There is a certain expectation that creative work should resolve itself neatly—that it should arrive in a finished form that feels complete, stable, and no longer in motion. A book, a poem, an image: each one treated as if it has reached a final point where meaning is fully contained and no longer shifting. I understand why that expectation exists. It makes work easier to categorize, easier to store, easier to explain. But it doesn’t reflect how my own process actually behaves.
Most of what I make begins in a far less certain place. A fragment of language written quickly before it disappears. A visual idea that appears without clear intention. A moment that feels slightly weighted for reasons I don’t fully understand yet. These things are not immediately assigned to a project. They are simply recorded, kept, and allowed to exist without pressure to become anything specific. Over time, they begin to accumulate, and it is only in retrospect that patterns start to reveal themselves.
Working as both writer and artist has meant learning to tolerate a kind of openness that doesn’t resolve quickly. Early on, I used to try to define things too soon—deciding what belonged where, what was part of a poem, what was part of a book, what was finished enough to be considered real. But I’ve found that when I do that too early, I often close down possibilities that the work itself hasn’t yet had time to reveal. So instead, I try to stay with the material longer than feels immediately necessary.
What happens in that longer space is subtle. Certain phrases begin to repeat without intention. Certain images return in slightly different forms. Ideas that seemed unrelated start to feel as though they are speaking to one another across time. Nothing is forced into connection; connection simply starts to appear. At a certain point, I begin to realize I’m no longer working on separate pieces but on a shared field of material that is slowly organizing itself.
I’ve come to value that in-between stage more than almost anything else in the process. The stage where nothing is finalized and everything is still capable of shifting. It can feel uncertain, because nothing is locked in place yet, but it is also the stage where the work is most alive. Once something is declared finished too quickly, it often stops responding. But while it remains open, it continues to change in relation to everything around it, including the passage of time and whatever else I happen to be making alongside it.
I don’t separate writing from visual work in any strict sense anymore. They are not different practices for me so much as different ways of engaging with the same underlying material. A visual fragment can shape the rhythm of a piece of writing. A line of text can suggest structure or spacing in an image. Sometimes I move between them so fluidly that I don’t notice the transition until after it has already happened. Over time, this has made the work feel less like separate disciplines and more like a single practice expressed through multiple forms.
When I return to older work, I rarely approach it with the goal of fixing anything. It feels more like returning to something that is still in motion, even if it has been quiet for a while. Some pieces remain unchanged. Others shift significantly depending on what has been created around them in the meantime. Distance plays a role here. Time changes how material reads. What once felt unresolved can become clear, not because it was corrected, but because I have changed in relation to it. In other cases, something I thought was finished reveals that it still has more to say, and I have to decide whether to follow it further or leave it where it is.
This is also why I’ve become cautious about the idea of finality. Not because I don’t finish work—I do—but because “finished” doesn’t mean closed in the way people often assume. It simply means that a piece has reached a point where it can stand on its own without collapsing. It doesn’t mean it is no longer part of a larger ongoing process. I think of each completed piece as a temporary clarity within something that is still unfolding.
A lot of my work is also shaped by the fact that it exists alongside daily life without a strict boundary between the two. Ideas don’t always arrive in designated creative moments. They appear while walking, listening, remembering, or doing something entirely unrelated. I try not to interrupt that process by forcing immediate categorization. If something wants to be held onto, I hold onto it. If it needs time before it becomes legible, I let it take that time. Over the years, this has made the work feel less like a series of isolated projects and more like a continuous conversation with attention itself.
If there is anything I am consistently trying to learn through all of this, it is how to stay with uncertainty without trying to resolve it prematurely. Not to eliminate it, but to allow it to remain present long enough that something meaningful can form inside it. Some pieces never fully settle into a fixed shape, and I’ve started to accept that as part of their nature rather than a failure in the process. Others take years before they feel ready to be shared, and that timeline can’t always be shortened without changing what the work is.
So I don’t think of my practice as something moving toward a final collection or a completed body of work. It feels more like an ongoing accumulation of related pieces that continue to shift in relation to one another. Some are visible now. Some will appear later. Some may never fully resolve in the way traditional publishing expects them to. But all of them belong to the same evolving field of attention.
And in that sense, the work is never really finished. It simply keeps changing form as I continue to make it.