How We Live Now: Morgan Harper Nichols on art and perception

Hello,

Every now and then, I wonder why I do this. I mean, there must be easier ways to make a living. The podcast, the newsletter, the books, the speaking appearances: things get pretty chaotic around here sometimes. I spend a lot of time fantasising about hiding out in a cabin in the woods.

But then, when I unpick it, I’m not trying to make a living in the first place. I’m trying to make a life. Certainly, it’s tricky to get all these different creative outputs into the world, but the admin is a necessary evil. I can’t not make this work. It feels too urgent for me to ignore. My creative life allows me to make sense of everything that happens, everything I know, and I have no choice but to make way for it. 

One aspect that I often find difficult is dealing with the feelings of exposure and vulnerability that come from making personal work. I feel okay - mostly - with the things I write (after all, I get to revise them until I feel safe and happy). But I often come away from interviews feeling unsettled. Have I been understood? Did I communicate with enough nuance? Do I trust my voice to be handled in good faith? This is particularly true when I talk about autism. I’m conscious that, when I speak, I’m representing so many different people (or at least it will be taken that way), and that feels like an agonising responsibility. I’ve come out of a few interviews lately feeling like an exhibition rather than a person; a walking, talking ‘angle’ on which the resulting podcast will be pitched. It’s deeply uncomfortable, deeply objectifying. All the while, I know that if I slip up and don’t radiate grace, it’ll be taken as an insight into all of us.

I hope that this new episode of How We Live Now - a conversation with Morgan Harper Nichols - is the opposite of that. The process of recording it was completely joyful: a roaming, fluid conversation between two autistic women, trying to capture the meaning of the work that is so intrinsic to both of us. This is a sacred space, a place of trust and gentleness woven between two people with similar minds. For me, it was restorative and even healing. As is so often the case when I meet other autistic people, it felt like a merging. I needed it so much in that moment. 

When I spoke to Morgan, she was taking a break from assignment-writing for the MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts she’s studying. That’s a telling detail for this exuberant soul: she has ideas and energy to spare, and she’s always learning, always reaching towards new forms. A visual artist, writer, musician, speaker and podcaster, I always see her as a communicator first and foremost. She draws on all these different modes of expression to facilitate the sheer urgency of what she has to say. 

In this episode, we discuss the ways that her work ushers us towards a kind of reenchantment with life itself - but, in all honesty, I quickly lost control of the whole conversation. I got lost in the joy of spending an hour in her thoughtful, inquisitive company. This is a conversation about how we see our work and the world around us, and how creativity helps us to connect. 

I hope you enjoy it.

Take care,

Katherine

Links from the episode:

• Morgan's website

• Morgan’s instagram

• Morgan’s podcast, The Morgan Harper Nichols Show

• Morgan's book, You Are Only Just Beginning: Lessons for the Journey Ahead

How We Live Now is recorded using RiversideFM and hosted by Acast.

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From the transcript

Morgan Harper Nichols:

I think the reason why I'm an artist, visual artist and a music artist too is largely because I live in a world that really prioritizes other ways of communicating over what's natural for me.

Katherine May:

That's so interesting. So, you've burst out sideways almost. Yeah.

Morgan Harper Nichols:

Yeah, colors and shapes. Abstraction is always how I've thought, how I've experienced things. I'll have a memory of something that happened years ago, and it could be something small. We're sitting in a restaurant or it could be that was the day that person told you that thing or that one thing happened on the news. It could be anywhere on the spectrum of events that one could have a reaction to.

Katherine May:

Of how meaningful they seem to be.

Morgan Harper Nichols:

I'll recall them in these layers that are very abstract and separate from one another. So, I'll have a memory of sitting at a bistro outside of a restaurant, and the sky is pulled away separately from the table. I feel them pulling apart. As they do, if I fix my mind on the table, I can hear the clanking of the glasses. I can hear the bee that was floating around. It's very hard to explain, but that's exactly what I'm thinking about, how I'm thinking about things when I'm making art. So, I'm like, "Is it art or it's just the way that I think?"

Katherine May:

You're trying to express a specific mode of perception that is how you experience the world, but which you don't necessarily see in mainstream culture.

Morgan Harper Nichols:

Exactly.

Katherine May:

So you're struggling to express it, because actually, there's not a lot out there that says this is really meaningful to... I know exactly the kind of immersive memory you're talking about that feels so particular and so special and so important and yet insignificant. It's about the intensity of feeling that you experience in that moment rather than the actual thing that happened. Although the importance, the external importance of the thing that happened, I suppose I'd say.

Morgan Harper Nichols:

Yes. That word intensity that you just said, that's it. I feel it with intensity, and it feels very big even for the so smallest thing. So, it makes really cool art. I'll say that I'm very proud of my art that I've made. At the same time, it can be challenging, because I wonder if you've ever had this experience in some way of where I'll get these points where I'll start to communicate in my way, and I'm just like, "Whatever. I'm just going for it." I'm like, "You're just going to have to just follow me. I cannot do it in that whole structure of the other way. I can't do it. It's just going to come out of order. It's going to come out the way I speak, the way I think about it." Then I'll have someone say, "Okay, but can you say that less poetic or less metaphorically?" I'm like, "Those weren't metaphors."

I was actually talking about the intensity of the sun and how hot the sun felt. When I'm writing about light, I'm talking about the sun. It's not just poetic. If I'm outside and the sun is shining, I'm like, "Oh, there's a sun and it's found me. I feel it. I feel the heat of that." That's not just poetic language for me.

Katherine May:

No, absolutely. If I express it in the way that I've processed it, loads of people won't understand what I'm talking about. I know I won't be using conventional language. I do often think that the reason I get away with being a writer is because I just am expressing my perception and that comes across as original. I'm not sure if that's the same. I'm just emptying the inside of my head really.

Morgan Harper Nichols:

Yes. I love that visual. I'll have to find the sketch and send it to you. I started working on a piece. I can't finish it, but I think you'll appreciate the sketch. It's this little stick figure that's sitting there with an ink pin and the top of their head is open and it's just spaghetti chaos-

Katherine May:

I know that's so wow.

Morgan Harper Nichols:

... coming out before them onto the page. It's not illustrated very well. For me at least, it's very hard to illustrate. But I was like, "I'll just keep the sketch as a reminder of yeah, this is what it feels like."

Katherine May:

I can feel it already. I know exactly the quality of experience. But I mean, what we're pointing to is that you are so accomplished in so many different ways. You're a beautiful writer. You're an illustrator. You're a musician, and you have this presence everywhere. You come off as incredibly energetic and all of it being integrated. That makes me envious really, because you have all these different modes of expression that you can deploy to say what you need to say. What comes first? When I look at your Instagram feed, for example, that's probably where most people see your work most immediately. The words and the images and the messaging, the overall arc of what you're trying to explain to the world are all tangled together in a really beautiful way.

Morgan Harper Nichols:

Thank you.

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