UND Today

University of North Dakota’s Official News Source

Famous writers, sculptor talk shop at UND Writers Conference

Topics range from where they find their inspiration to what they collect and how the pandemic has impacted America

Conceptual artist Cal Lane uses an oxy-acetylene torch to carve beautiful patterns out of industrial metal pieces such as tanks, shovels and wheelbarrows. (Screenshot photo)

The three-day UND Writers Conference — themed “Communities and the Individual” — opened each day with the special guests taking part in panel discussions focusing on how work, family and community impact their lives and the world around them.

What follows are just bits and pieces of those discussions and also some of what was shared during individual presentations.

From the panelists …

What does work look like to you in the late 20th and early 21st century?

Jessica Bruder: What I’ve seen is a lot of people who grew up in a world where they expected to have a safe job. From their entrance into the workforce until the end of their working days — and possibly retire with a pension if they were lucky. We know that was never everybody, but that was considered a pretty standard model. But obviously, we’re in a really different place.

Right now, we’re in the gig economy and in an era where antitrust law seems to have no teeth at all. We’ve got these huge corporate monopolies — one of them rhymes with Amazon — and they really have unchecked power, which is SCARY.

… Back in the 1960s, I hear tell, you could raise a family — even have a kid — on one minimum wage. You even could lift that family out of poverty. Now we all know there are plenty of people who have multiple full-time jobs and can’t do the same. They’re just stuck on this debt treadmill. One of the reasons, I’ve seen, in terms of productivity and labor is a decoupling around the 1970s. If wages had kept up with productivity, I think we’d be somewhere in your $20 minimum wage right now.

… What I didn’t realize in the beginning was that in a workplace that’s really ageist these days, there’s this weird little substrata of employers — and when I say little, I mean thousands of jobs — for what they call work campers. And they are just falling all over themselves to hire warm bodies of any age. And if you’re transient, it’s great.

Because you show up with your shelter, you plug in — I kind of picture it almost like a human USB drive — you plug into the port, you serve your purpose, and when you aren’t needed anymore, you plug out. It’s really an employer’s dream or fantasy. And it’s kind of amazing that it’s come to fruition that way. One of the first employers I heard about doing this was Amazon through their Camper Force Program. And it blew my mind.

Former North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner and first-time author Sarah Vogel signs a copy of her book, “The Farmer’s Lawyer,” during the 53rd UND Writers Conference on Thursday. (Photo by Grant McMillan/Graduate Teaching Assistant, UND Department of English)

The COVID-19 pandemic certainly has impacted existing work trends and likely our future work trends, too. What are your views on this with regulation to farmers as well as other types of work?

Sarah Vogel: I think one of the side insights of the pandemic is the sudden realization of how important our local food is when the grocery stores shelves are empty and the ships are traveling across the seas. You begin to appreciate and think “Where do we get our food? Where does it come from? Who is growing it? Can we trust them?”

It’s a wake-up call for all of us about the very deep importance of local foods and where our food comes from. At the end of my book, I make a plea that we all focus more. Let’s save the family farm. Let’s save local foods. Let’s have people growing our food, not corporations.

… There’s so much to do. We need to take politics back to the people level so that government works for the people — workers, farmers and small businesses — and not so much for the corporations.

Though artist Cal Lane probably is best-known for her intricate metal sculptures that have been exhibited worldwide, she says she enjoys working with all sorts of mediums and materials. One recent labor of love has been her Sleeping Portraits Project, in which she asked regular patrons of her husband’s bar to lie down and rest while she paints their image on a torn-away cover of a queen-sized mattress. Lane said she finds the different patterns and textures of the mattress material to be particularly interesting. (Screenshot photo)

How have your work experiences inside and outside the arts informed your work today? Where do you find your inspiration?

Cal Lane: Life takes you on different journeys. I’ve had a lot of jobs, I can’t remember how many, in my life. I started out as a hairdresser because I grew up in a hair salon. But I was a tomboy, so my mom fired me almost monthly for not looking right, not combing my hair, not dressing properly. … I was reading the newspaper one day and it said “become a welder,” and I thought “ahh, that’s so perfect.” I can dress however I want, not have to put makeup on. I can swear. It was the perfect fit.

But then I started to become a veterinarian as well. And I was very transient, too. I lived out of my camper and two different boats. I road my bike across country and lived out of a tent for a long time. I loved that kind of lifestyle. I loved not owning things and just experiencing life as it unfolds. But art was the one thing that was always in my life. It was always how I tried to make sense of the world.

… I didn’t start my undergraduate degree until I was 30 years old. When I graduated, like most students, I had almost no money. All I had was an oxy-acetylene torch that I got from a garage sale, and that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. If you’re given a whole bunch of art supplies, it’s hard to focus on one thing. (An exhibit earned her a scholarship to grad school.) … People call me a sculptor, but I work in all kinds of mediums and materials. I’m really attracted to different patterns on materials, so I started doing these sleeping portraits on queen-sized mattresses.

Anna Kinney (upper left), coordinator of the University Writing Program, engages sculptor and visual artist Cal Lane (lower right) and writers Hanif Abdurraqib (upper right) and Kaitlyn Greenidge in a panel discussion about community. (Screenshot photo)

What fuels your process? What are some of the little pleasures that help sustain your daily life?

Hanif Abdurraqib: Well, I’m a collector of things. Better or worse, sometimes worse. There are parts of my house that look a bit like a museum. But I think I rely on the collection of things from the past to inform the curiosities that kind of propel my present investment, interest and excitement. I collect old, Black magazines — like from the ’50s — and I collect bobbleheads, which has gotten a bit out of hand. I collect sneakers and things that excite me.

… I think the actual art and act of collecting isn’t just about holding onto or the hoarding of things. It is, at least for me, a chance to kind of turn something over in my hands that probably has been turned over in many hands before mine. And that creates a maze of excitement for me to wander through and tell stories that I otherwise would not be able to unspool.

In your writing, how do you deal with both the good and the bad side of familial relationships?

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Family is so rich for books and literature and for fiction, in particular. Most of us are learning our first understanding of relations with people — our first definitions for love and hurt and care — in the cradle of the family. And when I’m writing about families, the only way I can understand to do it is across multiple viewpoints. Because you know, one of the hallmarks of family is that an event will happen, and every single member of that family will have a slightly different — or sometimes drastically different — memory of it. …

Every family member will have a different way of incorporating that into their life story. And yet I think for most families, you’re still expected to hew to an established or official story about it. And to live through that can range from being a little bit irritating to really, really painful and devastating. People can react to the same situation completely differently, and as a writer, it’s fun to play with and layer these things. Then, the readers bring their own lens that I can’t possibly know. All of a sudden this thing that I put on the page takes on a whole other life because somebody is reading it through the lens of their own particular interaction with family.

UND Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs Eric Link (lower left) moderates a panel discussion on family between authors (clockwise from upper left) Sarah Vogel, Kelli Jo Ford and Kaitlyn Greenidge. (Screenshot photo)

What attributes do you find your strong female characters share and how do you go through the process of building such a character? What raw materials do you use?

Kelly Jo Ford: I think the common thread I feel through the characters and family and among the stories is that their love for one another is complete, and their determination to see future generations have a good life is complete. But the way that they go about that is often by butting up against one another. And sometimes it’s straight-up harmful. For a lot of reasons we could connect to history and just because that’s who we are. But I think that when I’m building and creating those characters, one, they are just inspirations from the women who raised me. …

But I also think that sometimes our greatest strengths also can be the things that potentially can be the most harmful to those we love. And I think that’s something that is carried through most of the women in “Crooked Hallelujah,” except for the great-grandmother who’s perfect because she just is.

Artist Cal Lane has done her lace artwork with human subjects as well, sometimes pouring sand, dirt or sugar over the top of lace material to create beautiful scenes of living art. Her work is so gorgeous that we couldn’t resist leaving you with some parting images from the slides she shared during her presentation. (Screenshot photos)