Tendrils Ten with J.R. Welch

J.R. Welch’s work appears in Trauma and the Environment, Issue 2

1. What brings you joy? It could be recent or something you’ve enjoyed for ages.
   Music and long walks in nature bring me great joy. The movement of leaves in wind, light bouncing off water. Pure delight.

2. What art form would you like to try at least once?
   Ballet

3. When was the first time you thought of yourself as an artist/writer?
   Third grade, when I placed in an art competition. I think it was the first time I understood that making things could be part of who I was.

4. What’s one way you process or manage painful emotions?
   Meditation and touching the beads on my wrist.

5. What’s a work of literature that has influenced you greatly?
   The works of Wendell Barry or Joan Didion.

6. What’s your favorite tool for writing/making art?
   Charcoal

7. If you weren’t an artist/writer, what would you be?
   Therapist

8. If you could instantly master any skill, what would you choose?
   The violin

9. If your workspace could talk, what would it say about you?
   He’s quiet and has excellent taste in music.

10. If you could chat with one writer, living or dead, who would you choose?
    Wendell Barry

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J. R. Welch is a writer and visual artist raised in Missouri’s Bootheel and based in New Orleans. His practice spans fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, painting, installation, and photography, drawing on the people, histories, landscapes, and cultural life of the American South and the Mississippi River. He currently has work on view at the George Dunbar Gallery and forthcoming at an exhibition at the University of Alabama. His writing has appeared in Reckon Review, The Christian Century, Queen’s Review, and other journals and reviews. Visit thejrwelch.com or follow him at @thejrwelch.