Writer-in-residence for April 2021, Austin-based poet and archive-enthusiast Julie Poole balances attentive construction with more organic gestures on the page to create an intensely authentic space through her lyric. In this episode of Rope Walker, Julie talks with us about her first collection of poems Bright Specimen, set to be released with Deep Vellum on May 4. She also shares with us her love of archival matter, bird watching, what she’s been working on while in Corsicana. Her next book of poems titled Landscapes Without Us aims to imagine nature as the focal point of life on earth.

Humorous and insightful, rigorous and celebratory, February resident Marian Bull’s ('21) writing is driven by her insatiable curiosity and her commitment to personal and collective delight. In this episode of Rope Walker, Marian talks with us about joie de vivre, her nonlinear journey to journalism, the mnemonic qualities of great food writing, and the challenges of writing memoir. The episode starts with a discussion of what brought her to Corsicana: the nonfiction memoir project about her childhood growing up in a live magic company.

In our latest episode of Rope Walker, we’re in conversation with January writer-in-residence, award-winning playwright and historian Kate Mulley ('21). From The Tudor, her play about a law student paying for school by selling her underwear, to The Grey Lady, a historical fiction piece about a female soldier in the Civil War, her works interrogate the complicated relationships between gender and power. Kate spent her time in Corsicana researching for her new play regarding the life of 17th-century Puritan Anne Hutchinson and her effect on the development of religious freedom in America. Kate’s also working on a book about the history of sex on stage. Here, the writer discusses gender, female rage, and residency life in Corsicana.

Francisco Moreno (’20), painter and 2nd Floor resident of 100W, uses his work to explore our mythologies and the imprint the scale of those myths leaves on the psyche. In this episode of Rope Walker, Fransisco and Dr. Benjamin Lima, a Dallas-based art historian and editor of Athenaeum Review,  the University of Texas at Dallas’ journal of arts and ideas, connect over art history and their shared project of reading Enrique Krauze’s Mexico, Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico. Moreno and Lima have had a long working relationship that evolved from an essay that Lima wrote about Francisco’s piece Chapel, an arched structure embellished with collage-like murals, which was recently acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art.

Milkweed is the sole host plant for Monarch Butterflies, which migrate annually from Central America to Canada through Texas. Erik DeLuca (Providence, RI) spent three months reactivating the second floor of the Samuels Building two blocks south of 100W into a nursery to grow thousands of milkweed from seed, where 92 year-old Babette's family once ran their business, Samuels' Mens Clothiers, for decades, before closing in the shadow of Walmart. Babette and Erik developed a special friendship by phone, collaborating on the concepts for his residency work, with exchanges about their discoveries and desires from Fiddler on the Roof, to Corsicana's Hebrew Cemetery.

Kendra A. Greene dives into the world of obscure collections in her recent book, The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, published by Penguin Random House, completed while in residence in 2019. In this episode she discusses the meaning of collecting with Corsicana Telephone Museum founders Don and Rita Capehart, the largest of its nature in this world, and Christina Lucas, Chief Curator at Corsicana’s Pearce Museum which holds a vast collection of arrowheads and civil war letters.

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See is available for purchase from our friends at Deep Vellum Books

Photo courtesy Noel Camardo

Wayne Hall lives twenty miles east of Corsicana in the settlement of Samaria, making art from dry macaroni to plastic rotisserie chicken containers, spray foam to gold spray paint.

In this Ropewalker episode, artist Nancy Rebal and essayist David Searcy describe their collaborations with Wayne, sipping champagne on lawn chairs in front of Wayne’s home on a hot summer evening, surrounded by a cicada symphony. Searcy wrote about Wayne in the Oxford American, with photos by resident alum Noel Camardo.

View Max Kuhn’s diorama installed across the street from 100W in ANTEROOM this October - December, 2020.

Linnea’s residency in 100W’s second floor studio expanded this room’s 60 x 40’ dimensions into a collection of spaces scaled to the intimacy of her work, which pursues materials in ripstop fabric, colored pencil, nuts, bolts, metal strapping and chain. She also produced a set of video works documenting the world of a street intersection visible from one studio window looking south.

Olivia Smith is director of Magenta Plains Gallery in NYC, has exhibited Linnea’s work, and is a longtime friend of this residency program. She and Linnea unravel various threads in this conversation.