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• 1 2022-04-09T11:12:05-07:00 Double Wonder 4 By Elizabeth Johnson plain 2022-04-09T21:45:56-07:00

  Artist Statement

  What has always drawn me to Alice in Wonderland: the sense of freedom. Lewis Carroll's wild ride of a book allowed my imagination to expand and allowed me to feel a level of boldness in my own creative life. As a writer, one of my biggest fears is of mistakes, which is a counterintuitive fear because, how can you make mistakes in your own creative work? Yet despite that logic, I am often worried and anxious over my writing-that it isn't bold enough, that it somehow bores or offends or boringly offends those who might read it. Though Alice has always inspired that freedom of creation and wonder, the USC Cassady Collection brought this sense of freedom for me to another level.
  
  Looking at Lewis Carroll's correspondence, I loved how wild and pensive he was; his letters reveal a person wholly himself, ready to recollect memories as easily as he might lend advice. His letters were wild and warm, and welcomed me toward them. I often felt like the letters were speaking to me, and the ability to access the letters themselves-to see his handwriting and the way his lines subtly curved across the page-made me feel like they were being written to me, even though I am in a future so many years from which he wrote. I loved when he underlined his lines (possibly crossed some out?)-he was not afraid to let the reader (in this case, me) know that there was a thinking mind behind the writing, a thinking mind that changed things or added emphasis even after the letter had been written.
  
  For reasons I can't quite explain, I was also very taken with the envelope backs in the collection of correspondence. I loved that that each one was unique­some embossed, some stamped ... even his markings did not appear orderly in the same place, but rather moved across the envelope wherever his mind took him. These collections of his correspondence are unusually moving and an extraordinary treasure I am grateful to have access to via the Cassady Collection at USC.
  
  Lastly, I would be remiss not to mention the impact that the colored Lantern slides had on my work. Going back to my original theme of mistakes and revision, the Lantern slides added an interesting counterpart to the images I found in my original texts: the Lantern slides were more elaborate, fleshed out drawings with more detail. They were beautiful revisions of the original drawings and looking at them caused me to reflect that both the original drawings and the Lantern slides are beautiful in different ways, and we can see the imagination of the unique artists are work in viewing their interpretations of the text. These were particularly inspiring to me, as I worked on my own version of Alice in this strange and fantastical poetic form. I chose to work with the form of the abecedarian as I believe it would have given Lewis Carroll great joy: it's a funny, quirky form (who doesn't love having to begin sentences with the unusual letters of x, y, and x?), but it also contains an alphabetic logic, and narrative logic is something I believe was deeply important in the writing of Alice. I hope Lewis Carroll would have approved!