The Unsettled Career of Tami Spry

I’ve been in and out of antique stores lately, on and off the beaten path, looking for a bookcase. Ideally, the bookcase would be hand-cut by some unknown artisan’s hands, hands lined with well-earned calices. It would be, theoretically, framed with carbon fiber nails, and expertly crafted with aluminum oxide and garnet sandpaper. There are material considerations, too. No balsa, no compressed particle board. I need cocobolo, Dalbergia, or ziricote, mixed and meshed with locks of well-theorized hair, jazz notes, and stones from the shore of Lake Superior, all vibrating together, intra-acting. It needs to be an agentic assemblage. But the materials can’t rest. They need to be steadfast, but they need to remain unsettled (Spry, 2016a).

I’m looking for a piece that has old scars, like a storied scratch or dent, preferably the work of an exhausted mover who took on a second job to make ends meet, who maybe late in the day, on her second shift, didn’t judge the angle of a doorframe quite right, and bumped into the trim. An artifact of wild, contained boredom is fine, too, the life-record of a semi-feral child who etched their initials into the underside of a shelf, a feat that went unnoticed for a century or so. Or maybe a well-placed cat scratch, the result of a tactical decision to sharpen-up, a readiness to climb a wall or a tree, or snatch a mouse from the garden. The cat scratch is preferable as it shows material evidence of significant otherness, which is important, but I’ll settle for the former. I need something that can hold the weight of it all. I need a constant reminder that to do the type of work we do, the work of performance, we must put our bodies into it. Right in it (Spry, 2021b).

It needs to be worthy of the words that rest on it. It needs to be a cosmic, dynamic, material entanglement of note. You see, the books I will place on this shelf hold secrets to human and non-human understanding, and the interactions between. They demonstrate that materiality must do metaphoric work, and metaphors must do material work, you know, like a “matterphor” (Spry, 2023). I will be lining this shelf with words written by someone who, without a doubt, put their body into them, all the way in them. These words contain the nexus of our shared “embodied methodological practice” (Spry, 2001). I need something that can hold the weight of it all.

Allow me to digress for a moment. I was reading Donna Haraway (2016) the other day, as we tend to do, and she was making another “critical and joyful fuss” about things, before urging her readers toward something called “tentacular thinking” (Haraway, 2016, p. 31). She explains that like the invertebrates, humans are tentacular creatures. And we are. We are finger-y, toey, phalange-y, arm-y, leggy creatures, co-dependent, co-bodies that contain literal multitudes. So, as she does, Haraway (2016) traces the life of a spider, the Pimoa cthulhu that lives under stumps in redwood forests to remind us that “nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere, nothing is connected to everything, everything is connected to something” (p. 31). She takes us on a journey into the entomological origins of tentacular creatures, those creatures that have their tentacles in things, spinning webs, borrowing in the dirt, building bookshelves, making “attachments and detachments” (Haraway, 2016, p. 31). From there, she reminds us that “tentacle” comes from the Latin tentaculum, meaning “feeler,” and tentare, meaning “to feel” and “to try” (Haraway, 2016, p. 31).

What is the performance of Tami Spry if not tentacular? Doesn’t she touch us and grip us and move us to feel and to try, in relation to Others and others? Not everywhere and everyone, but some well-theorized somewhere and someone. A feeler, a tentacle to grip and grab and move and embrace. To know through the body.

To feel. What many, in their own ways, have explained to mean the process of tuning in to the “visceral intensities” that move us, or as Tami puts it, articulating those “affectively heuristic moments” (Spry, 2016c, p. 91). Not everywhere, but somewhere. Not connected to everything, but always connected to something.

To try. To try your hand. What performance has been saying forever, try it before you say it’s simple; before you say it’s not research. Try it through praxis. But when you try it, put your body into it. All the way in it. Try to be the rock. Try to rewrite histories of the intersections of multiple types of material bodies on paper and physical stages (Spry, 2016b).

I have always viewed Tami as a scholar who, like Haraway (1998), “cannot not think through metaphor” (p. 86), or more precisely for Tami, “matterphor” (Spry, 2023). Matterphor is an ontological wormhole, it’s a multi-directional interconnected slip and slide on a summer day, where Tami slips and slides between the material, the linguistic, and the affective (Spry, 2021a); between the epistemic and the aesthetic (Spry, 2009); between that “auto” and the “ethno” and the “graphy” (Spry, 2001); between being self and being other (Spry, 2006); between jazz and blues (Spry, 2010a), entanglement and rapture (Spry, 2010b), skin and bone (Spry, 2018); between being here and being there (Spry, 2001); between a girl and her horse (Spry, 2012); between Goldilocks’s tentacular toes resting upon a box and tentacular well-theorized dreadlocks (Spry, 2014); between poetry and theory (Spry, 2001); between self and other (Spry, 2016c), victim and survivor (Spry, 1995), possibilities and positionalities (Spry et al., 2014); between the epistemological and the ontological (Spry, 2001); between beauties, barmaids, and ballbusters (Spry, 2015, 2018); between stars and stones (Spry, 2020), and on and on and everything else.

There’s this ritualized phenomenon that comes with to being celebrated, particularly in a forum like this. It’s that evocation of celebratory language, through ritual, of marking and mapping legacy that is coming to an end. There’s the invocation of words like “retirement” and the celebratory speeches that mark a distinguished career. For some, this means you stop spinning webs. You retreat to your place in the stump of the redwood tree to rest. For others, like Tami, it’s an opportunity to do more, to reach into unseen, under-theorized, and unsettled spaces and places, and groves and nodes, and notches and crevices, and you dig in. And she has already begun. “We” are so unbelievably lucky and privileged to have the opportunity to live our scholarly and artistic lives connected to the brilliant, internationally renowned writer and performer, Tami Spry (Spry, 2017).

So, I need a bookcase that captures the work of a scholar, artist, performer, practitioner, wife, mother, friend, leader, desert dweller, and confidant. I need something worthy of words that sprout frost flowers on your irises when you read them.