Many thanks to Eve Meyer, Editor in chief, Journal of the IAWM, for encouraging me to write an article for the journal about my work and career, all the way up through my latest endeavor, Aberfan.
See “Turn Us into Ashes”, page 25. IAWM Journal Spring 2016 Final (1)
I Ching 
“The wind drives over the water: when one’s vital energy is dammed up within, a gentleness serves to break up and dissolve the blockage…hence the idea of dissolution of one’s own self and, consequently, the absence of remorse…
Only on the basis of a great renunciation…” can I carry what has been tasked to me:
A book of essays by Chris Hedges: “….has become a world where the irrational has become rational, where lies become true. And facts alone will be powerless to thwart the mendacity spun out through billions of dollars in corporate advertising, lobbying, and control of traditional sources of information. We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film with anger and honesty…” The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress
Resonating with my own large and looming project Aberfan. An insistence we not forget. Please contribute here to support its recording.
To be a creative artist was born in me — a most slender thread connected to the core of the earth, through my very being and up beyond into the skies — a seriousness of such resiliency it could never be broken and would take all of life to realize.
Whether music, paint or word, whatever the form, if it takes you by surprise, propels itself through you — it is your art, a conscious spiritual calling, and your task to bring into the world.
In the arc of my own creative life, my earliest poems and lyrics came from this unconscious place, without thought — vaguely familial, words hacked out of walls or erupting through an external image — phrases which I instinctively pieced together. I had grown up surrounded by music, yet my first experience of the truly deep, creative source within myself arrived in dreams and the silence of words and images.
So it was, through prose poems and lyrics of my first three recordings: “when I left loss“, a singular phrase that arose as I lay still, became the title of my first album (1999); the dream of a two-story house, pressing unnaturally down upon me, its cover photo. Another dream, a man kneeling at my feet says “love flows like the blood of a river” — words of such import, I knew they would be the title for a song one day. So, too, the title of my second album (2003).
Free-writing upon a randomly chosen word or image, without editing, provided more material. Full stories articulated on the plumb line of an external image — a woman wearing a turban on a bus became “Eileen”, another leaning forward, clutching at her purse, the central character in “There is a Silence / Rolling of Time”.
During this period I also began to study voice for the first time — what had been, over years, petrified and buried.
“Talon of the Blackwater and Graces”, title track to my third album (2009), was presaged in a dream I had of black water gushing from a neighboring backyard (a woman’s shelter for those transitioning out of abusive situations) into ours — dark, lyrical material surging out over just a few days. The title itself came from a prose poem I had written years before. Was this the image of a disaster erupting from my own unconscious recollections as a child?
It was only during the process of recording Talon of the Blackwater that my poetry, subsumed in lyric, and my voice, fully became part of my music. I was, in fact, a songwriter and arranger, yet when I first heard the songs on the working demo, I believed someone else must have written them.
Starting in 2008, to my surprise, I began writing pieces for solo piano. One of these was the development of “Aberfan”, a song that my mother had written and I had arranged for my second recording. Over the years it has become a full length composition.
Laura Siersema 