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On Curating Hybrid Forms: Sarah Minor Introduces the Video Essay to Brink

Re:Viewed by clayton scofield

Summer 2025


RE:VIEW



Interview



Interdisciplinary artist and writer Sarah Minor recently joined the Brink team as the Video Essay Editor for the video essay series that debuted in Issue No. 9: ACCESS. As a video artist, I was excited to catch up with Sarah Minor with some questions about video essays, hybrid genres, and experimental forms. You can check out the video essays featured in Issue No. 9 here, and there are many references littered throughout the interview for further exploration. I also tagged Brink Editor-in-Chief Hannah Bonner into the conversation, with an invitation for Bonner and Minor to pose questions to each other.


Clay: Do you remember your first experience viewing a video essay? What was it and what was your reaction?  How does that initial experience shape how you consider the form today, if it does?


Sarah Minor: The deep recesses of my brain seem to be imprinted with early Tumblr posts that built a lavender web aesthetic through confessional texts and looping videos (where neither the video nor the text seemed exactly primary). I also notice the impulses of the video essay in the documentary (or mock documentary) impulses of the captioned experiments with early green screen technology I watched in art school, and in films like The Color of Pomegranates. I remember lighting up about the video work the students in my writing classes were making at the Cleveland Institute of Art that layered animated text and collaged video frames. Were those the first true video essays I saw? Coming from a fine art background, I confess that up until that point, whenever I saw short films labeled video essays in literary journals, I often felt underwhelmed or frustrated. I’d seen how meaningful video art could be, and those published works often limited the moving image to a kind of “background track,” contributing what my students would call “vibes,” to a narrative text. This was also during an era when the visual art community I was swimming in generally expected the role of text to either be descriptive of art, or to have an explicit message or “aboutness.” Since then, I’ve been interested in spanning those gaps between the mediums by featuring videos that push the work of a text beyond didactics and also use moving image as much more than a backdrop.



C:  As a maker and writer, are there ways your practice informs or shapes your role as a curator?


SM:  It’s a real gift that my creative practice has been shaped by this curation and editorial work. I make visual, graphic, and lyric essays, often using the Adobe suite, but recently I’m also working on a live collaborative shadow theater performance with the artist Johanna Winters that will involve a rotating stage, where all language is recited. Among the pleasures of curating and editing alongside a solo creative practice is the exposure I have to contemporary projects and the conversations I get to be in with other artists and editors in shaping that work for publication. I learn a lot about what artists are interested in through slush and solicitation. Because the video essay/cinepoem is still loosely defined and little made, I often find myself inviting writers to make it for the first time or reaching out to fine artists who are making video poems “without knowing it.” Instead of worrying about whether my own creative work is legible to the literary or art worlds, I’m often buoyed by supporting other artists in making multimedia projects the best version of what they already are. 


C:  When I approach interdisciplinary forms, I think about how it is not the sum of multiple disciplines, or this in conversation with that, but rather the thing that emerges between multiple forms. What I enjoyed about viewing Orson Welles’s F is For Fake is that it does this other thing of making a critical argument of an essay through the forms of video and text together. 


Most experimental films are working with text and visuals at least, so where is the slippery slope between video essay, cinepoem, and other forms? After all, we don’t call narrative films cinenovels. (I did just watch a short called “Life Without Dreams” by Jessica Bardsley, and it is also an experimental film that layers language as audio and visual text, but not as captioning, that creates multiple voices through a video essay form. In F is For Fake and “Life Without Dreams,” for me it is something more particular about the way meaning emerges through the multiple forms and the spaces between them, than just something that employs multiple media.)


C: How do you navigate the slipperiness of defining the discipline or genre of a necessarily interdisciplinary form?


SM: I remember feeling very confused when Philip Lopate wrote at length about Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil as a video essay. Maybe I still am. Today I understand that conversation in the early aughts as demonstrative of a moment when the essay was arguing for itself as a form equally as artful, ancient, and literary as fiction and poetry, and essayists were pointing to other forms that were already considered art, which behaved the way an essay could, attempting justification by proximity. Kristen Radtke’s “On Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil,” on the other hand, feels very much like a video essay, and Radtke’s other “still” graphic forms later morphed into video essays at TriQuarterly that go beyond, in literary terms, what Sans Soleil gestures towards.


I notice that the rise of the essay as a literary form has been paralleled by personal, confessional, and documentary interests among all kinds of other media, and in turn this rise has been framed by all the reading happening on screens, as well as stellar writers developing parallel skills with video software. Through this lens I think that literary video is indeed an emergent form though, like you, I’m not sure that genre terminology is very useful except to writers who are entering new media territory or learning that the essay is just as artful as a poem. 


For a few years I worked with a managing editor who was not interested in featuring video essays or cinepoems if they did not explicitly 1) feature a narrative or 2) include visible text on screen. Of course this frustrated me, but it also offered me insight into the ways writers encountering media experiments might prefer secure definitions at first. Of course I now have my own conventions: I want to see videos in which language still plays a central role, and I want those videos to be short—under 7 minutes. While I’m captivated by recitation and literary performance, I’m not interested in publishing documentation of live performances, though there are excellent venues for and examples of that kind of video work at Windfall Room and in Laura Paul’s Poem Video series. At Brink, you’ll see many examples of literary videos that break the old rules while retaining formal terms like video essay and cinepoem. Our submission guidelines also offer an invitation or method of permission-giving to makers allied with genre histories that might not use those words. 



C: I’m curious if you can imagine your ideal landscape for distributing work, what that might look like? Brink is a special place to highlight hybrid work that might not fit nicely into conventional genres. What do you envision for a world that might be more open or supportive of less conventional forms? (I’m thinking of, say, if we could understand poetry in the expanded field, would we need a separate series to highlight cinepoems, or could we understand that poetry could highlight a range of approaches to the genre?)


SM: After six years serving as the editor of the video section at TriQuarterly (and passing that curatorial role to the brilliant Hannah Bonner), I’m most excited about events that feature multimedia literary work performed live. I love that Brink is facilitating the link between physical and digital materialities by embedding QR codes linking videos on our physical pages. Though I share the feeling that QR codes are kind of gauche and will likely decay as all other attempts at uniting page and screen have, they’re also common and highly functional, and I’m really glad we’re experimenting with that form. Beyond the page I’m fascinated by expanded cinema projects, poetry installations, and live forms like Neo-Benshi that push beyond the strategy of a poet reading aloud in front of a video projection. I think of these examples as forms that are attuned to the attention of an image-savvy audience and aware of the writer’s potential relationship to spectacle. Together they also imagine the intimate, live audience as a kind of ideal reader.


C: What relationship do you see between the works that seek to resist categorization or disciplinary convention, and the works that end up getting categorized into hyper-specific subcategories of genres? 


SM: It’s fun to think about how the conventions of literary genres you name here are, in video essay/cinepoetry forms, also smashing up against the walls between art disciplines and the contrasting materialities of different media. That conundrum makes me think about how the poet Caryl Pagel describes the word “experimental” as a term that has been attached to forms of writing that have disobeyed genre limits, in some of the same ways, for more than 50 years. How long can a form remain “experimental” before it starts a backlog for future experiments? What explains the grip that genres codified in the 20th century have on contemporary publishing? The relationship between category/subcategory/resistance of category seems to me to be tied up in (money, of course, but also) the crisis of contemporary readerly attention and the expectations artists, editors, and venues have for what audiences need. I think categories are ultimately most useful for writers themselves, and that we are all sometimes guilty of underestimating our readers, of forgetting that the best work is always smarter than its maker. 


C: In your experience with video essays and cinepoems, can you recognize any conventions that develop? If so, what would they be?


SM: I notice that writers of prose, documentarians, dog owners, florists, virgos, and people who like feature-length films tend to make video essays, whereas poets, sculptors, ceramicists, vegetarians, and performance artists tend to make cinepoems. Different backgrounds in media and strategies for meaning-making seem to lead folks in one direction more than the other. These days I’m most invested in facilitating the recognition, by writers, of the cinepoem as a poem, or the video essay as an essay, more than I am in the distinction between the two forms.



C: How does working with hybrid genres require you to learn and explore new skills and ways of thinking to continuously support your work and realize projects?


SM: On one level, this curatorial work has pushed my digital skillsets further as an editor often struggling to embed multimedia work beautifully in text-friendly platforms, to convince a reader to click “play,” or to pick their phone up and then also put it back down again. On another level, it has motivated me to use my studio time for tedious software tutorials and free courses in programming language. The poet Lillian Yvonne Bertram inspired me to rebuild my graphic essay “Lunette” as an interactive text for the first Brink anthology, and the writer Nick Greer spent hours with me on Zoom troubleshooting that code. This loop of learning–making–curating means I can now support the work of writers who are using basic programming, and this summer I’ll be working behind the camera for the first time on a short experimental film. I give myself permission now to be a maker who is served by what she needs to know for a given project, who knows a little about a lot of tech, instead of developing my expertise in one form. 



C: What are you looking forward to in launching this new series with Brink?


SM: I’ve always been excited by Brink’s design sensibility, and I’m really curious to see how readers of the journal interact with and access our new video section online. I’m looking forward to demonstrating the range that exists within those forms and I’d love it if readers of the journal also considered the new video section an invitation to try their hand at making and submitting more short video works, to consider that a text that they’re stuck on elsewhere, a draft that isn’t working on the page, might be just the right thing for a screen-based form.



C: One of my preferred pastimes is eavesdropping on spirited conversations between passionate and curious people, so I invited Sarah Minor to craft a question for Brink Editor-in-Chief and TriQuarterly Film Editor Hannah Bonner, and for Hannah to share a question for Sarah in return. 


SM: Hannah, can you tell us about one particular video essay or cinepoem you published (or selected) recently, and describe the moment in that video when you knew you wanted to accept it? What excited you most about that project, overall?


Hannah Bonner: There's a delicate balance of video essays of being too polished or having an amateurish quality that winds up distracting from the film as a whole. When I saw Caitlin Lenz's "I Hate the Pool," I was instantly drawn in by her soundscape, which so deftly conveyed the sensation of handling archives. That tactile quality (of pages being turned, a camera shutter, Lenz's voice clearing) all immediately make me think of my own fleshy body: what shames, secrets, or joys it also holds. Lenz's film is a beautiful reminder of sound's power and how much work it can (and should) do in the video essay to add another layer of thought and feeling to the images on screen.


For Sarah, what's a video essay you selected that initially really challenged your perceptions of a video essay? What drew you in and also, perhaps initially, confounded you about it?


SM: What a cool question. Like Hannah, I've really enjoyed getting to confound and expand my understanding of the video essay by seeing the ways very different artists come to the genre. I'm also interested in the continuum you're naming between works made by writers of very different media backgrounds. It seems like in one broad category there are video essays like Willa Carroll's "Project Hazmatic" or Allain Daigle's "New Arctic," from TriQuarterly, or Jessie Kramer's "Instar" from Brink Issue 10, built using the tools and skillsets of a narrative filmmaker. On the other end there are video essays made by writers who may or may not have those skillsets, but who are choosing to combine analog and digital technologies, or perhaps learn them by making, like in Lenz's "I Hate the Pool," which develops a nostalgic tone, and a live sense of the story just-coming-together as the audience watches paper cut-outs move across the screen. You're so right that it's Lenz's soundscape pulling this technique together and clarifying the intention of that combined media. There's a kind of third category that I've been particularly challenged and instructed by, which I think of as a more conceptual expression of the video essay form in examples like Annelyse Gelman's "The Center" or Kelly Silvos's "Ars Poetica" from TriQuarterly, and Ryley O'Byrne's "one thing a thousand times" in Brink Issue 10. In these works, rather than using the video as a narrative tool or a strategy featuring stunning shots as a background to less narrative text, these writers use embedded tools like the live screen recording and face swap software to tune the viewer into the way the piece is also thinking about its own digital and video tools for expression by showing us how those tools might turn on themselves. In these examples I often feel like the video essay is watching me back. This last form, especially, helped remind me that the video essay is not necessarily something made by either a professional filmmaker or a writer messing around in iMovie. But, just like in writing, the art of a video essay can be the writer's performance of a set of found materials that, through that writer's curation and arrangement, express an insight, assert an idea, or develop a story that wasn't there before the arranger’s hand arrived. 

 



SARAH MINOR is a writer and interdisciplinary artist and the author of Bright Archive (Rescue Press) and Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press). She teaches writing at the University of Iowa.



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