Mckenzie Cassidy, Author

 

Hello and welcome to the 56th 3 Art Questions With Jackson interview! I am very excited to be interviewing author Mckenzie Cassidy. I read his debut novel Here Lies A Father with my Dad and I really loved it, parts of the book really stuck with me and I get into that in the interview. I think that you would love the novel and I believe you will enjoy his answers as much as I did. Thank you for reading! (Website: https://www.mckenziecassidy.com / Author photo courtesy of the author)

Jackson: How did you become an author? Were you a book lover when you were young? Did you feel like you had stories to tell?

Mckenzie: Growing up I never thought of myself as a writer and I wasn't interested in the act of writing. In school I was an average student (mostly Bs) who did enough to get my credit and move on to the next grade. One thing I did love was watching movies. I grew up in a small town in upstate New York in the 90s and in my free time I rode my bike to the video store. Back then it was all VHS tapes, 49 cents for old movies and 99 cents for new releases. I would end up riding home home with a plastic bag full of VHS tapes. I did some reading as a kid but not as much as you would expect. Most of my extensive reading started in my 20s. The truth was I considered myself a storyteller rather than a writer. It wasn't until I went to college to study Political Science, which probably should have been English or Literature, that I started writing a ton and getting positive feedback from my instructors. After that I slid into journalism where I wrote news and features for years, and finally started writing fiction. In my 20s I worked at a newspaper in southwest Florida and started reading memoirs (some of my favorites being This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt and The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls). These books inspired me and that's when I realized I may have my own interesting life story to tell.   

Jackson: The good wolf/bad wolf story from Here Lies A Father really stayed with me and I have repeated it to many people. Does it have personal meaning for you? Is that how it ended up in the book?

Mckenzie: I also love this story. Originally, it was a Cherokee legend demonstrating how no person is all good or all bad. I can't remember where I first heard it but it resonated with me in the context of addiction. We all have internal conflicts, urges that are both good and evil, but unlike wild animals we have the choice on whether to act on those thoughts or feelings. Mental disease makes it difficult for some people to make the right choice and substance abuse is like pouring gasoline on a burning fire. When I used this legend in Here Lies A Father, it was during a scene where the main character Ian was speaking with his mentor, a small-town boxing coach named Bud. It would actually be the last time Ian saw him. He talked about how for decades men had shown up to the gym trying to get control over their own demons. They spent too much time feeding the bad wolf and as a result their lives were a mess. I wanted Ian to have an epiphany about the importance of feeding his good wolf with healthy activities like exercising, education, reading, or the arts. This would be the opposite of what Ian's father Thomas had done for most of his life. For the child of an alcoholic or addict, that meant not following the same path by drinking or using highly addictive substances. I also think it's important we all stop seeing each other in such black and white terms. As a society, we're starting to lose the ability to see shades of gray. I'm not sure if it's our education system, television, or social media, but we tear each other apart and forget that each of us is flawed. We all have the good and bad wolf, everything about life is so nuanced.     

Jackson: If you could meet any author living or dead, who would it be and why?

Mckenzie: This may sound like a cliche, but Ernest Hemingway. When I was at Wilkes University working towards my MFA in Creative Writing I remember writing a short piece of fiction about having lunch with Hemingway. For one, I adore his writing style and enjoy most of his books. If I am ever in a writing funk and need some inspiration, I simply read some Hemingway to get the creative juices flowing. Even though I'm a fan of his writing and the legends around his life as "Papa" Hemingway, I also know he was an alcoholic, a womanizer, a bully, and an all around asshole (this could fit into a different conversation about whether we should separate the art from the artist). The most interesting part about meeting Hemingway would be separating the man from the myth. He was brilliant at branding himself in a certain way but who knows if that was really the man behind it all? Over the years, I've read various theories about his childhood, sexuality, and his real war experiences. Hell, his first novel is about a character who is both physically and emotionally impotent! He wouldn't be an easy person to understand or accept. To be honest, I'd probably end up hating his guts but at least I would've showed up. I also think Hemingway is another perfect example of feeding the good wolf and bad wolf.

  

 

Daniel Buettner, Artist and Musician

 

Hello and welcome to the 55th 3 Art Questions With Jackson interview! This time I interviewed the very talented painter and musician Daniel Buettner. I particularly liked his 2019 show at Rosalux Gallery and I have listened to his bands (Broken Hearts Are Blue and Skulpture) with my dad on Bandcamp. Really cool! Check them out! I really enjoyed his answers and I think you will too. Thank you for reading! (Instagram: @danbue / All images courtesy of the artist) 

Jackson: What cause your interest in both art and music? Do you feel art and music are connected for you?

Daniel: Growing up, there were a few artists in my family and in the neighborhood I lived in, in Upstate New York. To be an artist was never a crazy idea to me. It was something I saw other people doing, and even though it wasn't something that was necessarily nurtured in my immediate family, my parents recognized it was something I drifted in and out throughout my childhood. It wasn't until high school that I started taking it seriously, which is when I think my parents started to encourage me to turn it into a career. High school is also when I started playing music. I hadn't given playing an instrument much thought before then, but somewhere around 16 or 17 years old I noticed many of my friends were taking music lessons and/or starting punk bands. I was heavily involved in skateboard culture, and the two seemed to go hand in hand. I wanted to be part of that. I don't know when the DIY ethic became mainstream, but it was very ingrained in everything we did. We built our own ramps, printed our own photographs, started our own zines, and made our own t-shirts for our skate team. When it came to playing music, it was the same - you bought an instrument and started a band. There was no concern with learning how to play first. For me, visual art and music are not connected at all. Painting has always represented pure individual expression to me. It's you vs yourself. You celebrate your wins and learn from your loses privately. Being in bands and writing music with people brings collaboration to my life. The value is in creating a piece of art with others, whose contribution you can't control. It's a much different experience.

Jackson: What inspires your ideas for painting and playing music? Do ideas just come to you or do you have to work at coming up with things?

Daniel: With painting, I have to work at getting my ideas. My art has always been about finding humor in the small moments in life, and those are not always easy to find. I get inspired by looking at photographs. People, animals, objects - all things. I sift through photographs in magazines and online constantly, looking for something to jump out at me that would make a good beginning concept for a painting. I use a lot of other people's work in my own; mostly their photographs, but sometimes even artworks other people make appear in my paintings. When I do that, I always reference the original artist in the title. I'm inspired by interesting poses, expressions, patterns, and of course shiny things. Songwriting is much more organic. Though I do write independently for a long-distance band I'm in, I prefer to write in real-time with other people, which is why I also play with some local musicians. Our songs usually start out with everyone just kind of making sounds and looking for interesting patterns in what we are doing. Either something will come together and be the beginning of a song, or it won't and we will move on. I think to make interesting music you have to subscribe to the philosophy that there will never be any shortage of creative material, and therefore no need to force yourself to fall in love with something that is "good enough". It's always obvious when one member of a band wrote a song and forced it on everyone else, if for no other reason than they spent time writing it. I don't slave over songs. If it doesn't come easy, it doesn't stay long. In order to write this way you have to be playing with the right people. Bandmates are like spouses; the best ones have opposite interests but similar goals.

Jackson: If you could meet and artist living or dead, who would it be and why?

Daniel: This is a tough one! There are so many artists I'd like to meet. Julie Mehretu would definitely be in my top five. Kehinde Wiley for sure, Duchamp, Rauschenberg...but I'm going with Ben Shahn. I absolutely love his work and have tried any times to pair colors like he does, and I feel like I fail every time. I want to know how he chose his palate and his process for layering paint. He used Tempera, which I also find fascinating. I think I would learn a lot from a conversation with Ben Shahn.