SHOWINGS

In an eight-week artist and writer’s feedback group, I began working on an erasure poetry project that uses the book of Genesis as my found text. Since leaving the American Evangelical church, after being radicalized by Christianity in my teenage years, this project was a return to my textual, mythological, and linguistic roots. While the act of erasure is perhaps inherently violent, this project quickly turned into a humorous and tender rediscovery of a thing that I had loved and held so dearly, even as I struck through the text with my black Sharpie to reveal a new, sometimes transformative, sometimes silly, story underneath. At the showcase, I presented the first three chapters erased in a short film that voiced over the new, punctuated poem of Genesis, and braided this presentation with personal narrative. As the show began, I handed the audience my old worn, leather-bound Bible that belonged to me when I was sixteen, which they held, opened, and passed around to each other.