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We’re excited to announce the launch of “Voices from the Hill” a podcast dedicated to showcasing the incredible talent right here in our literary backyard. As a proud member of this vibrant community, Telegraph Hill Arts & Literature believes our local authors deserve a platform to share not just their published works, but the stories behind them.
If you’re a Bay Area author interested in being on the show, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us at submissions@telhilit.org.
Welcome to Voices from the Hill, celebrating the vibrant literary voices of the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host, Jennifer Barone, along with Joseph Carboni, owner of Telegraph Hill Books. Each episode, we sit down with a local author to explore their creative process, inspirations, and the unique stories that shape our community. Today, we are honored to welcome Kim Shuck, poet, artist, San Francisco poet laureate emeritus, and curator of the poem jam literary series at the San Francisco Public Library. Her poetry collections include Smuggling Cherokee, Deer Trails, Exile Heart, and the recent Pick a Garnet to Sleep In and Noodle Ranch Tangent, each a beautifully crafted reflection of memory, place, and community.
Jennifer Barone:She has also edited and co edited over 10 poetry collections with Bay Area writers. And from her art, including a current project on extinct, extirpated, and endangered animals, her beautiful beadwork and basket weaving projects, to her poetry that honors indigenous heritage. Kim invites us into worlds of depth, resilience, and profound storytelling. We are thrilled and honored to dive into her inspirations, her practice, and what's next for this remarkable artist living and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area. So let's jump in.
Jennifer Barone:Kim Shuck, welcome to Voices from the Hill. It's such a pleasure to have you here.
Kim Shuck:Anytime I get to spend with you, Jen. It's just a pleasure. And I'm honored you asked me to be part of the series.
Jennifer Barone:Oh, my gosh. You're one of the first people on my mind. I mean, when I think about poetry, when I think about San Francisco, when I think about the Bay Area, I mean, you encompass so much just depth and beauty for me. I've had the great, great honor and pleasure of seeing you perform, coming to your Halloween parties, are incredible, amazing, and just seeing your incredible art. I mean, there's just so much to to talk about today.
Jennifer Barone:So I'm, like, so excited to hear about the new projects and things that are on your mind. So I wanna maybe kick us off or have you kick it off with reading some pieces from maybe recent work or something that's top of mind to you, and then tell us a little bit about it and tell us why it holds special meaning for you.
Kim Shuck:Okay. I'll read you a couple. I've been doing these collections, splitting the year up in different ways and this is from the Wheel of the Year which was a project involving the pagan calendar. Transforming weather against a cold winter, years and miles from that home, I tell you now that I will wear fresh water pearls, will take the healing, will whisper old names of place to water, stands of trees, thumb polished hills, healing stones and tea weeds. I tell you now that as I set my feet against the now storm claims center that my love strength is great enough to take part in what comes next.
Kim Shuck:I'm going read this one because it reminded me of you when I wrote it. Reading to each other is like tucking one blanket another, warm a potluck of smiles and unusual nouns. And then maybe this. Water level in the marsh is high, egret elegant on an offering to the gods of the wetland, shredded tire, dead hot water heater. We hold ourselves light.
Kim Shuck:This round, we hunt the rainbow as this month closes in. This may be winter, but there are more bitter months coming. What
Jennifer Barone:is inspiring you to write on this topic of the Wheel of the Year?
Kim Shuck:It's one of a series where you know that I write every day. Mhmm. Yeah. So, I write every morning and, actually from a bit of advice that I got from Diane DePrima, which was, if you write every day at the same time, your body will start to crave it. And I had that advice years and years ago.
Kim Shuck:So, it stuck with me and I've done it and it's very true if I sit down in the morning, I will end up with work. So, that's good. And it's a combination of that and, you know, the memory function on Facebook because I used to publish my poems every day on Facebook and they will give it back to you as a memory some years later. And I've noticed that I tend to write about very similar things at the same time every year. So, there's something about that cycle.
Kim Shuck:So, that's really why I'm doing it. So, I did the calendar we're all sort of have imposed on us one year and then put those into tiny little booklets that I could carry around and read from. And then, I did the Wheel of the Year and put those into tiny little booklets. Weirdly, I'm now working on the Cherokee calendar which is my indigenous heritage and it's kicked off a bit of debate in my social circles about translations of what we call the different new moons and full moons because some of the translations on, Wikipedia are sketchy. And, I was not surprised by that because I figured that most Wikipedia pages should actually start out with, we reckon.
Kim Shuck:Yeah. I be a little more vague about their assertions because some of them are pretty off. I having being the subject of one of those Wikipedia pages, there's a bit that I've been trying to get off of there since they put it up. But since you can't edit the page about yourself, I'm having some trouble getting it off of there.
Jennifer Barone:What's your experience with following the moon just like in your life?
Kim Shuck:It's a Well, if you do it as a practice
Jennifer Barone:Yeah.
Kim Shuck:It's a good pause meditation moment. If you are with Mongolian Hawaiian guy for fifteen years in your life and have three kids with him, you end up doing moon viewing at a certain time of the year which will make you more aware of that if you were not before. And if only because the kids love the cakes. When I say kids, my children are probably the age or older than most of the people listening. I have adults now rather than children.
Kim Shuck:Yeah. So, my experience of it is that I was always sort of aware of the cycles of the moon and then it got reinforced over years of being with Brian and it got reinforced. It's a good hook for a poem if you are struggling. I mean, it might not be a publishable poem but it's a good way to start a poem as to what is the moon phase and what does that mean. And then the idea of, I guess we'll call them prayers that relate to where the moon cycle cycle is, you know.
Kim Shuck:So, there are all kinds of things that will come back to you and lead you back there.
Jennifer Barone:I know that my life changed quite dramatically when I started to become conscious and of the moon and then my body started to, like, literally sync up to it. Yeah. Like, because obviously women's bodies are going through phases much like the moon and and to have your body, like, sync up to viewing the moon is quite profound, you know. To be part of nature rather than Oh, absolutely. Outside of it.
Jennifer Barone:Or the cosmos literally part of it. Exactly. These cycles
Kim Shuck:of the world we live in rather than some sort of externally imposed thing. The the issue of exploring calendars the way I'm doing right now is is interesting because it will, San Francisco, where I was born as well as done all of these other things, is, has got a really specific climate. Mhmm. And people go, Oh, it's not different from one part of the year to the other. And then, they also say silly things like, oh, it's never that hot here.
Kim Shuck:Yeah, it is. It's hot for about a week and everybody goes around saying, it's never that hot here and panicking because none of the houses are built to accommodate, you know, hot weather.
Jennifer Barone:Right.
Kim Shuck:But it does have cycles and they're not necessarily related to the heat or or other things like that. They're related to the level of fog and when it comes in and when it goes out and, you know, being aware of what's around you. I was astounded to find that most people don't know how to look at the bay and tell you whether the the water's coming in or going out because it changes color. I mean, it's dramatic. It's not subtle.
Kim Shuck:Right. And, you know, I was in a car with a friend and I said, Oh, the, the tide's going out. She goes, how can you tell? I was like, look at the water. And if looking at the water doesn't help, you can look and see how the boats are at anchor because Yeah.
Kim Shuck:The water is shifting, you know. And the other day, we were at a club that I had not an I had not known existed. In all my years being here, I'd never been there, but there was an art show and we went to go see a a friend's photography show there. And we're sitting outside for a minute and I said, oh, the tide just shifted. Everybody went, what?
Jennifer Barone:I love that you're
Kim Shuck:connected to
Jennifer Barone:hear that? Yeah.
Kim Shuck:Well, we're five generations into this place at this point. So, you know, I'm sure I've evolved somewhat, shifted somewhat in my genes to be living here, you know.
Jennifer Barone:Well, there's so much about your work that is about people, but there's also this really strong connection to place. Right? It's like and even what you're just talking about right now, such sensitivity to the environment that I'm hearing that maybe even just the average person doesn't have that connection to. How do you connect that? Because I feel like poetry is like that too.
Jennifer Barone:Poetry requires this, like, viewpoint into seeing things that most people don't often see. But how does this connect to your work?
Kim Shuck:I think it's fundamental. Quite often, people blame it on me being indigenous, but in fact, my Polish grandma was also that way. Mhmm. You know? And that's the side of the family that we've been here for a long time.
Kim Shuck:I think, if you're willing to commit to actually being in community with a place, you start noticing things, you know, and you develop your own mythology around the place. Mhmm. So, as we're driving over here, my partner and I are mentioning where, you know, we're pointing out houses and apartment buildings, where our family has lived and where people we know have lived and just making those connections. Somebody asked me about a poem I wrote, oh, probably twenty five years ago, in which I was telling the time by birds, that the trip took a certain number of birds and specific birds. And, he's do you always tell time by birds?
Kim Shuck:And I was like, no. Sometimes it's leaves and The fog. The fog.
Jennifer Barone:The tide.
Kim Shuck:Yeah. The tide. But It's
Jennifer Barone:so alive. It's so rich.
Kim Shuck:It's all doing its thing. Even in the city, I mean, even in cities, this is a real thing. And people who are only here for a minute, people who are here because it's a cool place to live or whatever reason who are not invested in community here, who want their little, unitary bubble in whatever apartment they rent, potentially in one of those ice cube trays down South Of Market. When you want to shut yourself off from that, it's possible to do it, but you will probably not be noticing some important things, you know. Like Diane and I both know because we have been around the city a long time what drains are likely to flood up badly enough to where it's unwise to drive a car through.
Jennifer Barone:Which today is important in the
Kim Shuck:Which
Jennifer Barone:today is aviation important because it's raining outside right now.
Kim Shuck:It was bucketing this morning. Was not just raining, it was big. And, so that is why I managed to get here at the
Jennifer Barone:time I said I would be here. Amazing.
Kim Shuck:That happened because we know that and we managed to avoid a larger than normal puddle up on Broadway on the other side of the tunnel because we both know that happens. So, sometimes it's worth your while to step out of your own head for a minute and pay attention to what's going on. I also happen to write about those moments. Yes. You know?
Kim Shuck:You do.
Jennifer Barone:Beautifully too. Well, you talked about the moon, but then you also have this project that you just mentioned to me about extinct, extirpated, and endangered animals. And I was just reading one of your poems this morning about, I think, the wolf coming back to San Francisco.
Kim Shuck:Well, the wolf's coming back to California.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. To California. Yeah. And I was, like, thinking it was making me think about the COVID era, and I felt, like, during that time when when the city quieted down, we we were able to actually connect more maybe to the animal world that is living even in this city. Like, for instance, you know, the coyotes were howling on the street corner, and it was viscerally apparent that we're we are living in communion community with different types of animals that, you know, maybe we don't notice often.
Jennifer Barone:Sure. Or should off should notice more often. But, can you talk a little bit about this project and and what's going on
Kim Shuck:here? Yeah. But, first, I just wanna say, did you guys not get a mountain lion during
Jennifer Barone:that Yes. We did. It walked over the Golden Gate Bridge and down Embarcadero. I was like, what's over here
Kim Shuck:now that I'm not dodging as many cars?
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. That's really wild. And then I think it wound up going into San Bruno.
Kim Shuck:Yeah. Believe so. Yeah. Yeah. I well, at the same in the same time period, they found a mountain lion at the playground I used to play at as a child up in the dog park part.
Kim Shuck:And I don't know what that means because I it was not a dog park part when I was playing there. So, you know, these things reemerge. We think we've chased them off or something. Tend to reemerge but not not without a little bit of shift on our part. So the project I'm working on comes from a project I did a couple years ago, which, I was contemplating community in a larger sense.
Kim Shuck:And, I remembered, that my great grandmother told me her father had taken her to go look at, a pile of dead buffalo and said, basically, that's, that's how much they want us dead. And, this would be my native grandmother. And, I thought about that for a minute, and I thought did the numbers and went, you know, my grandfather would have been in Chicago at a time when, he could have seen passenger pigeons. And I started thinking about extinctions or reported extinctions. About that same time, I think, they said that, some animals that were closely related to the dodo and moved back to Mauritius and were like transforming back into a thing more like a dodo.
Kim Shuck:That like these genes are malleable and they will adjust to the current circumstances to an extent and I thought that was interesting and that all sort of turned into a project where I did eight beaded pieces and eight poems for each of my grandparents about places they lived or how the family had gotten to those places and animals that were extinct along the way.
Jennifer Barone:I know.
Kim Shuck:And a lot of people were like, That must be depressing. I'm like, Sort of. But I think it's good to be aware we talk about these things in the abstract and I wanted to make it personal. And I'd also, while I was poet laureate, in a project that didn't end up happening in quite the way that I anticipated and I ended up writing poems and doing beadwork for a tour of the Presidio, the Tennessee watershed, that you can look at on your phone. And, so the poems are recorded and they're also written out and the beadwork is photographed in there.
Kim Shuck:And so it's this tour, I use a walk that I usually did from the Arguello Gate down to basically Crissy Field.
Jennifer Barone:Was this around El Spring?
Kim Shuck:It was around El Poline Spring. And there were all these things that they told me when I came into the project that, Oh, this thing is extinct and we never see that anymore. And then while I was there, they found one of the plants in sort of a weird corner of the park and then they found one of the insects and they hadn't had checkerspot butterflies there for a while. Wow. And they had just replanted their wetlands there.
Kim Shuck:Yes. With things that they eat and it's sort of remarkable like, not. If you plan to think something eats, you might find that it's you know, it comes back. So, there was one morning when it takes a bit for the sun to get into the little cut that El Paline Spring is in and when the sun came up over the hill and hit the boardwalk, in about ten minutes there were about a thousand checkersplot butterflies. So, I'm kind of hopeful about a lot of this stuff.
Kim Shuck:I also got followed around by a young coyote the whole time I was there. Oh, wow. Every time I was there. It was kind of strange. But, there's a resilience and a presence.
Kim Shuck:And if you if you stop insisting on planting grasses from other places and you actually plant things from here, some of the animals that eat those might come back. So, yeah, so that's where the idea came from and the current project is, I picked things that I'm not sure I was aware of along the Pacific Coast. And by the Pacific Coast, also mean places that we refer to as territories and anything that touches the Pacific. So, the farthest north so far is, a thing called the Steller sea cow. And then I read Georg Steller's reports and decided that I wanted to decolonize that.
Kim Shuck:So I had to hunt about a bit to find out what the name of that was in one of the native languages that encountered those and they're called Aluki. Everybody told me, you're not gonna find it. They went extinct in the seventeen hundreds. I was like, are you kidding? The Caddo people remember what they called the giant ground sloth.
Kim Shuck:Somebody knows this word. It will be a grandma and she will be remote but someone will know and I will be able to find it if I'm persistent enough. So I'm in the business right now of decolonizing some of the other words but Wow. One of the things that I beated for it was a I think it's called the Strolinger's Parnassian butterfly which is the first insect we know for sure was made extinct by urbanization. So it's when we covered up all of the sand dunes, we got rid of the plants that they eat and they seem to be gone.
Kim Shuck:At the same time I was doing that particular piece, I read something about the green hairstreak butterfly that a whole bunch of people in the I think it's the think it's the sunset, but it's the sunset or the rich when they've been planting the plants that they like and they're getting them. They're showing up. So it doesn't take a whole lot of effort.
Jennifer Barone:It kind of feels like love, like when you want to invite love in, you have to be tender. You have to put some flowers around. A little bit Come make it welcoming. And then the animals come back.
Kim Shuck:Yeah. Exactly.
Jennifer Barone:But I think that holds true for people too.
Kim Shuck:I do too. I think anytime you want a thing, you've gotta make the space ready for that thing and then maybe you might get it and if not, you have to be more patient.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. You gotta set the mood. Yeah.
Kim Shuck:I mean, I made good friends with a raven during that shutdown. And she and I are kinda buds and Doug will tell you my partner will tell you, if you ask, that if I have failed to leave a cashew on the front porch for this raven and he is sitting in the front room, she will yell at him to go get me to do it.
Jennifer Barone:We're having conversations with everything.
Kim Shuck:Really are. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Did you read the the essay in noodle rant tangent about people are always asking me how it is I noticed birds and it's like.
Jennifer Barone:Do you wanna read a little something then?
Kim Shuck:No. But
Jennifer Barone:because I have that book with me.
Kim Shuck:But there's one in which I talk about how you how to notice birds. Yes. You know? And I've totally infected my poor partner who used to go on road trips and he'd be like, how is it that you're noticing all of these raptors and these different birds and stuff? I'm like, just it's a matter of practice.
Kim Shuck:Mhmm. You know?
Jennifer Barone:Is this something that you think, like, the practice of poetry gives us?
Kim Shuck:Sure. What I mean, what is poetry if it's not, attention to detail? Nerdy attention to detail. For sure. A whimsical sense of our place in the world.
Kim Shuck:It's what it's for. Absolutely. I think it's actually what we're for.
Jennifer Barone:I love that even better.
Kim Shuck:You know? I mean, what is it? I can't remember who's talking to. I don't think that person was important to me. But Keanu Reeves was interviewed not that long ago.
Kim Shuck:And he was the person was, like, talking about globalism and all this stuff. He goes, maybe we're not here to be in charge. Maybe we're just here to be curious and explore things. I am totally misquoting him, but I just found that that was the content of what he said. I just found that charming.
Kim Shuck:I think that's right. I think the best use of a life is to approach it with curiosity. People have all these fears about their income and all kinds of things. I'm here to tell you I've been a professional artist for a really long time and it's gotten close but the world catches me. It always has.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. I was just having this conversation with Mark who was here, Mark Bittner, who had lived out on the streets for a while and he was writing about that. But we were talking about that there's this energy, like an invisible energy that kind of exists that, yeah, takes care of us, that we have a a connection with if we decide to have a relationship relationship with with it. It. But there's an aspect, maybe even with working with nature in that way, where there's an invisible layer, kind of a liminal space.
Kim Shuck:Yeah. I mean, I don't know what that thing is. I know what some people call it. Yeah. But, I think there is I think the world does tend to lean towards taking care of everything.
Kim Shuck:And that the people who want to amass everything haven't read enough about what happens when you do that, you know? Mhmm. I have a lot of opinions about these things. I also think, for example, I don't know why this feels related to me, maybe you can contextualize it for me a little better, but if you think about some of the bad things that have happened to Britain over the years and the strange choices that they make like, Oh, I will pry this artwork off of this wall and haul it home now it's mine. Or, I will chip this stone out of this statue of a god where it's been carefully placed and energy's been put into it.
Kim Shuck:And we're gonna put it in our we're gonna put it in our our crown jewels and things just start going sideways from that point. And I just think, you know, if you mess about with the way energy is flowing without understanding it, you sort of risk Mhmm. Doing yourself a damage.
Jennifer Barone:Mhmm. Yeah. There's some there's something in in there like a lesson of the ego.
Kim Shuck:Yeah. Like ignorance is bad. Arrogance is worse.
Jennifer Barone:Well, you were talking a little bit about decolonizing, like naming. Can you talk to me a little bit about the importance of names for you, especially when you're writing about these subjects?
Kim Shuck:Yeah. Well, we know as writers that the word means a lot and that every word is sort of a collection of where it's been, if you know what I mean. The etymology of words is fascinating to me. And so, there's a certain taking possession that happens when you name a thing and there's this really interesting sort of Western perspective that your name has to be on everything. Mhmm.
Kim Shuck:It kind of goes along with graffiti and other things, you know, and I I kinda get that. Like, the power of the word is is real, you know? But, for the longest time, there's been this sort of notion, first of all, that all native people have passed away. We're gone. There are no more of us.
Kim Shuck:I used to hear that all the time at school, from teachers quite often. And the fact that the teachers could often not pronounce, they won't pronounce or they can't pronounce people's names with any fidelity. It's important, you know? And so in particular, in this area, in California, but in this area in particular and in the LA area in particular. I think it's really important that we use and are more aware of more of the names that are pertinent to this place, that come from this place.
Kim Shuck:First of all, they know more about the things that they're describing. That, straight up. And second of all, because those clues are essential to us, on the hill that my grandmother's house is on, where my kids live now, but I lived there for many, many years, There's this one spot in an intersection that every time after it's been very dry for a few years and then it starts raining, there's this spot that just collapses into the ground. It happens every time. They don't seem to be able to work out how to prevent it from happening.
Kim Shuck:And it I believe, though I have never looked at their schematics, that it has to do with the Royal Dolores, which comes down the hill from Twin Peaks, goes through my grandmother's backyard, down down into, you know, the Dolores Park area, Mission Dolores area. And, I'm pretty sure that once upon a time somebody could have told us some things about that Arroyo, like when to predict when it's going to run because it doesn't run all the time. It's mostly a dry creek bed. Right. But when it does flow, it really does.
Kim Shuck:So it floods my neighbor's basement. Yep. And because their drainage is bad, it eventually floods my basement. Caused a shift in the in the foundation of two houses up from from ours. You know, there are things you should be able to find out from people who've lived here for longer than a minute that we don't.
Kim Shuck:So that's part of what naming is. But also there's a beauty and an insight that goes along with each of these words. It makes it important to at least have some idea like what they are and what they're how they relate to other words in that language.
Jennifer Barone:I'm hearing that there's knowledge in the name. Like, there's wisdom in the name. There's information in the name that we're missing if don't have it.
Kim Shuck:Yeah. There are whole lives in each name. Right. You know? Yeah.
Kim Shuck:What was this hill called? I don't know. I don't know. If I lived here, I'd probably try to find out.
Jennifer Barone:There's been What if they've been starting to do the daylighting of little streams and creeks a little bit? I noticed Well, that like around Alpine Spring actually.
Kim Shuck:Yeah. The Tennessee Watershed, they totally daylit that.
Jennifer Barone:It's so cool.
Kim Shuck:Yeah. And almost immediately things started coming back.
Jennifer Barone:Right.
Kim Shuck:And they also, unfortunately, don't know, Mountain Lake Park is an interesting case and I don't know any of this from my own research. I just know it because I heard the stories when I was doing stuff out at the Presidio. When they tried to work with Mountain Lake Park, they drained it and they scraped the bottom. Right? And they tried to reintroduce stickleback and floating clams.
Kim Shuck:And so what they have now, because the stream isn't as active as it was for reasons of human intervention, They have aerators. So, basically, what that is now is it's an aquarium, but it's a really big one. Wow. They've they've reintroduced the stickleback. Anyway.
Jennifer Barone:Wow. Well, I've noticed not only are is the subject of nature, animals, like, appearing in your poetry, in your writing, but it also appears in your beadwork. It also appears in your art. Can you tell us a little bit about your beadwork, about your art? And then I also wanna hear because I've noticed recently on your feed, you've been posting these gorgeous photos that Doug took of your math basket.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. And I wanna know about what is a math
Kim Shuck:People have No. Been asking me questions
Jennifer Barone:let's
Kim Shuck:see. Let's start with Where did we start? Something about animals and my beadwork. Yeah. So, beadwork, I We don't know when I started doing beadwork.
Kim Shuck:Nobody currently alive knows. I've asked my parents because people always ask me that question and I don't know the answer.
Jennifer Barone:Did you do it since you were very young?
Kim Shuck:Yeah, since I was tiny.
Jennifer Barone:Oh my gosh.
Kim Shuck:Yeah, yeah. Since I was quite tiny. I have thoughts about when I started learning to do that, but I'm not sure. But, traditional Cherokee beadwork is kind of under known. People are used to seeing Great Plains work or Eastern, Southeastern.
Kim Shuck:And, the beads, of course, came with colonization, but the patterns were there in other forms before that. So we're sort of a a pattern kind of crew rather than a, like, animals kind of crew and when I see a pattern, I'm always curious like, where did that come from? And so there's a whole lot of looking at plants that are indigenous to where we were at that time. Also looking at petroglyphs from the area and stuff to try to figure out like, what is that pattern, you know, apart from there are some logical things that happen if you are working with anything that kind of sets up in a brickwork way, end up with diamonds and left with zigzags. I mean, anything that sort of offsets by one or half of one every row.
Kim Shuck:So, I've done a bit of that and I've done it more in basketry than in beadwork. But I think my work has taken a couple of leaps in topic. One of them came because I was teaching in, American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, where I professed for a certain period of time. And I was looking at different tribal things and I wrote a paper that's probably my most popular thing I've ever written that nobody in the poetry world has read, which is Say How to American Indian Barbie, where I was dealing with Barbie dolls and the way that they approach the other. Wow.
Kim Shuck:And, which is pretty much with few clues about what any of it means. But people enjoyed that essay and I started bringing the dolls in to my oral literature class. Like, how do you learn things? How do you know things? A lot of people learn about native people from these dolls and what does that mean and how does that affect us?
Kim Shuck:And then somebody's grandmother said, Well, if you're gonna show how they're misrepresenting us, you should probably have some of our dolls to represent how we represent us. I thought, That is genius. Thank you for that input. And I made a crow doll, a human doll with a crow head and I remembered how much I hate sewing. And, this is not a minimal thing.
Kim Shuck:I really loathe it. So, I, instead started beating heads on sticks.
Jennifer Barone:Oh, wow. That's nice. Which appears on the cover of one of your books.
Kim Shuck:Appears on the cover of one of my books and also on the cover of a book by, oh, this is horrible. I can't think of her name. I can't think of her name. Anyway, my beebwork appears on the cover of a lot of my books. It's on the, Wizard Cat is on the cover of Pick a Garnet to Sleep In.
Kim Shuck:Oh, it's also there's a deer on the cover of Deer Trails Mhmm. Oh, a dear. Buck, which is also one of my beaded pieces.
Jennifer Barone:It's amazing. I got to see some of these pieces in person retrospective of your artwork at the San Francisco Public Library, the main library, and it was just an epic retrospective of your beadwork because it was taking so many forms. Some of them were flat, some of them were three-dimensional. It was gorgeous.
Kim Shuck:Yeah. I mean, I sort of view myself as an impressionistic bead artist in that it's often called not traditional but I'm bringing all the same stories forward so I think I would argue that it is traditional. Mhmm. It's just not usual. Right.
Kim Shuck:It doesn't manifest in the same way. I use different sized beads which there's an aesthetic in native beadwork that it be perfectly flat. So every once in a while, I do a perfectly flat, absolutely clean bit of beading with perfectly straight lines just to prove to everyone I can still do it. But I like working three d and I like doing animals and some of them are fly. I'm gonna be doing the Poem Jam in December.
Kim Shuck:I think it's the December 11, but I'm not sure. Second Thursday of the month. I'm presenting the work that I've been doing for this grant and there will be really big photos We're projecting images of the beadwork that I've done for it. And the reason we're doing that is because it allows everybody to see it rather than trying to put them up and have a bunch of people try to look at each individual piece. And I use really small beads.
Kim Shuck:So if you actually want to get a very good view of it, you need to make it bigger.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. When I look at your work, I think it must be meditative and very labor intensive.
Kim Shuck:Yeah. I don't know. I mean, yeah, I don't know. But this is where I'm at right now is these animals and I have to have a reason to do them and sometimes it's, well ultimately the choice of animal or plant species comes from what I think is gorgeous Mhmm. Or disturbing or I'm offended by how it got extinct Mhmm.
Kim Shuck:Or, you know, they're whimsical for sure. The the three d pieces are really whimsical. The flat pieces tend to be more literal. I don't know.
Jennifer Barone:Tell me a little bit about the math baskets.
Kim Shuck:Math baskets. So, all baskets are math baskets. Southeastern flat splint work, it's plating, not weaving. And the difference is in plating, start with all of the material you're going to use. So it's not built up in rows.
Kim Shuck:It comes up at diagonals. So it's all that. So I used to work with a mathematician from the Exploratorium and I did a lot of math myself. I was a math goober my own self. But I used to work with a guy from the Exploratorium originally from France who, if you took particle physics at any time in the last fifty years, you've been working out of his book, that we used to show people what pie means.
Kim Shuck:3.1415 pie. What pie means by using a plated basket. You start with a square base, you weave up and by the time you get to the lip, it's circular. You've added nothing, you've subtracted nothing. So the base is the same measurement as the top.
Kim Shuck:And then you show them what had to change to make the square into a circle. So, Greek mathematics says you can't square a circle. But you can circle a square, you just have to get out of the flat. Interesting. So I was He used to grab people's baskets when we'd be working with a high school.
Kim Shuck:And these children had labored to get their first basket out and they were pleased with it and he'd grab it and write on it with a sharpie. So I, which offended a lot of people and I was actually offended by that behavior as well. So I used to, before we'd have a series of classes, just make a big bag full of these baskets so that when he would try to steal somebody's basket and show them, I'd just provide him with an alternative to scribble on. And this has gotta be the nerdiest transitional art moment of all time, but I was watching the Star Trek Next Generation one day. I was not really paying attention to what I was doing, I put the wrong number of corners on the basket, and it changed the shape entirely.
Kim Shuck:So these baskets are not standard shaped baskets and they are it would be inconvenient to store things in or gather things into, but they do serve as sculptures.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. They're like, almost like modern, modern, yeah, yeah, sculpture, sculpture, like like abstract. Abstract.
Kim Shuck:I was thrilled because somebody told me looking at them one time that they reminded him of Ruth Asawa's work and I was like, she was my first art teacher so that's there's probably something in that. Like, what aesthetically pleases me probably owes something to her aesthetic. So, yeah, that's what the math baskets are, and they're all based in equations that I write before I weave it. So I don't know what it's gonna look like, but it's I'm meticulously working through a series of assignments that I've given myself based on numbers.
Jennifer Barone:This this concept that you're bringing forward through the creation of this abstract math basket brings me to a question I've always wanted to ask you, which is, like, an aspect of your personality that I've witnessed personally, but then I've also, like, see sometimes come through your writing too. But so I've heard you, and it's, this foolish gesture, this trickster quality to you. And I've heard you say that you embrace this quality as a poet and an artist and that you even believe in carrying a bubble wand, you carry cat's cradle string. And when I saw you give your inauguration speech at the library, I the the vision that I remember, like, distinctly because I was there in person was these hats that you kept, like, wearing. And and I was just like, wow.
Jennifer Barone:What is happening? What's she gonna put on next? And you kept switching these hats. And some of the hats, as you were giving this very profound inauguration speech, you had one color ful hat after the next and some might have been animal forms and things like that.
Kim Shuck:There's a squid hat.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. Squid. That's the one I remember the most. But tell me about, for you, like, the importance of being playful, like, this quality of fun and surprise that's in your work but also in your personal life.
Kim Shuck:There speaks a person who's been to my house and listened to a whole bunch of speeches. I think I wore a cat hat before it was a big thing to the first thing I did here in North Beach after getting inaugurated to you. I spent a lot of time being very serious. And it's extremely a lot of my childhood and my early into my twenties, I was a very serious person. And that came from probably anxiety on the part of my parents.
Kim Shuck:I just picked it right up. Two different cultures that have been recently exposed to genocidal behavior and people will tense up and seize up and not really be able to move forward with, with release, you know? It's hard to find that. And it it's it's, you know, the genocide of native people is ongoing, native women and others, but my focus is on women, so that's what I talk about. They, disappear and show up dead at alarming rates.
Kim Shuck:And San Francisco is in the top 20 of places that happens, but people don't know it. And, you know, so it's easy to be dour and serious and I think for my mental well-being, needed to change in order to make myself be happier. And we're there. I've I've definitely shifted it. You can get a lot more done if you if people write you off a little bit.
Kim Shuck:You know? I had been identified as being very, very bright as a child. And it was a barrier between myself and people in the way I choose to encourage people to understand that that barrier is not necessary. We don't have to behave that way if we don't feel like it. I mean, if you still wanna maintain that attitude towards me, you're welcome to, but I don't take myself all that seriously.
Kim Shuck:You know? So that's really what that is. And the math baskets is my my inner serious nerd sort of making itself known in a playful and and curious way, you know? Because I think what people refer to as, intellectual prowess, genius, whatever word you wanna use for it, is actually a manifestation of your curiosity rather than anything else. I think it just means that you ask really good questions.
Jennifer Barone:Do you think it's a manifestation of what you don't know? Yeah. Suppose to what you do know.
Kim Shuck:Some clarity about what is not known. And, you know, so I I I kind of clown a bit. I know that my least favorite moment in recent performance was we went to Haskell Indian Nations University and we threw copies of all of the books I've done in there. It's like 10, something like that. There are many.
Kim Shuck:On the table, most of them has some lightness in them, but there's one that I wrote called Murder and Missing, which is literally about murdering and missing indigenous women. And the looks on the faces of the people who got there early who just sort of picked up books and were looking at them. And there's an array of curious and introspective and all of that. And then the woman who picked up Murdered Missing cried. I don't wanna make people cry.
Kim Shuck:I do wanna make them think. Mhmm. But for my own well-being, I had to get that one book out. Yeah. That was for me.
Kim Shuck:So
Jennifer Barone:I also think it's okay if make we people cry as poets sometimes.
Kim Shuck:This is, like, bad though. I I had gone and read some of that book one time at Haskell and ended up having
Jennifer Barone:to stay an extra hour to talk to everybody and hear who they'd lost. I mean, that's how extreme it is in our communities is that everybody has lost somebody. How do you balance because you are an artist and an amazing poet who's able to tackle these incredibly, profoundly deep and challenging subjects like that emotionally, and it's on the personal level as well as the collective level. But in your work, in your writing, like, how do you balance that, with beauty, with with the lightness that you're describing?
Kim Shuck:I'm glad you think I manage it. I'm not always sure that I do. I don't know. I mean, I just I'm willing to hurt a little bit over these things when I'm working on it. I am not willing to injure other people too badly.
Kim Shuck:Yeah. I don't know. I'm not sure I always hit the balance. Sometimes I hit the balance.
Jennifer Barone:I think you definitely do. Well, Kim, I wanna thank you so much for being here and sharing your words, your process, and what it's like to write, to be in the city, to witness the city, not only the people, the places, but the animals, the streams, the rivers, the tides. Tides. It's such a pleasure to know you. I feel so honored just to to have you as a friend and to know you on that level as well as witness your incredible work.
Kim Shuck:I you know, I view you as a ray of sunshine in human form. So I'm sort of delighted you feel that way because I could kind of be a downer sometimes.
Jennifer Barone:You make me smile, Kim Shuck. I'm glad
Kim Shuck:because you make me smile too.
Jennifer Barone:For listeners who wanna learn more about Kim Shuck and her work, please find her and her mouth baskets on Instagram at kim dot shuck. And find her books at your local independent bookstores, including Telegraph Hill Books. If you're in San Francisco, find her hosting the poetry series, Poem Jam, at the San Francisco Main Library every second Thursday from six to 07:15 on the Lower Level. And if you happen to be out of town, find videos of Poem Jam archived on the San Francisco Public Library's YouTube channel. Thank you, Kim.
Kim Shuck:Thank you for having me, Jen.
Jennifer Barone:This podcast is brought to you by Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature. If you enjoyed today's episode, please follow, subscribe, and leave us a review. Visit tellhighlit.org to find out about our local events such as author talks, writing workshops, and more. Consider making a donation to support our public programs. If you are a Bay Area author interested in being on the show, we'd love to hear from you.
Jennifer Barone:Reach out to us at submissions@telhilit.org. Thanks again for tuning in. I'm Jennifer Barone along with Joseph Carboni at Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature. And this has been Voices from the Hill. Until next time, keep reading, keep writing, stay inspired, and come visit us at Telegraph Hill Books in North Beach, San Francisco.