You found your way to flowers through an unconventional route, with a background in art and literature - can you share how these parts of your creative identity inform your floral work? 

I am/was a writer first - I got my BA at the University of Virginia in English Language and Literature, took some time off and away, and then a few years later I got my MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English Literature from McNeese State, down in the southwestern corner of Louisiana. I taught for a few years full time at universities before finding my way to full-time work as a floral designer. I grew up in Northern Virginia where I feel like the culture was, study in order to master one thing, do one thing your whole life, retire, and die, so I thought for a long time I would just be a Writer and Teacher until the End. But it didn’t work out that way. I still teach, writing and floral design, from time to time, which is important to me. I also have a second book I’m working on, some of which deals with my writing and teaching and how I got into working with flowers, so maybe this is a good place to push this not-yet-in-existence book? I hope to always be exploring all of my interests and never stifling one in order to pursue another, if possible. I know life is short, but it is also long, and I think you can stretch it out a bit by always pushing towards something.

Though FIELD is based in Richmond, you have deep roots in New Orleans, Louisiana. What are some of your favorite things about this place? Are there any specific flowers or plants or other vegetation that you miss working with?  

I really miss the lushness. It’s a place where flora and vegetation are characters, city dwellers as much as I was. Banana plants shoot out of sidewalks, jasmine vines sprawl out over chain link fences. The growing season is longer there, too, so you can buy local flowers for a longer stretch of time, which feels more sustainable. I remember, even before I got into floral design, finding a dried palm frond on the sidewalk and bringing it home. I placed it on my mantle, where it sat until I went to grad school a couple years later. Nature feels more present and forceful down there, something I appreciate. Whether it’s a hurricane or jasmine vine, nature has a way of showing you that you’re just a passenger on this journey and as much as you want to enforce some path or plan, you really have to just hold on, try and have a meaningful, good time, and wait for the jasmine to take over every spring.

You’ve described the ethos of FIELD to be based on the Japanese concept of mono no aware - a beautiful idea that honors the pathos or empathy of things, especially through ephemerality and impermanence. Are there connections to this idea that can be drawn from your personal life and larger creative practice? 

In my mid-twenties, I wrote a column for the Rumpus that explored death and loss in various forms - I once toured the Museum of Death, I interviewed a death doula, a woman who designed eco-friendly, art-caskets, a mortician-in-training, the proprietor of DiedInHouse.com, a site that allows you to plug in your address and get a report that reveals how many deaths occurred at your home - so I suppose I’ve had an interest in exploring this subject for a long time. Then I had my novel debut on February 18, 2020, which we may all remember as the last couple weeks before our society locked down. That experience - part of my book tour got cancelled, I had to do virtual readings instead of in-person ones, etc. - made me sort of refocus, as that time likely did for all of us. It sort of forced me to focus more on the actual art-making, less on the final product, which publishing obviously prioritizes, to stay more in the present. After all, if you have spent your life working towards all these goals and have a big project in the works that suddenly halts, what else is there but the present moment, the making the coffee, the scrawling out messy sentences on the digital page? I also think that perhaps some culture can be inherited even if you didn’t grow up in a place. My mother is half Japanese, was born in Tokyo, but she was adopted from there when she was an infant. So my brother and I never got Japanese culture instilled in us by being immersed in it, but perhaps, and I say this with a fair degree of facetiousness, aspects of culture can be inherited genetically, like this Japanese concept of mono no aware, because a comfortability with talking about and living with death certainly does not feel like an American value, it feels Japanese, like where my mother and her family is from.

Flowers are chosen to mark occasions in life - celebratory and otherwise. In your piece for The Oxford American, you share your stance on funeral flowers and whether or not they should make a “statement.” Have you ever imagined what the arrangements at your (hypothetical) funeral would be like?

A great question - and not as hypothetical as inevitable (!) - and one I ‘ve never really thought about. I think I’d likely want to be cremated, and so I think the idea of having my funeral be some sort of experiential commemoration where attendees walk to some wildflower field and sprinkle my ashes there would be fitting, sweet, nice. And people must not wear black, unless they want to wear a dramatic black lace veil and the Row sheath dress. I appreciate a little visual drama and want people to express their feelings through their clothes, even at a funeral, especially at a funeral.

What’s a dream project, plan, or wish you have in mind for the future of FIELD? 

I want FIELD to be malleable. As I’ve already discussed, my life has not been one thing, and I want the brand to be able to transform as I do. It’s a floral design brand and brick and mortar, but who knows what it will look like in the future. More specifically and less evasively, I would love to get FIELD into doing more production work for film and TV - I’d love to be the person that makes a floral arrangement that sits in Uncle Baby Billy’s dressing room on The Righteous Gemstones. I’d love to design some conceptual floral installations for a Baz Luhrmann film. I’m not sure most people notice the floral designs in a TV show, but I’m looking. I’m noticing. I’m noticing the one drooping daffodil in an arrangement on Shiv and Tom’s kitchen counter on Succession. I’m noticing.