my debut book

Around a year and a half into being mostly housebound with an infant, still feeling fresh to being a mother, still feeling overwhelmed by the pandemic, still very much in the midst of an internal meltdown over the irregular trajectory of my career, I scratched out a rambling, middle of the night, barely sensical poem about weight. I wrote about the metaphorical weight I was carrying around, and the physical weight, and while I was writing, I had this picture in my head that I wanted to take. I wouldn’t realize until much later that it was the exact shock that my system needed to reorient my focus. A chicken scratched train of thought had cracked me wide open. I let those words percolate for a while, and shortly thereafter, I picked up my camera with a level of intention I hadn’t felt for a very long time.

Now here we are on Mother’s Day just a few years later, a polarizing and complicated day for many, but nevertheless- significant. Motherhood changed me, in ways that artist mothers are only recently becoming comfortable speaking about openly. The shift that has permeated through my bones since giving birth to my daughter has forced me to tap into a different type of creative fluidity. All of this to say, I am thrilled to announce my debut book, We keep swimming, until we all reach home will be published this fall with Daylight.

I ugly cried when the first design draft hit my inbox, and so many mothers have touched this book already. With poems from my dear friend / incredible mom / New York Times bestselling author Kate Baer (you can pre-order her new book How About Now from your local bookshop), an essay by award-winning fellow artist mom / Fine Art photographer Elinor Carucci, and designed with such intention by another fellow creative mom Ursula Damm, this book is my heart and soul on paper. It is so surreal to be on the cusp of tangibly sharing this work beyond the confines of the internet.

Pre-orders will be available this summer, and I will be signing advanced copies at the ICP Photobook Fest in early October.

If you are new to this work- We keep swimming, until we all reach home is a series of pictures born out of my curiosity for women’s intergenerational relationships, inherited histories, and my esoteric upbringing. All of the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother, meaning our cellular life begins in the womb of our grandmother. This work explores the energy of that connection, alongside my ever evolving spiritual curiosity. My body and mind have spent years balancing the practical with the magical. Guided in the faith and mystery of something unseen, all while doing my best to stay grounded in the reality that is the here and now. I look at my daughter and I see my mother. I see me. All of us, one by one, piece by piece. Quick and curious glimpses of inherited histories, inherited wounds. A familiar, yet hazy hand-me-down of a memory. You can’t quite place why, but there’s a rhythm to it all. A privilege to the age and history that all of these mothers hold, spoken in a language I now understand with a different type of fluency. Anchored by my child, and shored by memory.

An element that really began to flourish in this work as I spent more time with it, is the intersection of caring for a small child while caring for aging parents. The ease at which my mother, my mother-in-law, and my daughter have allowed, and continue to allow me to create this body of work has me in a buzzing state of gratitude. Most of us are lacking the village, and I will never stop shouting from the rooftops about how essentially impossible it would be to have the type of career that I have while raising a small child, without the help that has been offered to me from our mothers. While their willing participation of having my camera pointed at them regularly is essential for this body of work, it’s their ongoing care work and support within our family that feels most essential.

Keep an eye out for my cover reveal, and pre-order announcement this summer, and Happy Mother’s Day every day to the moms, the grandmoms, the mother figures in our lives and caregivers of all kinds. Despite the absolute chaos happening in the world around us, you continue to keep it all moving.