An essayist, printer and book artist, A. Kendra Greene has refined the art of the tome. A former writer in residence at the Dallas Museum of Art, Greene approaches every project she undertakes by crafting a tangible object designed to be as beautiful as it is illuminating.
The idea that books should be visually compelling as well as entertaining was one Greene refined at the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College in Chicago, where she studied book arts while earning her MFA in nonfiction. A later stint volunteering at the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History taught her how imagery can complement nonfiction text, just as a wall text in a museum helps explain the objects inside a dusty case.
“I’m interested in what museums hold on to,” Greene explains. “The tradition of science offers us a lot in approaching the essay — the careful giving of attention, trying to meet the world where it is and to make sense of it. My first book [2020’s The Museum of Whales You Will Never See] got me thinking about what nonfiction text might mean, and I started thinking about the old religious bestiaries.”
Just as moral lessons accompanied those medieval compendiums of animals and rocks, the 26 stories in Greene’s latest book, No Less Strange or Wonderful, are supported by illustrations that draw from natural history books, children’s stories, cabinets of curiosities — even her own medical scans — as the author’s “love letter to text and image.”
The design of No Less Strange is enchanting, but the essays remain a bit more down-to-earth, examining ordinary events in Greene’s life through a surrealistic lens. Greene recounts her role as a stylist for a giant sloth, attends a balloon twisters’ convention, meets the devil (twice!) and encounters Dallas’ best Scrooge impersonator at a hoity-toity holiday party.
Greene will discuss her “anthropology of how we are” at several events this spring, including the Nasher Sculpture Center on March 5, Interabang Books on March 14, and the Dallas Literary Festival on April 3.
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