Meet the Artists & Their Work in Progress

Sarah Kiepper, an internationally published writer/poet who grew up in the Midwest, resides with her partner and dogs on the SouthCoast of MA. She retired from teaching college humanities courses, is now a remote chief compliance officer, and a doctorate student at Kent State University. She is a board member of the Friends of the Millicent Library and Writing With Community Inc., and enjoys participating in writing groups and researching genealogy. Her photography, poetry, and prose have been published in Akros Review, Asylum, Jenny Magazine, Penguin Review, Rituals, TPT Magazine, Tidings, and the YWCA of Youngstown, OH. 

Working with Ian–he is brilliant–has been an awe-inspiring experience. There were so many moments where our ideas crossed over and then others where I learned so much from him. His eclectic background of art and music + knowledge library + technology + his word-speak is amazing and I was in for all of it. We each chose five of our favorite texts and presented them to one another–our goal was to review and narrow down to one text. BUT, how do we choose just one, or the best text–how do we even define the best text, or even define ‘literature’ at all–what are the expectations of the audience in the pieces we choose?! Breathe. The process of narrowing down the ten texts (and then some) led to conversations about other options and pieces, ideas of flipping our idea entirely to something else, and then we returned back to the roots of our thoughts. We built layer upon layer of new ideas and our continuous stream of thought/conversations/text messages surrounding this project = our process > became more of a focus for us than the crux/purpose/ intended end result of the project. Through our collaboration, we used the lens of our process, our ideas and conversations, to define us and our process as we became the literature to which we narrowed down to one word: connection.