Katrin Horowitz interviews Wattle and Daub author Gloria Barkley about her book Water Window Mirror in
the Fall 2014 issue of The Federation of British Columbia Writers' WordWorks
magazine:
"The only thing that frightens Gloria Barkley
anymore is spiders. So much so that her Coquitlam clay studio is equipped with
a special trap to keep them from running over her feet. But this poet and sculptor
uses her fear to create artistic spiders, because spiders as metaphor intrigue
her: they show up both in her poems and as figures she fashions from clay...
"...after a medical journey that included far too many misdiagnoses, she
discovered she was allergic to 95 different foods and food additives, ranging
from wheat to caffeine, nitrates to sulphites. And much in the same way she
transforms her fear of spiders into art (which she wryly names after food
additives), she has turned her long narrative of frightening hallucinations,
feelings of non-reality, anxiety, depression and something like the flu —
together with the attempts to treat her symptoms — into an impressive book of
poems, entitled Water Window Mirror..."
Side
Effects (p.53)
Phantom
spiders
crawl
along
her skin
pause
at pores
their
legs tap
erratic
codes
she
dare not
decipher.
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