Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020
Arteles Creative Center's residency artists and their projects 2023-2020
Arteles Creative Center's residency artists and their projects 2023-2020
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Back to Basics program / JUNE <strong>2023</strong><br />
Lisa Rebert<br />
Netherlands<br />
www.wordalchemists.com<br />
About<br />
Lisa is a self-described word alchemist whose day job<br />
consists of copywriting, editing, and otherwise playing with<br />
words in various freelance communications projects. Now<br />
she is shifting her attention to producing her first collection<br />
of short stories.<br />
Lisa writes both fiction and creative nonfiction, and grounds<br />
her work in a strong sense of intersectional feminism, the<br />
power of cultural exchange, and a desire to free travel writing<br />
from its colonial shackles.<br />
She has long been interested in the power of storytelling and<br />
the stories we tell ourselves (collectively and individually),<br />
and how they ultimately frame the world we live in. For Lisa,<br />
storytelling is less of an escape from the human experience<br />
and more of a distillation that strengthens its proof.<br />
Stories: Fiction + Non-Fiction<br />
I watched the Lily of the Valley give way to Oxtail Daisies and<br />
Scentless Chamomile. Plodded through waist-high fields of<br />
Valerian while the Lupine struggled in the relentless heat. I<br />
became like the Jackdaws – colonizing an existing room and<br />
helping build a community that foraged together. Mining our<br />
various talents; being generous with our gifts. I built sauna<br />
fires with quiet intensity, which were fueled by solidarity as<br />
much as by the natural laws of chemistry. I walked in the<br />
forest, leaned against white birch, and found myself once<br />
more. It’s not that I was lost, I just needed the stillness to<br />
guide me.<br />
Armed with my neon sticky notes, sitting in the yellow<br />
reading chair in the attic or on the picnic blanket beneath<br />
the trees – (coincidentally?) the soft blue-green fabric the<br />
color of Jackdaw eggs flecked with dirt, imitating their brown<br />
speckles – and accompanied by a stack of ever-rotating<br />
books, I wrote. I began two non-fiction essays while also<br />
cleaning up several short pieces of fiction. Most importantly<br />
I rekindled that creative fire within me, in large part due to<br />
several books from the <strong>Arteles</strong> library. A big thanks you to<br />
those in my cohort and these books for all that they inspired<br />
in me: The Courage to Create by Roland May, Women Who<br />
Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, The Zen of<br />
Creativity by John Daido Loori, and Devotions by Mary Oliver.