We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Annaliese Jakimides. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Annaliese below.

Annaliese, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

If I hadn’t moved from a large urban environment to a small town in northern Maine to live off the land—pumping water by hand, growing almost all the family’s food, grinding whole wheat berries to make the flour to bake the bread—I don’t believe I would be a writer or an artist. I certainly would not be the writer and artist I am now, if I were.

Most people would describe me as self-taught. I am, but how I make is shaped by how I see the world, which is directly and dramatically shaped by this place I moved to. So my teachers have been moose and eagle, bear and blackfly, the lichen-crusted rocks, mountains, pigweed and rivers, star-crusted nights, the interstices of storm and silence, and the everyday people of Mount Chase and its surrounding communities.

If that description leads you to see nature writer or painter of trees and skies, landscapes, I apologize. That is so far from the truth of me as maker.

The obstacles were more of time—both in terms of hours and minutes available in this life I chose, as well as the times in which I started. Researching markets, accessing materials, making connections in a pre-internet world were a challenge to any maker, particularly a rural one whose town had a population of one hundred and sixty or so.

I cut my word teeth by writing a twice-monthly, what-we-would-now-call-flash essay for a weekly newspaper fifty miles from where I lived—a sort of internal and external weather report that laid the groundwork for much of what I have written since, be it fiction or non. Without a market, someone expecting my work on deadline, I knew I would be sidelined by gardening and canning, putting in the wood, by children and their needs, by volunteering in the schools and the thousands of miles on the road. I cut my art teeth with materials at hand, like moss and skeletonized leaves from the forest floor, pressed flowers and grasses.

Art, both written and visual, come from the life we have lived, we live. Mine includes early years in an inner city, with live music and the likes of Coltrane and Havens—first generation from a refugee family driven out by genocide although we never said that, were busy being American— and later years with my life partner, musician Henry Butler, and those in-between years in the north. And I think those years, that place up north, keenly inform my understanding of coexistence in a larger world, a global world. I believe I learned how to listen on that dirt road in the woods, in that town—about complexity and cooperation. So many people are hell bent on the importance of what they have to say, and it may be important, but what one has to say is more impactful if you’ve really been listening to what somebody else is saying. That listening piece is a very underrated part of who we are and what gives a writer a compelling voice on the page.

Could I have speeded up the process? The learning? Getting the work out in the world? Perhaps. But would I? Oh, no. Speeding up would have made me a very different writer—and art maker—and I have no desire to be other than who I am. These days people often think the faster one turns out things, the better. “I wrote a poem last night, and now I’ll read it to you.” Please, no, no, no! Writing takes time; it takes revisiting, rewriting, a willingness to show up and listen to what it’s asking for. I had the time I had. And I did the best I could with that time.

Sometimes I wish I could have paid attention to all the doors that were opening to me, believed all the established makers—in both arenas—who were encouraging me. But we can only hear when we can hear, see when we can see. And so will I be able to write all I could have, make all I have in me? Unlikely. And creatives are not natural marketers, but that’s the world we now live in. And so.

For me as a maker, the most essential skills are openness, exploration, chance-taking. I’m willing to not know where I’m going, to be surprised by the turn, by what’s around a corner I never even saw—and I mean even the corner.

This kind of creating is not just about a “product,” the poem or short story for you to read, the mixed media piece I have made for you to view or perhaps even live with. These are links of interconnectedness, and what are we here for, on planet Earth for these few years, but to connect with each other? My way to do that is through story—both visual and written.

My approach is to show up. It’s as if I’m standing on a train platform, and once I get a first line, a solid first line, the splash of movement on the surface—which I rarely change—it’s as if I’ve gotten on the train and I’m off, although, of course, I didn’t catch the sign with the destination on it. I have no idea where I’m going, but I’m sure as hell on my way.

Over time I’ve learned that every creative piece knows what it wants to be—a poem, short story, nonfiction, artwork. If I’m listening, they get the life they want. And if they get the life they want, you—and I—have a way into a world we hadn’t known existed. We get the payoff!

I’m changing the world one reader and one viewer at a time. Or so it feels.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I write poetry and prose, including both short fiction and nonfiction, with about a thousand pieces published in many magazines and journals, and anthologized in more than twenty-five collections. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and cited in national competitions by poets laureate, National Book Award winners, and other notable writers, my work has also been broadcast on NPR and Maine Public. One year, from thousands of submissions, “Silver Lining” was one of forty essays selected for the This I Believe radio series as well as included in its anthology and CD recording.

I’ve written features about some of Maine’s most significant creatives and been a personal essay columnist for a variety of publications. The editor of the monograph series for Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, I also facilitate conversations on life through the lens of children’s books in community centers, libraries, schools, and correctional facilities.

In 2024 the musical Love Affair, of which I’m the cowriter, premiered in New England. A musical adaptation of the 1939 film Love Affair (remade as An Affair to Remember, it’s my first walk into the theatre world—although another is in its beginning stages. I’m also at work on a memoir, the story of intersecting worlds, love and loss.

A member of Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance’s community advisory board, I’m also the cofounder of the Belfast Poetry Festival, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year.

Clearly, you can see the words take the front seat in my public making life. But my mixed media artwork is always in play, insisting when it needs to be the vehicle to carry the story that wants to be told. Sometimes they work in tandem. One responding to the other. My most commonly employed materials include fiber, botanicals (twigs, leaves, moss), used teabags, coffee, pepper, photographs (my own), rust-dyed silks, nails, acrylic paints, dyes, and knitted wire, usually on board.

After decades on a dirt road in the woods of northern Maine, I now live in an apartment overlooking the Bangor Public Library, a five-minute walk to the Penobscot River.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

For me—and I’m not saying that all creatives work this way—it’s literally being accountable to no one but myself. Yes, yes, I have jobs (employments, freelance assignments, etc.) that have restrictions, requirements, a need to follow someone else’s roadmap in order to keep a roof over my head.

But the making, what drives me, is all mine. I don’t really care that such-and-such big-time, successful novelist thought I should write a novel, that I’d be very successful at it. I don’t want to write a novel. I write what I want, what drives me and pulls me. And I cannot see that as a failing. What is success anyway? I think many people are trying to work themselves to being able to do/make what they want. I make what I want.

I’m sure the largest failings I have these days revolve around marketing. I only want to make. I want someone else to find the markets—the journals, the publishers, the galleries. No one’s going to do that for me. Given my laissez-faire approach to all that, it’s a miracle I have all those publications. It’s a miracle so many people have my art in their homes, that it hangs on walls on other continents. Could I have a book? Probably. Maybe I will still. Have I written enough work that could even be a book already? Oh, yes. But the wending and winding and offering and proffering to get there? Not so much.

I’m not saying all creatives work this way or even value this independent streak. I know many who are uncomfortably caught in the cycle of a series, one book after another—because their agent, their publisher insists. Or more artwork in a certain way because that’s what sells, or that’s what they’re known for making and selling.

Every first line, every first mark is still a thrill to me!

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I’m sure I’m still unlearning this. For years, I thought because I had no training, no education, because I had no understanding of formal art or could not discuss the intricacies of plot and structure, color theory, perspective, all that, I could not be what I called a “real” writer or artist. No one else was telling me this. I was telling me this.

This did not stop me from making, but it stopped me from believing I was making work of real substance. It didn’t matter how many people told me—it didn’t matter that national magazine editors told me they liked something they read but couldn’t use it, please send something else, something more, try again. It didn’t matter. I didn’t send, sure they had made a mistake!

I’m not sure what would have been different if I had been able to hear, to believe earlier. But something would have.

And so I just continue to untell myself all the stuff of the before-time. It’s the best I can do, the best any of us can do. One foot in front of the other, until the dancing is majestic or magical, mystical—something with an m. I can feel it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://annaliesejakimides.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annaliese_jakimides/

Image Credits
headshot by Jodi Renshaw