Jessica Gigot at a microphone, wearing headphones.

As Long As You Need Holding – Jessica Gigot

Jessica Gigot’s project for the 2022 Jack Straw Writers Program is a poetry manuscript in response to ecological grief. In her conversation with curator Michael Schmeltzer, they discuss the unique aspects of ecological grief, the lessons she’s learned about nurturing from being a farmer and a new mother, and how the ideas in her previous poetry collection Feeding Hour led her to her new work. “Just that that change is happening and not knowing how that’s going to affect the world that I know now or the community that I know now, I can’t grieve that loss yet, it hasn’t happened yet . . . it fills me with a lot of different feelings, and I think that’s where this work is coming from.”

Music by Ran Park, produced through the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.