Lindsay Costello on our past and tender selves, technology, being pulled in many creative directions, and dreaming of abundant community
Lindsay Costello does a little (or a lot) of it all: to name a few she authors a wise collage of a monthly e-letter Pink Dogwood, dreams in milky oats moments, archives aural relationship to bird friends through audio diaries, recently picked up the hammer and mountain dulcimer, and is currently undergoing an MFA program in Landscape, Ecology, Community writing, when she isn’t busy with doing all that, in her working life she is an arts journalist for The Mercury.
As friends, we recently tested an indigo vat, share poetry, gossip about our shared Quaker roots, and lead wetland walks and write for our People’s Wetland Project.
As I edit this interview on this August morning that the venerable Mary Oliver might agree offers a “deepening and quieting of the spirit”, I find myself short on words to properly honor Lindsay’s body of work, except through Sufi poet Hafiz:
“What
is the
root of all these
Words?
One thing: Love.
But a love so deep and sweet
It needed to express itself
With scents, sounds, colors
that never before
Existed.”
Hannah Althea: I was an admirer of your art and writing from afar, before we even met! I’ve always been impressed by your ability to build homes of your curios using many different tools, online and off. Then I get this blessing of getting to know the person behind it after the fact, and now have such a strong friendship, which adds the dimension of your whole humanity that only comes through this knowing. I’m grateful to pass on a little bit of that gift to others through this interview…!
What are the earliest origins of your creativity you can remember? Does it have any impact on your artistry now?
Lindsay Costello: Thank you for such a generous series of questions Hannah, I feel so blessed to know and be seen by you.
This is maybe a slightly sad way to start my responses to you, but I had a very, very difficult childhood. I was raised by a single parent and experienced firsthand the chaos that poverty, addiction, abuse, mental illness, and a general lack of resources can inflict. It was also when I developed a very rich inner world.
I knew early on that I needed to envision my own modes of care and it made me internal, sort of guarded, yet dreamy. Whether good or bad, I still tend to be that way. There was a southern live oak tree I liked to climb. I would climb the tree and pretend I was this made-up girl named Alexandria. She had a completely different life and she was very confident.
When I climbed the tree I also plotted novels. The earliest things I made were these novels about girl detectives. I started writing them when I was 8, and stopped around 13 when I switched to smoking weed, but that’s a different story.
Anyway, one of the girl detectives was named Moira. Mysteries would unravel wherever she went—a fashion show, a pumpkin patch, a hotel. I remember that one of the mysteries was about a missing basketball, and another was about a haunted Snowmobile. I had never seen snow, so no idea where I got the idea for that one from. I know I found all of my character names in an old paperback baby name book that I treasured.
I think that all of my art is for the girl in the tree, the person who wanted to be loved. The person who thought that she was not brave.
Your art spans far reaches: film, writing, audio diaries, weaving, painting, to name a few. How does each one offer something different for you (or do they?)
I read a poem by a little boy once that went something like, “Wake up, people! The Moon loves you.”
The best way I can explain my multihyphenate work is that I am always noticing new ways to approach the same idea—to reach for a vulnerability I’ve been seeking all my life.
To say, “Hello, I’m here on the planet next to you, and I’m going to die, and so are you! So now what!”
Sometimes that reaching has looked like tinctures, or field recordings, or newsletters, or installations, or weavings, or paintings, or stories. Right now I am learning calligraphy from Jade Novarino and teaching myself hammered dulcimer, and I’m in a writing MFA program, and I work in arts journalism full-time. It sounds more than a little funny when I spell it all out, but I think these elements of my practice are all murmuring to each other. I don’t think I’ve lost the plot entirely. Who knows, I guess.
That said, I’ve spent a lot of time beating myself up for creating “too many” sorts of things, as though it’s not a miracle to create in the first place. That’s something I push back against now. I’m lucky to be here, creating.
(above, a clip from flying flowers, an archival nature show by Lindsay Costello)
Our friendship has a shared pursuit of navigating techno-complexities. That is, we feel both puzzled and compelled to explore the question of “what is real”?
We’ve discussed our complicated relationship with social media as a platform for connecting art worlds, or smartphones as tools and distractions. I think we also share a curiosity about softening the noise of the world, while still maintaining connection to community and culture, the dual misgivings and blessings of living in a city.
How do you find this manifesting for you lately?
It’s a bit of a cliche at this point: Social media has helped foster some of the strongest friendships in my life, but it also stimulates comparison, dissociation, and even a sort of sharp meanness in me. Yadda, yadda. We’ve all heard this. Sometimes I want to run, but I can’t leave the internet in any meaningful way right now due to my job.
I think the internet can be a catalyst for love, but it’s obviously not the end or the solution to Big Loneliness. You can never be fully seen there. I’m thinking about our attempts to create art with artificial intelligence models; there’s always something amiss, eerie. I still need to reach out and touch something. So that’s one important piece: For me, a community or friendship formed online needs to have some sort of offline expression, whether it’s in-person contact or even something like a penpal relationship. Something to hold.
(the above video is a glimpse of her project nighthawk daydream, a tape that holds a series of field recordings she created on a @birdherspdx retreat to the malheur national wildlife)
Technology encourages some of the traits I struggle against the most. I’m impatient, I intellectualize, and I worry. It’s interesting that you bring up softening the noise of the world, because I feel like the internet and my phone are what silence my world, leaving me floating somewhere muffled. When I go for a walk without my phone, for instance, suddenly I see and hear and notice again. At the same time, I know what you mean; when I do leave social media for a while, it sounds so loud when I return. It drowns me out.
During the pandemic, the municipal employees who had previously pulled plants and mowed public areas in my neighborhood stopped. There were these lush, totally overgrown bioswales along the busier roads and in little alleyways. I’d stop and try to identify every plant there, spending ages staring at the same few feet of land. I think I am always trying to get back to that.
A few things that help: Quaker friends meetings, field recordings on my phone, listening to my friends talk about their lives, spending time with animals.
Speaking of shared Quaker roots, we could (and perhaps should) devote a whole interview just to our rumination of god/God.
What are your wildest wishes for your life?
I dream of a wholeheartedness that I can extend outward reliably and constantly to all people. I dream of uncoiling past resentments from a spiral into a looong snake who slithers alongside me as a friend. I dream of regarding my ego, flaws, and hang-ups as dear friends.
I dream of abundant community, work that empowers me and enriches others, modest financial stability, and a feeling of safety for everyone. On a more specific level, I would love to live on an island someday, and I’d like to publish books. I’d like to feel enough spaciousness to expand my spiritual practices and become a foster parent someday, too. And I want to swim a lot.
What do your mornings look like lately?
Some days I am up early, staring into the blue dawn, writing my little morning pages and reading Joanna Macy and practicing metta. Some days I wake up two minutes before I have to be somewhere. Isn’t that the way it goes?
It sure does.
✩✩✩
You can read, listen, and support Lindsay’s current work:
lindsay-costello.com
find her on instagram
pink dogwood, her incredibly e-letters
the people’s wetland project (with me!)
more, more, more! (also found on her website):
@errolheights, a diary of wetlands (how we first bonded!)
please take a moment to peruse her paintings
milky oats moments, a short film about avena sativa
plant poetics
flying flowers, an archival nature show
an installation for interwoven in a kiwi orchard in scotts mills, oregon
blackberry basket diary
two film essays
adore you both!! so lucky to know you and befriend you and witness so much reverence for nature within you two.