d
d
d
d
d
d
d
d
d
d
d
dd
PETRICHORIC.
THE IDEA STAGEThis all began because I wanted something to pass down through my family and to my friends. I wanted to create a piece of physical art that cemented my impact on this earth. How do I do that? Paintings didn’t really feel substantial enough to fit that niche, and I was bored of painting. I needed something new for me, but had long-lasting significance. Call it ego, human desire, boredom, etc., I just knew I needed to make something big.THE WRITING STAGE - POETRY I’m always heavily inspired by music and my friends’ own art projects. There’s this creative conscious that I tend to tap into that I don’t ever fully understand in the moment. Sometimes it might be years until I understand the levels of depth in something I’ve made. Whether thats because I’m inspired by others, or there is this prescient quality to art as a whole, I’m not sure.
I began writing in 2021, initially just for fun, but it slowly grew to be more. I found the world building element to be the most engaging: writing a series of poems that all played off similar themes or characters, but never linking them too definitively. I created commonalities and color palettes within each poem, and that gave way to the sections I had made. Here are some moodboards to visualize the concepts for each:
After solidifying each direction, I had to... actually write the book. This process varied kind of wildly: some poems were a collection of fragments I had written in piecemeal from my notes; some poems were intentionally written in a few sittings to represent a certain element of the direction; some poems arrived fully formed in my head, and had minimal editing done to them. Here are a few of my favorite drafts shown handwritten below.
THE WRITING STAGE - SHORT STORIES I wanted to have a piece that fully embodied each section, so I decided to write a short story for each to serve as the throughline for each concept. I hadn’t initially planned this, but when I was discussing the idea in my time studying abroad, I realized it would help in bringing all the different threads together. Plus, I was taking an Irish Fables and Folklore class in Dublin, and we had to write a short story as an assignment. Inspired by Oscar Wilde and the poet H.D., I wrote “a crane named Heliodora”, included here. After that, I was certain that I wanted to write two more short stories for the book.
THE ASSEMBLY STAGE You’d think using a program like InDesign would be what I used, but at the time of writing petrichoric, I was a business student. I didn’t have access to the Adobe Creative Suite, so of course, I used Microsoft Powerpoint to assemble every page and poem of the book. Call it ingenuity or stupidity, but I made it work!
Deciding which poem goes in what section was pretty easy, as I wrote the poems with distinct voices and points of view based on each section (see moodboards above). However, I wanted there to be a bit of a narrative created by the order of poems, and that part was a lot more difficult. One section is mirrored after the plot of the corresponding short story, another section is a bit more random.
Picking the photography for this was the definitely the most difficult part. Not only did each film photo need to match the vibe of the preceding and subsequent poem, but it needed to work within the color palette and tone of the section. Each photo needed to complement each other.
THE PROMOTION STAGEI wanted to keep it real cute with the way I spoke about this project. I didn’t want it to make a lot of noise, I wasn’t wanting random people on the internet to see my hard work before I got the copyright for it. So, I only posted a few things on my grid and on my stories to create a buzz of exclusivity, but not make it this huge thing. The people who knew me are the ones who got it, not anyone else. I used several stories and reels to promote it, I hope to upload those soon.