Meet Lorette C. Luzajic

We were lucky to catch up with Lorette C. Luzajic recently and have shared our conversation below.

Lorette C. , we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?

A sense of purpose goes a long way toward navigating the ups and downs and the obstacles that one encounters along the way. When you believe that what you are doing is important or has meaning, faltering and failing only give you more incentive to figure it all out. For whatever reason, when it comes to growing as a writer and artist, I feel I “have to” or “have no choice” and so nothing can really stand in the way of that for long. It has been a very rocky road, like snakes and ladders, or the Pilgrim’s Progress, so sometimes things have felt impossible. But when you know inside who you are, you have to find your way there. Self-esteem and confidence can only come through accomplishment and learning. You develop confidence through trying, failing, picking yourself up, trying something else, trying something a different way, and building on all of those stops and starts. Your confidence grows when you connect with others who see value in your art or who resonate with your poetry. When you attempt to learn something new, and work at it until you’ve created something, your confidence grows again. Accepting yourself and taking responsibility for your choices and path is another way to grow in confidence. You stop comparing yourself to others, and start comparing yourself to how you were. You start working at your weaknesses and facing them so you can improve them. You start seeing progress because you are looking at your own life and trajectory.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

As far back as I can remember, I understood that my life had to revolve around art and poetry. I can’t explain the reasons they were so central to me from the get-go, but they were. The world of creativity feels enchanted to me, beautiful and magical and meaningful and symbolic. I write poetry, short stories, and essays. I studied journalism in hopes of taking a more practical route to writing but ended up with an even more expansive creativity. I started to create collage mixed media art and write about art in different ways. In 2015, I founded a literary journal, The Ekphrastic Review, for poetry inspired by art. It reflected the intersection of the worlds I was passionate about. I continued growing my visual art career, creating large-scale urban abstract collage paintings and quirky smaller works with pop art, surrealism and street art sensibilities. I continued writing small stories, mostly about art. I started The Ekphrastic Academy to share art history and creative writing ideas with writers and have taught on a wide variety of themes and subjects in art. I am doing everything I want to do: I love sharing art with others. It’s like a magic portal that takes you into the whole world, into the past and future. You are in communication with people from other times and other places. Everything I do an an artist, writer, and educator is inspired by my love for the stories behind art.

Today I am the editor of two literary arts journals, The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry. I teach art and writing zooms and full length courses, through The Ekphrastic Academy and through other organizations. I write short stories and my most recent book is Disgust, a collection of 72 ekphrastic stories (that is, inspired by visual art) on the subject of illness and the turmoil of the body. I write essays about art. And I create art and exhibit it anywhere I can, working on marketing, shows, and online sales as I go. My visual art has won a major award, been featured in an ad campaign, been featured on a billboard in New Orleans, been featured on several textbook covers, and much more. I have collectors in forty countries so far.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

My tagline is “eclectic curiosity” because I want to know everything: human psychology, how pigments evolved, the symbolism of jewelry in various cultures, world poetry. Everything interests me. It is very difficult to focus when you are drawn in every direction. It is very difficult for me to “narrow things down.” Just a few of my areas of interest include the story of ballet, ancient civilizations, West Coast indigenous art, folklore and mythology, wines of the world, Tarot symbolism and archetypes, children’s books, the blues, masks, 80s nostalgia, Mexico, archeology, nomad jewelry, Canadian poetry, and more…it is exhausting and exhilarating. How can you specialize and grow when this is who you are? How can you turn your unique attributes and interests into your superpower? I had to find a way. Art history is my overarching passion because it encompasses all of this and more. Art is about everything. It is the story of individual people and whole cultures, and all the stories inside of those: history, faith, conflict, nature, mythology, travel, fairy tales, beliefs, clothing, and more. Writing about art gives me a way in to all of my curiosities. My artwork is collage and mixed media based, and the gorgeous chaos I spill on the canvas is everything I have consumed, placed into the wood chipper of my psyche, to make its random way back onto the canvas. I have learned that your weaknesses and idiosyncrasies are your gifts. You have to corral them and wrestle with them and work with them to find a way. You can turn the very thing that holds you back into the thing that propels you forward.

How would you spend the next decade if you somehow knew that it was your last?

Every day of my life has to include writing, creating art, studying art, reading literature, and whenever possible, travelling near or far to look at more art and read more poetry. That is how I will spend every day of the rest of my life, whether it is ten years or forty or two.

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