Gabriela Everett on Terror, Discipline, and Connection
Interview by Katie Lynn Johnston
For this week’s interview, I had the absolute pleasure of talking with all-around artist and spellbinding writer, Gabriela Everett (“Mother, Almighty”), about the god complexes of creatives, art as political, and the contribution of fear and love to her creative work.
Self Portrait by Gabriela Everett
When was it that you realized you wanted to become an artist and writer? What was it that drew you to art and literature?
I wanted to be god before anything else, because, at age four, the universe refused to deliver me a puppy. I yelled at “god” in my backyard, stomped my feet, and demanded I get what I want: something soft to love. But how many people get what they want? Work, dough, world domination––it’s safe to say most settle, which isn’t the worst thing. It makes sense I never got that puppy. I’m allergic to pet dander.
I am convinced artistic fields appeal to anyone with a god complex, same as science or law. People want something they can manage, something that speaks to them in symbols and terms they recognize. Something they resonate with. The drive to know is human, and understanding is a path to freedom. Because “why” tends to lead to more whys, I became a writer. I write to find ends. He dies here, she finds this afterlife, everyone stays where I say. Am I a control freak? Of course. I need answers to the things no one can know––if I can’t find them, I’ll stare and stare and see what I can find. Then I’ll tell everyone about it like a cosmic snitch: I listened to the world in the shower and they told me to tell you. Writing allows me to calm down and exist, really, honestly exist. There doesn’t have to be debate over god, military spending, gender equality, or if Christmas songs suck (they do). There is just the truth I know.
A writer has three jobs: document, communicate and point out the poetry in life. One that does all three performs the critical task of speaking for a time, a people, a place, that will one day be dead. Every generation needs voices, soft and loud, for its infinity of subcultures. In being yourself and saying what's rattling around your skull, you're relating everyone who shares a part of you, proclaiming they exist. I was drawn to art and literature because I needed to make the world into something I can understand or, at least, find beautiful in its mystery. I want to help things make sense for others. I can do that by organizing what I’ve learned and sharing it. Like a class presentation to a piece of the internet.
Are there authors and artists you would say have most influenced your writing and art style? Do you have a favorite work of prose, verse, or art you always find yourself going back to?
Anyone who knows me is aware I’ve been up Albert Camus’s ass for the last five years. I read The Stranger in my sophomore year of high school and I didn’t quite grasp it, and that caught me by the brain: something I didn’t know! I had to cut it up and stare hard until I knew its secrets. I bought copies of The Rebel, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague. (Reading The Plague during quarantine felt surreal.) They hurt my head, and all of them gave me a new way to examine life. Oddly enough, out of all these works, it’s a speech of Camus’s that sticks with me the most: “Create Dangerously.” He delivered it in 1957 to the University of Uppsala a few weeks after winning the Nobel Prize for literature. It was printed in a collection of his essays, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. Its heart is this: the artist’s job is to create work that stirs the public toward a greater goal, one that challenges the current standard of powers. A creative person’s duty is to push for progress and, to do this, art is political. Some people dislike thinking of art as a political tool, but art and writing are methods of communication. Why not choose to empower others? Or at least, to help them examine their power structures around them. When our art is political, we can choose what we wish to champion. To whom do we point our barrel, if anyone?
Not everyone wants to look at scary things. Our lives are often surrounded by stressors—whether or not one has to examine these horrors is the part that differs. Some things are so entrenched into our way of life that we don’t even see them as a problem, even when they hurt large groups of people or ourselves. I want to inspire an urgency for change in as many people as possible: find a problem you care deeply about, then imagine ways to fix it. If it is a big, serious problem, you will likely be met with friction from the great, omnipotent “they” that dominants a cultural canon—the ones who benefit from oppression, exploitation, and destruction; it can get dicey. Fight anyway. Lives are on the line. Their bodies count. So does yours.
Is there anything you would say you have learned while quarantining and creating over the past year and a half that you’d like to share? Advice you would give to others who also juggle writing and art with their work, responsibilities, and desires?
More than anything, I learned how valuable discipline can be and how it impacts all aspects of creative efficiency. There’s this romanticized version of writers and artists and drugged-up-and-out bohemians, smoking and drinking late at night in cities and being loose on a stranger’s sofa while they contemplate their thesis. While it’s entertaining and full of sensual, extra-shiny dangers, it’s not sustainable. I’m not saying to throw out the whiskey or joints in your nightstand drawer, but to consider the beauty of bullet points and waking up well-rested to a bottle of water that is not secretly vodka. If you want something, you have to work for it. Even the idea of manifestation requires work—natural gravity can and must be cultivated. People don’t like the “rat race,” but don’t always consider that the race can be for and against whatever they want. And, like any race, training on a schedule helps. Be intentional. Value your time and energy. Use a calendar. If no one is going to see something, forget about it looking good unless it damages your mental state. If people who have no impact on your livelihood are going to see something, keep it tidy and keep it moving; 75% of where you want it to be should be fine; it will make your 90% or 100% of effort even more impressive, should you need to hit that.
Think about whom you want to be by the end of the year, then think about what you'd have to do each day to get there. Be balanced. View drugs and supplements as tools; life is a game, think about what's in your bag and what stats and tradeoffs certain things offer. You may not always love what you’re doing, but your will almost always love when you’ve finished it. It’s okay to let go. Don’t worry about “abandoning” projects, drafts, journals, etcetera. Things that matter to us have a way of returning until we eternalize them. It’s how we get them out of our heads without forgetting them. If the brain is like any other computer, it has limited capacity for things, so storing your thoughts and work in a place like a sketchbook or Word document is like putting yourself in an external hard drive. Assuming they are not consumed by flooding or nukes, you will have it to go back to as reference material. And who wouldn’t love to be a cited source, one day?
I know you write and create in many different types of art and literature—but is there one in particular that you most enjoy crafting?
Writing feels like talking but easier. I can take things back. I can edit. I have time to think. Making visual art feels like trying to extract a chunk of my psyche and put it on paper. It’s painful. I enjoy writing more because of this. Visual art feels like love on a page, and for me, love is very hard to stomach. I’m not good at feeling emotions in full yet, but I am good at analyzing them. Writing appeals to the analytical piece of me, my thinking-heart. Making original, visual art appeals to that strange, squirmy heart space. My feeling-heart. It hurts a lot to engage with that heart. Perhaps it’s sensitive. Visual art is all the things I haven’t figured out how to show people and desperately want to share. It feels like pointing at a U.F.O., but when someone else looks, it’s not there. That happened to me in Santa Fe once and, because my friend in the car didn’t see it—this light of purple and green that idled while we sat at a stop sign, then streaked across the sky for an inch, then vanished—I feel like it’s not real. I know what I saw and what I feel, but if no one else truly understands it, knows it, it can make it harder to connect. I crave that connection, to look at someone and know they see me, and I them.
When creating, whether art or writing, what inspires you most? What gets the ideas flowing and makes you want to keep creating?
Terror. I have been so laden with anger and fear of the world that it drives me to use everything at my disposable to try to tame it, to comprehend its violence, if only for a sense of safety. If true freedom is not in the cards for me, the next best thing for me is order. If there must be rules, I like to know them. Once you know the rules, you can see how to cheat, who cheats, and, maybe, if cheating is built into the game.
If not terror, then love moves me to create. I am a simple person: fear, love, sex, and death. The true spirit of humanity! What have wars been fought for, if not for love, gods, and procreation? If I need an idea, I need to get startled. Maybe I’ll take some mushrooms and lock myself in my bedroom, pray to gods I do not believe in. Maybe I’ll drive to another state with a friend. Maybe I’ll find a stranger and ask them what makes them happy. Or, I’ll read a book that hurts my head. Philosophers tend to be men who talk circles around themselves and then try to bend those circles into new ideas. Who’s to say I can’t do that, too? I want better. To do that, I need to look at what needs improvement. And that involves looking at what causes fear and what dialect of love can, perhaps, cure it. As far as finding cures go, the malaise of life is right up there with the common cold. Still, I search. We are creatures of hope and future, after all.
What have you been working on recently? Anything you are excited about and feel like sharing?
I was sitting at a coffee shop in Boca Park last week and decided to revisit some pieces I wrote on my experiences with LSD. Real artsty-fartsy, huh? It feels cheesy to be another writer wanting to talk about psychedelics. I decided to run with it after I compiled and reread my work and saw a cohesive story: the progression from innocence to adulthood and the anxiety of it all. It’s a coming-of-age narrative! I know people who’ve had terrifying psychedelic experiences. I want to stand with those who say you can use acid to get to know yourself, even when you have a “bad” trip. Because it’s an illegal substance, I’d like to be another person to show it in the light of a tool for growth. I think it should be legalized. It certainly has therapeutic value in my experience.
Other pieces I’m working on include a collection of short stories I’m tentatively calling Sci-fi-ish. I’m not certain how long it will be, but I’ve got four stories drafted so far, all of which deal with different aspects of how contemporary culture tries to define us: profession, hyper-individuality, ability to (re)produce, being the first at something—things that cause people to break down. I'm also working on a story about lesbian vampires and what happens when one of them is charged with killing a human child. That one is fun because vampires exist in this moral-gray. The ethics for monsters is interesting to me because I think we are all part monster. I’m far more frightened of man than I am of bigfoot. Or, to quote Marina Diamandis, “I’m not afraid of God, I am afraid of man.”
Gabriela Everett is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer based in her hometown of Las Vegas. She possesses a BA in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago and an affinity for coffee at midnight. Everett's previous publications include visual art in Mementos, short fiction in Columbia College Chicago’s Hair Trigger, Mulberry Literary, and poetry and prose in Santa Fe University of Art and Design's lit mag, Glyph.
You can follow Everett on her art instagram @mangosherbet and her writing instagram @g.v.everett .