Carmen Germain
Oyster River Pages: What is the most challenging aspect of your artistic process?
Carmen Germain: Self-doubt can derail a person, and validation can make an artist sail. Maybe it works best not to fall hard on either side. Lack of confidence can cause a person to scowl "Why bother? No one cares anyway," and too many laurels too early can do the opposite kind of damage where everything comes too easily and the person doesn't evolve in the work.
ORP: What do you think is the best way to improve writing and/or artistic skills?
CG: For both: be curious about this life we lead. Observe. Live your life fully in whatever way is available to you, and pay attention. All art—writing, visual art, music—is not separate from you and does not exist in a closed, little studio or writing space. It's spread around you if you open yourself to it.
ORP: Who do you consider to be your creative ancestors and contemporaries for your art and/or writing? How does your creative work converse with theirs?
CG: Many writers/poets are also visual artists who have developed their creative life in both areas: Elizabeth Bishop (who used some of her paintings as cover art); William Blake; E.E. Cummings; Ferlinghetti; Gunter Grass ("Look, says the image, at how few words I need. Listen, says the poem, to what you can read between the lines"); Hermann Hesse, and Weldon Kees, among many others ("Painting and writing complement one another. Shifting from one to the other I don't get into periods of absolute sterility that are often experienced by writers who just write, or painters who just paint.")
ORP: Do habits help or hinder creativity? Why or why not?
CG: Some insist an artist has to haul into the studio every day or a poet/writer has to put in seat time every day, but these approaches don't work for me. Why spend six hours nailed to my desk working and working on just the right line or word? Why slop around in my garage studio if I'm not interested in what I'm trying to bring into focus? That said, it also doesn't work to wait for inspiration to suddenly halt me as I'm chopping onions for stir fry. I have to be open to understanding the ebb and flow of creativity. Do I contradict myself? So I contradict myself, to quote Walt.