“Dreams seem to like it when you pay attention to them, and they get more and more vivid …”
At Broad Street, we’re all about telling true stories in multiple forms. We have big dreams. So do poet Judith Serin and artist Masami Inoue.
For some time now, Judith has been working on a series of prose poems about her dreams, plotting out what Freud called “the royal road to the unconscious.” At the California College of Arts and Crafts, she met the ideal illustrator for her project in Masami, a Japanese-American artist whose work draws on multiple styles and media.
When we serialized six pieces in their Dream Geographies collaboration on our website, we wanted to find out about how this collaboration evolved—from first dream to final marriage of words and visual image. How do a writer and an artist talk to each other about realising a particular vision?
So during a coast-to-coast conference call in mid-June, Editorial Director Susann Cokal asked Judith and Masami about their individual methods and how they worked together. What emerged: some very interesting truths.