The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note by Katie Peterson and Young Suh was part of her curriculum for her workshop Writing in Community: Collaborations and Experiments at The Writing Salon in March 2022.
We are so happy that you are reading Life in a Field, and we want to start by expressing our gratitude to you. The book came out of our collaboration – Katie, the writer, and Young, the photographer. That collaboration began when we met in 2011 and continues to this day. But the specific project Life in a Field emerged from started in the summer of 2013, and culminated in a gallery show at Mills College Museum of Art titled Can We Live Here? Stories from a Difficult World in Winter 2016. You may also be interested to know that our collaborations also resulted in our marriage (2015), our daughter Emily (2017), and the teaching of a class on collaboration at UC Davis (Fall 2020). The work from the first gallery show, including a large-format version of Life in a Field with more text and pictures (a director’s cut?) was exhibited at the Datz Museum in Gwangju, South Korea in Summer / Fall 2021. Which is all to say that you are holding a version of our story in your hands, but we are also at peace with – no, we celebrate! – other versions of this story that we have made, and that circulate. The writing and the pictures may have been inspired by moments of experience and moments of thought, but they have also been processed many times, and translated between media, like a retold folk tale. Maybe there is a way multiple media simulate the old ways of the oral tradition. We do not think these different versions and interpretations dilute the story – it is wonderful that they can circulate together, just as the photos and the writing circulate together as a storybook.
If we were you, we might want to know what came first, the pictures or the photos. But this is a difficult story to tell! The writing emerged in the months of May and June 2015. We were pregnant with a baby that didn’t make it into the world; the loss was complicated, late in the pregnancy, and physically difficult. To console myself, I (Katie) started writing a story about a girl and a donkey that would undo the sad fairy tale of French filmmaker Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar. At the time the only works of art I could really engage with were Bresson’s movies, and American gospel music / sorrow songs. Bresson’s film is so sad – I don’t want you to watch it! But my story was going to keep the sadness from happening, and undo the part where the girl and the donkey can’t sustain a friendship that keeps the world out, and in which they heal each other. I wrote this story in prose paragraphs, very short ones. Some of my students have called it flash fiction but I am not sure. I wanted to try to stay with the image of the girl and the donkey in the field as long as possible but other things kept happening. Time happened, they had to grow up. I ended up with a story and a narrator. The narrator just wants to tell people to leave the girl and the donkey alone. I kept returning to the phrase “what do you do with the story you didn’t wish for?” This story was our baby who disappeared, but it is also climate change, and war, and a pandemic, and that was clear to me too, even then – the many-ness of the stories we don’t wish for. So the whole thing was about the tension between grieving and continuing.
The pictures came first though. Young was working on a project about California wildfires in 2008 – long before our present age of fires, in a sense. As a result of this project, he decided he wanted to make a film of himself making a fire. In the middle of doing that, cutting down branches, he was interrupted by two donkeys, a mama and daughter, who lived on the nature preserve near Clear Lake where he was going to shoot. He became friends with these donkeys and made some photographs with them which appear in the book. We ended up making a bunch of other movies with the donkeys also. We met the girl in the inflatable baptism pool in Alaska in Winter 2013. The landscapes arranged at the end come from across the years 2012 – 2017; some of them take place in the Eastern Sierra, where I (Katie) used to teach at a small college. It was in the reservoir of that small college that we encountered the mysterious half-donkey, half girl you see at the end of the book.
In the 2015 show at Mills, we made four hand-bound books – one section per book – Life in a Field I, II, III IV. We pronounced these the most beautiful books we ever made. You can find this work on Young’s website in pictures. It is good that we took pictures. Sometime during the fall of 2016, we figured out we had lost the books. Lost them! Gone! We have theories about where they went. But the best theory we have is that the universe had to take the books back in order to let us have our daughter Emily. We had to lose something beautiful to gain something beautiful. The original four volume version had many, many more pictures, and many more stories circulating within its pages – it had more text too, but by “more stories” I just mean, more pictures of different sorts of people. We always hoped we would find a publisher for what we called the donkey book.
Over the years we sent some of this material out to magazines – there was no interest. So take heart, artists and writers, some things take longer to understand! Even after Omnidawn took the book, most people I approached to publish bits of this weren’t interested. Maybe it just lives more as a book. In the summer of 2019, we decided to make a short cut. Young arranged some of the pictures into folio-like stories. He deserves more than photo credit – it is his arrangement that makes the book make sense. We ended up with this approximately 90 page version, which I sent to Omnidawn’s prize competition in part because Rachel Zucker was judge and in part because Omnidawn is the best innovative press I know. We were happy and shocked when Omnidawn called to tell us the good news. Then the pandemic happened. In spite of that our book reached the world, and many readers, and you, and we have Omnidawn and Rachel Zucker to thank for that.
Young Suh directs the graduate program in Art Studio at the University of California at Davis where he is Professor of Art. His work has been shown at many museums and galleries in the United States and Korea, including the Datz Museum (Korea), the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, the Mills College Museum of Art, the Chelsea Art Museum (New York), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento, and the Palo Alto Cultural Center. Datz Press (Seoul, Korea) will publish his book of photography and writing, Dear Mother, on September 26, 2022.. He received a BFA in Photography from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Katie Peterson is the author of five published books of poetry, including Life in a Field, which was selected by Rachel Zucker for the 2020 Omnidawn Open Books Award. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Chancellor's Fund at UC Davis. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at UC Davis where she is Professor of English.
Maw Shein Win's most recent poetry book is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press) and chapbooks Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito and often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers. mawsheinwin.com