Featured Instructor: Heather Allen-Swarttouw
Heather Allen-Swarttouw teaches “Keeping Creative Journals” beginning April 8, and an ongoing class entitled “Journaling For Your Creative Voice.”

A Brief Interview with Heather about Creative Journaling Practices How did your journaling practices / concepts develop? I have kept a journal and sketchbooks since high school. They were often a sketchbook / journal, all mixed up. In 1980/81, I had to keep a daily journal for a year when I was an exchange student to Japan in high school. When I was in Japan I also made a journal of the foods, in watercolors and recipes, lots of the beautiful obento lunch boxes my host mother made for me. That was probably my first specialized topic journal. In 1997 a fire took away all my journals for me and I think in starting again there was a new beginning. Also moving, putting my life in storage spaces for long periods of time, inspired me to try and organize my creative ideas so I could access them. When I was asked to write an article on "Journaling and My Creative Process" (Surface Design Journal Summer 2003) it made me aware of the importance of journaling to my creative process and I began to give my journals more time and attention. How does your journaling practice inform your creative process? Some of my journals are flip books of ideas and images I have collected, like a postcard wall in a book form, others are theme specific to ideas I am exploring, or for a residency like the kelp journal. I don't leave home without my daily/annual journal. It is an ongoing way for me to filter what life presents to me in the outside and inner worlds. It is the story of my creative process, intertwined with life and express in a balance of free verse and visuals. This is the method that keeps me in tune with myself. The idea of journaling as a portable studio is very much on my mind as my studio space has been occupied since Jan 07 with a huge project replicating a set of textiles in the Bitlmore Estate collection that will hang as pelmets in the Second Floor Living Hall set to open in 2001. Gearing up for the embroidery phase of the project that I have just begun, last fall I was inspired to begin a morning stitches journal to train my left hand to sew. How did you become interested in teaching these classes? The response to the article and conversations with friends gave me the idea that I had something to share. Creativity is part of every artist. This class is about accessing creativity in general and I try to approach this class from that standpoint. I teach by example and by the idea of the teacher as a facilitator to help convey the ideas and allow the individual to customize and personalize the ideas and techniques presented for themselves. I am not about promoting a system (at least I don't think so) but a set of ideas to help guide an individual to create and sustain a journal practice that works for them. I hope students will develop a closer connection to their inner self / creative side and a sense of honoring this by journaling.

Transplant, a limited-edition letterpress artist's book, was created during a three-month book arts residency in the Spring of 2006 at Asheville BookWorks. Through twelve stories about missing and exposed body parts, apparitions, electricity, and butterflies, Transplant explores how memory, when absent of structure or landscape, becomes encoded in our bodies. The physical structure of Transplant amalgamates the body and house. Opening this book is akin to opening a door, yet the soft pages are evocative of skin. Threads hanging below suggest tissues and tendons, as well as roots plucked from the earth.