Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Interview with Prof. Carrie Lee Schwartz( Artist)


Prof. Carrie Lee Schwartz:
Who are you?

Sanda Spicmiler-Lewis:
I am an educator and an explorer of what elates and torments the human spirit. Because of my faith in victory of what is best in us, I consider myself a Tireless Humanist.

I write about how people express their individualism through their art or how they react to art of others.

Carrie Lee Schwartz: 
Why is the manifestation of  the individual through the arts so important to you?

Sanda Spicmiler-Lewis:
Because it makes each voice visible and relevant:  this is essential to the realization of a free human being in a democratic society.  We need to be able to articulate our changing self in a safe way.
 
Having a voice makes uniqueness relevant and helps us become a community that can negotiate across  differences that make us unique. It requires self-awareness and heightens a sense of personal responsibility for our actions.
 
When I lived and was receiving my education in the  oppressive socialist regime of former
Yugoslavia, the way in which I felt most free was through the arts -- visual, musical, kinetic, cinematographic, or textual.

In the absence of free articulation of faith, because religious life was heavily repressed and absent from the public arena of thought and dialogue, the arts created a free space to challenge the ideology  that defined human values only in association with the regime.  I was young when I realized art could be timeless and allow me to travel across time and space, finding kinship with kindred souls across cultures, faiths, and policies. This was happening in my parents' theater where both they and my grandparents worked as actors, through film (where my family was also actively involved) but also as I navigated the endless maze of my hometown's public library, my parents' book collections, and quite ironically, fabulous domestic and foreign art exhibits that were government sponsored in both small and big Yugoslav towns.  I say 'ironic' because there was much art production and sponsorship of arts, but again little free discussion of its possible versatile meanings.

My father, Radoslav Spitzmuller, an actor in a satirical theater "Jazavac" in Zagreb, encouraged me to always read and think between the lines of what is presented to me in 'the press' of on television.  The real story is always hidden somewhere, as a puzzle, in the official story, he would say.  He found subtle ways to cultivate my inquisitive mind toward thinking creatively and outside the box, while at the same time not getting 'in trouble' with censorship.  Much later, while preparing to teach an essay for a composition course at Tulane, in US,  I read M.L.K.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail."  It made me re-appreciate as an adult, what an art form my father's parenting was: to empower the child to be open-minded in a regime where a parent could suffer a consequence for doing so was also a heroic act of resistance on his part. He was changing history through me.

Carrie Lee Scwartz:
How did you find your voice, or the expression of your thought and feeling through the arts?

Sanda Spicmiler-Lewis: 
"I wrote poetry as a youngster but also practiced film-reviews and journal-keeping, the latter two as private forms of expression not meant to be shared with an audience, but a free space for idea-recording.  I was influenced by Anne Frank's diary which I was given as a present for my 13th birthday, because it made me aware that even a child's voice can be historically powerful and relevant against a huge machinery for extermination of everything human.  Although I needed to believe that what she experienced will never be historically repeated, a part of me felt like compulsively documenting the everyday life of my youth, not just through words but through simple artifacts and mementos scrapped around my words.

I  pursued photography as another means of documentation, as I was aware of the rapid passage of time and an acute sense that the regime I was born into will eventually dissolve, or transform into something else, something hopefully better and less isolating.  What I dreaded was how the change would come about.  As a form of therapeutic escape, I also photographed what gave me solace: beautiful plants that surrounded me in our minute garden, cemetery we lived next to, facades of old buildings in much need of facelift, and other objects of interest that to me were a-political and a-historical and therefore freeing."

Finding the voice did not happen until much later when I was living in US. I came to New Orleans to pursue a doctorate at 25.  Although fluent in English, it took me a while to realize that challenging someone's opinion through writing was not only permitted but desired. I never wanted to engage in hostile or confrontational rhetoric, as much as that could be avoided.  I believed in the dialogue between the reader and writer, or  writer and critic, as a civilized discourse that mandated mutual respect. However in academia, verbal combativeness was popular between different schools of thought and I once again find language limiting rather than freeing.

Carrie Lee Scwartz:
What forms of writing are you most comfortable with now?

Sanda Spicmiler-Lewis:
After years of writing graduate school seminar papers which had to fit a certain format, and then also practicing the art of commenting on student essays, which I believe needs to take a form of a dialogue rather than 'verdict' in order to be pedagogically successful, I found writing letters a welcome return guests in my war-fractured and two-continental life. At one point, in former Yugoslavia, I used to have pen pals from different parts of the world in order to practice my English or German but also to extend beyond the borders of the country and culture without travel. When studying in US, followed letters 'home,' or rather to family and friends in the country I left in order to study here. As war escalated and resulted in an extremely erratic postal services, I gave up for a number of years. Instead of writing, I read others' war-related writing like Slavenka Drakulic's "How we Survived Communism and Even Laughed" or "Balkan Express."  I also enjoyed Dubravka Ugresic's "Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream."  I was living in US, was from a country that did not exist any more, yet was also unable to explain to others (or to myself) which is this new place of my origin, called Croatia.  The negotiating through these different identities took a number of years, and a process of writing again became instrumental to my healing from the artificial fissures in my identity and of learning to belong in a new way.

Thanks to internet and e-mail, a flood of repressed letters began pouring out of me--some to steady friends, some to friends long lost and found again, others to complete strangers. Over the years, these letters became a way of holding onto sanity in the aftermath of a particularly brutal and divisive war, but later also of overcoming artificial divisions that breaking up of Yugoslavia caused for many of us, whichever sides of the new state borders we found themselves on.  Letter-writing continues to soothe me and guide me in self-reinvention and recovery, even if some letters never get sent. It is about imagining that one particular listener, the caring emphatic ear.

Living in New Orleans also involved living through and overcoming another violent life changing-event: hurricane Katrina.  After weathering the war, Katrina was not as difficult, but still took a toll as it reorganized life plans and created new setbacks.  Yet once again, I resurfaced whole, through helping others write about their aftermath and recovery, through my own writing, and through reading.  Photography and film again played a major role in documenting, processing and sharing what we underwent as a community here, both to ourselves and to those not of here. 

What came as the most pleasant surprise was comment-writing on social media. My global identity of someone writing in English but someone not necessarily known to communities within which I comment on others' art empowered me as a writer in a new way.  As long as writing is driven from love and a position of constructive criticism, as long as I write 'from the gut' -- that is without too much premeditation, writing in the moment immediately after I experience a work of art, I find that the authors on what I comment about found it valuable and affirmative of their intention, or interesting in terms of how their work resonates with others beyond their original intent.  As a result of 'comment-writing,' I met writers who are free in the truly global sense.  Some thank me for articulating in narrative or descriptive prose what they can only conceive of in form of a painting, a poem, a sculpture or a photo montage.  Perhaps it is a new form of unpretentious criticism, not a criticism for winning the accolades of our academic peers, or for pleasing institutional arbiters of what is fashionable, but a direct and unmediated interaction between the artist and most immediate recipient, in real time.
 
 
Carrie Lee Scwartz:
What is this blog going to be about?
 
 
Sanda Spicmiler-Lewis:
I hope it will shape itself as I go along. It is my first blog.  I will write about what feeds my soul and what I find relevant to share with my students, academic community, and friends in the wider world of online learning and fellowship.


The Tirelesss Humanist




·      Child Rights
·      Child Stardom
·      Child in Literature
·      Child in Film
·      Against Abuse

·      The Jackson Connection (recommended resource links to notable Michael Jackson scholars, fan artists, and fan activists)
·      Chaplin Resurrected
·      For the love of NOLA
·      SS’s Balkan Diaspora
·      SS’s  Global Friends
·      War is never good
·      Books that built me
·      Speaking with Leaves – Photo-narrative Explorations

Joseph Vogel
Dr. Willa Stillwater




Monday, October 8, 2012

Welcome

My name is Sanda Spicmiler-Lewis and I am a Tireless Humanist.