"Sitting Through Green" by Jamie Cheshire

 – Truth is, she’s sitting here beside me right now.

I was looking at the mismatched attire of poverty and fatigue.

Fascinated with every big and little thing, Jamie Cheshire has long been an avid student of design and structure. Having worked together with giants, he has had the extreme good fortune to practice his craft for most of the last four decades and has seen his work appear nationally and in several countries on three continents. He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with his beloved feral, hippie-chick wife, their three dogs and two cats. Deeply committed to the ordinary, he is constantly searching for a way to describe it.

Author’s Talk

Jamie Cheshire

I’ve always seen myself as mainly a designer and a builder. But in the past few years, I’ve come to think most of what I do is really just hallucination in one way or another. Designing anything is hallucination. Building, even more so. You see something that is not there. You look at all the details of the thing that is not there and you see how to craft it so that it is there, so that it will stand and be visible to everybody else who did not see it when it wasn’t there. 

It’s a reversal of that when I write. I see something that IS there – but that I could not see before some convergence of light and an invisible invitation came and allowed me to see it. 

Designing and building both demand tools; some light and delicate, some heavy and some, sharp and dangerous. And it requires clamps, always one or two – or a dozen – more than you have. The clamps hold your hallucination in place and upright until you’re ready to let it stand. 

Same thing with writing. Some of it is light, some heavy, and some really dangerous. But for me – and I think this may be why I began doing it – the words are clamps. They hold my hallucination in place and upright until I can see that I’ve understood what has been shown to me, until I’m ready to let it stand.—Jamie Cheshire