You need to meet Rebecca

Rebecca Macijeski

Work by the multi-talented Rebecca Macijeski is getting quite a bit of attention this summer.  An original series titled “How to Stay Curious” opened June 18 at Artspace in Shreveport as part of Critical MASS 13, an annual exhibition that spans visual, literary and performing arts. Rebecca’s collection features quilts that she created to complement her original poetry.

She calls the show “the intersection of poems and quilts, and whatever the fabulous other winners in the visual and performance art categories have been up to.”

As an associate professor and coordinator of Creative Writing in Northwestern State University’s Department of English, Languages and Cultural Studies, Rebecca is best known as a poet, teacher and mentor to student writers. She has published poems in over 100 journals, published two chapbooks of poetry and is currently working on several full-length collections. She is also an accomplished violinist.

Rebecca grew up in Vermont and earned a B.A. in English and music from Simmons College, a Master of Fine Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  She joined NSU’s faculty and moved to Louisiana in 2017. Her impressive resume includes work at literary journals, conferences and collaborative workshops.

During the COVID pandemic and its attendant isolation, she resurrected an old hobby:  quilting. After winning the Critical MASS prize and in developing a solo show, she envisioned making quilts to correspond with her poetry, hand stitching the quilts and applying appliqued fabric letters and writing with fabric ink.

She visited with me recently to talk about her creative endeavors, her perspective on living in different part of the country and how her teaching informs her creative process. 

"How to Stay Curious" opened at Artspace June 18.

At what age did you start writing/writing poetry and what themes did you initially explore? 

I've been writing in some capacity since I was a little kid. I initially preferred stories over poems. Poetry felt suspicious to me. The poems I was reading in school felt too complicated or pseudo-intellectual, like there was a puzzle you couldn't ever figure out—or on the other side of things they were so in their emotions I wasn't sure what my part was as a reader. I was reading the wrong poems.

It wasn't until I took a summer class at a state arts camp in high school that I saw poetry as an outlet for me. I wrote, like a lot of writers do, about how weird it is to try to figure out who you are in a society with so many mixed messages and expectations. The course was "Jazz and Poetry," and it was co-taught by a poet and a jazz musician. It's my first early memory of collaboration. Sometimes the musicians would improvise and we would write poems over their sounds, or vice versa. It felt like wild raw creativity, and it showed me that I didn't need to follow as many prescribed rules. I could invent my own rules. And then I could break those rules, too.

How did your life experiences growing up in Vermont, then moving to Boston, Nebraska and finally Louisiana inform your perspectives and how did that seep into your artistic work? 

I LOVE that I have had the chance to live in different regions of the country. All these places are different geographically, culturally and politically, so those migrations have naturally had an impact on my aesthetic. When I lived in New England my poems were smaller and quiet. I think I was most interested in chasing a surprising image, a different way to capture the sensory experience of something. When I moved to Nebraska, I left the protected old hills and valleys for the wide open flat prairie of the Midwest. My poetic line expanded like the landscape. I found myself getting curious to reach farther and wider in what I was writing. Now that I'm in Louisiana I think I'm more interested in representing the fullness of that curiosity as a kind of protest, or at least as an invitation first for me to see myself as a fully complex person and then hoping readers feel invited to see themselves in a new way, too. I've also been drawn to prose poems since moving here, which means I think I'm chasing a dynamic sentence more than a single poetic line. That feels more human and lived in to me. I love hearing how people talk, so I'm thinking about how my poems talk.

Can you talk about being a musician and how it interplays with your additional creative endeavors? 

Yes. In undergrad I double majored in English (Creative Writing) and Music (Violin Performance). I had played in the violin section in orchestras for years, so it felt natural to continue this study alongside my writing. Since my University had a very small music department, I was able to take lessons from the local New England Conservatory. I also played all four years while in Boston in the New England Philharmonic. We played all kinds of classical music—traditional standards like Beethoven and Sibelius symphonies, but also atonal work and newly-commissioned premieres. I loved it. For one performance I even got to fill in and play water glasses.

Studying music and poetry together makes perfect sense for me. I'm interested in how when one art form is so beautiful that we can't quite describe it, it transcends and defaults to the language of the other. When music feels organic and true and reaches us, we call it poetry. When a poem finds us right in the middle of whatever moment we're living, we call it music. When I write, I'm at least as interested in what the words sound and feel like as what they say. That's how you reach someone. A poem can't be merely information or experience factually reported; it has to lull the way a song does or a melody in a string quartet swelling at just the right moment.

How does your teaching experience also inform your work?  

I love this question. I think I would be a lesser poet/artist if I didn't teach. I'm inspired all the time by what students share, what they're willing to try out. They're hungry for new ways to discover and express themselves, and I'm always so honored when they trust me to be part of that work. It's also a useful and meaningful challenge for me to pick poets for us to read together that meet students where they are and in what matters to them. I don't ever want to be guilty of sharing the same poets and poems other people share only because they're already out there in the conversation. Finding new poets to share for class also means searching for new poets who speak to me, which fuels my own practice. It's pretty synergistic that way.

Lately I've also been particularly impressed with how students are tackling the more difficult subjects. This is inspiring me to do more of that hard work myself. We always get to decide what we disclose in the work and what we keep for ourselves, and it's truly remarkable to watch other poets, especially young poets, navigate that.

You have done a lot of collaboration with other artists. Can you talk about that?  

Yes! I LOVE to collaborate. Lately I had the opportunity to work as part of NSU's Catalyst Team to put out the April series of performances, MOVE. This project brought specialists from the arts and sciences to create a multi-disciplinary technology and discovery-driven series of dance performances. I think this experience showed me that I love tackling the challenge of translating creative and practical ideas across different disciplines and vocabularies. I always love when creativity can feel valued and at home in places where we don't expect to find it.

When I was studying in my Ph.D. program, it became clear to me that even in my home department of English there is often a problematic divide between critical and creative, as if there's an artificial line separating people who study or interpret and people who play or make. But that binary isn't real. Every time you make a critical claim you're being creative about how you present it, and every time you make a creative choice you're also thinking critically about the best way to transmit your message. There's so much I can learn from people who think, act, and move in different fields of study and/or different expressions of thought, and I hope that my home realm of poetry helps to bring this simultaneity together.

As far as my own art-making goes, it's important for my process to be creative in idioms other than verbal language. Lately I've been making quilts. This process, on the one hand, is very different from writing. It's tangible. It's material. There's math and thread involved. On the other hand, though, making a quilt—in a metaphorical sense, at least—is quite similar to making a book of poems. A quilt requires that I work on individual pieces first with micro-level focus; then, after some time, the small things come together and are suddenly a larger thing. Stitches and blocks become a whole quilt. Lines and poems become a whole book. They're both a study in steadiness and process.

Putting creative work out into open is hard for any artist, so how do you overcome self-doubt about sharing work that is personal and vulnerable?  

I'm not sure self-doubt is anything I overcome, so much as I learn when and how to put it away. Earlier in my career I built a kind of distance insurance into some of my work; by this, I mean I would write about deeply personal and vulnerable things but hide them in obscure metaphors or give my experiences to personas—characters who were quite different from the self I was living. Now I think I look at this dilemma differently. I think of myself as a professional imaginer, which sounds kind of fun and whimsical but can be a little self-destructive at times. Instead of worrying whether any one poem gives too much away about some tender piece of story from my life or my mental health or anything else, I try to look at each poem as a carrier for one true thing. It's a clue or a window, and probably no one is going to pick up every clue or look through every window. So they'll only ever know one aspect of me: whatever the poem shares. Of course! Then there's a sense of freedom, a sense of shapeshifting. Then it becomes fun. Then I start to think about how each poem is like a different contained universe of possibility, and instead of imagining the unlikelihood of an unfriendly reader I imagine the unlikelihood of someone finding themselves in whatever weird thing I shared.

Information on Critical MASS 13 is available at https://www.artspaceshreveport.com/critical-mass-13. 

Information on NSU’s Department of English and Creative Writing is available at https://www.nsula.edu/program/bachelor-of-arts-in-english/.