Hello from Galveston!

The Short

• I’ve been at the Galveston Artist Residency for a month!

• Send me recs for Houston art things (or Texas things generally!)

• Scroll down for cool petrified log pictures!

The Long

I started writing this while a parade was passing by my window last Saturday! I had planned a quiet night of reading and writing, then a marching band went by, and Bird ran into the bathroom. In the spirit of “if you can’t beat em, join em”, I sat on the balcony and watched the floats and drunk people go by, and the newsletter waited another week.

It’s been a big transition living perched in my historic loft above downtown Galveston: the noise, the party atmosphere, the feeling of no wild land to retreat into. It’s exciting, and it’s terrifying, and my nervous system is, let’s say, confused.

The gulf is beautiful and damply mysterious. However, unlike other cities I’ve lived in, there’s no real public land to escape to in Texas, no big hike in the San Gabriels on a Thursday afternoon, no random forest road to drive down and camp, definitely no backpacking nor even a crappy boulder to grab a few grips on.

I’m experiencing a bit of a landscape anxiety. I didn’t recognize a jellyfish on the beach. I don’t know how to gauge tides, what kind of sand I can drive on and how to get out if I get stuck. There are plaques all over town marking the hurricane Ike high water line feet above my head. I’m used to places of craggy edges, rocks tumbling from a slope, trees anchoring a hillside, a geological record visible in lines striating a canyon wall. Here there are no edges, just shifting sediment drifting into the sea or blown about by these low, solid, damp winds. Here, geology is happening real time, literally shifting sands.

Walking the beach, I found a battered prickly pear cactus washed up in the sand and couldn’t help but feel “same, friend”. I am out of my element, and while uncomfortable, it’s already doing some weird cool things to my work. The studio space is an incredible dream at GAR, and I’m allowing the work to develop with a completely different metabolism. It feels like a much longer, more unknown kind of cycle.

I’ve been reflecting on certain kinds of familiarity I take for granted, an idea that arose while I was at Ucross last month. While wandering into the sage hills to explore huge petrified logs, I noticed certain things I just “knew” like how to open a barbed wire fence, what slight variations in the gravel meant there are fossils or bits of crystals, how to stroll most easily off trail without getting too tangled in brush. I understood the huge boulders as logs right away through subtle markers of their woody origins: the bark bits, the tree rings, the shards on the ground of rock that has splintered exactly like wood.

One day I went out into the logs with two other residents, Sam, a choreographer working on a piece on the land relating to the death of her father, and Avery, a writer who was curious to see these rocks I had been so excited about at dinner. After running around waving my hands about my favorite ones for a good while, she tentatively asked me how it was so obvious to me that they were petrified logs. It forced me to articulate specifically the shapes and lines that spoke wood. It was a familiarity I had taken for granted, living so much outside around living and fallen trees and working with materials. Then Sam and I started talking casually about our dead dads, addressing them, joking with them. I looked over to see Avery wiping away tears. She apologized (totally unnecessarily! I was moved) and said she was just caught up thinking about eventually losing her parents. And I thought about the kind of almost casual familiarity we develop with loss too.

Welp, I definitely don’t get to feel smugly familiar with anything out here in this watery landscape. I’m very curious about this unsettled feeling in myself. There’s nothing to hold onto except Bird and the studio. I keep thinking about the time was pulled out to sea and had to be rescued. Apparently rather than fight against the riptide (and risk dying of exhaustion), it’s better to relax and swim along the shore until you can easily reach the beach.

Wish me luck!

Love,

Christina and Bird (who is surprisingly adapting to city life with ease)