The ministry of making art in Appalachia

–by Final Girl

Sleep, My Brother

For miles, I had been searching for a canvas.

All I had seen on the morning drive through Pennsylvania was one tag on a highway bridge. I had noticed it because of the typewriter-style letters. The tag was Sleep. Strange, I thought. I remembered it. Sleep.

And soon it was almost evening in West Virginia, almost home, almost too late to do a piece. So I went for it, turned off the highway into the unknown. I just drove. I didn’t know where I was going. When I passed a little gravel turnoff with a sloppy grouping of concrete pylons, I thought: a decent canvas; if I don’t find anywhere else, I’ll turn back.

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