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COATES COATES
Location
Massachusetts, US
Media
Photography, installation, long-form hybrid fiction and poetry.
Title of Works
I want to become a beaver so I can eat my home
Bio
I am a writer and artist based in Western Mass and work in between photography, installation, long-form hybrid fiction, and poetry. I teach art and writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and have been published, exhibited, or have work forthcoming in, The New River, 3 am Magazine, the Iowa Review, Hawai'i Review, Quarter Press, Moonstone Press, CICA, Marzee Gallery, 555 Gallery, among others.
'I want to become a beaver so I can eat my home' is a longer project where I haunt my local beaver lodges when I'm not in pain or working. I've been documenting them for about a year. I'm hoping one day an eldritch horror will find me and turn me into a beaver. Wouldn't that be nice?
'I am a little pain weasel. When I'm not in pain, I scrounge around Western Massachusetts swamps. In those reprieves I will ferret from my pain hole. Awkwardly, but with a greedy glee. And after catching up on work left chronically hanging, my sad little claws clicking on the computer at double speed as if that will make up for the days spent in bed, I visit beavers at the Poor Lawrence Swamp and find fun bugs to call my friends and dream of an existence outside of capitalism. The days I am in pain or am sick, I spend staring out of windows in the dark or from my bed with sunglasses on because everything is too bright. Light finds the hollow of the back of my skull where new pain lies sleeping and wakes and makes itself known. It has sharp nails and chalkboard screeches and a high, giddy cackle. I spend these days wishing pain away as if wishes were real. I slip into fantasy. I dream of becoming a beaver'.
