Writing and making art while under the confluence

Chris King is a writer and musician living in St. Louis, a city born at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Chris has a thing for confluences, both literal and metaphoric — thus the theme of his blog, Confluence City.

This fascination with confluences is something we have in common, as you’d probably guess by looking at my work, which at its most basic level is a confluence of word + image.

I don’t know Chris, have never met him. He just emailed me out of the blue a couple hours ago to introduce himself and to say that we share an affinity for Robert Walser. Another confluence. And an influence.

He and I also share a trait of writing things down in notebooks and any scrap of paper at hand, which, as  professional musician, he used to do in between gigs in notebooks he dubbed “gigbooks”. In “The Chatter of the Soul,” he elaborates: (more…)