Edited excerpts from an essay written in December 2023 for Life Writing 1600-1800: Personal and Political Histories, taught by Professor Carrie Hintz at the CUNY Graduate Center.

The Object

Book of the Dead is a multimedia project in book form that I worked on between October 2022 and August 2023. It is intended as a navigational aid for the dark space of personal transformation. The center piece (“The Centerfold”) is orientational, serving as both compass rose and legend; each of the remaining twenty-four pieces marks or describes an encounter with a form – a feeling, event, or motion that is necessary to the process of transformation. I made Book of the Dead as a way to trace my own path through a tangle of internal and external change; it represents both a desperate attempt to light my way in the moment and the hopeful idea that, having done so, I might provide a map for future experiences, for myself and for others.

The substrate of Book of the Dead is a three-subject wide-ruled composition notebook whose pages have been glued together, giving it half the number of pages at double-thickness. It is covered with brown paper that is blank but for a few smudges of paint. The book contains twenty-five separate multimedia pieces; each piece is a two-page spread. Some of the pieces are back-to-back, so that you turn the page directly from one piece to the next. Some are separated by blank pages, or rather by pages that hold only the backs of the previous and next pieces; such spaces are necessary if one or both neighboring pieces are embroidered, because the thread goes through to the back of the page. With the exception of the center spread, which is untitled, each piece is labelled with a title at the upper left-hand corner; the titles are handwritten in pencil, pen, or permanent marker, or typewritten.

Because the pages have been crumpled, and because they carry layers of paint, paper, thread, and other materials, they do not lie flush against each other. The book no longer closes all the way, being about four inches thick at its outer edge. When it is resting on a flat surface, the front cover and sometimes the first few pages might flip open; given a bit of a nudge, the book might open itself to a random spot, often to the backs of pages between pieces. The initially uniform appearance of the gold edging is now broken up by the slivers of color visible on each page, and by protruding bits of embroidery floss, fabric leaves, and fabric flower petals.

The Media

Watercolor paint

Acrylic paint

Tempera paint

Chalk pastel

Pen

Pencil

Permanent marker

Graphite transfer

Adhesives: glue stick, acrylic medium, Mod Podge, modeling paste, hot glue, scotch tape, masking tape, painter’s tape

Embroidery floss

Thread

Ribbon

Yarn

Metal charms

Images cut from magazines, wrapping paper, and a postcard

Images cut from photocopies of books, magazines, photographs, and drawings

Images cut from printed-out photographs and digital sources

Paper

Fabric

Shells

Stones

Fabric flowers and leaves

Sequins

Stickers

Menstrual blood

One bead

One envelope

One needle

One bandage

One candle

Textuality

           It seems important to acknowledge the overwhelming presence of text in Book of the Dead. All pieces besides the centerpiece (“The Centerfold”) have their titles in the upper left-hand corners; sixteen out of the twenty-five pieces are composed on top of blocks of handwritten text (sometimes relatively visible, as in “The Wheel”; sometimes nearly invisible, as in “The Preparation”); nine pieces also feature text in their contents (“The Call” and “The Wound,” for example).

            The handwritten text that lies under many of the pieces was composed in a free-writing mode, quickly, without much forethought; each piece’s text is a reflection on the form that the piece encounters. These are a record of my (often extremely agitated) emotional state at the time of writing, and my understanding of how the form in question was moving through my experience, or how my experience was moving through it. It is a record, however, that is largely illegible. Even in the pieces where the underlying text is visible, it is extremely difficult to read, both because it is interrupted and obscured by the elements of the piece itself, and because the looking eye is not the reading eye, the looking mind not the reading mind.

            The idea of extant-but-invisible, or visible-but-illegible, text is echoed in my work in literary scholarship. While I can read Middle English somewhat fluently and Old French somewhat haltingly, I find it absolutely impossible to read original manuscripts written in these languages; my paleographical skills are simply not up to the task. Even the more modern handwritten texts within my purview (Austen’s letters, Gaskell’s manuscripts, Brontë juvenilia, and so on) often feel impenetrable to me – too spiky, too loopy, too smudgy, too distant from my eye’s experience. The underlying text in Book of the Dead may function in this way: we register the work, understand the language, and perhaps even recognize some of the words and phrases, but we cannot quite decode the whole with any real fluency.

            Hidden or encoded personal text has a distinctly feminine resonance. The crossed letters written by thrifty sisters and female friends, Lydia Bennett’s letters that are “too full of lines under the words to be made public,” Pamela Andrews’s writing supplies cached in teacups and closets, the encoded diaries of Beatrix Potter and Anne Lister – all speak to a history of female life writing in which an urgency of self-expression is matched by an urgent need to obscure the substance of the expression. Too, there is a link here to the understanding of a cultural imperative for women to hide truths of our bodies, lives, and feelings, particularly from men, an imperative that often results in the production of strange obfuscatory structures – physical, behavioral, and psychic – that serve to conceal what everyone knows exists.

            Book of the Dead also contains a small amount of writing taken from four outside sources: two translations and commentaries on the I Ching, and two poems. These texts were introduced to me by two close friends (the I Ching volumes by one and the poems by the other); they entered our mutual discourse in the context of coping with intense and destabilizing emotional experiences. While not intentional in the moment, it seems significant that I have only included outside texts that represent the substance of extensive ongoing communication between myself and my closest female friends, rather than texts that are meaningful or important to me individually; these texts speak not to “inspiration” or even “meaning,” but rather long-term collaboration, conversation, relation, and support between women.

            Book of the Dead brings all of these internal and external texts into conversation with images – in particular, images of the female body. There are only four pieces in the book (“The Impasse,” “The Window,” “The Vanishing,” and “The Temples,”) that do not make clear reference to the female body in one way or another. (And one could easily construct a cogent argument as to the representation or evocation of the female body in those four pieces, particularly when they are taken in relation with the other pieces in the book.) The relationship between the word and the female body is in many ways the substance of all of my work, both academically and professionally. Much of my scholarly work is related to textual representations of embodied and material aspects of the female experience. As a birth worker, my constant task is to locate and deploy the discursive methods that authentically speak to and support the intense physical transformations that comprise the perinatal period and reproductive life. In my art, my scholarship, and my birth work, then, the “feminine” word coexists with the “feminine” body, each shaping, contextualizing, and becoming a representation of the other.

Femininity

Having considered the ways in which my use of text reflects facets of the female experience, it is worth considering how the non-textual elements of the work may also persistently evoke a sense of the feminine. It’s terribly difficult to discuss such issues with any real cogency, sliding so quickly as they do so into essentialism, mystification, exotification, reification, and tautology, and landing so frequently on top of the woman and her work, constraining and diminishing their meaning and function. Perhaps the worst trouble comes in attempts to express how or why a piece of work “feels feminine” – not the least because it probably doesn’t ultimately matter. Having said that, I think it is true that viewers are likely to experience Book of the Dead as a strikingly feminine production – indeed, I think it’s possible that this could be, for some, the controlling takeaway – and it thus seems important to give some thought to the matter.

One of the most straightforward signifiers of the feminine hand in Book of the Dead is the embroidery. Men, obviously, are capable of sewing, and have sewn throughout history and across cultures. I do not think, though, that I will encounter much argument when I say that sewing and textile work are generally encoded as feminine: sewing is women’s work. The embroidered surface thus draws continuous attention not only to the physical process of creation and the “worked” nature of each piece, but also to the location of this process within a long lineage of women working with cloth and thread — for money, for pleasure, for status, and to meet the practical needs of their households. A friend told me the other evening that he thinks of my embroidery as “weaving,” thus associating it with a storytelling tradition that places the female weaver within narratives that raise questions about mutual care responsibilities and consent (Arachne; Penelope; the Wife of Bath). While embroidery is not in fact weaving, this association seems entirely apposite to the movements and meanings of my project.

Images of the female body recur throughout Book of the Dead. Many of the pieces feature images of women that I have removed from their original contexts and re-placed in settings that suggest fraught, but not necessarily catastrophic, interactions with social and emotional structures of growth and wisdom: the fragile egg-girl of “The Orphan”; the insouciant, grubby ingenue and shocked, entangled lover of “The Call”; the cautiously determined traveler of “The Preparation.” When images of myself appear in the work, it is in contexts of pre-existing iconography that has become troubled – irresolute, threatening, threatened: the phone-wielding Venus of vermin in “The Gift”; the anxious mermaid that is both siren and Madonna in “The Error”; the Marian breastfeeding Aphrodite crab in “The Mother”; the nude model disaffectedly contemplating death, enlightenment, and the abyss in “The Centerfold”; the nude nun entangled in cords in “The Wheel.” All of these images combine recognizable cultural narratives with facets of my own understandings, experiences, and body to produce an uneasy – if often lush, abundant, and glowing – meditation on my own place in and movement through the world; the risks that I face and that I pose to others; the dangers of growth, change, and relationality.