Shoshanah Lee Marohn

Practice Your Mistakes Shoshanah Lee Marohn

I've been wanting to do a coffee table book with Dan for a long time. A book of photographs, big as a car grill, full of his beautiful side glances, his wonderful moments. Ansel Adams style, I guess. But I don't know how to do that. I only know how to do small paperbacks, so that is what I have convinced Dan that we should put together, together. My poems on his archaically developed photographs. So, I've harassed him, every month or so, and if the dog is walked and the children are taken care of and the bunny is not eating an electrical cord, he will send me a photo or two, and I will try to match it with my tattered book of poems of which my daughter once said, "Hey, these are actually pretty good." And then I arrange the words, carefully, careful not to mar his beautiful photographs, but enhance them. And so, one by one, our melancholy book has been made. These are photographs, but photographs developed in completely nonmodern ways, so that sometimes, color is dripping down the page. Dripping away, sort of like our sad ideas about the safety of modern life, beautiful and blue, and leaving something else, something equally beautiful, in their place. Practicing Your Mistakes is about how our underlying selves have become unveiled by the pandemic. About the beauties of our failings. The cracks where the light comes in. There's no running from anything, anymore, just the raw truth. Masked and afraid, we face the light. -Shoshanah Marohn, June 20, 2020