HEY VENUS RADIO

An unusual winter unfurled. Had it been an arrival or an illusion? Late one morning I found an author whose work I’d yet to come across, the humble Wulan Dirgantoro. I wrote an email to a one Lucia Dove at Amsterdam Press, inquiring about how I might get in touch.

Dirgantoro was warm and responsive to the invitation, and we scheduled a phone interview. Although over the course of the few months to follow, we continued our dialogue through email instead. It’s an honor to introduce you to one of our favorite researchers —how fortunate we are to have Dirgantoro join us for a conversation.

GINA JELINSKI: Tell us about your day so far, Wulan. And, if you don't mind, we'd like to know a little bit about what you've been working on over the last few weeks.

WULAN DIRGANTORO: Hi Gina, I'm writing this from Naarm/Melbourne, the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation in Australia. This morning started with a dawn chorus from Pied currawongs and Kookaburras, and I can now hear a flock of Yellow-tailed Black cockatoos making their contact calls as they fly among the tall Eucalypt trees. Listening to bird calls and watching them foraging for their breakfast always reminds me of the power of nature as a provider and as a healer. 

I've been doing a lot of catch-ups in the last few weeks. I just finished an essay on IGAK Murniasih, a Balinese painter who passed away in 2006, for her upcoming exhibition in Singapore. I was deeply immersed in her vivid imagination and technicolour paintings for several months already, so a walk outside on the local nature reserve is always reinvigorating for me.

GJ: In 2019 you wrote an essay for Emotion, Space and Society volume 31, which navigates gendered identity affected by first (and sometimes second) generation migrants —while highlighting transnational mother-daughter intimacies. You had written, "we consider how independently mobile young women navigate the emotional and geographic distances in their intimate relationships with their mothers, both within and beyond their artistic works." I find this to be a conversation that should be discussed on a more public level - and often wonder why these topics seem to be ‘mysteries’ outside of the academics. What are your thoughts?

WD: I’m actually only one of the three authors, of that particular piece; Monika Winarnita and Raelene Wilding are my other co-authors. Monika and Raelene have been working together for a while about the experiences of female migrants in Australia. They invited me along because many migrant women in their study used art to express themselves, particularly the sense of loss, longing, and building a connection with their new homeland. As a first-generation migrant in Australia, I can really relate to their stories. 

As artists, the women we engage in our study already asserted their independence from the status quo and dutiful daughter trope common to many Asian/Southeast Asian migrant women. Creative professions are not valued particularly high in their home countries (Indonesia and the Philippines), but they prioritized their passion above the demands of their other identities. We found out that the dynamic emotional landscapes in their mother-daughter relations are quite diverse, from collaborative relationships with mothers who are perceived as close and supportive to more ambivalent and strained relationships that are nevertheless perceived as intimate. That is, they were close (but also) not close. 

GJ: In one of our previous emails, you had mentioned you wanted to have a speculative conversation on how plant matter communicates changes to their environment; relating to how human remains plays an essential role in these situations. I am very curious of your findings here, as I believe plant life plays a crucial role in our development -yet we still have come to arrive so incredibly far from where we should be, concerning our relationship to nature. Our impact has become a tragedy. 

WD: Absolutely, it is sad that we take plant life for granted. Maybe because modern humans tend to see them as inanimate, we do not have the same connection as we'd have with other animate beings. Plants gave us so much more than just nutrition or shelter. One of the things that they do is, of course, as a fantastic database of information: they tell us about the soil, the water, the weather, the animals that come to visit them and so on. They also mark a place and time. 

In my research about the impact of historical violence in aesthetic practices, I came across plenty of first account testimonies from witnesses, survivors, and perpetrators. I was struck by how many times they mentioned trees as markers for mass graves or as witnesses. Artists, of course, have explored this information and often use trees or landscape as a metaphor for memory and trauma. More commonly, nature is perceived as a source of solace and as a secret archive. On the latter, I'm beginning to think about the materiality of this archive, what can we find out from the trees about what is hidden deep inside the soil. To present the history of humans from the perspective of trees if you like.  

GJ: I would love to talk more again on this subject, especially the idea of nature being “a secret archive”. The Senecio crassisimus is a plant that I sing to at night. I feel a unique sort of energy when we interact. Sacred encounters. I met this one water botanist recently, and he was telling me about the Acmella oleracea (the buzz button), and how it tastes like electricity! 

WD: I had a similar experience earlier this year. My family and I went for a hike at Gippsland on the East coast. We were looking for a Cabbage Tree Palms Walk track to find the Cabbage fan tree palms (Livistona australis). This track is the southernmost range of this rare palm; normally, you'd only see them in Queensland or New South Wales. The track is short, but it is unbelievably beautiful; the palms that dotted around the path have this energy that, until today, I also can't shake the feeling from being around them. Eucalyptus has the same effect on me. I have Yellow gum (Eucalyptus leucoxylon) and Red-flowering gum (Corymbia ficifolia) in my garden. Every day I look at them in wonder and thinking, is it possible to feel such a deep connection to a tree when you're not from the land?

My family and I built a wildlife garden from scratch starting in 2019; we gave away the rose bushes, the agapanthuses, the lilies - all the non-native plants - and we planted native and endemic species as much as possible. Our idea is to make the garden attractive to native birds and wildlife, from nectar-feeders to seed-eaters, and provide some protection for the small birds. We're aware that our garden is tiny and can't provide support for all wildlife, so we talked to our neighbours to share the load, so to speak. There's now shelter, food, and water for all size of birds and wildlife between the three houses! 

GJ: Tell us about your childhood. 

WD: I grew up in Tasikmalaya, at the time was a small town in West Java, where my parents' house was bordered by a small stretch of forest and paddy fields. My parents used to keep geese, dogs and cats and those geese used to terrorize me. My parents kept them because our house was built just on the edge of the forest. Cobras were regular guests during the rainy season, so the geese were supposed to deter them. I roamed around the paddy fields and climbing kersen (Muntingia calubra) trees around the air force base nearby with my friends. I lost that connection with nature after we moved to Bandung, the third biggest city in Java. We played on the street instead. 

Growing up in an environment surrounded by civil servants, I knew quite early what I didn't want to be. Much to my parent's dismay, I went to an art school! I had a great time, and around 1999, after the collapse of the authoritarian regime, I began to develop more interest in the intersection between activism and artmaking. This was a brief window of time where discussion of feminism and gender was part of the national conversation on the media; I began to closely observe my education. The more I observed, the more I was bothered. There were very few women artists mentioned in art history lectures, let alone discussed. So, when I went to study in Australia, I realised that while there are many brilliant artists in Indonesia, yet there were very few researchers, so I started to do that instead. 

Having lived outside Indonesia for nearly twenty years now, I have the privilege to be able to observe Indonesia from both insider and outsider perspectives. Indonesia is currently experiencing democratic regression, and it's increasingly difficult for many critical voices to speak their concerns; many of us fear that Indonesia's going backwards towards an authoritarian government. I'm only a tiny part of a bigger network of Indonesian academics, artists, curators, activists and other cultural workers working hard to create a safe and supportive space for creative practitioners and critical voices. 

GJ: One of your current research projects is a piece on the artist, and political prisoner, Mia Bustam. What led you to discovering her work, and would you like to tell us about your findings so far? 

WD: Mia Bustam (1920-2011) was a memoirist, translator, political prisoner and painter. She was married to one of Indonesia's renowned modern painter and writer, S. Sudjojono, between 1943 and 1959. I discovered her memoirs during my PhD research because I wanted to understand what life was like for women artists during the early years of the Indonesian modern art scene. Her first memoir, Sudjojono and Me (2001), gave a vivid account of the artistic milieu of the time and her role in it. In this memoir, she was still married to Sudjojono, and she was mostly an observer. But this was also when she discovered her artistic awakening; she began to paint with encouragement from her husband and his mates. When I was reading her writings, I focused only on her first book. But her second memoir that focused on her life inside various political prisoner camps, which I didn't go into more depths in my PhD, continued to haunt me. 

Mia's second book, From Camp to Camp: Story of a Woman (2007), was written in the style of political memoirs. She spoke of her political interest and active involvement in a Left-leaning arts organisation known as LEKRA. Her involvement with the organisation was after she was divorced from Sudjojono and became a single mother of eight children. She was living in the art co-op that Sudjojono founded in 1946 and later abandoned after their divorce. Mia took over the co-op while trying to make ends meet for her own family. She was later arrested during Indonesia's 1965-66 anti-communist pogrom because of her involvement with LEKRA. She spent thirteen years in various prison camps without a trial, and her children were looked after by various extended family members. 

She described how she managed to continue making art in the camps, from portraits of the camp guards (unpaid commission by the guards), backdrops for performances by the camp inmates (to entertain visiting officials) to a small landscape painting. About this painting, she described how she removed the barbed wires on her landscape because she wanted to evoke a sense of freedom in her painting. You can see her remarkable resilience and strength during those times and how making art helped her retained her sense of self and dignity in such a dehumanizing place. Mia stated that none of her paintings and drawings survived, and only one photo documentation that she made before her imprisonment existed. 

Her oldest son, Tedjabayu Sudjojono, who was 17 at the time, was also imprisoned due to his involvement with a student organization. I met Tedjabayu two years ago, and he spoke about when he was released from the men's prison in 1979, his mother was waiting for him (Mia was already released in 1978). He said, "Other people were greeted with tears of joy by their family members. I wasn't sure how my mother would greet me. I haven't seen her for fourteen years, and I have changed a lot during my time in prison camps." Mia approached him, offered him a handshake and said simply to Tedjabayu, 'C'est la Vie.'

Tedjabayu passed away this year from Covid-19. I was extremely fortunate to have met him and to learn more about his family history.

GJ:  What an incredible story. I am so sorry to hear about Tedjabayu’s passing from covid. Last year you wrote an article which featured Indonesian artists Tintin Wulia and Dadang Christanto - through their works you examine trauma, specifically related to the devastating mass killings of anti-communists in 1960's Indonesia. Might you elaborate here?

WD: This piece was a small part of a larger work that I'm doing now: aesthetic practices and historical violence in Indonesia. The 1965-66 anti-communist killings stand out because of the unresolved nature of the massacre and its impact across generation and geography. Scholars, writers, artists, and filmmakers have studied and produced works about 1965-66 mass killings in the past five decades. The films that Joshua Oppenheimer and his anonymous Indonesian collaborators produced, titled The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), are probably one of the few well-known films about this event in recent times. 

Tintin Wulia and Dadang Christanto are two of Indonesia's foremost contemporary artists whose body of work have been focusing on this topic. They're third and second-generation Indonesians after 1965, respectively. Both artists have lost family members to mass violence. Tintin has lost her grandfather and Dadang, his father; both were taken away by the military and militia at night or early morning in 1965; they're still missing and presumed dead. Their works highlighted the intergenerational trauma of the killings from personal history and simultaneously spoke about this past to the broader audience outside their close family circle. Tintin's work, in particular, situates the memory of the killings as something more mutable and not bound to the past. 

GJ: What are your thoughts on contemporary writers; I feel they tend to turn a blind eye toward the academics, and focus instead on fiction. This has been an issue for decades now. I do enjoy fiction, it’s a crucial genre. I remember when I first came across the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o —whose work candidly addressed the corruption and hypocrisy of the economic elite of Kenya. But I fear readers may not take fiction as seriously as nonfiction.

WD: Fiction is, of course, an important element in art and image-making. If I may turn to artmaking to elaborate: for many Indonesian artists who were active during Indonesia's authoritarian regime (1966-1998), criticism towards corruption, human rights abuses and environmental destruction had to be carefully deployed to avoid censorship, jail or worse. The artists employed elements of fiction to deliver these criticisms, from allegories to metaphor. This strategy continues after the regime's fall; the mass killings of 1965-66 are a good example. 

Because the Indonesian state continues to deny their responsibility for the killings, the topic is largely still taboo for the larger population. There's still strong resistance in discussing justice, let alone compensation for the survivors and their families. So for those who wanted to bring attention to the past must use several strategies to do it. One of them is turning into the world of fiction; Tintin's work "1001 Martian Homes" (2017) is only one example of this. Her video work depicted political prisoners sent to Mars to establish a colony fit for human habitation, set in 2165. The work referenced 1965 and the political prisoners who were sent to Buru, a remote island in Eastern Indonesia. The use of fiction allows visual artists to speak about and with the survivors about the past violence and highlights their resilience, not just as victims from the space of imagination. 

GJ: I was curious about your process while working on Transformative Territory: Performance Art and Gender in Post-New Order Indonesia. I also wanted to know more about the Kelompok Perek collective; can you elaborate on their work & origins, and how you came to discover them?

WD: Kelompok Perek is a collective formed by several female artists from different nationalities in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 1999. This was after the fall of the New Order regime in May 1998, where after 32 years of rigid gender roles, there was a brief window of freedom where women were able to speak about issues such as gender and feminism in the public discourse. KP emerged from this environment and, importantly, as a reaction against the male-dominated art scene in Yogyakarta. While the collective emerged from a specific locale, I think their actions resonated with the discontent felt by women artists across different places in Indonesia. I had heard of the group when I was still based in Indonesia, but I get to know about them more from one of their members who lived in Melbourne around 2004. 

I met Heidi Arbuckle when she was doing her PhD about Emiria Sunassa at Melbourne University. She knew about my work on feminism and curation, so we caught up regularly and became good friends. When I finally started my PhD later on, I became more interested to learn how women artists in Indonesia use feminist strategies to challenge patriarchy. So I got in touch with other members of the collective in Yogyakarta. It was really interesting to see how their artistic trajectory evolved over the decades: they were quite outspoken about their feminist and left-leaning directions, in the beginning, the late 1990s, and I see them as very much continuing the trajectory of other progressive women's groups in Indonesia before the anti-communist killings in 65-66. Later, while they continue to do works that focus on women's experience, much of their earlier radical politics have shifted. I think this is also reflective of the organic nature of a collective.   

GJ: One of my favorite pieces of yours is from your book Feminisms and Contemporary Art in Indonesia: Defining Experiences. The chapter I departed from was "Reading The Primitive"; it begins on page 110. You're elaborating on the work of a woman named Emiria Sunassa, the painter whose works focused on subjects who were "unable to mourn the loss of their culture, rendered invisible by colonialism and its aftermath."

WD: Thanks! When I wrote that section, I was thinking about how Emiria's paintings give another perspective of the nation. Her portraits of indigenous people from Eastern Indonesia and Kalimantan showed the extent of her mobility (unusual for a single woman during the 1940s) and empathy towards the people that she painted. 

Writing from today's perspective, I could see that her works bring out the emotional impact of colonisation, namely loss and mourning, that rarely talked about in Indonesian art history. Indonesian art history is a reflection of the nation's history; it is centred on nationalism and modernism. So, the (male) heroism and the anti-colonial attitude are very much celebrated, yet the loss and the inability to mourn, or the vulnerabilities, are not acknowledged. In a way, the moving forward attitude reflects a postcolonial nation eager to move on and put itself in the international arena. I see Emiria's works as bringing visibility to the fact that there was/is a severe disconnection between the people and their land – not being able to mourn means that you can't move on. Hence, the cycle of violence and disruption continues. 

GJ: From the same work, you write on page 139, "When women are typically represented as mute objects with their cultural agency marginalised from the mainstream, self-portraiture is often a strategy to control their representation." You discuss the still image as a weapon. Then, we encounter Lakshmi Shitaresmi, who produced a series of self-portraits while she was pregnant - what do these women represent for you?

WD: The artists and their artworks that I discussed in my book are only a glimpse of what women artists are working in Indonesia. Laksmi and her peers showed that for many Indonesian artists, self-portraiture is important to challenge the representation and perception of women within their community. Specifically, they utilize the imagination to question the idealized representation of motherhood. They do so by showing the conflicting emotions in their parenting and caring roles, not all aspects of motherhood are glorious, so to speak. 

GJ: I might be making an assumption, but I'm curious about what languages you might speak.

WD: I speak only Indonesian and English now, but I grew up where my parents and people around me also speak Javanese and Sundanese at home – the two out of seven hundred ethnic languages in Indonesia. I can still understand when people speak Javanese or Sundanese to me, but sadly I can only answer in Indonesian. Indonesians are very adept at switching codes, from formal to informal Indonesian, from their ethnic language to the national language, from English to Indonesian again, sometimes this code switching happens within one set of conversation! I deeply regret that I don't continue speaking Sundanese or Javanese; this means I often lose some nuances of the conversation whenever I come back to Indonesia to visit my family and friends. 

GJ: Do you believe that there may be languages out there we have yet to discover?

WD: I think so! Or rather, there are languages that we have yet to recover. 

GJ: What are you currently reading? And, what might your plans be for the summer?

WD: I like having several books on the go. I just finished the Rampart trilogy by MR Carey; it's an apocalyptic dystopia set in a post-climate crisis world, and Margaret Atwood's Moral Disorder. I have now Evelyn Araluen's debut poetry collection “Dropbear”; she's a Goori – Koorie poet, her work is a savage and insightful look on colonialism in Australia, and I'm looking forward to reading that.

We're in the middle of winter here in the Southern hemisphere. It's time for the winter garden, something that I didn't get to do last year. Given that we're not going anywhere anytime soon as Australia still closes its international borders, I will spend the time to reconnect with my garden again. 

Wulan Dirgantoro is a researcher of modern and contemporary Indonesian art. She is currently a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne, Australia. Wulan is the author of Feminisms and Contemporary Art in Indonesia: Defining Experiences (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). Her research interests are on feminism, gender, memory and trauma in Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art. Her writings have been published in various publications in Indonesia, Australia, Japan and Europe. Together with Michelle Antoinette, Wulan co-curated the exhibition “Shaping Geographies: Art I Women I Southeast Asia” (2019-2020) that highlighted recent contemporary art practices by Southeast Asian women artists.

Language is a tool which shapes our humanity — a sanctified entity whom embodies the power to seduce, yet simultaneously, destroy us. Language is an anomaly, one whose whisper may be raspy, in fact it leaves scratch marks onto the human condition. But then we’ve metaphors, pseudonyms, even undecipherable inscriptions left behind by our ancestors which we crave to fully comprehend. O—pity the tongue!

Amidst this fascination I spoke with two translators, in the fall of 2019, Audrey Harris and Matt Gleeson; on their work translating Amparo Dávila’s novel, The Houseguest. The three of us had surrendered to Dávila’s words; they tumbled around in our throats, a tango worthy of infinite threads spilling out  —softly, crooked, brazen. Although, there were remnants of our conversation which we had wanted to elaborate on; that being said, were are thrilled to further our dialogue on the language arts, and hope that as a reader (or perhaps a linguist) you might find yourself intrigued by our inherent obsession with translation.

GINA JELINSKI: Before your practice as a translator, what were you doing for work? And, what led you to your initial fascination with translating?

AUDREY HARRIS: I was a book publicist in New York, for Farrar, Straus and Giroux and then for Harper Collins. I loved working at Farrar, Straus because their books are very literary and they publish excellent works in translation. While I was there, I remember being excited that we published Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels in English, and I particularly remember when we published Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, and all of the commotion it caused. All of the assistants were invited to the launch party. Bolaño wasn’t there, but I remember meeting the book’s translator Natasha Wimmer at the party. I remember that she had wild curly hair and wore glasses, and that my heart was beating wildly when I approached her- she was such a star to me. I asked her if she had any advice on translation, and she just looked at me and said, use a thesaurus, or a few of them. I thought she was putting me down at the time but now I consider it very good practical advice.

MATT GLEESON: I’ve worked in libraries and bookshops (including my beloved City Lights in San Francisco), copyedited academic books, waited tables and bartended, worked for a film festival in Mexico, tutored high schoolers in math, taught literature workshops to students in Oaxaca, and more. Several of those jobs I still do: literary translation didn’t suddenly pay the bills! My fascination with translation was a pretty natural outgrowth of loving literature and enjoying the challenge of reading in other languages. 

GJ: How might you set up your environment when getting started on a translation? 

MG: When I write—when I create a new text where there was none before—I have no idea where I’ll end up, and I don’t know precisely what I have to do to finish it. I just know I have to show up and be available, like a fisherman going out to sea. But when I translate, the map is very clearly laid out. There’s a text already. It’s impossible to be 100% faithful to it, and there may be difficulties. But the author has laid the path. It’s almost impossible to get lost, because the text exists already and at every moment it’s insisting, it’s telling me what it is and what I have to confront next. Perhaps because of this, I don’t need to set up my environment methodically. The work can easily absorb me and I become compulsive. I can idly start translating while in my pajamas waiting for the boiler to heat the water for my shower, and get sucked in for hours. Words I was chewing over will suddenly occur to me while I’m walking on the street, or riding the bus. 

AH: I have my original copy of the book, the best copy that I can find. I read through the story, and identify difficult words and passages, which I translate first, sometimes with multiple possible translations for one word. At the bottom of my story I write, in ink, questions and analysis, as I would when preparing to teach the story, or to write an essay on it. My apartment has to be quite clean and orderly before I get started, and I try to eliminate distractions by muting my phone and not checking emails. I’ll often end up doing quite a bit of research as I translate, looking up place names, literary references, listening to songs if they’re mentioned in the story, and so on. I find it an extremely soothing task to translate, one that can make me forget absolutely everything else, because I’m disconnected from everything else except the task of entering and interpreting the writer’s world. These days I’m trying to be conscious of setting up a more ergonomic space for translating and writing, because bending over a laptop while in a seated position can create terrible neck problems.

GJ: Do you think there are still languages out there that have yet to be discovered? 

AH: Discovered by whom?

MG: Well, if anyone speaks them, then they’ve already been discovered. But surely there are languages of the future that don’t exist yet and will be “discovered” by their eventual speakers. Languages are constantly mutating, including English and Spanish (really, there are multiple Englishes and Spanishes). New shoots and runners that we can’t even imagine are sure to be thrown out in the future.

GJ: Which types of languages do your gravitate toward most, and why- such as isolating languages, agglutinating, polysynthetic, as well as inflecting?

AH: Last summer,  I was conversing with a very perceptive man who asked me about how I had become interested in learning Spanish. I described being fascinated in my early teenage years with San Francisco’s Mission District, which was then still heavily Spanish-speaking. I remember hearing music- Spanish rock or salsa music- playing in the streets on a Tuesday morning, and wandering into a bakery where the woman working there who sort of doted on me and cheered me on for my attempts to speak Spanish with her, and I remember she gave me pan dulce, and wouldn’t accept any payment. It felt like I was in another world, one with different values and currencies, a world that coexisted with my own, but that I could only unlock through language. After explaining all this to this man, he smiled and said, “so you chose to learn Spanish for social reasons.” And I think that’s true.

I’ve gravitated to Spanish, and to other Romance languages (Portuguese, and next I’d like to learn more Italian, since my sister just moved to Trieste) because of a desire for connection to their people and their culture. So my answer is that I do gravitate to Inflecting languages over others, but it’s been originally for social reasons. Though I would love to speak and translate Swedish, Japanese, Mayan, and too many other languages to list here. Every time I hear someone speaking in another language I have a desire to speak with them in that language; every time I read another language I wish to understand it. That said, I do think that translation is a social act, because it involves delivering a text from one group of people to another. My friend, the translation scholar Isabel Gómez, who teaches at UMASS in Boston, thinks about translation in terms of gift exchange theory, and I like that idea, of translation as an exchange of gifts between the writer, the translator, and the reader. Along somewhat similar lines, there is a Quechua word, Chasqui, that means “person of relay.” During the Incan empire, Chasquis were young messengers charged with carrying messages in the Tahuantinsuyo postal system. Using coca leaves for fuel, they delivered messages by foot in a relay system, and had to be strong runners and swimmers. They would use quipus, or a system of knots, to convey their messages, or they would repeat the words until they memorized the entire message. Later, the word Chasqui became a more general term for someone who carried news or ideas from one place to another. I also think the Chasqui could be a fitting symbol for the translator, someone whose specific function is to carry words across large expanses of geographical territory. 

GJ: To taste another dialect is to further inquire the vocal prosody of our ancestors, and evoke identities long forgotten. We cannot deny that this is indeed the ecstasy that language provides us with. We saturate our lives with stories; we are unravelling the tide and witnesses to its divine influence over us. Can you break down these elements, in your own experience with the language arts?

MG: I definitely share your enthusiasm for the wonder of language, but I think I might describe its elements differently. 

I guess I feel that, when used as an act of conscious communication, language is inherently a translation—a translation of something that isn’t words into words. It’s also, thus, inherently imperfect, inherently failing to capture everything that the not-words are and do and feel like. But because human beings are so embedded in language, the words can strike up the most remarkable echoes, concepts, images, and feelings inside us: words have been passed down from ancestors but can be constantly remolded by us and the people around us, they have their own plasticity and sound and presence, and they’ve also become fused with personal sensations and images inside us through constant use and association. Really, these systems of symbols escape our control. Sometimes words even act on their own, not to translate anything, just to create a play of sounds and shapes and references. And the things around us have inexhaustibly deep character and presence too: say, a particular oak tree. You can use the word “oak” functionally, to indicate a type of tree in a set of directions; or you can use the word to unlock an incredibly complicated set of traits and qualities and memories of encounters in a reader. It’s wondrous that everything in and around us, all of experience, is inherently uncapturable in some way. It’s also wondrous that words can put thoughts and inhabitable worlds inside us that weren’t there before. 

And this all makes me very hopeful and sanguine about translation. If the original imperfect translation of not-words into words can do such amazing things, why can’t the imperfect translation from one language to another do equally amazing things?

GJ: Recently I’ve discovered Icelandic and Latin. I’m no expert, but I really love the word Echidna (Latin), which means a spined, burrowing, egg laying, ant eating mammal of Australia. Then there is the Icelandic word for mysterious, which translates to leyndardomsfuller. Sometimes it’s the definitions that cause me to obsess with certain words, when other times it’s word itself  —isolated, a song on my tongue. What words, in any language, do you find yourself falling for? 

MG: I’m a sucker for juicy- or absurd-sounding words, like “refunfuñar” in Spanish, which basically means to grumble with annoyance or sputter with rage. I kind of want to laugh with delight every time someone uses it. I also have a particular appreciation these days for simple words that describe relatively irreducible or concrete things. Colors—and not fancier words like “dun” or “ochre,” but the simplest ones: “red,” “black,” “green.” The names assigned to animals, plants, foods, geological features, bodily phenomena: “carpenter bee,” “radish,” “castor bean,” “sandstone,” “pork chop,” “tepache,” “sweat.” Using them feels like being sensually in touch with the world. 

AH: I love the Spanish word ‘fugaz,’ which means ‘fleeting.’ It’s almost onomatopoeic, because it rolls off the tongue so quickly, with the final ‘z’ sounding more like an ’s’ than what we think of as a ‘z’ sound in English. I love how the first syllable, ‘fug,’ is also the first syllable of the word for ‘fugitive’—‘fugitivo.’ I would never have stopped to think about the connections between the words ‘fleeting’ and ‘fugitive,’ but in Spanish the connection is spelled out clearly by identical first syllable, which derives from the Latin prefix -fug meaning ‘flee’ or ‘move’ (meanwhile the English ‘flee’ comes from the Dutch word ‘vlieden’). In Spanish, the phrase “estrella fugaz” means a “shooting star.” I like the idea this phrasing suggests that when we see a star streaking across the sky, it must be a fugitive star, hurrying to hide itself in the night sky. It reminds me of the last lines from the William Butler Yeats poem, “When You are Old,” when Love “hid[es] his face among a crowd of stars.”  

GJ: Do either of you have any language exercises that you tend to practice; when you’re either feeling blocked or just inspired to get to work? Sometimes I’ll write out a poem in English, then translate it into German, Polish, then back to English again. It’s difficult to figure which languages translate correctly, yet all of a sudden I’ve got a piece that is almost unrecognizable from its original form. 

AH: I love that exercise! Mine are a bit more boring. I’ll just force myself to write scenes and memories from my own life. It’s inspiring because when I read them I realize that they are original to me, that no one else would write them the way I do. There is no better inspiration for writing than reading a good book. I love reading Borges’s essays on language. Recently I have been inspired by Francisco Goldman’s Say her Name, by the way he pieces together his dead wife’s life, like a scrapbook, blending small scenes of dialog, passages from her journals, conversations with others, dreams, and his own experience of living following her death. For me, team translation is an interesting kind of exercise. 

When Matt and I translate Dávila’s stories, from the beginning we establish a constant dialog. One of us will send the other the first draft of a story.  Then the other will go through with both the original and the draft, and make tons of notes and comments. Why not translate this word that way? Why not rearrange the phrasing? Why was this choice made? What about x, y, or z alternative? By the time the second one of us has gone over the draft, it’s completely marked up and written over. We’ll go back and forth like this many times, until we are both satisfied with the final result. Often the phrasing we ultimately choose emerges as part of the explanation or answer to a question. If I were to teach translation, I’d have my students translate in pairs or even larger groups, so that they could learn to challenge each other in this way.

MG: With translation, I don’t generally feel blocked, because there’s a text to inspire and guide me. However, exercises that have been incredibly valuable for my long-term translation practice are writing stories and poetry directly in Spanish, and translating my own English texts into Spanish: doing this forces me to reckon with Spanish vocabulary and syntax in a new way, building it from the ground up. It also places me in the position of a learner, a beginner, a child. Different things come out of me. To anyone who wants to deepen their relationship with a language that’s not their mother tongue, I recommend challenging yourself this way.  

GJ: If translation has allowed for us to become more in touch with other cultures, why do you believe that we are still struggling with how we treat immigrants? Are there any realistic solutions for the ways in which our government has been intruding on the lives of these individuals —very specifically pertaining to all of the children & their families who have been kidnapped;they are tucked away in modern day concentration camps. I cannot accept this horrid reality which none of our leaders fully address.

We are witnesses to unfortunate realities which are prominently evoking irrational ideologies across the globe. With the current state of our political climate, have we actually evolved?

AH: Compared to other civilizations, in the Americas and elsewhere, the United States is extremely young. Based on our current treatment of non-white immigrants, I don’t think we’ve evolved far enough beyond our original European-colonial project. We’ve created a terrible caste system in our society, and the division of wealth is shocking.

MG: Broadly, translation isn’t only a means toward peaceful coexistence, respect, and compassion; it’s also a means for banks and mining companies to do lucrative business across international borders, or for proselytizers to invade remote areas and “spread the faith,” both of which are examples of things I find profoundly violent. An arms deal between the Trump administration and Saudi Arabia needs translators and people in touch with both cultures at some point along the line. The real questions for me are what are you translating, and why? What kind of power structure are you working for? And also, who’s going to read it? Literary translation seems to be a niche interest in the U.S., and I’m not sure how much effect it has on the larger culture, or how much influence it has on those people who are genuinely ready to deny the personhood of migrants from other lands. 

The current, awful climate of growing hatred around the world isn’t just a failure of sympathy. I think it’s deeply rooted in the brute exercise of political power, and partly in long-term colonial and capitalist trends like pursuing profit based on the appropriation of land and bodies and minds, brutally pillaging colonized countries and making certain places nearly unlivable, and creating arbitrary false hierarchies of skin color over the course of centuries. In her book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks proposes not framing the struggle in terms of gaining rights or “equality,” but rather in terms of ending oppression. I think about this a lot. I don’t think I believe in humans “evolving.” I hope that through struggle and hard work, we’ll manage to make less destructive systems triumph. But I think we’ll always be governed by irrationality, and in many ways I’m glad for that: love, wonder, and beauty are as irrational as hate. 

GJ: What languages do you believe there is a shortage of translators for? 

AH: Sticking close to home, I’ll advocate for indigenous American languages, which are disappearing at an alarming rate. There is so much important knowledge, folklore, history, that is indigenous to these lands and that is contained within the history of these languages. If I could go back and start my Ph.D. over I would love to have learned Maya, Nahuatl, Purepecha, etc. There is also a huge need for legal translators of these languages in Mexico, where indigenous people often get blamed for crimes they didn’t commit and lack important resources to defend themselves.

MG: There are too few people learning and speaking Indigenous languages in the Americas. But that’s not necessarily a question of translating novels. That has more to do with these languages surviving in all their richness, and with having the respect to speak with people native to the land on their terms and in their vocabulary. Even within languages, there are still social cleavages across which we don’t do enough translation. For example, John Keene talks about how there aren’t enough Black writers being translated from other languages: in a given year there might be a certain list of writers from Latin America and Europe translated into English, yet almost none are Black, and this deprives the English-reading public of an important part of the full panorama of those languages and countries. I think he’s pointing out something that’s really important for us to recognize and question. 

 Brian Henry is a self-taught experimental photographer and explorer. While Henry had won a few scholarships to attend college, he chose to apply his money to his own unscripted, artistic journey. He has traveled up and down the East Coast of the U.S., as well as Europe and the Balkans. He has exhibited works for the following organizations: Steven Amedee Gallery, Area 405, Pulp Gallery, Goucher College, Streit House Space, Gallery 1 of 1, Le Bocal, and Carlheim Mansion. We’re excited to speak to Brian on his photographic works, which are both sensual and unnerving to bear witness to.

GINA JELINSKI: Can you reveal to us the elements of intimacy and abandonment that is represented through your work?

BRIAN HENRY: Through my photography, I often try my best to connect with a location with my physical presence combined with emotions enhanced by analog means. I find analog photography to be intimate on it's own. Light on film, processed and printed by my hands. Occasionally stories play in my mind of what it was like to once exist there and what happened. I find beauty in contrasting skin among decayed walls, and mold. Nature is taking back what is hers and I'm grateful to create memories of this process.

GJ: Which of your shoots do you hold most sacred, and why?

BH: Each location can touch me in a different way. I'd hate to say that one is more sacred than others. I will say that one of the places I worked hardest to photograph was at a state hospital in Massachusetts. It involved driving 7 hours there and getting over a 10 foot anti-climb fence before sunrise. I was able to shoot beloved Polaroid Time-Zero film there before the hospital was completely demolished a couple of months later.

GJ: Tell us about the influences you had as a child.

BH: I can't recall having any specific people that influenced me, but I feel that I was born with a natural curiosity of things that was often sparked by characters and situations from Television. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files, as well as horror films. I feel like there were many fictional stories that influenced me into seeking out abandoned places as a kid. So much grew from there. Only over the past few years have I really attempted to explore the work of historic photographers.

GJ: What rituals/routines you practice?

BH: I have long mornings which I prefer to spend with my dog and cats. I also have off on Tuesdays, which has naturally become a day for me to work on photography.

GJ: What is your greatest fear? And, do you have any phobias?

BH: I fear getting a terminal illness or any health-related issue that would make me have to seek constant medical attention. I have a phobia of my own blood...although it depends where I bleed from. It's really strange.

GJ: Who do you want as president, and why so?

BH: A true progressive black trans woman because I'm tired of old, conservative white men. We need a leader that has lived a life of oppression and injustice to understand and help fight against what rots this nation.

GJ: Would you like to elaborate on queerness? 

BH: Whenever I dwell on queerness, I think of the origin of the word. To be labeled as peculiar because of a lack of heterosexuality or being cisgender. I'm hoping that one day, the label of "queer" no longer exists. We get there when everyone accepts that we do not need to be considered odd or peculiar anymore. Until then, we should embody our queerness in pride. There should be no reason to oppress ourselves.

GJ: Tell us more about your work, Brian.

BH: It is an ongoing journal documenting architectural decay, fears, freedom and mortality. I attempt to portray the beauty I see in forlorn locations and use myself and medium as a means to connect to them. Although many photographs are made, a large part of my work is the adventure of exploring new territory and experiencing the unknown. My self portraits have been therapeutic in that it's pushed me to step out of my comfort zone and explore different levels of fear and anxiety.

From a technical standpoint, I primarily use analog processes. When I shoot Polaroid film, I consider it a unique souvenir of my experience. There's something meaningful in creating something tangible within a space that will soon be destroyed, or with someone that will eventually be gone. Darkroom work allows me to bend reality and add additional effects of distress and decay to compliment the subject. In some instances, I have used photographic paper and film found in abandoned buildings. Other times, I have buried my images in decaying buildings for the effects.  These techniques are all used in my attempts to connect to a space, and create irreplaceable mementos of time.

GJ: What books, whether fiction or nonfiction, do you often find yourself revisiting?

BH: There are several photo-books that I often go back to. I love to see the works of Arthur Tress, Francesca Woodman, Deborah Turbeville, Edmund Teske, Jerry Uelsmann, Man Ray...

GJ: Fantasy and obsession. These are two realms which develop further our socio-emotive senses - how do these affect your life philosophy?

BH: I find that I've had a continued nature of curiosity that is deeply a part of who I am. If there's something that piques my interest, it's easy for me to obsess in figuring out the answers. When there are no answers, I can fall back on fantasy.

Brian Henry currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland. To inquire about Brian’s work and view his portfolio visit Decayed Emulsion. You can also visit his featured works on our contributor’s page.

Bryan Washington is one of the most important voices of our decade. His debut novel, Lot, is a humble glimpse into the lives of the working class, revealing tales of familial trauma, and the forbidden aspects of queer love. His stories contain elements which broadly illustrate the politics of race, infidelity, and poverty; intimate monologues nodding off into a weightless symphony. Washington leaves nothing to the imagination; highlighting how toxic ideologies of domesticity still runs rampant, and prejudice is everywhere, even in places that appear hidden.

GINA JELINSKI: Did you foresee these elements being so profound when you first began the process of putting the stories together?

BRYAN WASHINGTON: Thanks for the kind words, Gina — and no, I didn’t foresee it at all. I was just trying to write the stories I wanted to read. But I credit my agent, my editor, my friends, and the Riverhead crew for believing in the narratives and putting them out in the world.

GJ: Can you tell us about the first book you’d read that spoke to you on an intimate level?

BW: I wasn’t a reader as a kid by any stretch of the imagination, but I spent a lot of time with cookbooks and comic books. My folks kept plenty of both around the house. The cookbooks were mostly written by women of color, across continents and communities, and getting to see windows into their lives through 150 and 300 word excerpts was formative for me.

And fan fiction was pretty important to me, too. As someone who gravitated towards queer narratives as a teen, insofar as I gravitated to written narratives at all, it was gratifying and lovely to find those avenues on the internet in the early aughts, and for free.

GJ: What is your creative process?

BW: I usually write generative material (new stuff) in the mornings, and I’m no good for that in the evenings. But I can edit just about anytime. And I can write just about anywhere, although a place with some sort of ambient noise in the background doesn’t hurt.

But if I want to tell a story, then I’ll make time to tell that story. That’s usually a pretty big indicator that it’s something I’m interested in thoroughly enough, especially if it’s looking like a longer project. There are too many other things you could be doing, so that impulse is pretty important to me.

GJ: Let’s talk about the intimacy of one of your characters, specifically Roberto…who offers us a telling glimpse into his own psychology; his runaway parents, the love affair with the narrator..Roberto states that he had never even been to church. These intrinsic strengths portray the diversities between each character. How was it that you imagined all of these characters?

BW: I generally start each piece with a conversation, which usually yields some sort of conflict (eventually, if not immediately). Then I build the characters’s world from the inside out. Their personal problems (infrastructural, familial, interpersonal, whatever) determine the lens that I can navigate their surroundings from.

GJ: Roberto also says to the narrator: “Home is wherever you are at the time.” The narrator cannot find himself to grasp much meaning in that statement -although Roberto goes on to explain that if he (the narrator) in fact knew what it was like to not have a home, he would one day understand. Do you imagine that readers who cannot relate to these concepts, and for lack of a better word…have been spoon fed their whole lives…that they might be able to better comprehend the dividing lines of class and race, and hopefully have an awakening to realize their own privileges?

BW: I guess there’s two parts to that: for one thing, in my capacity as someone who writes fiction, I don’t craft stories to educate or to illuminate or to enlighten or any of that. I’m just trying to tell the story I’m trying to tell, to the best of my abilities at the time. That’s it. So if a well-off, white reader in the States comes across that line and takes it to heart, great. If not, great. As far as fiction’s concerned, I’m interested in telling the stories I’d like to tell, and the audience I have in mind are my friends. And they already know.

But if you’re telling me that a well-off, white reader in the States can internalize the whole of Hogwarts, with all of the classes and electives, as well as Mordor and Westeros and the Upside Down, then asking them to make the leap of conceptualizing — not even internalizing, but just envisioning — the presence of class divides in their immediate atmosphere is not a very big or demanding ask. The key is that it might force them to reckon with their own situation, which no one wants to do, and that can yield for an uncomfortable reading experience in the way that a more fantastical scenario might not (although it absolutely could).

GJ: “…Too dark for the blancos, too latin for the blacks.” Can you elaborate on this line, for the readers who are not yet educated on certain racial politics?

BW: Colorism is a very real thing, as are the stereotypes and typecasting associated with it. There isn’t enough room to extrapolate here, and other folks have done it much better than I could, so I’d recommend starting with Nawshaba Ahmed’s Film and Fabrication, Winifred G. Barbee’s Coming Aware of Our Multiraciality, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, Evelyn Glenn’s Shades of Difference, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

GJ: You opened the door to discussions on child abuse, familial trauma, and homophobia. How difficult was that to do? Or, did you find it necessary rather than a struggle?

BW: I didn’t have a larger goal when writing the stories other than writing the stories that I wanted to write, however they turned out. That was it. The themes as a whole weren’t the result of a didactic effort or anything like that — but our respective obsessions and preoccupations are our respective obsessions and preoccupations. It’s always a struggle for me to tell stories, but that’s how I think about my problems. I rarely find solutions. So I’m not a very optimistic person, but if there’s any optimism to be gleaned then I think it’s through people telling the stories they want to tell, whatever they are, in whatever avenues and forums they’re able to finagle.

GJ: Miguel is a character who stands boldly in view, as the narrator’s harbinger to spiritual and sexual freedom. Their relationship is so essential to better understanding all of the other voices that are ever so present in your novel. Might you elaborate on the recurring narrator and Miguel’s relationship?

BW: Sure: they’re casual friends. Which is to say that they have similar struggles, and they just so happen to occupy a similar geographic space. And where the recurring narrator is maybe more brazen in his actions, I don’t think that he’s comfortable with himself like Miguel is. Their interacting with each other was fun to play with on the page: partly because of the tension, sexual and otherwise, and partly because they’re both just so different, from their senses of humor on down. But you could probably argue that the recurring narrator envies Miguel very much, and you could also probably argue that Miguel wouldn’t understand that sentiment at all (or that, at the very least, he’d call it bullshit).

GJ: What is the wisdom you’d like to share with other young black writers?

BW: Be wary of anyone’s free wisdom. Read everything. Write whatever you want to write about, on your terms. Don’t feel pressured or compelled to create work that solely centers your identity or existence in a marginalized group (or groups), unless that’s what you want to do, and on your terms.

GJ: What books are you reading right now?

BW: Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams, Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li, My Brother’s Husband by Gengoroh Tagame, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. And I’m stoked for Morgan Parker’s novel.

GJ: What about other works that you look forward to experiencing? And, who is it that you believe might be an individual whose philosophy we need to pay more attention to?

BW: Mitski. I don’t know that she needs or wants anymore attention, and she’s been very careful about how much of herself she gives her audience. But her music is a gift and that is enough. People always want more, and it’s rad to see someone just say, “No, what I’m giving you is enough”.

Bryan Washington is a writer from Houston. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times Style Magazine, BuzzFeed, the BBC, Vulture, The Paris Review, Boston Review, The Cut, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, MUNCHIES, American Short Fiction, GQ, FADER, The Awl, The Believer, Hazlitt, and Catapult, where he wrote a column called “Bayou Diaries”. He’s also a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 winner, an Ernest J. Gaines Award recipient, an International Dylan Thomas Prize recipient, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize finalist, a National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize finalist, and the recipient of an O. Henry Award.

His first novel, Memorial, drops on October 6th. You can pre-order it here, or from your local indie. His first book, Lot, was pubbed by Riverhead.

Plant portraits by Domonick Gravine. Interview by Gina Jelinski

Growing up in the Valley, most of my childhood was spent hopping around to various different nurseries. Some were botanical gardens, or private plant sales in someone’s backyard just as they’re obtaining their business license. Although what I can’t seem to escape are the carnivorous plant exhibits, where I was exposed to beak-leafed pitcher plants; the Sarracenia hybrid, and the uncanny Nepenthes.

What caught my attention out of the collection was the strange existence of the Sundew, most specifically the fan-leafed Tuberous Drosera. A delicate yet robust plant, some only 8 inches tall, whose production of white flowers and rosettes of elliptical leaves fanned out into an unbelievably lucid green aura. I was in enchanted. I started to do my research, and by doing so I discovered Domonick Gravine, the owner of Red Leaf Exotics; a carnivorous plant nursery out of Brooklyn, New York.

I could not be there to visit Domonick (as I am on the West Coast), but he was kind enough to donate his time to answer my questions. He even gave permission to showcase some photographs from the archives of his magical gully of blood-thirsty specimens. I’ve never encountered anything quite like them.

—deep fuchsia glands blushing indigo ammonium, probing and inviting regulatory enzymes. Vermillion amino acids, simple products of digestion. Suggesting that emotional levels of glutamine may just be responsible for the plants insipid appetite. Membrane potential? Moody physiological root systems! Periwinkle violet tongue, a homologue of kinetic biochemical properties.

Detail (above) of carnivorous macrophylla teeth, jelly exudate beneath lid of N. Truncata red x lowii

Gina Jelinski: Obtaining a relationship with plant life is not a weekly endeavor  -it’s an every day affair. An obsession. One that brings us all closer to our primal selves. Can you recall when it was that your fascination with carnivorous plants began?

Dominick Gravine: Since I could walk, I’d always been fascinated with nature! Around age ten, my curiosity was taken by this very strange clump of leaves & roots that was just thrown into a neighbor’s compost pile. I didn’t grow plants at this point, but something inside of me decided to tie a rope around the little plant and drag it on home. I found a clear patch in the woods behind our house, and planted it. This was my secret garden that I visited everyday! I added some other plants my mom gave me, as leftovers from her garden had always grown so bountiful. Over time, I’d realized that indeed the large mystery clump had begun to produce a beautiful purple flora. It was an Iris. I was fascinated instantly, and felt complete satisfaction that I had helped this flower bloom.  I  felt as if it was thanking me.  As my passion for plants grew, I started collecting more. Eventually I found my first Venus flytrap, but it was the odd ball amongst them that caught my attention. Behold…a tropical pitcher plant, the uncanny Nepenthes. I took it home, did my research, and instantly became addicted.

Pictured above: N. hurrelliana, and N. Spectabilis

DG (continued): Fast forward to 2015…I took a trip to the worlds best Nepenthes nursery in Australia, Exotica Plants, run by Geoff and Andrea Mansell.  This was on the top of my list  of of things to do. While pruning some of their spectacular Nepenthes specimens, I found myself in this surreal moment of knowing that for the rest of my life I want to be surrounded by these odd creatures, and created my own business from it. I knew this was the only way of having as many plants as I desired.

GJ: Tell us about the specific types of  creatures that appear to be attracted to carnivorous plants.

DG: Amongst the tropical pitcher plants, termites are attracted to Nepenthes albomarginata; which is named for the white collar around the opening of the trap. The termites find this irresistible and come to feast on the plant tissue itself. It doesn’t exactly harm the plant, and they surely trap and digest enough of them in the process. Nepenthes lowii attracts a mammal called the shrew, which defecates in it’s pitchers while eating a sugary substance (called exudate) from under the pitcher lid. The plant uses the available nitrogen. Nepenthes seem to be a little more specific in what they attract, compared to other carnivorous plants. Drosera (sundews), Pinguicula (butterwart), and Sarracenia (North American pitcher plants) seem to capture a variety of insects and small invertebrates with their trapping mechanisms.

Nepenthes jamban with spider, detail of Sundew Drosera wateri, and zombie fly in a N. Jacquelineae

GJ: We’d all love to know about the smells in a carnivorous plant nursery!

DG: The carnivorous plant greenhouse is very sensual! There certainly is a mixture of  interesting aromas. When the tropical pitcher plants bloom they have a very pungent odor. Heliamphora smell like honey. The Nepenthes produce this musty sweet smell that I love, specifically the lowii  hybrids. I like to go around and stick my face in them and take a big whiff!

GJ: What a rush! Had you many odd experiences with any of the plants?

DG: Of course, I’ve accidentally dumped the digestive fluids on me, and that can smell like, well, as you could probably guess, like a lavatory.

Nepenthes gully at Red Leaf Exotics

GJ: Are there many that flower? If so, what are some of your favorites?

DG: Many carnivorous plants produce very attractive flowers. I would have to go with Heliamphora (marsh pitcher plant)  for my absolute favorite flower. They remind me of a lily that hangs gracefully from the stems. I also love the intense red flower of a species of butterwart called Pinguicula laueana.

GJ: What complications do you most frequently monitor at your nursery?

DG: I give the Plants hours and hours of care everyday. Moisture and temperature are monitored most often. The plants enjoy being watered every morning, and I make sure the temperature isn’t too hot or cold, depending on the season.

Dominick tip-toeing around the greenhouse

GJ: If for some reason you were only able to keep two types of carnivorous plants, which ones would they be, and can you reveal to us (in detail) about their origins?

DG: If I had to pick two different genus, I would choose Nepenthes Veitchii-Bario and Heliamphora sarraceniodes. The specific variety of N. Veitchii is from a small region called Bario on the island of Borneo. My favorite thing in the entire world is my variant that produces round, red pitchers, with a huge flared peristome heavily streaked in red. I grew mine from seed, and lucked out with a very rare variety. It looks like a candy cane (and it’s also my company logo). The marsh pitcher plant, H.  sarracenoides, is endemic to the Tepui Mountains of Venezuela. It’s just so bizarre looking and the deep red pitchers really excite me…red is my favorite color, after all.

N. Veitchii-Bario

GJ: And what a mystical color it is…speaking of such a hue  -hypothetically, if Seymour Krelborn, Skid Row’s own botanical enthusiast, were here right now, what advice would  you have for him, and  -what might you thank him for?

DG: I would tell Seymour he should have propagated more of his flesh eating plant and fed the world to them! Also the plant deserved a greenhouse. I’d also thank him for his initial dedication of blood and sweat to serve the Audrey II’s hunger.

GJ: The plant swiftly seduces us with it’s need to over-indulge, as if each meal were its last. We see a reflection of our own behaviors in the plant; the thirst to be recognized often takes it’s toll. Now that we’re on the subject, might you have any secrets to reveal to us, on the chronicles of love itself?

DG: I don’t think there are any love  secrets. Feel good and treat everything in your world with kindness. Most importantly, love yourself. The universe will light up when you feel the emotion of love. You don’t have to have the physical manifestation to feel it either. Go inside and feel love and love will blossom all around you.

GJ: Clearly you would have been a beneficial guide for Seymour.  But, what exactly is ‘desire’? It is programmed, inherited, or simply a self-motivated trait?

DG: This really strikes a cord with me. Not everyday, but many mornings (when I’m showering), I write the word DESIRE on the glass shower door with my finger. Desire is everything. Desire is the beginning to everything we want. Desire drives us.  If I just plainly want something…I can do without it, but if I desire it, I will stop at nothing to experience whatever it is!

Dominick with the luscious Heliamphora

GJ: I admire your humble ritual(s) of keeping your focus on desire itself. Often, some of us forget that we depend on our desires to keep us moving. We become stagnant, and forget that there are so many things around us to keep us passionate, to keep us going.

DG:  For me, desire was self-motivated. I showed myself if I desired something, that I could have it. Once I saw the pattern of how everything I desired eventually came to me, I practiced having more things to desire and look forward to. And, I sing to my plants every single day.

N. Flava x sibuyanensis

GJ: What are some books that we would find on your shelves?

DG: So, I have only one carnivorous plant book  –The Savage Garden by Peter D’ Amato. It’s an iconic read for the carnivorous plant enthusiast! I am very much into metaphysics as well.  Other than that, I mainly read online plant material.

GJ: …do you prefer orange marmalade, or boysenberry jam?

DG: Orange marmalade all the way. Love me some bright citrus flavors! Tastes great slathered on some grilled salmon!

GJ: Mmm. Yes. Alright, back on topic…can those of us in Southern California successfully maintain a carnivorous plant garden?

DG: Oh yes! I don’t have much experience with your climate, but some are more suited than others.  I know many growers who grow Sarracenia outdoors and Nepenthes in simple greenhouse setups.  Things like Heliamphora and Nepenthes really do best in controlled environments.

GJ: Could you elaborate on ‘controlled environments’?

DG: Nepenthes, Helaimphora, and few others love greenhouses or indoor enclosures such as grow tents, where the humidity and light levels are high. T5 and LED grow light fixtures can be suspended over the plants and a humidifier can be added for proper moisture. The plants prefer a photo period of 12-14 hours and consistent temperatures to thrive. This can prove difficult in most outdoor areas, unless you live in a climate such as Hawaii. Many species do like night time temperature drops. Most regions in the US get too dark and cool in the winter for the plants to continue to thrive, but they would bounce back in the spring once the light and temperatures rise.

GJ: Aside from various diptera, are there any other types of small creatures that you have mysteriously found being digested in one of your monstrous leafy beauties?

DG: Any local insects like cockroaches, centipedes, butterflies, moths… unfortunately no mice yet! One time I found two centipedes intertwined…they were saying goodbye to one another as the plant digested them.

GJ: Can you tell us about your least favorite job from your past?

DG: The worst job I ever had…well, I attended college in Hawaii for a year and after deciding I wanted something less far away from home,  I returned to Pennsylvania for a few months (not knowing what I was going to do). In the meantime I had to get a job. I was hired by a local factory.  I poured metal dye cast for machine parts. Literally like the opposite of everything I’m attracted to. I had to wear long sleeves and jeans with bulky boots. I frequently got burned, and it was so dark and depressing inside of the factory. It was not my cup of tea, especially since it didn’t feel purposeful to me.

GJ: I’d love to know about your thoughts on the subconscious realm.

DG: I’m a Pisces, so I’m all about dreams and outer realms. I’m very connected to my dreams, as there are numerous things I’ve dreamt that have blossomed into reality. I had various dreams of visiting Exotica Plants in Australia, hanging with Geoff and Andrea in their  amazing greenhouses. One day, that dream came true -and faster than I could have imagined. I tend to ignore nightmares.

GJ: How do your dreams affect your everyday, and do you keep a dream journal?

DG: I don’t keep a dream journal, but I do write my future, so to speak. I get caught up in what I want to experience and how that’s going to feel when it manifests. I have to say creating the future and focusing there is a lot more productive (and useful) than recording the present and past.

GJ: Outside of plant life, where do your other musings of nefarious pleasures depart from?

DG: I find great inspiration and motivation through the talents of others. When I see an artist creating something amazing it drives me crazy, motivates me. Knowing that anything we put our minds to is possible, is how I find inspiration in life itself. The circles of beginning to end and back again are fascinating. I find inspiration in contrast too. By contrast I mean when I observe something that I dislike or don’t prefer, I’m inspired into positive action.

GJ: What might your plans be for the coming summer? Any major preparations at hand at Red Leaf Exotics?

DG: This year is the busiest year of my life! I’ve only been in business for a year now and it’s going so well. I’ve recently made plans to expand the nursery. I’m currently right in the middle of relocating to a new location, in Eastern Tennessee.

DG: My best friend and business partner, Jerry Brady, has stepped on board as well. He will help operate the business with me. We have a house, and the first of two large greenhouses have been erected. There will be a lot to do, not only on the greenhouses, but on the property as well. I desire to create a place so magical, that people will come from across the globe just to experience it.

GJ: What advice do you have to give to beginners in horticulture, specifically those who work with carnivorous plants?

DG: ENJOY! It’s such an amazing thing to get involved in, and you’ll constantly be surrounded by beauty. It takes time to learn the exact requirements to grow different carnivorous plants, which is why you must absorb as much knowledge as you can. Most importantly, spend all your time with your plants. If you can visit their native habitats, this will aid in you getting the feel for what they love.

DG: I always encourage visiting different growers to garner perspective. We all have different energy, and ways of loving our plants! Never give up. It took me years to perfect ideal Nepenthes conditions, and I’m still learning to this day. Be proud that you have a passion for the heart of nature. It’s in these times that green souls are needed most, as what you’re embarking on is a magical journey filled with some of the best feelings we are capable of experiencing.

N. lowii and N. Jacquelineae

GJ:  Domick, it’s clearly been such a pleasure to hear all about your journey. These photographs are so enchanting. I look forward to what becomes of Red Leaf Exotics…what lies ahead in this miraculous journey.

DG:  Thank you! Many adventures are to come. Hoping all your Nepenthes dreams come true.

Upon your bewildering interest in these creatures, please contact Domonick directly to schedule your appointment for a visit. Don’t hesitate to visit the RED LEAF EXOTICS website, especially if you’d like to special order some carnivorous babies, learn more about how to care for your Nepenthes, and don’t forget to register  for an account if you’re really serious about taking your curiosity to the next level.

Mycology photographs courtesy of Gordon Walker

Without warning, our lives can be turned upside-down. We can arrive to a place where we truly belong though, if we look to nature for guidance — from this enchantment, we are revived.

Ever so recently I had picked up a few books on Mycology, in hopes of deciphering the majestic kingdom of the mushroom. I had found myself head over heels, when discovering this one very specific German antiquarian book:

Eventually I'd arrived to becoming profoundly moved by these findings, although I had soon felt the urge to speak with a present day naturalist. I called around at a few plant nurseries, and wrote a dozen emails. And to my surprise, one of those individuals had gotten back to me: Gordon Walker, a PHD Graduate from UCDavis, and resident of Napa Valley. He maintains a beautifully curated page, @fascinatedbyfungi, where he documents all of his fungi findings - such as happy slime molds from plasmodiums, and further elaborates on certain species, like the Craterellus.

Being intrigued by his individual discoveries, I had a few questions to ask him  -in ordinance of digging a little deeper into Gordon's process and passion, as a Phenologist, and bringing more attention to the significance of his work. He is not only a teacher, but a mentor in ways that should not be overlooked.

Gina Jelinski: What are some of your favorite smells, from any one fungi?

Gordon Walker: I love the aroma of different mushrooms, there is an amazing variety of smells they produce. Two of my favorites are the almondy agarics (mushrooms that smell like marzipan), and the candy cap mushrooms that smell like maple syrup (Sotolon). I also love the smell of dried porcini powder, and many other dried mushrooms -as the drying process enhances umami, and deepens the aromas.

GJ: I was hoping you might share with us how your interest with fungi first took place?

GW: As a child I had several experiences that made me intensely interested in fungi, but the fascination didn’t fully blossom until a couple of years ago when I started my @fascinatedbyfungi account. As a child I would go up to the woods of Quebec to stay at my grandparents cabin, walking around in the woods I would see many types of mushrooms. I remember finding, and being particularly enchanted by, a slimy green parrot mushroom -the Gliophorus psittacinus, my grandfather had identified for me. I also remember finding and eating a giant puffball mushroom, as we all spent our time harvesting chicken of the woods, and honey mushrooms from trees in our yard.

GJ: How is it that mushrooms bear more similarities to animals and insects? I have read about there being a common misconception of fungi being related to plants.

GW: Evolutionarily fungi are closer the animal kingdom than plants are. Insects and fungi both contain chitin (a nitrogen containing polysaccharide) unlike plants, which are primarily composed of cellulose. Fungi share more metabolic similarities with animals in that they are both consumers of organic matter rather than photosynthetic creators.

GJ: What are issues that you have recently monitored out in nature?

GW: In my local park I observe the ecology of the Oak Chapparal Woodland. Many of the oak trees are sick, infected with Sudden Oak Death (Phytopthera ramorum), a plant pathogen that weakens the immune system of the trees. SOD leads to the oak trees being infected by pathogenic fungi (honey mushrooms (Armillaria), Lions mane (Hericium), Jack O’ Lantern Mushrooms (Omphalotus). I also witnessed all of the Eucalyptus trees in Napa get infected with Chicken of the Woods (Laetiporus gilbertsonii), it weakens the heartwood of the trees which causes them to fall into vineyards, crushing grape vines.

GJ: Might you inform us on the specific types of creatures that appear to be attracted to fungi?

GW: Slugs and snails are my favorite animals to find eating fungi, they are also some of the most voracious and can quickly plow through mushrooms you might otherwise want to eat. Mushrooms support a wife range of insect life, they are essential to biodiversity and are the foundation of all of our ecosystems (especially given the role they play in the nitrogen cycle)…

…The Ariolimazcalifornicus species complex. This hungry sluggo is going to town on a bounty of Fat Jacks (Suilluscaerulescens). Arilomax are some of the largest slugs in the world and can live 1-7 years. The two sets of tentacles they use to sense the world, the two top ones have primitive eye spots that sense light and motion, the bottom two are chemical sensing. They mate as simultaneous hermaphroditic pairs, although one member of the pairing will occasionally eat the penis of the other, potentially as a source of nutrient or as a competition/dominance thing (do your own research into it, Banana slug videos are wild). This Suillus species is mycorrhizal with Doug-Fir and makes a pretty decent edible if picked young and prime.

GJ: You also have some bewildering self-portraits with a few different species, one I particularly admire is the one where you are holding the Cauliflower mushroom -it's a massive creature!

GW: This Western version of the Cauliflower Mushroom tends to grow on conifers (pines and fir). It is a brown rot or butt rot fungi that will occur on the same tree year after year. Colloquially, I have heard that Sparassis lasts for quite awhile after being picked. Like many fungi, Sparassis contain a multitude of antibacterial, antifungal, cytotoxic, and immunostimulatory compounds. All of these various activities help the fruiting bodies of Sparassis last quite awhile, dispersing many spores and giving the fungi the best chance of survival. "

GJ: Being a witness to the miraculous life of the animal kingdom, what might you say, aside from patience, is a requirement in the field of mycology? And, what would you recommend as a means to begin studies, for a blossoming mycologist?

GW: Mycology is vast, requiring many different personalities to tackle the range of topics. I think a keen eye, passion, persistence and scientific mindset are the great assets for a budding myco-enthusiast.

Get a regional specific field guide. I like “Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast” for California and the PNW. Make an account on iNaturalist and or Mushroom Observer (the latter being more intermediate to advanced). Take photos, start uploading observations and interacting with the community online.

Gordon states: "The mixed hardwoods of the eastern forests support a rich variety of mycorrhizal fungi that fruit abundantly in the warm wet summer months of the north east. Cape Ann gets battered by famed Nor’Easters in the cold dark winters but in the long muggy summer days fungi come out to play (so do mosquitos and ticks)."

GJ: Gordon, are there any specific myths that you enjoy reading about?

GW: I prefer data and peer review, to myths. Although I am fond of Norse mythology, Scandinavian/Nordic cultures value mushroom foraging and have many stories involving fungi.

GW: Mythology has stated that the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria is responsible for such an infamous history, although most historians have recently abandoned this theory.

GJ: In making the assumption that you have a green thumb, I was curious as to what species we might find in your garden?

GW: I am growing a winter garden with French breakfast radishes, mache, fennel, bok choy, and onions. I also have mushroom beds for 3 kinds of oyster mushrooms, shiitake, wine caps, and blewits.

GJ: Do you think that carnivorous plant life gets along with fungi -if they were the last two creatures alive on this planet...or would they work against one another in a sense?

GW: Carnivorous plants are adapted to anoxic nutrient poor bogs, there is very little fungal activity in that type of environment because it is dominated by anerobic bacteria. Carnivorous plants are dependent on insects for nitrogen, as opposed to the nitrogen deposited into soils via organic degradation by fungi.

Mushrooms can have a variety of relationships with plants. 90% of plant life has a mycorrhizal fungal partner, and many plants also contain endophytes: fungi that live in between plant cells, acting as an innate immune system for the plant. There are also parasitic fungi that prey on plants, leading to a wide variety of common fungal diseases for agriculture.