, to memories of grandparents and mothers; from flash fiction based on a single detail in a painting, to a persona poem; and from museum-experience ekphrasis, to addressing both the painter and model; etc. Each piece of ekphrastic writing curated for this book, is successful in that each gives the readers more than what’s there (in the companion artwork). All these approaches came about organically, and based on the unique approaches that each curated writing produced, I began to compose my chapters.