Blum Projects Hits the Road

Throughout our childhood, our mom represented the epitome of a loving, care-taking, and generous mother. And yet, when we were 8 and 10 years old, she drove hours from our home in Eugene, Oregon, to a reservoir in desolate eastern Oregon, filled a backpack with rocks, and walked into the water. We’ve spent our lives since attempting to compose a narrative of our mother’s life and suicide. We’ve stitched together the fragments of our own memories with the impressions left by others throughout the years. And still, we live with infinitely more questions than answers. Our mom left no note, she had never attempted suicide before, we didn’t know that she was depressed, and we grew up having very little contact with any of her family members. As we get older, the desire to come to a greater understanding of her story only grows.

This summer, we are traveling across and around the United States in order to collect stories, artifacts, and perceptions of our mom, Linda May Blum Bovee. We will meet and record conversations with her family, friends, acquaintances-- anyone who saw a piece of her-- with the intention of learning more about her relationships, dreams, and choices. We aim to visit each of the places that she ever lived, and we are curious to do some real investigation into aspects of her life that we never knew about. To make the trip, we’re converting a used minivan into a camper-style van to live in for two months as we circumvent the country. We will start in Portland, Oregon (where we both live now), head south towards Albuquerque (where our parents lived before we were born), then east across Texas towards Florida, north towards Maine, and then west back towards Seattle (where Linda gave birth to us 27 and 29 years ago).

Ultimately, our aim is to co-produce a multimedia composition that documents our journey, artistic processes, and the ‘artifacts’ of our mother’s life that we uncover along the way. We will integrate interviews into an audio narrative that explores the biographical details of our mother’s life and our own journey for understanding. We are inspired by serial podcasts with a narrative form (think S-Town) and hybrid-form writing that incorporates memoir, theory, and poetry (especially Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder). The exact nature of the product will develop over the course of the journey, but if you are a fan of cross-genre audio-visual projects, you can imagine where we are headed.

You can follow our work on www.blumprojects.com 



Campaign photo by Eli Espinoza Goodman:  Etsy Shop