Their strain poured from my skin, until I woke dripping with their deaths.
—Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

According to C.G. Jung, dreams of car crashes or failing brakes warn us that we need to get better control of a situation.

Beginning just after Trump’s election, figures causing near crashes began appearing with greater frequency in my dreamscape. While this could reflect an inner turmoil, it could also signal an accumulated collective unconsciousness around the egregious collapse of rules in the U.S.

And now, in ever-growing extremes of what governance looks like when it’s devoid of humanity, we attempt to pilot through the ongoing political nightmare. These dreams of near-misses scream and whisper. It has felt like a kind of bardo, akin to the dreamworld in its liminal state and its adjacency. Sensing the near-crash causes a hyper-vigilant stance: when is the next one coming and what will its impact be? Like death, we know it will happen. And we want to honor its transit.

Intersecting these embodied psychic spirits are narrative threads accumulated across time: a conversation in the early 2000s with an animal cemetery care-taker; strands of poetic storytelling from Anne Michaels 1996 novel, Fugitive Pieces; and an offering to enfold the vibrational acoustics from Kevin T. Allen’s sound-film from a decade ago called Bridge.

By a whisker (2025)

Writing, vocals and composition — field sounds/Creative Commons licensed audio: Joan Schuman
Borrowed sounds — Kevin T. Allen’s Bridge, a macro-acoustic study of three similar but distinct microcultures of Manhattan bridges
Spun ideas + words — Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (1996)

After-Reading (2026) – Zadie Smith, “The Dream of the Raised Arm,” written on 5 November 2024, the day of the American election: The Third Reich of Dreams is Charlotte Beradt’s original collection of dreamers during Nazi Germany, illuminating the psychological effects of propaganda and manipulation upon a populace:

Yesterday I lost a country.
I was in a hurry,
and didn’t notice when it fell from me
like a broken branch from a forgetful tree.
Please, if anyone passes by
and stumbles across it,
perhaps in a suitcase
open to the sky,
or engraved on a rock
like a gaping wound,
or wrapped
in the blankets of emigrants,
or cancelled
like a losing lottery ticket …

featured online, on-air, in festivals

2025 | Beyond the Silence, Chigiana Radioarte, international radio festival, Siena, Italy

2025 | Electroacoustical Poetical Society (EAPS) commissioned for artist collective (broadcast theme: “Accumulation”) featuring works by Brian K. Price (USA), Joan Schuman (USA), Ilaria Boffa (Italy), Tony Brewer (USA), Gregory Whitehead (USA), Marjorie Van Halteren (France) – June 2025

2025 | Audio Buffet, Wave Farm, WGXC-FM — dialog between Gregory Whitehead and Marjorie Van Halteren, featuring the July 2025 EAPS broadcast