For, "Mixed Up Midwest" what were some of the themes? Was it sort of political? Was it more environmental? Both?

Yeah, it's sort of my coming-of-age story. It's a collection of poems written from 2020 to 2022, and a lot of the themes have to do with my identity and my relationship to nature, and to other people, and the climate crisis as an overarching societal impact while all this personal growth is happening.

Also, with TranZine? Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Yeah, that is a PermaBuds Zine project. Me and a few other PermaBuds organizers led the project, but I was the main person who organized it and made it happen. Basically, it's a collection of art from trans artists in the area. That was the main goal. And it really came together amazing. We kind of wanted to put it out there and see what people would bring to the table. And at the beginning, I was like, "We could even do it if we get a bunch of submissions." Submit whatever you want, because even if we got audio files or weird shit, we could make a digital zine. We didn't end up making a digital scene because of the submissions we got, but it's such a well-rounded piece of work altogether. It's amazing that that happened because it was literally just what was submitted. There was no filter.

It was a perfect amount of visual art with written work and all the themes that are important to at least my experience of being a trans person. All the good stuff and bad stuff.

What does your brainstorming process look like as far as tattoos or fine art?

My creative process is interesting. I'm definitely very inspired by whatever I'm exposed to. So, as someone with a background in urban planning, I understand a lot about the built environment, and I'm really curious about it, and I really like walking and traveling and experiencing the world. A lot of my inspiration and creative process looks like taking things from my environment and my life story and molding that into something interesting that I can share with another person. I'll do tattoos of just random, weird stuff. I'm also inspired by more historical and cultural things. I've been really into Raggedy Annie and, like, Care Bears—anything from our parents’ generation, all of that aesthetic stuff, all of those traditional characters that have some special cultural significance and I really like giving them a new energy, and a new light in the context of, like, hyperpop. So. Pinterest.

My creative process for poetry and other writing starts with thoughts and notes, more like journal entries. And then I'll kind of just take those through a few iterations, turn it into a poem, and then interact with that poem, sometimes through a visual aspect. My poetry has some drawings in it as well.

What kind of work were you making as a child, and as an adolescent? How did we form into now and when did those things start?

I have always been an artist, and my first babysitter, that I really liked, she was really good at art. That was really inspiring. I also had a best friend who was really good at art. So, I started, honestly, with mixed media and drawing. In high school, I got into oil painting, and I was really inspired by the impressionism movement because I was like, "oh, you can create art that is not so locked down into a form and is more focused on the lighting and the color and the impression of what you're experiencing." So, then I started painting, and then I also started exploring themes of identity, and then I got into mixed media stuff because I wanted to start putting objects into my art that help with the themes of gender and sexuality. One of the first pieces I made with that just had a lot of objects associated with boyhood and girlhood. I ended up doing a whole series about gender expression and gender celebration for my senior high school senior thesis. And then as I moved more into mixed media, I started doing acrylic because it's just easier than oil. There were several experiences with nature that got me really invested in the environmental movement, but, as a kid, I spent most of my free time playing outside. I also grew up in suburbia, though. Now I'm studying urban planning and understanding more about why the things are the way they are. A lot of it always comes back to racism, to be honest, and neoliberalism, a lot of that plays into our built environment and the way people live their lives.

Several years ago, I was working at a boy scout camp in Wisconsin, and that was when I was like, "Oh, damn, nature is actually everything and my reason for being alive and the thing that everyone has in common and the thing that matters most." There was a really big storm that happened—a big tornado—and so that was my first experience of a natural disaster, and I was in a leadership position. That was really intense. That was my first experience living in nature, being immersed in nature, and I realized how important it was to me and how important taking action for the climate justice movement and caring about how we interact with our environment, and trying to get people to reconnect to nature as a way to heal and a way to create community. We've always had the indigenous knowledge of nature and we've always had our identity with regards to being a part of the environment and their native ecology, but we somehow lost all of that in Western society, which is a bummer. But also, people our age in our communities are realizing that we still have all of that knowledge, we still have that connection. We just have to put our energy and resources into it and let go of the things that are hurting us.