Tub Talks by Secular Sabbath

Jacqueline Suskin is a writer, poet and educator now based in Detroit, Michigan. She has released many poetry books, two artistic creation books, and is now teaching young people in Detroit at the intersection of art and nature.

Yet the move to Detroit is recent. Only a little bit ago, she was stewarding art and a farm in northern California. Before that, Jacqueline was based in Los Angeles, where we met, when she was supporting herself with a made-up job she created called ‘Poem Store.’ Jacqueline describes Poem Store as an experiment. It was an experiment in which she would pull up at farmer’s markets and special events with her bike and a typewriter. Jacqueline would sit and let people come up to her and request a poem on a topic of their choosing, paying what felt right to them. “Your poem, your price,” she would say. As she tells her students now, “You can have a weird job that you make up.” She lives that truth.

Simultaneously, Jacqueline was always writing long format pieces. She wrote for magazines. She wrote poetry books. And in the pandemic, Jacqueline released her first prose book: Every Day Is A Poem. This book encourages readers to write poems, as Jacqueline drops all of her personal practice into these pages, granting the reader access to every tool in her box.

In this bath, we dive into what goes into Jacqueline’s artistic practice and how to bring projects from start to finish. Jacqueline is wise and self-aware. She describes herself as a naturally born performer, identifying with performance from a young age. Being a performer, however, doesn’t mean always being in performance. In living in Detroit, the reality of people having basic needs is raw. In being in a landscape where everyone has to get their own things done, Jacqueline describes a natural balance of knowing when to be inward and when to be outward (when is performance-time and when is it not).

Jacqueline believes that the intrinsic knowledge all exists within the seasons. Her latest book A Year In Practice delves into what practices resonate with the cycles of the earth, in order to create art and birth it into the world. Los Angeles taught her about the seasons, because of their subtlety. She urges us to witness how we are doing art with the earth, not ever alone. Therefore, in places like Los Angeles and even just living in a capitalist society, we have to fight for Winter. We have to fight to turn down, and fight to embrace the inward nature of winter. And there are practices for that.

“You don’t have to reinvent the wheel” is a sign that sits at her desk. Jacqueline suggests that there are carefully documented and practiced activities that so many incredible artists have done before us, and we can lean into their way of doing things. We are not losing our authenticity by using someone else’s methodology. "We don’t have to make this all up from scratch," Jacqueline says. And her most recent book distills these practices into something accessible. We hope you enjoy this conversation and her book!