Dispatches from the Void: River’s Corner

Hi it’s River, I’m going to be taking over primarily for a little while. Celia is educating young minds and shaping the future. Give her a round of applause, buy our books so she doesn’t have to.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a steady art practice. At this point, I’m not even sure I can call myself an artist anymore. I feel like I need to earn that title back. When I took my first screenwriting class in college, I was told I was an artist simply because I was there. And maybe at that time it was true. I was surrounded by other artists, completely immersed, making work, thinking about work, living and breathing creativity. Those were the only years I truly lived, ate, and didn’t sleep for art.

I regret letting that go. Self-sabotage has always been my downfall. I doubted myself, so I never followed through. It’s not a good quality, and of course there were other complicated things at play, but I’m not here to relive them.

What matters now is this: I need to treat my life like a residency. If I don’t, I’ll never know what I could have created, and the sacrifices my wife is making right now will have been for nothing. So here it is, time to eat, sleep, and breathe art again, for the first time since college.

When I first graduated, all I wanted to do was write about process. That’s still what excites me most about making art. The experimenting, the mistakes, the unexpected breakthroughs, that’s where I feel most alive as a creator. The finished painting or photograph is important, but it’s never been the whole point. For me, the creative process has always mattered more than perfection.

That said, there are pieces I’m proud of, works where the process really shines through. Those are the ones I’ve chosen to share, and you can find them in my Printify shop. They’re available as prints and more, for anyone who wants to support independent artists or bring unique, meaningful wall art into their space.

Even though I haven’t had a consistent art practice in years, I never stopped completely. My creativity came in bursts, usually when I had the space to make something. I never stopped painting faces, and I never fully stopped making photographs.

The Faces series has been with me since just after college. To me, these portraits feel familiar, almost comforting, but I know they unsettle others. That tension is intentional. The response mirrors what it feels like to move through the world as a neurodivergent artist, where even something as ordinary as eye contact can be overwhelming, sometimes even painful. That unease lingers in the work, and that’s what makes them honest.

I love these pieces. They are me, and they are you. They hold a mirror up to the strange ways we connect and disconnect. Now I’m looking for funding and applying to artist residencies so I can take the series further: scaling them up, experimenting with fabric, beads, and other three-dimensional materials. The next stage of this project will push the work into mixed-media territory, where texture and form can deepen the impact and make the discomfort, and the beauty, even more tangible.

Work in progress

We also have a poetry workshop happening September 13th! See the information here.

If this resonated, please give it a share on Bluesky (or anywhere folks still have an attention span longer than a moth after a sleepless night), leave us a comment, or check out our latest anthologies

Poetry Collection, ‘Is this all we get?’

Prose Collection, ‘ Fifth Avenue Pizza’