ROPE WALKER Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency

In the first installment of Rope Walker’s two-part conversation with Danish writer Mathilde Walter Clark and Deep Vellum’s Will Evans, author and publisher discuss Clark’s newest novel "Lone Star," which was recently translated and released in English by Deep Vellum Press. With excitement and laughter, they also share heartwarming stories of how they met and the role Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency played in connecting the two.

Writer-in-residence for April 2021, Austin-based poet and archive-enthusiast Julie Poole balances attentive construction with more organic gestures on the page, to create an intensely authentic space through her lyric. In this episode of Rope Walker, Julie  talks with us about her first collection of poems "Bright Specimen," set to be released with Deep Vellum on May 4. She also shares with us her love of archival matter, bird watching, what she's been working on while in Corsicana. Her next book of poems, titled "Landscapes Without Us," aims to imagine nature as the focal point of life on earth.

Humorous and insightful, rigorous and celebratory, February resident Marian Bull’s ('21) writing is driven by her insatiable curiosity and her commitment to personal and collective delight. In this episode of Rope Walker, Marian talks with us about joie de vivre, her nonlinear journey to journalism, the mnemonic qualities of great food writing, and the challenges of writing memoir. The episode starts with a discussion of what brought her to Corsicana: the nonfiction memoir project about her childhood growing up in a live magic company.

In this episode we're in conversation with January writer-in-residence, award-winning playwright and historian Kate Mulley ('21). From The Tudor, her play about a law student paying for school by selling her underwear, to The Grey Lady, a historical fiction piece about a female soldier in the Civil War, her works interrogate the complicated relationships between gender and power. Kate spent her time in Corsicana researching for her new play regarding the life of 17th-century Puritan Anne Hutchinson and her effect on the development of religious freedom in America. Kate’s also working on a book about the history of sex on stage. Here, the writer discusses gender, female rage, and residency life in Corsicana.

Francisco Moreno (’20), painter and 2nd floor resident of 100W, uses his work to explore our mythologies and the imprint the scale of those myths leaves on the psyche. In this episode of Rope Walker, Fransisco and Dr. Benjamin Lima, a Dallas-based art historian and editor of Athenaeum Review, the University of Texas at Dallas’ journal of arts and ideas, connect over art history and their shared project of reading Enrique Krauze’s Mexico, Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico. Moreno and Lima have had a long working relationship that evolved from an essay that Lima wrote about Francisco’s piece Chapel, an arched structure embellished with collage-like murals, which was recently acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art.

Milkweed is the sole host plant for Monarch Butterflies, which migrate annually from Central America to Canada through Texas. Erik DeLuca (Providence, RI) spent three months reactivating the second floor of the Samuels Building two blocks south of 100W into a nursery to grow thousands of milkweed from seed, where Babette's family once ran their business, Samuels' Mens Clothiers for decades, before closing in the shadow of Walmart. Babette and Erik developed a special friendship by phone, collaborating on the concepts for his residency work, with exchanges about their discoveries and desires from Fiddler on the Roof, to Corsicana's Hebrew Cemetery.