Interview with Janée J. Baugher, author of The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles

Interview with Janée J. Baugher, author of The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles
(Winner of Tupelo Press’s Dorset Prize)
 
Janée, will you tell our readers a bit about your ekphrastic journey?
 
For me, writing ekphrastically became an important stay against the drudgery of my boring life. In his essays, T. S. Eliot talks about extinguishing the personality in light of the demands of the imagination. Poet Rilke also had adopted the method of subverting the needs of the self for the needs of the object the writer chooses to engage with. Once it clicked for me to turn my gaze away from the self and to an object d’art, I knew I’d found the artistic method that works best for me.

What drew you to the artwork of American painter Andrew Wyeth?  

As museum-goers, we make the mistake of solely bringing our cerebral side to the art engagement. When we behold a work of art and ask, “what does it mean” or “what was the artist’s intention,” those types of questions further separate us from the art-making as a creative act and an artwork, a creative product. In 2006 at the Philadelphia Art Museum when I stood before the first Wyeth painting that I had ever seen (Trodden Weeds) my imagination soared. As I strolled from canvas to canvas, I sensed vastness in his muted tones, sparce settings, and sprawling landscapes. In his work, there’s space for me to explore visually and to dive in emotionally. It’s tenderness. That’s what I see in his work, and it’s what I was after in my poetry collection, The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles.

Which Andrew Wyeth paintings are your favourites?   

I was immediately taken with Sunflowers, 1982. However, I struggled because what could I say about something as pure as sunflowers? I laboured for weeks before I found the poem’s central tension. One morning, as I sat free-writing on the porch of the house at the Write On Door County residency, a spider appeared. When something as miraculous as a spider walks near enough to touch, everything must stop (at least that’s my philosophy). So, I watched her and I listened and I wondered. It was raining and she eventually crawled under the cover of the porch, and the whole thing moved me. Her presence was a gift, and it was just what my poem needed. 
 
My poem, “Andrew Wyeth’s Footnotes to Cosmos, 2005” is my wee underdog. While a majority of The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles poems had found previous homes in literary journals, this poem had not. Cosmos are my favourite flowers mostly because they’re not at all ostentatious: they’re without fragrance and they grow as freely as weeds. While Wyeth might have painted roses, hydrangeas, or hyacinths, I particularly love the humility of his cosmos. 

Tell us something about your ekphrastic process.  

It’s the visual stimulation of ekphrastic writing that piques my wonderment. Before an artwork, I reach for my pen and notebook and I free-write at a feverish pace. Speed-writing prevents my logical brain from interrupting what the unconscious mind has to show me. The words have a mind of their own and my job in that moment, standing on the gallery floor, is about writing without thinking. 

Was there a poem that proved especially difficult or challenging?  

From my Window, 1974 intrigued me, for it appears at though Wyeth were actually standing at a window and had painted the snow-covered structure outside it. Yet, I needed a backstory, an emotional point-of-view, and I struggled inventing it. Then I turned to the painting’s date, which prompted me to look at Andrew Wyeth’s biographical events. I learned that in 1973 his mother had passed away. Huzzah. I was awash with ideas about him as a bereaved son looking out the window and reminiscing about his loving mother. Of course, this is my invention, as no one knows what all was on Wyeth’s mind as he painted.

What new projects are you working on?  

Late spring of 2025 I was diagnosed with cancer. While I thought my life’s work would never stray from the state of personal detachment, the diagnosis has creatively compelled me to turn my gaze toward the self. I don’t know what will become of the “Cancer Pages” manuscript, but I’m curious to see where it’ll take me.
 
**

Purchase The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles (Tupelo Press, Feb. 2026) through University of Chicago Press: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo266703933.html
​ 
At Amazon: 
​https://www.amazon.com/-/fr/Andrew-Wyeth-Chronicles-Jan%C3%A9e-Baugher/dp/1961209535

from The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, by Janée J. Baugher, Tupelo Press, 2026.