Bio: Coco Spencer is a mixed-media artist from California now based in Chicago. @cocozpencer 

Tiny Talks is an interview series with Tiny Spoon’s talented contributors. This week we spoke with Melissa Eleftherion Carr from Issue 3, Consumption! Read her piece “Patriarchy Tonic” in our third issue!

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Tiny Spoon: What kindles your creativity?

Melissa: Books. Art. Languages. Traveling. Hiking with my family. Reading about mycelia or birds or bacteria or the tarot. Extreme sadness or immense joy. I’m one of these relentlessly curious people who can’t stop studying things that strike me.  

Tiny Spoon: Are there any artists/ heroines/ idols/ friends that you look up to? 

Melissa: Yes, so many but I’ll just list a few. Lorine Niedecker. Octavia Butler. Remedios Vario. Diane Arbus. Nan Goldin. Anne Carson. Audre Lorde. Diane di Prima. Claudia Rankine. Leonora Carrington. A.S. King. Robin Wall Kimmerer. My Mendo friends: Margo, Joann & Leslie.

Tiny Spoon: Are there any natural entities that move your work?

Melissa: Since moving to California from Brooklyn 19 years ago, I’ve tried to learn the names of various native plants and birds & bugs to catch up a bit since that was a big learning gap for me. Now I read field guides for fun which is probably weird but definitely exciting to me personally. For example, I read a lot about insects & arthropods, bacteria, mushrooms, and trees. One element of the natural world that has transformed & reshaped how I want to show up & what I write about is how forests cooperate & thrive as one massive organism by communicating through mycelia.    

Tiny Spoon: We love insight into the creative process. Could you share what it is like for you, either with your work that appears in Tiny Spoon or in general?

Melissa: My process varies from project to project. Some projects are fragmented, and are puzzled together through stray lines and bits that I jotted down while going about my day. For example, I keep a document titled FRAGS where I transcribe these lines & bits from my journal, and later on some of them accrete and form poems, some don’t. 

Often, I find myself writing poems in response to texts I’m reading as a means of working out & integrating the concepts. I have ADD so this is also a means of focusing my attention in an attempt to commit what I have learned to memory.

When I schedule time to write, I usually have strict windows of time where I won’t be interrupted so I find it helps to jolt my imagination by using another text as a prompt (field guides & encyclopedias are favorites). Occasionally, I will get an idea while I’m running out the door to work & will write a whole poem in one swoop, but that has become a rare occurrence. 

Tiny Spoon: Do you have any current or future projects that you are working on that you would like to share?

Melissa: In Dec. 2020, I started a drop-in writing group on Zoom where I draw a card from the tarot as a prompt. We discuss images, ideas, and themes of the card, and then go off and write about it or something related. Each poem in my current manuscript, Witch Biota, is based on a different tarot card, and pairs the themes from that card with various ecological systems, branches of science, and/or life experiences. Working with the tarot has been generative & has also led to some personal discoveries.

Tiny Spoon: What book, artwork, music, etc., would you recommend to others?

Melissa: Two great books I have read recently are My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of our Bodies and Hearts by Resmaa Menakem & The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture by Emanuele Coccia.

Find Melissa online www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com 

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/melissa.eleftherion/ 

On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/libpoe/ 

On Twitter: @libpoe

Tiny Talks is an interview series with Tiny Spoon’s talented contributors. This week we spoke with MA|DE from our seventh issue. You can read their piece “They Eat Them Weeping” in Collaboration: Issue 7!

Tiny Spoon: What called you to collaborate and what was that process like? 

MA|DE: We started writing together to conquer distance, when we were living an hour away from each other. One of us would sketch out a few lines in a virtual document before going to work, the other would respond after getting home from errands; it was our way of keeping in touch throughout the days. Now that we live together, and now that MA|DE — the name we use for all of our collaborative work — has grown into a creature all its own, our collaboration has become much more deliberate and scheduled. 

Tiny Spoon: Why do you create? 

MA|DE: It’s what we do together. Some couples go out for drinks with their friends on weekends, some couples go hiking. We conspire about poetry.

Tiny Spoon: Where do you find most of your inspiration?

MA|DE: The surreality of daily life as it’s reported by the news can often spark ideas for us, actually. We tend to listen to a lot of public broadcast journalism over dinner, and we’re forever saying to one another, as we listen, ‘Oh, write that down, we have to use that in a poem …” If you read our poems you’d probably never notice that their genesis is in new stories, because there’s nothing overtly political, or even topical about them, but that’s our clay.

Tiny Spoon: What is your dream project?

MA|DE: We’ve actually started working on it now! Tentatively titled Waste Not the Marrow, it’s a book-length series of pieces that combine sculpture, collage, photography and poetry. It’s a big project, and it’ll likely take us a couple of years to complete. The ‘dreaming’ here is not so much the act of creation, which has proven quite doable, but the issue of the project’s future publication. Who might be willing to invest in something that is both literary manuscript and full-colour art book? We’re dreaming up a special thing here, and it’s going to take a special publisher to give it the kind of presentation we’re envisioning. 

Tiny Spoon: Do you have any current projects that you are working on that you would like to share? 

MA|DE: We are currently adapting our recent poetry chapbook, A Trip to the ZZOO (Collusion Books, 2020) into a full-length manuscript, ZZOO [pictured below].

Recently, we received a generous grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to complete this project, which felt very affirming for our existence as a collaborative entity, because there historically hasn’t been a lot of institutional support for sustained collaborative work in literature the way there is in music or art. We’re happy to be at the edge of this change.

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Tiny Spoon: What book, artwork, music, etc., would you recommend to others? 

MA|DE: What a task: recommending work to an unknown reader. Here, modestly, is a sample of things we have read or listened to together in the recent past:

• Joey Yearous-Algozin’s meditative, post-apoc poetry book A Feeling Called Heaven (2021, Nightboat Books); a personalized/collaged gift copy of Conor McDonnell’s new chapbook In the Museum (2021, Above/Ground Press) … he’s tipped in all kinds of interesting images, which he’s been doing to select copies as he sends them out to friends; and, as Halloween is approaching, we finally got around to reading Shirley Jackson’s seminal gothic novel, The Haunting of Hill House (1959, Viking).

• Sufjan Stevens & Angelo De Augustine’s collection of gentle folk duets, A Beginner’s Mind (2021, Asthmatic Kitty); Gazelle Twin & NYX (a NYC electronic drone choir)’s haunting collaborative album Deep England (2021, NYX Collective Records); German folk singer Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green, a collection of songs recorded in the early 1970s but not released until 2006, after they were shopped around by her son more than 30 years after they were made … we’re so glad this one exists! 

Tiny Spoon: Is there anything else you would like others to know about you, your creations, or beyond?

MA|DE: We have some chapbooks available!

Test Centre from ZED Press: https://zedpress.bigcartel.com/product/test-centre-by-ma-de 

A Trip to the ZZOO from Collusion Books: https://longconmag.com/collusionbooks/a-trip-to-the-zzoo/ 

A Barely Concealed Design from Puddles of Sky Press: https://www.puddlesofskypress.com/ 

Find MA|DE online at http://ma-de.ca and on Twitter and Instagram: @ma_de_projects

Tiny Talks are interviews between our editors and contributors. It is just another way Tiny Spoon is growing through community support. We will be sending all contributors from our issues these carefully curated questions.

TS: What called you to collaborate and what was that process like? 

Jenny: Sarah and I first started writing poems together at the Porches: a writing retreat in Virginia in response to the Trump Presidency. This past year, as I went through some employment ups and downs, writing 1-2 lines and then sending them to Sarah and waiting for her response–was one of the few ways I found I could be creative.

Sarah: I think it’s interesting to create art with another writer, to bounce ideas off of each other and make a final piece. The process is enlightening to learn more about yourself and the other writer.

TS: Why do you create? 

Jenny: I feel like I have always written as a form of self-expression. It helps me express emotions that maybe I cannot analyze right away.

Sarah:  It fulfills something in me that I want to share with the world. I write because I can’t not write.

TS: Where do you find most of your inspiration?

Jenny: I notice that I find inspiration when I travel to a new place and see new things and also and Always in art museums and galleries. I also found that I love being in a new place by myself where I can hear my thoughts. That quiet time is such a luxury.

Sarah: I find inspiration in the mundane aspects of life, current events, and sometimes in television shows or books I’m reading.

TS: What is your dream project?

Jenny: One project I have in my head is a future collage project with photos or drawings of rocks and poems imprinted over the rock images. I have created one collage project so far and I really love it!

Sarah: Maybe a book of photographs with poems that go with them.

(Note: Sarah and I came up with this answer separately- but now we are really excited to explore this creative idea together!)

TS: Do you have any current projects that you are working on that you would like to share? 

Jenny: Sarah and I are writing poems where the titles are body parts. We are very open with our flow in what comes and goes into the lines. 

Sarah: I look forward to continue working on the body poems project with Jenny MacBain-Stephens and now we have a future photo/poem project in the planning.

TS: What book, artwork, music, etc., would you recommend to others? 

Jenny: I recently fell in love with the band Of Monsters and Men. And I just began “Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape” by Lauret Savoy, and I am loving it.  I am curious and interested in how humans interact with any sort of landscape and how does it change them?

Sarah:  I just finished OBIT by Victoria Chang and I definitely recommend it.

TS: Is there anything else you would like others to know about you, your creations, or beyond?

Jenny:  I am more and more interested in visual creations with words. I enjoy making hybrid works. My most recent chapbook is from Ethel Press called “Lying Travel Notes from the Desert,” (poems inspired by a trip out west,) and I am working on a full length poetry collection called “Pool Parties.”

Sarah: My first full-length book of poetry was published this summer. It’s called Dirty Words by Indie Blu(e) Publishing, which you can purchase on Amazon.

TS: Where can people learn more about what you do? 

Jenny: insta: @jennycmacb

You can find my work listed here! https://jennifermacbainstephens.com/

Sarah: my website is: sarahlilius.com

twitter: @slilius

Bios: 

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens (she/her) went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in Iowa where she is landlocked. She is the author of four poetry collections and fifteen chapbooks and enjoys exploring how to blend creativity with nurturing the earth. Recent work appeared in The Westchester Review, Cleaver, Dream Pop, and Grist. She also hosts a free, monthly reading series sponsored by Iowa City Poetry called Today You Are Perfect. Find her at http://jennifermacbainstephens.com/.

Sarah Lilius (she/her) is the author of five poetry chapbooks, including GIRL (dancing girl press, 2017) and Traffic Girl (Ghost City Press, 2020). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her poetry appears or is forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review, New South, Boulevard, Fourteen Hills, Court Green, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her first full length collection, Dirty Words is now available for purchase. Her website can be found at sarahlilius.com.

Tiny Talks is an interview series with Tiny Spoon’s talented contributors. This week we spoke with Beth Kephart from our seventh issue, Collaboration! Read Beth’s piece “Overjoy Cruise” in our issue.

*Since Beth’s work in our collaboration issue was an internal collaboration with the self, she conducted the interview with herself and we appreciate that.

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TS: What called you to collaborate and what was that process like? 

Beth: As a writer of books I became increasingly obsessed with the art of books. And so I joined the two halves of myself.

TS: Why do you create? 

Beth: Because I am miserable (inside and out) when I don’t. Just ask my husband

TS: Where do you find most of your inspiration? / When do you feel most inspired?

Beth: There is, as Moyra Davey writes in her brilliant INDEX CARDS, no writing without reading. And so I read. And think.

TS: What is your dream project?

Beth: In my dream project I learn some very new things. I am surprised. I am awed. I struggle to put it all down, to share it.

TS: What book, artwork, music, etc., would you recommend to others? 

Beth: Anything Alice McDermott writes. 

TS: Do you have any current projects that you are working on that you would like to share?

Beth: I’ve taken my obsession with the art of blank books into the making and selling of blank books, collaborating with my artist husband. Here is our Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/BINDbyBIND

I also have a new craft book, created with my husband, called WE ARE THE WORDS: THE MASTER MEMOIR CLASS. 

Tiny Talks is an interview series with Tiny Spoon’s talented contributors. This week we spoke with Rochelle Robshaw & Beverly Frydman from our seventh issue, Collaboration!

Tiny Spoon: What called you to collaborate and what was that process like? 

Beverly Frydman & Rochelle Scholar: We were on a train to Liverpool and realized that we were writers who were not writing. We gave ourselves this challenge: what could we do to do some writing on a daily basis.  We decided to email each other.

TS: Why do you create? 

B&R: We create because we want to connect with ourselves and others.  We create together because we inspire each other to keep going. Plus, we make each other laugh.

TS: Where do you find most of your inspiration? When do you feel most inspired?

B&R: We find inspiration in the bits and pieces of our lives that might otherwise get lost. We write about memories, observations, absurdities, and daily life.

TS: What is your dream project?

B&R: We have many! We want to be a book, an art installation, a quilt, song lyrics, have our posts on pieces of pottery.

TS: Do you have any current projects that you are working on that you would like to share? 

B&R: Recently, our lockdown posts were adapted into a play, Spring 2020. It was performed as part of the Love (and Survival) in a Time of Covid festival at the Tower Theatre in London.

TS: What book, artwork, music, etc., would you recommend to others?

B&R: We see ourselves as part of a continuum of living memoir. We are inspired by Gertrude Stein and Deborah Levy.

We have an Instagram account @ourpostproject where we post bits of our correspondence and some photos.

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Tiny Talks is an interview series with Tiny Spoon’s talented contributors. This week we spoke with Laura Bell and Ian Ganassi from our seventh issue, Collaboration! They completed our interview with each other virtually over Zoom.

Tiny Spoon: What called you to collaborate and what was that process like?

Laura: Our ongoing collaborative collage series, “The Corpses,” was Ian’s idea. He’s a poet who lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and we met as artists-in-residence at the Millay Colony. Some years after we’d been at the residency together, he initiated the project, thinking it would be interesting for a poet and a painter to collaborate. It was basically along the lines of: I’ll send you something, you do something to it and send it back to me. (I live in NYC.)

Ian mailed me an unfinished poem on a page stained with coffee rings, but I didn’t act on it right away, it may have been a year or so before I came across the page again, made some moves, and sent it back to him. The evolution was pretty quick after that, and soon we were mailing multiple pieces back and forth. What started out as a possible short-term project between us has become a long-running series of more than a decade, with 300 pieces and counting.

Tiny Spoon: Why do you create?

Laura: It’s just the best way of interpreting, and living in, the world.

Tiny Spoon: Where do you find most of your inspiration? When do you feel most inspired?

Laura: We were both already working with found materials—Ian with found text in his poems and me with images and found objects in my paintings and mixed-media pieces on paper. So the collage sensibility was already part of our individual practices. What we have found is that the habit of looking for materials everywhere we go has turned the whole world into material, whether it be out on the street or anywhere else we find ourselves; we have even found collage materials in a hospital room.

Ian: The Corpses turned us into scavengers. We tried to get the whole world into them.

TS: What is your dream project?

Laura: We have been showing and publishing pieces from the series in groups from 3 to 30, and what we would like now is to find a space to put up 200 or more pieces. There are often repetitions of text and images from piece to piece over the years, and we imagine that a really large group, covering every wall, would create a terrific resonance of echoes and relationships.

TS: Do you have any current projects that you are working on that you would like to share? 

Laura: Right now, Ian is awaiting the publication of his second book of poetry, by MadHat Press, True for the Moment. His previous book-length poetry collection, Mean Numbers, published in 2016, had as its cover one of our collaborative collages, “Natural Equation.” And I am currently arranging to hold a collage workshop in my Bronx neighborhood as part of a grant I received from the Bronx Council for the Arts, where I will talk about and show images from our series, as well as having the group create their own collages.

TS: What book, artwork, music, etc., would you recommend to others?

Laura: I am a devotee of Joseph Cornell’s assemblage boxes, which captured a transcendent poetry, often with dime-store finds. He is really a found-art icon.

Ian: John Ashbery’s Selected Poems, because Ashbery is “the supreme user of collage in poetry.”

Laura and Ian’s work can be viewed on their website – thecorpses.com – or on Instagram – @bellandganassi & you can find their collages in Issue 7, Collaboration.

We kick off our Tiny Talks Series with Issue 7: Collaboration cover artists, Jordain Gillen and Megan Sanderson!

Tiny Talks are interviews between our editors and contributors. It is just another way Tiny Spoon is growing through community support. We will be sending all contributors from our issues these carefully curated questions.

Tiny Spoon: What called you to collaborate and what was that process like? 

Jordain: Myself and Megan have been best friends for years. We both studied art in high school and at university. So it just came naturally for us to collaborate. We both have a similar mindset as well so our ideas just bounce off one another.

Tiny Spoon: Why do you create? 

Jordain: I create because it’s my passion ! I know nothing else other than to be creative. I enjoy the aesthetic of creating other worldly pieces as a form of escapism. I am always looking for the next thing or the next idea and it just comes naturally to me. I am so passionate about a number of different things including Queer culture, the mystic, holistic well being and humanitarian rights which is all reflected within my work. So being creative also gives me an outlet to express my views and my creativity.

Megan: I create because I enjoy experimenting. I always like to try something new so I would try a variety of different art forms. Photography is my passion though. I like to capture nature in its natural form and enjoy the outdoors. I’m also very passionate about controversial issues within society and sometimes like to address this through my work.

Tiny Spoon: Where do you find most of your inspiration? / When do you feel most inspired?

Jordain: I am always feeling inspired by something. Though a majority of my inspiration comes from being very spiritual. I am at my happiest when I am in nature and so a lot of the work I create would portray this. As a cancerian I very much enjoy being by the sea and in the water, feeling grounded by the natural earth. So no matter what I create, whether it be inspired by queer culture or by nature, I will always bring it back to the seaside to be photographed through my own interpretation.

Megan: As I said above I enjoy the outdoors. I would do a lot of water sports and sightseeing around my home in Northern Ireland. We have a lot of greenery and nature spots here in Northern Ireland, so I always enjoy photographing them in a new way to capture their natural beauty. Other times I just have an idea and I just go with it. For me it’s all about having fun and experimenting.

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Tiny Spoon: What is your dream project?

Jordain: My dream project would be to create a series that’s underwater. It’s hard to describe but imagine an art performance that’s documented from under the water. Something along those lines.

Megan: I’m not sure what mine would be, but I do love to travel so perhaps photographing beautiful places throughout the world where I’ve never been before.

Tiny Spoon: Do you have any current projects that you are working on that you would like to share? 

Jordain: At the moment I am just finishing up with showcasing my ‘The Universe Untold’ Collection, which had two showings here in Northern Ireland. One in my hometown of Ballymena and the other which was just last week in Belfast. I will have an online showing as well which will be available on my website soon. This project was massive so it feels good that it has been well received in both showings. I am also currently planning an exhibition for my Ghosties which were very popular last Autumn. However, due to lockdown I could only show them online, so this year I have big plans for them.

Megan: At the moment I have no plans. I’m just enjoying the last of the summer holidays out in nature and photographing as I go along.

Tiny Spoon: What book, artwork, music, etc., would you recommend to others?

Jordain: At the moment I am currently hooked on the Love Victor series on Disney+. Music wise I love everything but at the moment I am hooked on the new Billie Elish album. It just has so much depth and experimentation which I love. Book wise, I have currently been flicking my way through Dom and Inks new book ‘Queer Power’, which illustrates inspirational people in the queer community.

Megan: I am a huge fan of Horror so anything horror related I recommend. I’m a big fan of American Horror Story so I’m excited for the new season coming soon.

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Tiny Spoon: Is there anything else you would like others to know about you, your creations, or beyond?

Jordain: I’m not sure if I mentioned but I am very spiritual. So I am very interested in crystal healing, journaling and love to meditate and practice yoga on a daily basis which also influences my work. I have so many exciting things in the works at the moment which I am so excited to share with everyone soon.

Megan: I am quite interested in the occult and love learning about different aspects of the mystic which goes hand in hand with my love of horror. Even though it’s not everyone’s cup of tea I do love creating horror inspired work as well. Sometimes it’s a good outlet for frustration or dealing with problems within society through art.

Tiny Spoon: Where can people learn more about what you do?

Jordain: My instagram is probably my most active place for updates, but you can also find out more on my website and other social media:

https://jordainmolloygillen.wixsite.com/jordainmolloygillen

https://www.instagram.com/jordainmolloygillen/

https://www.facebook.com/JordainGillenArtist/

Tweets by JordainMGillen

Megan: Again my Instagram is probably my most active platform but I am also on Facebook: https://www.instagram.com/imprintphotographyni/

https://www.facebook.com/imprintphotographyni/

This piece was published in black and white in our seventh issue. Here is a more intimate look in full color featuring a photo of the artist.

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“Ukrainian Atlantis is located in an extremely picturesque place called Bakota,
Podilsky Tovtry, Khmelnytsky region. Bakota was once a large, strong border village,
but its history ended in 1981, when the village was completely flooded during the
construction of a hydroelectric power plant. Now there is a wide and deep river
Dniester, 42 meters deep. There in the rocks is one of the oldest monasteries “Rock
Monastery”. This place is called the place of power, and indeed, having been there
you feel that you are on top of the world and full of energy. There are no routes or
buses in Bakota, you can only get there by your own transport on a difficult road.
In the artwork I depicted the river Dniester under which is the past village, the
nature that surrounds this beautiful place, here you feel alone with nature. I wanted
to convey the grandeur, the power of the water element, this picture radiates power
and makes the viewer think about how strong nature is and we must protect it”

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Find more work on Tanbelia’s website:  https://tanbeliaart.wixsite.com/tanbelia and on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tanbeliaart/