RIDING THE MUSIC WAVE No. 2: CHELSEA HICKS
Music is really important to me, but finding music that I like can be difficult. It’s not about genre. It’s about a sense of uniqueness or distinctiveness in the song craft, combined with something that is magnetic for me. I also use music as a container to feel my more vulnerable emotions. I used to be a musician, and when I lost that practice, it was really grievous to me. It’s something that I have been trying to get up the courage to return to. I can’t listen to music when I’m writing, but I listen when I’m cooking or getting ready for the day or walking; my favorite thing to do is—when I am in my feelings—I just sit down with nothing else to focus on except for music videos, and I watch whatever music videos I can find that I like.
Chelsea T. Hicks is a Tulsa Artist Fellow currently creating experimental collaborative work in her ancestral language of Wahzhazhe ie (Osage) with other Osages. Her first book, A Calm & Normal Heart, received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 award. She earned an MFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where she taught before launching Words of the People (https://wtpgathering.org/) which holds Indigenous language creative writing workshops. Her writing has been published in Poetry, World Literature Today, McSweeney’s, and shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and elsewhere. She is a citizen of the Osage Nation.