My father is a year-round camper. He is a truck driver and after a few years of weekend camping rain or cold, he invited me along. Of course I remembered camping in lots of places growing up, but this didn’t mean I had ever driven myself to these campsites. What can I say, I got lost. I made a wrong turn and found myself being chased around by a beat-up red 1990’s Chevy Silverado, whose driver I would meet a year later... Within a year of telling the full story to my father, he was living at that campsite . I found myself sitting in a tight makeshift cabin listening to stories and eating fried wild rabbit. The landowner, an old man, named Calvin, drunkenly told me of two rabbit hunters lost near Granite City, Illinois. Calvin never finished telling his story, but his telling had sparked interest in me for the beginning of my own story. I had found this form of writing to be much like a stylized observational drawing. Words were the vehicle for making the image. While writing, I met the inspiration for my main character: I call him Wayne Kenneth Greer. In his burned-out meth-lab, I shot a documentary video called Gwlynn’s Palings. After piecing together my notes of the place, I expanded the story into a linear full-length novel, I began to think how it could become a visual artwork. The Chapter Headings became a series of sculptural landscape paintings constructed from cast natural artifacts originally found in the flooded woods and leftover debris after meth lab explosions in Southern Illinois. Along the way I am finding ways to record the oral storytelling of rural America, as well as find my roots in Little Egypt, better known as Southern Illinois. Categories All Student Profile