Searching

I’ve really only worked a lot on one project, In Store—I don’t count South of Cota, because I didn’t realize it was a project until it was nearly done—and In Store is such a literal project in my mind, straightforward facts, unvarnished reality. Writing the statement for the project was easy, and what I wrote hasn’t become outdated in the months since.

I have several new projects in the works—one I haven’t started photographing yet, another I’ve only just begun, and a third that I’ve delved into a little more deeply, though it’s still in the beginning stages. Of these three, the one I haven’t started yet is probably the most literal, the easiest to describe in words. The other two are less prose, more poetry. I’ve been trying to think of how to describe the third one, the one I’m farthest along with. All I can think of is that Jhumpa Lahiri’s words are the closest to getting at what the project is about. So last week I read The Namesake, and I’m just now starting to reread Interpreter of Maladies; her most recent short-story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, is waiting on my nightstand. I thought I might find something—some quote or passage—that would get at what the project is about for me, but so far, I haven’t. The feeling I get when I read Lahiri is the feeling I’m going for in this project, but it’s hard for me to be more articulate about it than that.

It’ll come. In the meantime, I’m getting to read one of my favorite authors, someone who, as I told S., “really has a way of taking your heart and tearing it apart.”