Molly Schaeffer works between intersections of writing and visual art. She has shown work at The Vestibule in Seattle; her chapbook, STATE ZAP,* was published by MO(0)ON/IO in 2023. A finalist in the 2022 BOMB Magazine Poetry Contest, her work has appeared in publications including The Recluse, Prelude online, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and Tagvverk. She was a writing Fellow at the Lighthouse Works on Fishers Island, NY in spring 2023. A graduate of the Brown University MFA in poetry, where she was a recipient of the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award, the Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop Prize for Innovative Writing, and the Edwin Honig Memorial award, she teaches writing and interdisciplinary courses at Tacoma Community College; Pierce College; Hugo House, a writing center in Seattle; and in the Summer @ Brown Precollege Program. She lives in Tacoma, WA.
I am an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily in poetry, drawing, and found-material sculpture to investigate reinvention and overlap in concepts and textures; how a misunderstanding might lead to a new discovery or direction. My work explores conversation between text and image–less illustration, and more how one discipline might enhance/reroute the other. More recently, I’ve been exploring the ways that sculptural works resemble drawings, and how collaged/long-form poems collaborate with these visual pieces. Other concepts that excite me: dailiness and the minutiae of everyday life; negative space/unseeability; disorientation/reorientation; slippages and hinging moments, where one word, concept, or image slides into another. As an instructor, I’m excited by teaching and examining ideas of noticing and ways that using multiple senses interact with and enhance one’s creative practice. I also live with chronic illness, and find that I’m frequently circling back to ideas of the body and its relationship to space, time, to oneself at a given moment, ways that strange sensations and bodily phenomena might be recontextualized both within and without the space of the body itself. Having a body means considering that body’s (dis)orientation with and against the natural (and unnatural) world(s).
