Ashlan Runyan’s project for the 2017 Jack Straw Writers Program combines an essay, “All That Is Seen and Unseen,” exploring the creation of work and healing with a poem/quilt project entitled nothing is sacred, everything is holy. Her conversation with curator Jourdan Imani Keith covers religion in modern times, finding the sacred in the everyday and mundane, and how the fabric of words can knit us back together in a time when we are increasingly torn apart. “I think that the big space of a church or a cathedral especially is . . . a good place to let go of a lot of things that maybe are too big to be held anywhere else.”

Music by the Steve Griggs Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.