Windows on My Unravelling: Art, Poverty, and Art about Poverty

 Usually it's just poems and announcements here, but for a change here's a slice of life -- my life. It originally appeared on our Substack (which features a new poem of mine almost every day and which you might want to subscribe to).

About three months ago, I found myself unable to pay my rent. My work as a freelance instructional designer, writer and editor had been becoming increasingly less lucrative for years, and the rise of AI tools meant that more and more clients now had a way to produce “good enough” training materials for far less than I could charge for better materials. The math wasn’t mathing, as they say. I applied for time-limited provincial income support (less than half my rent). I signed up for Food Bank hampers. I worried I would end up on the street.

In the end, a friend who’s also a struggling freelancer and an artist (in her case a visual artist) came through with a place to live — a room in her house for far less than the two-bedroom suite I’d been renting. That didn’t solve my income problem, but it did solve my immediate living problem, and the two of us did what artists do — started thinking of ways to turn the experience into art.

What we came up with was an installation piece consisting of drawings and poems (a couple of the poems are on this Substack, including this one:

https://poemsforpoi.substack.com/p/todays-poem-and-news-from-contributors

We found an old piece of plywood in an alley, mounted unravelling fabric and CD cases on it, and placed the poems beneath drawings in the CD cases, so people could literally open up a window onto my experience.

We put the piece into an exhibition about empathy at local gallery, and the response from people who saw it was great—there were often tears, and I had great conversations with many of the patrons at the exhibition opening, where I also read the poems and Fiona (my friend) gave a talk on the piece.

We thought we might make a little money by printing art cards to sell at the opening, and we sold a few, and also started taking orders for a book containing all the poems and drawings. We have a couple of orders — you can order the book here:

I also managed to place a story about the going broke experience in a magazine I regularly do book reviews for. The income from that, when I get it, is not spectacular, but it’s about 10 times what Fiona and I have made in sales. People liked the art, but they liked it for free. I wish I had a great message to end up with, but I don’t — just a nagging feeling that I may be able to do another, similar piece in the not too distant future.