Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object
Kathleen Rooney

Let's begins with a question you always ask of your Redivider interviewees. Of what does a typical day in the life of Kathleen Rooney consist?
If it’s a weekday, which it usually is, I will get up early and ride either the redline El or the pretty bike that I won during Mayor Daley’s Bike to Work Week from my neighborhood up in Edgewater downtown to the Loop. I will enter a tall, black, and glassy Federal Building designed by the great architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and go up very high in the elevators to the 38th floor. Then I will go into the office where I work, and I will work. I will spend time in between work-related tasks collaborating with my co-author Elisa Gabbert on poems or translations over email. After work, I will go back up to Edgewater, maybe go do some yoga, maybe cook something with my husband, hopefully do some writing, read some blogs, read some books and take care of business for Rose Metal Press, the publisher I help run with Abby Beckel.

How did you begin to work as an artists' model? Do you still do it?
The really detailed answer to this question is in the book, but briefly: I was living in DC at the time, finishing up my last year of undergrad, and I had had a decent part time job in an art gallery that abruptly came to an end. I needed to find another job quickly. A friend of mine who had been working with me at the gallery, and who had also learned that her job would be disappearing, came over for lunch and we sat there eating peanut butter sandwiches and paging through the classifieds of the City Paper. (Isn’t that strange? Looking for a job in the newspaper? This was just slightly before such sites as Craigslist became a Big Deal.) I saw this ad that said “BE A PART OF ART” calling for nude models at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Georgetown, and dared my friend to call and then she double-dared me back so I called them up right then and within just a few days I was standing in a studio taking my clothes off in front of 20 complete strangers.
At the moment, since I a now have a “real job” in the traditional 9-to-5 sense, I do not have a lot of time to work as an artists’ model anymore. It’s been a little over a year since the last time I posed, and I have to say that I really miss it.

When people find out that you work as an artists' model, how do they react? How do your friends and family feel about it?
I try not to make a big deal over that part of my life (I mean, aside from writing a book about it), particularly at my aforementioned day job for fear of hurting my or my employer’s credibility. That said, a lot of people think it’s cool, and a surprising number of them have either done it themselves or know someone who has. It’s like this secret community of individuals who have this rewarding, interesting, helpful job that most people outside of the arts are only vaguely aware exists. Other people think it’s weird or scary or even kind of inappropriate, but almost everyone wants to know a) how I got started, and b) what it’s like. Most of my friends are supportive, although a few of them have said that they think it might be one of those allegedly empowering, feminist jobs that is secretly oppressive and self-exploitive, but I think that these people do not really understand what the job entails.
As for my family, my middle sister is a professional photographer, and has worked with the nude herself, so she doesn’t bat an eyelash; she understands the long tradition of depicting the (frequently unclothed) human body in art as a way to address themes of beauty, mortality, mystery, sexuality, etc. My parents, on the other hand, find nude modeling rather risqué and impolite so, for the sake of family harmony, the subject has been tacitly placed on our list of Things We Simply Do Not Talk About.

Was it strange to be used as the raw material of someone else's creative process? Was this ever frustrating, or did it make it easier to understand the artists you with and for whom you worked?
At first, it was incredibly strange to be used as the raw material of someone else’s creative process, especially because I kept thinking how odd it is that for thousands of years, some people’s nude bodies have been used as the jumping off point for other people’s art. Then, like almost everything else, I got used to it.
Quite a few of the other artists’ models I either worked with or ran into at various art schools in DC and Boston told me they viewed themselves as collaborators more than raw material, and some of them even said that they felt almost equally as important as the painters or sculptors or photographers themselves. While I would never go so far as to say that—I remain convinced that, although art modeling certainly takes skill and imagination, it is much more difficult to make a painting or sculpture or photograph than it is to pose for one—I do see what they mean by feeling as though the artist-model relationship is in some sense a collaborative one. The relationship between an artist and his or her model is unlike any other relationship I can think of, and at its best it can be intimate and entertaining and satisfying. A bad model can wreck a class or session, whereas a good one can be a kind of partner or at least an encouragement. I think that because I am a writer myself, I was able to become friends with—and to achieve a rare kind of sympathy with—quite a few of the artists I posed for, especially the ones I worked with one-on-one in their private studios as opposed to in a big class full of lots of people.
Deciding to make a painting or to write a poem is a risky move; most of the time, the general population could not care less whether you do or do not do something creative. So I found it inspiring to work with these artists who in many cases were putting a lot on the line to live the kinds of lives they wanted and to create the kinds of things they wanted to create. I hope that some of them felt the same about working with me.

What are you working on these days?
These days, I am working on collaborative poetry and translations of the French poet Max Jacob with Elisa Gabbert. If you are so inclined (maybe you have an office job where you sometimes have to “look busy”?) can read about our process and outcomes on our blog, Even the Details Have Details.
I am also finishing up a collection of 12 linked personal essays called For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs which is due to be published in 2010, which sounds incredibly far away now, but probably isn’t actually. I am also taking lots of notes, doing lots of research, and making plans for what I hope will be my next big project: a novel. I have never written one, so it freaks me out a little just to type that. Besides actual writing projects, I am getting ready to do a bunch of readings this fall—many of them with Brandi Homan who is the author of the collection Hard Reds, as well as one of my editors—in support of my first solo poetry collection Oneiromance, published by Switchback Books.
Additionally, Rose Metal Press has its lineup set all the way through mid-2010, so Abby and I are working on getting these books into the world, including Tinderbox Lawn by Carol Guess, Color Plates by Adam Golaski, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction edited by Tara L. Masih, and The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry co-edited by Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek. Keep an eye out for them!