WHO ARE YOU?

Who am I? As a writer and artist, this is a question I have never been able to fully answer. Who do we assume to be? Who do we pretend to be? Are we anyone at all, or merely ghosts skimming the ground with our dirty feet?

My poetry, fiction, and artists books deal with identity, the self-preservation of the identity we take on by choice- or not. How we construct ourselves and how we desperately cling to the cloaks we wear. The struggle to reconcile dualities and opposing needs within ourselves. Death in all its forms- of the body, of the soul. Yearning. Memory. The terrible reality that all love is conditional.

I also write art and film criticism. The close reading of art, it feeds.


CARLA BARGER grew up in Camden, Ohio, the birthplace of Sherwood Anderson. She earned a BA in English/Creative Writing from Miami University in 1999 and a MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. Carla has shown her artists books in Chicago, published poetry and art reviews, collaborated on several projects with visual artists, and was a member of the Splat Flats artist community in Chicago. Currently she is finishing a novel in the southern gothic tradition. She lives and works in Cambridge, MA.