We recently connected with Kate McGunagle and have shared our conversation below.

Kate, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

For most of my life, I have struggled to make my art a priority while also maintaining basic financial security. I simply resigned myself to society’s belief in the “starving artist” — the notion that full-time art-making always comes at a high cost, or is virtually impossible for the average creator. I called myself an “artist with a day job,” yet those freelance gigs and day jobs I held always took the lion’s share of my personal energy, making it difficult to create in my off-hours. I faced a lot of shame around this — if art was my passion, I reasoned, why wasn’t passion enough to sustain me? Why couldn’t I be like Mary Oliver and wake up at 4 a.m. every day to write for 5 hours before my day job? Why couldn’t I churn out paintings on any given weekend, find a day job that co-existed beautifully with my artistic hobbies, discover that elusive equilibrium?

Weary of these questions, and weary of the either/or mentality that society likes to ascribe to the life of a contemporary artist, I kept coming back to one truth: making art is essential, and not having the space or time to make art felt equivalent to slowly losing my capacity to breathe. I felt like I was squandering my gifts, even though it was easier to throw them at fields I didn’t really care about — education, marketing, technical writing, etc.

One of my favorite bands is The National. I had the chance to see them perform live in August of 2023 — I have always loved this band for their lyrics, which carry so much poetry and story in them, but that night I experienced more than just powerful songwriting. I saw the lead singer absolutely give himself to each verse, to fully and emotionally embody his art on a stage. It moved me completely. I wanted that so badly — I wanted to give myself to my art. (I later read an article in which the lead singer talked about his own weariness of writing marketing material for some financial company, and realizing he just wanted to walk out of that boardroom and make music and not look back. And that’s exactly what he did.)

A few months later, I quit my day job without a backup plan. It made everyone in my life collectively gasp — a lot of people were quick to project their own fears onto me, to share their opinions on what they thought I should do next, to reiterate the importance of having a plan B. These reactions were persuasive, but I ultimately respectfully ignored them. I had recognized that I needed to make my art a priority, instead of waiting for another person, or company, or situation to give me the permission to do so, and I was not about to trade that recognition in for familiar fear. It was an enormous risk, and I am still unsure of what is next, but I will say this — in the first two weeks following that leap, I created more art than I’ve made in the last several years of my life, and the flood of ideas has not ceased. To me, that alone is all the affirmation I need.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a queer writer and multimedia visual artist. Since I was capable of putting shapes and letters down on a page, I have loved storytelling, regardless of genre (fiction, nonfiction, playwriting, painting, drawing, collage, etc.). Today, I strive to inspire meaningful conversation and challenge my readers and viewers with multidimensional art: work that is provocative, activist, relatable, humorous, experimental, joyous, and/or honest. More specifically, I am deeply interested in telling stories that wrestle with the seemingly impossible – those that examine queer bodies, experience, and pleasure, interrogate rape culture and gendered violence, and revel in the spaces between social categories and within ordinary life.

Because it is so multidimensional, my body of work is wide-ranging. My Substack Bardette (https://katemcgunagle.substack.com/) gives subscribers weekly doses of my humor writing, pieces that examine queer experience and uncover delight in the absurd ordinary. My short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in various literary journals (Passages North, The North American Review, The Whitefish Review, Five Points), and I am an active playwright (plays include SISTER OF MINE, produced in October of 2023 via the Strides Collective, M (via the Tennessee Playwrights Studio), CAT THINGS (forthcoming), and JUDITH GOES TO CHURCH (forthcoming)).

I am currently at work on two multimedia collage series, one that incorporates found objects and reused materials, and another that interrogates gendered violence.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

It’s taken me years to identify the mission behind my creative journey. Yes, I want my art to inspire, provoke, and move my audience — I long to impact the way that I have been impacted (and fundamentally changed) by art and literature in my life. Yet ultimately, I want others to feel seen through the art that I create and the stories I tell. I care deeply about our shared humanity, and if I can illuminated that connectedness and truth in what I create, if I can make just one individual feel that they are not alone in this journey, then that is true success.

Another personal goal I have is to never veer away from telling the truth in my art-making, even if it is uncomfortable (for myself or others). Through my art, I want to talk about what people are afraid to talk about, because that is how change and healing ultimately happen.

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

I thrive as an artist when I lay aside my own self limitations, and I thrive as a human when I do the same. To make the art I want to make, I have to challenge my own conceptions of what is possible and what constitutes a “boundary” or a “category.” This ultimately allows me to approach life with a rewarding openness. It has meant leaning further into uncertainty and really holding my assumptions up to the light. Both are uncomfortable, but both have allowed me to grow in profound ways and have some of the most powerful experiences in my life. I love being a creative for this reason — it allows me to dance with change, to welcome it fully and to experience the full dimension of what it is to be human.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.katemcgunagle.com
• Instagram: @bardette_herself and @absaroka_art
• Other: TikTok: @bardette Substack: https://katemcgunagle.substack.com/

Image Credits
Kate McGunagle