The next blog in our Alchemists Series on interdisicplinary, collaborative and hybrid approaches to writing and creation is the stellar choreographer, dance dramaturge and creator Helen Simard.

I feel like my creative practice has been this kind of secret wife on the side where I’m committed and betrothed to this person (my practice) who takes all of my energy and all of my time, but then I leave her at home and do my personal life elsewhere and bring information and energy back from these exchanges to put into this secret wife relationship with my work. With Tommi, I feel like we both understood this. We had these other personal relationships outside of creative practice, and then these intense relationships to work. So there was a kind of funny polyamory there that we could share.

I suppose the main thing I love about the process of making things is defamiliarization. It feels critical to the act of paying attention in the world, this investment in what I call “aliveness,” and it disrupts your self-making too, right? It’s like, oh, I can see myself anew because of this artwork, or this poem, or because of someone else’s experience of, and response to, something I’ve made. It’s this beautiful circular thing.

I’d say right now that I write to resolve the big questions or conflicts I’m contending with. It’s really about how I’m looking at the things I can’t really change. The things I feel powerless with. I tend to then focus on this in writing because I’m not good at letting things go. I write because I can’t let things go, but when I write it, it helps me to let it go a little bit.

Jessica Bebenek is a writer & interdisciplinary artist currently based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). In 2021 she was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry. Her recent chapbooks include Fourth Walk (Desert Pets Press, 2017), k2tog (Broken Dimanche, 2018), and What is Punk (2019). She recently completed her first full collection of poetry, No One Knows Us There.