Speculative Artist’s Statement for Queer Writers

Try out Atom Evie Atkinson’s speculative artist’s statement, developed to help her students pivot from past educations to a utopian future of their own design.

When I am writing and it is hard to feel the possible futures around the corner of my own thinking and feeling, I am like most other people—I read and watch and listen to the art and writing that moves me to believe in what I do. What I’m chasing.

Perhaps you are like me, in that this can also make you feel a twinge of despair! The chasm between our own work and our hopes for it, between the world as it is and the world our heroes seem to have glimpsed, can feel like it stretches even further the longer we look at it.

If you find yourself there, or if you just want to refresh your sense of purpose and feel what Muñoz called “the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality,” I recommend writing a speculative artist statement.

Step 1. Pick a genius.

Who do you most admire for their capacity to brush away the cobwebs of the status quo, think of the world differently, and theorize in terms that remade your brainheart? Maybe it was an essay or, like it was for me in the fall of 2016 when I started doing this, whole books of essays: Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks and Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz. But it can be a film or a poem or a song. It should still move you, even if you first encountered it a long time ago.

Step 2. Pin down your genius’s genius.

How can you distill what makes this essay or film or poem so earthshaking and inspiring for you? Did they bust up a tired binary? Carve out more room for pleasure? Name something that we’d all been breathing in and out unawares? Write it down in a sentence or two.

Step 3. Diagram that despair-inducing chasm.

Suffice to say those busted-up binaries have nevertheless haunted our lives, the world intrudes on our pleasure spaces all the time, and you can’t un-breathe something toxic. Think specifically about the ways your genius’s genius did not sufficiently inform the ways your teachers went about their teaching, or the ways you were told to be creative, in school or otherwise, implicitly or explicitly. Be your own ghost of straight teachers past. List it all.

Step 4. Get imaginative about your despair!

So what could have been? Imagine that your genius’s genius lived at the heart of every one of your learning experiences, every model of creative life you were supplied. How would your life have changed? What would the ramifications be for your writing? You can imagine a specific artwork, or a kind of practice—and you can imagine as boldly or impossibly as you like.

Step 5. Pick a horizon.

Find one facet of your imaginings that especially calls to you. Circle it a few times. Draw some rays of light radiating from the circle. Let it actually glow at you!

Step 6. Write an artist’s statement.

Describe as specifically as you can one way your work, or your process, could change in order to move towards the horizon you selected. You can’t undo the past that made you, and this exercise isn’t meant to suggest you should. But why shouldn’t your writing make alternate realities, and indeed the possible futures that moved you to write at all, feel just a little more fully realized even as you are doing it, whatever the result?

Step 7. It’s up to you!

You might pin this to the wall and get to work. You might stick this in a drawer and let it do the work it can through the fibers of the wood. Whatever you choose to do, I hope you are reminded of the potential of your work—and that queer writers always draw from many timelines at once when we sit down to create.