We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Wendolyn Lozano Tovar. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Wendolyn below.
Wendolyn, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?
Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been deeply connected to nature. Born and raised in Mexico City, I loved spending hours in solitude contemplating the garden, the insects and rocks, the flowers and stars. Everything I thought and felt back then was something I could touch and articulate with my hands. I loved collecting leaves, rocks, feathers, paper, and my curiosity was not very different from what it looks like now. For me, science, art, and poetry are one same expression. My passion is to illuminate the many and often imperceptible intersections in between.
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.
For a time, I thought it had been a mistake studying law instead of literature or art, which were both so close to my heart. Today, I understand that professions (all of them) aren’t one-way paths, but rather a set of interconnected arteries that allow us to channel our human expression. Knowledge is not a final destination, no matter how much one gathers. During my years in law school in Mexico City, I spent hours in the library reading poetry, non-fiction, physics, and enrolling in extra-curricular creative writing courses with writers like Hugo Gutierrez Vega, Antonio Tenorio Muñoz Cota and Ivan Portela.
As years went by and having lived in different cities like Toronto, Houston, Denver and New York, my many-sided interests amplified. In 2007 I had my first collection of poems published (Tiempo de Agua/Water Age) by Literal Publishing, an independent, bilingual book publisher, as well as a quarterly magazine, based in Houston, Texas. They focus on publishing books by Latin American writers for readers in both the U.S. and Latin America, often in bilingual editions, offering a bridge between the two languages and cultures.
My life experiences called for plastic art explorations so I went to The Art Students League of New York to take sculpture classes with Leonid Brener. I realized that most of what I had written in my first book had a material component to it. I discovered that not only could I interchangeably express myself in words and clay, but that they were both vital to my art. The same was true for my second book, Como el mirlo/Like the Robin, Literal Publishing, 2023. This one took more than 14 years in the making as I navigated and registered loss and longing. Poetry, life itself, reveals ever so slowly. To collect it, one must be very patient, knowing that more often than not, it will “melt like a pearl of ice under your tongue”. Before I even attempted to write this book, I created my own natural pigments, totally unconcerned about the result on the canvas. I wanted to understand where life comes from as I longed to become a mother, and where life goes to, as I lost my dad. I studied the fundamentals of physics as I collected various materials and ground them. I wanted to know what we are made of and what binds us together as I strived to understand universal principles. My beloved brother Paulo, a distinguished aerospace engineer and professor at MIT, illuminated my art with his scientific and poetic insights. We both grew up watching Carl Sagan´s Cosmos series in awe and then took seemingly different paths. Life has taught me that every path, every atom in the universe, from every point in time-space, indeed intersects.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
What I most appreciate about the diverse creative paths that I have explored is the meditative potential to them. Art is not about what I have to say or paint. If I don´t write the poem that perhaps will land on my mind tomorrow, if I don´t paint the image in my dreams, someone else will pick it up, or not, like a sea shell left alone by the sea. We all share the same stories and waves, sometimes calm or tempestuous. Art is about how open we are to life itself.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
When I was younger I used to believe that in order to be a writer I had to be published; that in order to be an artist my work had to be exhibited in galleries. Sharing my work is certainly exciting news, it involves hard work and often requires a stroke of luck. However, to me art is something larger than the artist. Art, poetry, life itself are the force of nature that can´t be forced. Nature, in all its transient beauty, is indifferent to our paying attention to it. But alas! how extraordinary it is to bear witness of it.
Contact Info:
- Linkedin: @wendolynlozanotovar
- Twitter: @wendolynlozano
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_Ae7_rVTpM
- Other: https://www.amazon.com.mx/mirlo-Spanish-Wendolyn-Lozano-Tovar/dp/1942307527
Image Credits
Wendolyn Lozano Tovar