Nora Revenaugh

Nora Revenaugh

While Nora has worked as a lyricist, a bartender, a playwright, a janitor, a massage therapist, a musician, a 9-to-5-er at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a teaching artist for international storytelling non-profit The Moth, approaching creative work as a folk practice means that Nora defines a creative life less by bill-paying jobs than by the somatic transmission of care and information from human to human outside of traditional structures of power and influence. What if art is not the object hanging on a wall, but the alchemical transformations that happen within each viewer? Through this lens, the most resilient product of an artist is not the artifact of a song or a novel or a quilt, but the ways in which our work alters how others move through the world. Nora’s practice stems from this belief, allowing a reclamation of processes and mediums that have historically been elided or denigrated as primitive, feminine, and without cultural value. For Nora, this currently looks like gifting homemade candles and sharing garden bounty with neighbors, scribbling lyrics and melodies down between zoom calls, sewing clothes, waking up tired from fiddling in pubs too late on work nights, hosting artist residents and community concerts, managing chronic illness, working at sunrise on novels and essays that suffer from a lack of time and space to grow, and trying not to grieve for things left undone while hanging laundry to dry in the spring sunshine.