Janette (pronounced Yanette) van de Geest-Van Gruisen is from England and the Netherlands, where she studied English & American poetry, French & German literature, and International Relations. She was a freelance writer and editor for fifteen years. She is currently researching the poetry of journey and quest and is studying the oral tradition of Native American storytelling and poetry. She works at the Redwood Library & Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island. Janette divides her time between Rhode Island and Vermont, where she keeps her horse.
Influences and Intentions:
Artist Statement
Exploring the white space on and off the page means balancing—patiently, precariously—at the intersection of absolute certainty and the complete unknown, diving beneath the surface of an idea to follow the murky trail of a metaphor to any depth; it means peering into the empty quarter between letters and lines and listening for the silent places in between—between harmony and chaos, where discourse is mere distraction. These are the invisible places—liminal space—to explore the concepts of belonging, of fromness, and the hope of common language.
I am profoundly indebted to (in no particular order) Ellis, Ashenar, Frost, Eliot, Woolf, Ferlinghetti, Thesiger, Cavafy, Emerson, Maugham, Neruda, Longsoldier, Naipaul, Whitman, Yeats, Harjo, Dillard, Kunz, Chatwin, Ginsberg, Hacker, Momaday, Camus, Hemingway, Heaney, Sartre, Ginzburg, McPhee, Didion.