Today we’d like to introduce you to Virginia Grise.
Hi Virginia, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work life, how can you bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I am an artist. I became an artist in Austin in the early 2000s when rent was cheap, and people had time to sit by the river, debate ideas, and make art. The first poem I ever read publicly was in a juvenile detention center in Austin, Texas. La Peña had a poetry workshop in the juvenile detention center. In this program, I met a twelve-year-old who was functionally illiterate. One of the poets in the program, Raul Salinas, asked me to work with him one-on-one. For two weeks, I would listen as he told me the story he wanted to tell and transcribed the words he dictated each day. Every night, the young man returned to his cell, paper tucked in the waistband of his pants. With the help of his cellmate, he would memorize the words on the page before returning to class the next day. At the end of the program, he performed his story with the rest of the students, paper in hand. The night before the reading, he asked me, “What about you, Miss? What story are you going to tell tomorrow?” Without thinking, I responded, “I’m not a writer.” Raul calmly walked up behind me and, under his breath, said, “You better go home tonight and write that boy a poem, sister.”
I was raised as an artist in a program called the Austin Project. The Austin Project was a group of artists, activists, and academics led by performance studies scholar Omi Osun Joni L. Jones. It was a space for women of color and their allies to build relationships based on trust, creativity, and commitment to social justice by working together to write and perform work in the jazz aesthetic. In the Austin Project, I was introduced to and worked directly with artists like Bessie Award–winning choreographer Laurie Carlos, writer/performer Robbie McCauley and playwright Daniel Alexander Jones. After that, I was invited to take writing workshops with Sharon Bridgforth, and she became my teacher, mentor, and Art Pa.
I became an artist that works all over the country. My body includes plays, multimedia performances, dance theater, performance installations, guerilla theater, site-specific interventions, and community gatherings. I have taught writing for performance at the university level as a public school teacher in community centers, women’s prisons, and the juvenile correction system. I am the Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Cara Mia Theatre and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. I live in Cedar Park, Texas, with my partner and dog.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Being a working artist in the United States of America has been a challenging road; however, my work is about radical imagination and dreaming, and I want to stay in the place of dreaming as long as possible.
From my book, Your Healing is Killing Me:
I always ask my acupuncturist-in-training lots of questions. Today I ask, Why did you put the needles in my back? You don’t normally do that. Eh, new moon, Eastern medicine, he scoffs. I’m unsure if my acupuncturist in training believes in acupuncture or Eastern medicine. Maybe going to acupuncture school is something his parents made him do. I don’t even know if I believe in acupuncture, but I like it when he sticks the needle in my forehead between my eyes.
For stress, he says. I knock out cold every time. He turns out the lights. It’s one of the few moments I sleep peacefully. Sometimes it’s the most uninterrupted sleep I will get in weeks. He returns to check on me: Your job is very stressful, right? Yes, I admit. Do you like your job? Yes, I have to admit. Remember that the next time you sit down to write.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Writing, in part, is my attempt to liberate myself from confinement, conventional rules, norms, and structures, an attempt to imagine freedom. In South Texas, we dance in a circle counterclockwise. In the back of dark bars without windows, I learned how a community takes over space, how people move, transcend the present moment, and how people dream. I want to create a theatre that is in a constant state of motion: music playing, voices overlapping, and bodies that can’t stop dancing, which to me is the same as dreaming. As an artist, I want to craft and build spaces for collective dreaming, for ambitious work that is transformative, that demands that we listen to ourselves and each other, and that incites movement. I want to do work that sets people free.
What was your favorite childhood memory?
I was going to Mexico. Every summer, every long weekend, every holiday. Crossing the border, growing up multilingual and multiethnic taught me that those borders were man-made, imposed, not real. So much of my work is about thinking beyond borders, boxes, and walls. Three hours from the border, I spent much of my childhood at my grandmother’s house in Monterrey, Mexico. We always arrived at her house late at night. A single light bulb hangs from the ceiling in the kitchen. My Tio Abuelo Andres cooks and serves me coffee, pan, and eggs that stick to my stomach, keeping me from ever feeling hungry. Everyone is talking at the same time, mostly in Spanish, which I barely understand, so I sit quietly eating, trying to listen to the overlapping voices and the stories as they unfold.
Andres and my grandfather were merchants. They sold fruits and vegetables in the Mercado Colón. After my grandfather died, my uncle left the business, but not after helping several of the men who worked for him start businesses of their own. Because of this, Andres always had an endless supply of groceries. I remember going with him to the market to pick up boxes of fresh fruits and vegetables. We would come home, and he would give some of those groceries to the neighbors. I asked him about it once, and he said, nadie va a tener hambre aquí. I learned that to survive as a people, we must ensure that no one went hungry. There is a word for this in Chinese. I can not remember what it is, but I never forgot the lesson. Nadie va a tener hambre aqui.
Contact Info:
- Website: virginiagrise.com
- Instagram: @virginiagrise & @atododarproductions
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/atododarprod/
Image Credits
Pablo Aguilar, David Hester, Ben Torres, Gema Galiana
