Artists Interviewing Artists: Sarah Lawson Interviews MaKshya Tolbert
Published on June 28, 2023.
In this interview, Fall 2022 New City Artist-in-Residence, Sarah Lawson (she/they), asks Spring 2023 New City Artist-in-Residence, MaKshya Tolbert (she/they) about returning to Virginia, their favorite tree, and what reading recommendations she has for us.
During the residency, MaKshya wrote and embodied a long poem anchored in shade, shared livability, and black ecological loneliness as entangled beneath Charlottesville’s rapidly changing urban tree canopy. Meanwhile, Makshya self-apprenticed to coiling clay, shaping tree trunks in the wake of imminent and intimate climate transition – past, present, and unfolding.
It seems like you've traveled pretty extensively, so I'm curious how it feels to have returned to your roots in Virginia—what do you enjoy most about being back? What do you miss most about being away?
I enjoy being so close to what scares me: history, the afterlives of slavery, the land my family lost in the wake of my grandmother’s death. It means so much to face my bioregion head on: to attend to the transitions we are coming through in my poems. I don’t miss being away but I do miss moving. I found that everywhere I went, the performance of being a person had a distinct shape. I have fond and funny memories of being surprised by how I was in different places.
What's your favorite tree—in the world, generally, and specifically, in Charlottesville? How do you feel that the work you came into the residency planning to do has (or has not) evolved in response to being physically in the space and in new routines?
I’m grateful to be beneath them all. I think a lot about the economy and movement of trees in favor of what we miss, the trees we love. I believe English Ivy was brought to the states because folks missed the ivy back at home…and here we are. But I can be a good sport. This last year, I’ve been apprenticing myself to the Willow oaks on the Downtown Mall. Five willow oaks came down and awe is the word that comes to mind when I think about watching the arborist team do such a gentle, caring job bringing down each tree. There’s one tree they realized could stay, without some of its deadwood. That’s the tree I say hi to the most.
Which office snack and/or seltzer flavor have you most enjoyed while working in the studio space at New City Arts? :)
I like bubbles, I won’t lie. I stand while I write and I stand while I coil clay. I don’t snack much: full hands and full brain. I get distracted. But I do try to hydrate and I’ll reach for seltzer and a Corner Juice ginger shot or some pickle juice, to keep the muscle cramps away.
Which office snack and/or seltzer flavor have you most enjoyed while working in the studio space at New City Arts? :)
I like bubbles, I won’t lie. I stand while I write and I stand while I coil clay. I don’t snack much: full hands and full brain. I get distracted. But I do try to hydrate and I’ll reach for seltzer and a Corner Juice ginger shot or some pickle juice, to keep the muscle cramps away.
Outside of your residency work, what is holding your attention these days?
“It’s going to be a long, hot summer.” I heard a man say that in the studio recently, in March, after noting how the trees were already blooming. I’m thinking about how to offer comfort and relief, even if only for a moment. Currently, I'm building some relationships to make sure community members in our least shaded neighborhoods have their AC needs met this summer. I'm hoping to offer gift cards so folks can stay cool. And I'm teaching myself new juggling tricks, which has been the most exciting thing I've learned to do since moving to Charlottesville. I recently got into group juggling and am curious about doing some passing on the Downtown Mall this summer.
What are one or two reading recommendations (short- or long-form) that you'd encourage others to engage with and explore?
Short–
The Fall
by Russell Edson
There was a man who found two leaves and came indoors holding them out saying to his parents that he was a tree.
To which they said then go into the yard and do not grow in the living-room as your roots may ruin the carpet.
He said I was fooling I am not a tree and he dropped his leaves.
But his parents said look it is fall.
Long–
Thomas Jefferson’s October 1786 letter to Maria Cosway, a conversation he stages between his “Head” and his “Heart” amid his well-documented lovesickness for her. The first time I read it, I realized something he and I have in common: staging wordy conversations with ourselves, and ramblers. The letter begins: “Having performed the last sad office of handing you into your carriage at the Pavillon de St. Denis, and seen the wheels get actually into motion, I turned on my heel and walked, more dead than alive, to the opposite door, where my own was awaiting me.”
MaKshya Tolbert (she/they) is a poet, cook, and artist who just found her way back to Virginia. Her recent poems and essays have been published in Interim, Narrative Magazine, Emergence Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Art Papers, The Night Heron Barks, Ran Off with the Star Bassoon, For the Culture, Earth in Color, Odd Apples, Queer Poem-a-Day, RHINO Poetry, and Earth in Color. Makshya is currently based on unceded Monacan and Manahoac land in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is a second-year MFA student at the University of Virginia. Makshya serves on the Charlottesville Tree Commission and is a 2022-23 Lead to Life Curatorial Fellow. In her free time, she is elsewhere— what Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. calls 'that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.'
The New City Arts Fall 2022 Residency was made possible with support from The Genan Foundation.
