When Stephanie Pruitt sits down to write a poem, she often starts with a "What if" question that carries her into the mind of a stranger or a world of alternate possibility.
Last year, as Pruitt and OZ Arts artistic director Lauren Snelling started exploring the idea of a poetry-inspired art installation, Pruitt asked herself this: What if you could plunge into a poem and live inside it? What would that look like?
Pruitt knows how it feels to sink down into a poem until it seems like time stops and the light of the world dims. She fell in love with poetry when she was in high school at Hume-Fogg with one of Nashville's most beloved alchemists of student creativity — poet and longtime writing teacher Bill Brown. She went on to study at MTSU, and after graduating she self-published her first book of poetry, I Am, loaded the books and her 18-month-old daughter in the car, and traveled around the country reading poems at churches, schools and conferences.
To survive as an artist, she had to learn how to impart the pleasures of immersion — the joys of losing oneself in words and ideas — to audiences.
And learn she did. Pruitt nearly sold out of books at every speaking engagement, and in three years, she sold almost 5,000 copies.
"I was doing what I loved," she says, "and I was scared as hell."
Pruitt, now a 36-year-old Nashville poet and arts educator with an MFA in creative writing from Vanderbilt, is still doing what she loves: Thriving as a working artist. She's taught writing classes at Vanderbilt and the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference, spoken to audiences at TEDx about the places where art and business intersect, and brought poetry to people in innovative ways; she built a series of collaborative "quilted poems" penned by visitors to OZ and the Frist's family events, and she created a line of poetry vending machines.
Try to nail Pruitt down to a single well-defined job title, and she'll cheerfully steer you toward a more creative and amorphous one. She calls herself an ARTrepreneur and "an a-ha-moment maker." And for her, many of those a-ha moments are born of that same jump-off-the-deep-end fear that she felt as a young single mom, supporting herself by selling poetry out of the trunk of her car and writing poems on commission.
Pruitt felt that familiar creative jolt of thrill and terror last fall, when she told Snelling that yes, she'd be glad to curate one of OZ Arts' quarterly Thursday Night Things (TNT) events, with a single poem as inspiration for the one-night-only exhibition. Especially when she actually saw the 10,000 square feet of yawning, intimidating warehouse space she'd have to fill with an abstract idea made tangible.
"A book can be nice and comfortable for a writer, " she says. "But putting a poem in a home where it doesn't typically go, that's exciting and scary. That's the creative risk."
Then came Pruitt's big "a-ha" idea: to ask artists of various disciplines to interpret her poem, "Close Reading," through layers of sensation, from sight and sound to texture and taste. More than 20 creative collaborators, among them chef Josh Habiger, aromatherapist Roy Hamilton, musician Joy Styles and visual artist Jamaal Sheats, have created works that stand alongside Pruitt's poem like sensory metaphors — dissimilar things juxtaposed, each illuminating the other.
"Once she settled on the concept of five senses, it was like a spark," says Snelling. "It has been a complete wildfire ever since."
For Pruitt, that unbridled flame is the magic and mystery of collaboration: Sharing creative control with artists she trusts creates an unpredictable and thrilling cross-pollination — with the potential to succeed or fail on a grand scale, in the form of 10,000 square feet of sensory experience.
"When I saw the space, I nearly soiled myself," laughs Mike Kahnle, a landscape architect whom Pruitt asked to help her reimagine her poem as physical space. "I was like, 'How are we gonna pull this off?' " But as the two laid out exhibition areas with paper plates and string and problem-solved some of the crazier ideas, he started to revel in the creative freedom OZ and Pruitt had given him, something his day job didn't often provide. "The whole thing has been a delight," he says. "To know that there are creative types in the world pursuing real art."
Pruitt and her collaborators have stepped outside their comfort zone to produce em•bod•i•ment, and she hopes visitors on Thursday night will do the same as they experience it. The $15 ticket includes three live music performances and food samples prepared by Habiger. Don't expect to be handed a printed program. Instead, a proximity-based technology by Nashville-based tech company BKON will push artists' info to your smartphone as you move around the room.
"Once you've had a taste of creative freedom," says Pruitt, her wide smile warm and knowing, "it's hard to accept anything less."
Email arts@nashvillescene.com
