Art as Lifeline/Embracing Art: A Conversation with L.M. Cole
By Melissa Nunez, written March 2023
I am as polished as silver,
which is to say, only with great effort.
I am as folded as paper planes,
which is to say, carefully, carelessly creased. – “Which is to say”
Have you ever wondered what people from the Renaissance or Reformation era would look like with pastry for heads? Or decided red-winged butterflies are best suited bursting forth from anatomical hearts? What about creating a cento poem out of lines from a movie like Balto? These are just a few of the innovative works of artist, author, and editor L.M. Cole. Her work covers topics like self-discovery, the nature of relationships, and the defining moments of life. She balances weighty themes with a lighthearted flare in her hybrid works. Cole’s first chapbook SALT MOUTH MOSS QUEEN debuted in September 2022. We were also pleased to publish her work in Yellow Arrow Vignette AWAKEN, a Yellow Arrow online series. L.M. and I were able to connect over Zoom in March for an inspiring video chat where we bonded over a love of nature and the way writing helps us through the chaotic tides life can sling our way.
Who are some women-identified writers who inspire you?
I am really drawn to other nature writers. I didn’t intend to become one, but apparently, I am one. Mary Oliver and Edna St. Vincent Millay really inspire me. I love the work of Lucille Clifton. Ada Limón speaks to me as well. These are some powerful voices that have a lot of important things to tell us.
What would you pinpoint as the moment you knew you were a writer/artist?
I have had a nontraditional tumble into writing. I didn’t consider myself a writer at all until high school when I took a creative writing class. There was a poetry section at the end where we made a chapbook collection of different forms and my teacher wrote on the back page of it, “You should never stop writing.” That really touched me, but I was not in a place when I was younger to believe in myself at all. Like a lot of women, with my upbringing and sense of self, I didn’t have the confidence to really channel that into anything useful. I didn’t pursue writing until around 2021. My whole world exploded personally. My family was very low income and writing was a thing that my husband at the time felt wasn’t going to make money and so wasn’t worth doing. I had gotten older and wanted to get back into writing, but he felt it would not lead anywhere productive. After eight years of that, everything changed. He was out of the picture, and I had to learn to be the best me I could be for myself and my kids. It has been a rocky journey this past year. Learning and relearning how best to handle everything. Poetry during this time really was a lifesaver, a buoy in life’s storm. Poetry and writing kept me from drowning. Somewhere in that last year and a half is when I decided I needed this, writing, creating, for myself. That makes me better in all aspects of my life. I really embraced poetry, exploring it, and developing my craft from there.
I was bottled green and seasick
salted in the waves and you
have pulled me to shore
to say oh lovely thing – “Post-Vitrification”
What drives your visual art?
Visual art is new for me. I feel I have developed a recognizable style over the past year. I was playing with it for a few months before the start of my magazine, Bulb Culture Collective. When my coeditor Jared [Povanda] and I started this project, I decided I wanted to make custom art for promotion on Twitter. I make all those images myself and I feel that has really homed in on what I’m trying to do. For me, the aesthetic is bringing classic Old World into modern thinking. All my images are found from public access books. I don’t take images from things later than 1950. I will spend hours every week going through these sources. I clip whatever speaks to me and go back in later and start putting things together. The aesthetic is full of warm tones: oranges, reds, yellows. I like warm tones and classic 1950 style.
When do you feel a concept necessitates the hybrid form, both visual and textual?
Many times, if I am going to make a hybrid, I have a micro piece, a very short poem, or some page of text that I feel is going to make a good erasure. I think it can be compared to people who title their poems in a way to give you more insight into the text. That is what you are doing for those hybrid pieces. You are pulling images to give more context to the poem and the words, even if it is unexpected. I have some pieces that are from a physical textbook called Meat Through the Microscope. I have a bunch of erasure sourced from there. I found one phrase I really liked but it was very short so I started looking around to see what I could do with it. The phrase itself was something about time immemorial and this universal truth: absence. This made me think of things leaving and fading away. I ended up with images of leaves in the process of dying and drying out. It became a very autumnal poem. Without that, there are a lot of ways to read into it and it could be very heavy. Tying back into nature gives it more of a universal feeling and less of a mourning feeling. You can do that a lot with images when adding to small poems and snippets. You can take it in different directions and experiment. Sometimes it does not turn out how you imagined. I might not like these leaves and will instead find something like an empty doorway. There are a lot of things to explore with that. It opens more avenues for furthering poetry as well. You might start and find an image and in the process of tying it together you might become inspired to expand on it and then it is not a micro anymore. Art and poetry speak very well to each other. I love to experiment with it.
What advice do you have for those interested in creating hybrid works?
There are no hard and fast rules for it. The way it works for me is starting with an image or poem/phrase that I love. I think you need to have clear idea of one or the other before you can get going. I have a lot of drafts and messes in folders that aren’t quite right because I did not have that clear direction and it got all jumbled. What works for me is to have that direction from the start with at least one of the components.
What is it like to work at different magazines? How did you get involved? And how do you balance the work of editor/reader/creator?
I started with reading for Moss Puppy Magazine. That was my first foray into working with magazines. They were looking for readers during their last issue, Blades, and I had already submitted poems that were accepted into the issue. I worried that might be a problem, but it was not at all. It was a very natural transition into the team. They are all so welcoming and kind. The editor is great to work with and they have multiple readers to help balance things out. Life happens sometimes and things do slip through the cracks. I have three kids and five pets, and everyone has appointments and activities and sometimes I can’t get everything done. Everyone being so understanding is the amazing thing in this writing community we have. I think the same would be true of most places. We are all writers with our own lives, and we respect that.
I also read briefly for Tree and Stone which was a cool experience. I was reading fiction, which I don’t have a lot of experience writing. I made it clear that I was interested in the position and came with more of a lyrical poetry slant but would like to learn more. I think that is the key to getting into many of these opportunities. You must be open and willing to learn because things evolve, and you see so many different perspectives and work from so many writers. It is important to stay open to that.
I started Bulb Culture with Jared because we both had work that had lost their publication, were in magazines that had disappeared. What do people do then? What do we do because things like this do happen and keep happening? We saw this need for people losing the publication of their works, now technically previously published but the original magazine is gone so it’s in a weird limbo. We started [it] because we needed a place in the community to send previously published work that is no longer available to an audience, a place where writers know their work is going to have a good home. That is what we’ve been striving to do. At first, we were only taking work from places that had closed, gone dark, or appeared in print only. Recently we opened to any previously published work, regardless, as long as it is over two years old. We’ve had a good response, steady submissions, not huge by any means, but it has been nice. It can be hard with decision-making because Jared and I are both so accommodating of each other and can go back and forth at times, but we are also very encouraging, and we manage to get it all done.
It can be difficult to balance all of that and right now, but I’ve surrounded myself with very understanding people whom I consider my friends as well. Everyone is generous about giving me some slack when I’m scrambling to meet deadlines. We make it work.
I am what I am making myself
green brown gold in the wilderness
salt mouth moss queen
I am forest path
I am refracted shine
I am made
I am in the making. – “I Am”
Let’s talk about your debut chapbook. What inspired the title and order of collection?
Salt Mouth Moss Queen came from a poem in the chapbook that I had written for Messy Misfits Club. It was a way of writing about my transition and growth as a person and also my connection in nature. The poem itself travels along the same lines my life has. I grew up in the Midwest where everything is flat and gray, but I still consider it beautiful. Wheat fields and gravel roads are still very much a part of me. Then it transitions into now. I live in North Carolina, which is a recent change. I haven’t even lived here a year, but things are so different. It felt like a new beginning and a new me and I was learning these new things about myself.
“Salt mouth” is an idea that resonates and comes back and echoes in a few poems I’ve written. I have always been very drawn to the ocean, but I never lived close enough to it to see it. I had never visited the ocean until after my move last year. On my first visit, after climbing over the sand dunes, the first time I saw the water, heard it, and smelled it, I just started crying. My partner and kids were asking me if I was OK. I was like, “It’s everything.” It was such a transformational thing for me. I was always drawn to it even though I had never seen it and to have that affirming experience with it was huge.
“Moss queen” just encapsulates my desire to lay out in the grass all day, that connection to the earth. It came from trying to describe myself as a person in poem form and give people a glimpse into my identity. The pieces in this collection follow a trajectory of my move and the ups and downs of my life over the last year or two. There is loss and pain and a rediscovering of love and hope. It shows that even through all that very human experience the link with nature is still there. I wanted that connection very prominent throughout.
I love the way you laid out the significance of salt and the ocean. Can you expand a little on the meaning of moss for you?
I think moss for me is a symbol of resilience because it is always there. I was recently out at Sundress Farm for my residency, and everything is gray out there. It is still cold in Knoxville, but there is just moss everywhere. It is vibrant, green, constant. I feel like the last year I’ve really had to embrace resilience where I can find it, so I think moss really became a symbol for me for persisting.
Nature imagery in general is rich in your work. Why does it speak to you?
The reason nature always crops up in my poetry is because I am disabled. I suffer with chronic pain and mental illness so a lot of times nature, experiencing it, writing about it, works as kind of a grounding exercise for me to get out of my own pain. I can think about cardinals instead of how much my back hurts right now. It is very much distracting and also healing to interact with nature and converse so deeply with it.
I’ve been letting things slip
from behind my teeth, through
my clenched jaw, like ants
through crack in the concrete
trying to get to the flower bed
I’m holding onto for dear life. – “Ants in the Begonias”
In a piece like “Ants in the Begonias,” the metaphor is everything. How do you go about finding the metaphor? Is it something that just happens to do have to work at it at times?
Usually if there is going to be a strong metaphor in a poem that is the thing that comes to me first before I even start writing. I will think, “oh, that one is good,” and I’ll write around it. This poem holds a lot of my experience with healing and going to therapy after everything went down in my personal life in 2021. It has that connection with nature for grounding. I think you can see that here very prominently. This connection with nature is really the driving force of the healing and is intertwined with the emotion. It just happened, which is not always the case, but when I have a good metaphor, I start there.
How much of yourself do you think you can encapsulate in any one poem or collection?
That’s a good question. I think that there are a lot of parts of me that haven’t made it into poetry yet. I don’t know if it is because I am afraid of being that vulnerable or I feel it is not going to be relatable to anybody. I think that poetry is a very unique vehicle for putting yourself onto the page. There are so many ways that you can capture yourself through a thought, a word, an image, a memory. Looking at “Ants in the Begonias” again, it only happened because the house I grew up in when I was little had a stone deck and two begonias on each side of the stairs. I always thought they were so pretty but there were ants everywhere. That is why that became such a central image for that poem. There are so many ways you can put yourself into a poem that I feel are unique. I know you can do it with CNF and memoir, but poetry lets you kind of wink and nod at the part of yourself you are putting out there. There is always that mystery of the identity of the speaker. Is it the poet or just a persona? Are you the I? You can be a little more vulnerable. In September, I was flying back to North Dakota to see my dad for his birthday, and I was sitting next to someone on the plane who asked me what I do. We had some sort of sixth-degree connection to someone in my hometown, and then you have to make idle chitchat in this tiny tin can in the sky. She asked me what I do, and I told her I am a poet. She said, “That is so cool.” And my response was, “You just have to be really willing to embarrass yourself in public.” Which made her kind of back track on that. To put your writing out there is a very vulnerable act. People are so nuanced and complex it is hard to fit everything of yourself in one poem unless you are writing an epic. However, if you are in a certain headspace, you can definitely put 100% of that self in that moment into that piece. It is a matter of unlocking that space and staying open to the resulting vulnerability.
What is the best writing advice you can share with our readers?
Don’t be so demanding of yourself. For many women-identified creatives, we really want to be amazing at something or not do it at all. If it is not perfect, if it is not living up to a perceived standard that we have, we can get disheartened and be afraid to put ourselves out there. But we just have to. Writing and art are so important, and everyone has a different perspective. Don’t be so hard on yourself! Make your art and put it out there. You put yourself in it, your love in it, and it is going to resonate with somebody. I don’t think I will ever be poet laureate or anything, but I put my little poems out there. If three people read them, then I am good! Somebody read it. That’s great. Just don’t have such rigid expectations for yourself. I fall into that same trap of thinking I need to be X amount successful or else, but it is not true. Embrace the art for art’s sake.
What makes writing worth it? For L.M. Cole it is knowing she is being true to herself, her best self, and following the inner call to create. Connecting with people through art, however big or small the amount, is powerful. You can follow L.M. Cole as she continues her writing journey by connect with her on Twitter @_scoops_ or her website at poetlmcole.com. You can purchase a copy of her chapbook SALT MOUTH MOSS QUEEN on Amazon.
Melissa Nunez is a Latin@ writer and homeschooling mother of three from the Rio Grande Valley. Her essays have appeared in magazines like Hypertext and Scrawl Place. She has work forthcoming in Musing Publications, The Hooghly Review, and others. She writes an anime column for The Daily Drunk, interviews for Yellow Arrow Publishing, and is a staff writer for Alebrijes Review. You can follow her on Twitter @MelissaKNunez.
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