Agape Editions

Agape Blog Mistress Jessica L. Walsh had the opportunity to interview Jay Halsey on his remarkable new collection from our Haunted Doll House imprint Barely Half in an Awkward Line.

JW: Tell me about the process of creating this book. Did pictures give rise to texts? How did image and word interact throughout the composition of Barely Half?

JH: What I compose in words and photos are from my gut feelings, from my own unchanging worldview that has only become more defined since early in my life. It’s a selfish display of my truth. So, when I shoot a photo, my goal is not to present a pristine shot, but instead to frame, shoot, and then process that shot in a way that conveys to the audience how that specific scene or subject made me feel on a deeply personal level during the moment I captured it. It’s less about how the images inform the words, and vice versa, but more about finding photos that carry a similar vibe as the written pieces. It’s as honest as I can be, which is how I organized the collection.

Arranging the photos to the written pieces was a difficult process because my “best” photos weren’t always the ones that displayed the most honest feelings to match the written pieces. And I had to be cool with that compromise. Feeling something truthfully, or transferring certain deep emotions to the audience, is always more important to me than aesthetic or technical perfection.

The process wasn’t really a process so much as a prompt to string together a collection. I’ve been sitting on twelve years’ worth of written pieces and photography that had never been published, aside from a tiny handful of pieces previously accepted by small online and print journals. My partner, Hillary, urged for us to sit down and sort through and organize my favorite written pieces, which was just enough for a chapbook length manuscript. But my dream was always to publish my photos alongside my words, which is how this collection came to be. The process of creating this book was nothing more than recording my feelings in written pieces and imagery for over a decade, and I’m thankful for the opportunity Agape Editions has given me to publish new pieces written specifically for this second edition of Barely Half.

JW: Among the stunning photos are some of people in a pig mask. These seem especially jarring and grotesque; I can envision the mask as a horror icon. How do you see those images functioning within the book? How do you hope to challenge readers?

JH: The pig mask shots are absolutely iconic horror and I’m so happy you asked about those shots because I’ve never had the opportunity to talk about them before now. Thank you!

A little bit of background speaking to the horror aspect and aesthetic behind those shots: I was raised on horror films, every horror genre you can imagine. As a child, my mom always rented horror movies on VHS every Friday night for us to watch over the weekends. My grandpapa—my mom’s father—was also a big horror buff, so the horror craft has always been a big part of my artistic DNA.

In 2014, I began a pig mask photo project that evolved from a self-portrait series. The project included friends and their children, and acquaintances, who also eventually became good friends, because they expressed interest in being included in the project. This is why the pig mask shots exist.

I feel like the idea of a pig in society has a wide range of symbolism relating to humans. “Pig” is often associated with public figures of authority like cops, greedy corporate tycoons, and politicians who pull the strings. Pigs are also deemed as people of laziness and filth, etc. But pigs, as animals, have been scientifically proven to experience a deep range of complex emotions. They love and hurt like many other forms of intelligent life. Their brains connect and process on complicated levels. Pigs can also be wild and destroy everything in their paths, just like humans. And that was the idea behind including a few of those shots in the collection: To challenge the readers with the idea that the horror we oftentimes see on the surface of humans might simply be a mask hiding the intricacies and traumas inside us. For me, it’s always about presenting empathy over everything else, the desire to understand why people become how we see them, and/or how they choose or don’t choose to present themselves.

JW: I often talk with my students about how texts can use bleakness and decay as devices that can implicitly create space for renewal. I wonder if you can comment on the possibility laid bare within the words and images of your book. In other words, where can hope live in the world of the text?

JH: This reminds me of a video I watched of modern philosopher Slavoj Žižek years back. He wandered around a massive trash dump while he spoke about our perceptions of what we deem as “natural” versus what is “unnatural.” He spoke about how society views nature as a harmonious and balanced structure in the universe, and how it only becomes unbalanced when humans disturb and/or destroy that balance. He pondered the opposite, saying that humans are part of nature; that nature has always been a series of unimaginable catastrophes; that we must find poetry and spirituality within our destructive devices; and that we need to view the world just as we view someone we are truly in love with: That loving another human honestly is not an idealization of that person, but an acceptance of that person for all their imperfections because they are the one for us without doubt. We see perfection in their imperfections, and that’s exactly how we should love the world.

I was immediately smitten with that notion and concluded for myself we can only be hopeful if we first accept the hopelessness we created, that exists as simply being humans in a world that profits from oppressing humans over loving humans to help them thrive. I feel that true hope can only exist if we first confront the overwhelming suffering so many in our communities, and abroad, experience on an everyday basis, and by doing this, we can love each other fully and without judgement. I keep striving to be that way. It’s a lifelong effort.

So yeah, bleakness, desperation, decay, whatever you call it, are certainly the major themes within the words and photos of Barely Half because that’s how I felt for so much of my life when creating these pieces. But I also believe the desire to pull ourselves from the darkness holds an underlying presence throughout the collection. I want this book to not only champion and validate our people who are worse off and left to deal with life without the necessary tools, but to provide an awareness to those who aren’t worse off, and to at least attempt to love the people doing their best under terrible circumstances they never chose.  

JW: What projects are you working on now?

JH: Hillary [Leftwich] and I are currently working on a collaboration that involves photos of her—no direct face shots so that it remains as anonymous as possible—around our working-class neighborhood, which will be paired with our written pieces. We have an idea for the words, but I don’t want to give away too much. Getting to work with the person I love most in life is rewarding in ways that differ from solo projects and I’m super excited with the possibilities.

I’ve also been writing new pieces for my next collection. So far, most are lyric essays about my childhood experiences growing up in Dayton, Ohio. These are words I always wanted to write without the poesy abstracting the direct honesty of the stories I want to tell. This isn’t to say there won’t be poems, I just haven’t found them yet. All said, reconnecting with my estranged mom after twenty years has sort of given me the permission to write this collection with the validation I needed from her. It’s a hard collection to write but I’m happy to finally confront these dark parts of my childhood full force.

____________________________________________________________________________

Jessica L. Walsh is the author of the poetry collection Book of Gods and Grudges (Glass Lyre, 2022), as well as two previous collections. She teaches English at Harper, a community college in the Chicago suburbs. Her poetry has appeared in RHINO, Tinderbox, Whale Road Review, and many other journals. She writes and shoots arrows at targets, mostly missing the mark in both but enjoying the effort.

Jay Halsey’s poems, prose and photos have been published in several online and print journals and nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net. His photography has been used as cover art for poetry collections and novels, featured in fundraising campaigns for the Rocky Mountain Land Library in Fairplay, Colorado, and was part of a touring exhibit featured at libraries and bookstores throughout France to represent Editions Gallmeister’s American authors. He was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio and has lived on the Colorado Front Range for the past sixteen years.