A Southern Soul Journey

Michelle John, Monroe native, now resides in Austin, TX as a practicing art therapist

BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE | PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARTIN G MEYERS

Michelle John, a native of Monroe, is a mixed media artist currently living in Austin, Texas. She is also a licensed psychotherapist who never stays in one place for too long. She is not afraid of chance, change or circumstance. She believes in art, expression and is constantly discovering new paths, mediums and forms of healing. Michelle is an artist, in every sense of the word, and is consistently evolving her craft and, in a sense, her approach to life. In order to view the world in a, “different lens,” Michelle felt she had to get out of Monroe to learn about other cultures and see people up close. She went to River Oaks High School, and then attended Ole Miss receiving a BFA in visual communication. She traveled to Memphis where she freelanced and worked for clients like Frito Lay as a computer artist. While waiting tables at BB King’s Blues Club, she carded the man himself when he walked up to the door with his two big bodyguards. He wasn’t recognizable with his sunglasses on, but she still had a job the next day. After Memphis, she moved first to Shreveport to do PR for Russian Ministries then moved to Baton Rouge and worked for a printing house then a retail outlet – United Apparel Liquidators – that transferred her to New Orleans; while there, she sold artwork on Jackson Square and waited tables at the Cafe Masperós on Decatur and Palace Cafe before taking a job on The American Queen, a steamboat that traveled up and down the Mississippi River. She isn’t afraid of uprooting everything for the sake of a soul’s journey, quoting Tolkien,“Not all who wander are lost.”

Onto the next adventure, Michelle’s 1972 Super Beetle VW with a rubber band engine gave out, and she decided to “lay low for a minute” and conserve money. She lived for a month at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and moved to Santa Fe to wait tables at La Fonda. While in Santa Fe, she decided to get her Master’s in art therapy at Southwestern College. She found her passion. Art for therapy came naturally, but she didn’t realize she could get a degree doing it. At Ole Miss she had met a man creating, “huge spiky sculptures,” who said they were representations of his seizures. It was the first Michelle heard of creating art for healing therapy, and she decided to make it her life’s work. While in Santa Fe, Albuquerque and Gallup, New Mexico, Michelle had the opportunity to work with populations in an acute psychiatric hospital, several outpatient clinics, adoption agency, court-ordered family mediation, domestic violence shelter and children’s treatment centers.

After a very short move to Gallup, she finally made it to Alaska where she worked in the bush for 5 years. Flying in and out on a single-engine aircraft they called a, “puddle-jumper,” Michelle served as the only Masters level counselor for eight villages totaling 2500 people based out of McGrath, Alaska. Eventually, she was promoted to executive director. Alaska experiences daylight for 20 hours per day in summer, and nighttime for 20 hours per day in the winter. At 2 am one night, Michelle received a call that a wild animal was sniffing her bike. A bear cub was loose in the village and had sniffed out the juice from the dogfish Michelle had brought home for her cats. It was bright outside, but Michelle didn’t see the animal at first. He had climbed up a tree, so she hopped on a four-wheeler she used to get to work and found the bear cub up a tree no more than a car length away from her. This wasn’t the only animal encounter – far from it – she has lots of these experiences.  Moose were common in the bush; Michelle used trees to dodge them, insisting, “Moose don’t corner well.” Lynx, wolverines, bears (brown and black mostly) were everywhere. She could see wolves from the air on her flights in and out. She worked mainly with the Athabascans, a native Alaskan population, along with the Yupik Eskimo, Tlingit and other tribes. The villages were located along four main river systems: Kuskokwim, Takotna, Yukon and Innoko. The agency where she worked was called Four Rivers Counseling Services, a nonprofit, state-funded. Living in Alaska is expensive: a jar of peanut butter being $12, a frozen T Bone steak being $18, and a bag of Oreos ranging from $6-$8. She would go into Anchorage monthly to shop for food; it was cheaper to box it up and ship it. During that time Michelle was also flying out to Santa Barbara monthly working on her PhD in clinical psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute.

She was living in Anchorage working for Southcentral Foundation as a Clinical Supervisor for four years when her last summer in Alaska was grey and dark, and she couldn’t stomach the prospect of another dark winter. It was time to come back South. Michelle insists, “It all came down to the darkness.” She adds, you can take the girl outta the South but not the South outta the girl.” Dating in Alaska was tough, as Michelle puts it, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

Her friend, Jana Brockman, told her to come stay at her lake house in Austin, and Michelle landed a job within the month at The Art Institute of Austin. Michelle claims, “Austin was like coming home to the mothership.” She taught basic psychology classes: general psychology, career development and human sexuality. Michelle says, “I still run into my students all the time.”  She used to show at EAST (East Austin Studio Tour) and may show at WEST (West Austin Studio Tour) in the future.

Her garage in Austin has become her studio. She loves doing interior design, and she comes by it honest, as her mother was well-known for her interior design skill. Her mother, Sandra John, had her own design business and is well known by many of the families in the Monroe area. Michelle notes that her mother helping people with their environment is not unlike therapy.

In Alaska, Michelle found she liked quilting and layering of fabrics or fiber arts. She’s not choosy, when it comes to media used in her own works of art and art therapy. She’s known to melt crayons, incorporate pastels, acrylics, beadwork, feathers, watercolors, whatever strikes her fancy. She dabbles in lots of media, lets the materials speak for themselves.

In art therapy, for example when working with over-anxious kids or adults, she might use black and white coloring sheets to help mirror back, “containment and boundaries.” Watercolor is harder to contain, a more emotional medium, loose and unrestrained. Teens tend to harbor lots of self-judgment and prefer working with pencils and erasers, lots of sketching. They prefer a harder, more contained medium. Sometimes she just gives her clients a craft for a sense of accomplishment; it’s a step in the right direction.

Her home is filled with art. Her living room has a distinct botanical, undersea vibe with large undersea prints.  She has a bust of Poseidon she found in Memphis with her late mother. She has since begun beading it, using it as personal therapy in the grieving process. Michelle says “anything can become therapeutic, for example, playing golf – where you are definitely playing against yourself on those greens – you can work out a lot of emotion…like screaming at the ball – so getting frustrated with beads popping off a sculpture is also therapeutic.” Crafting becomes an, “outer manifestation of the inner process; it gives emotions expression.” A suncatcher collection she began in Alaska fills a sunny window. She makes voodoo dolls from found objects like: wood, symbols, jewelry pieces, feathers and beads. Voodoo dolls are a different cultural expression that may have gotten a bad rap. It can harness beautiful sentiments of, “prosperity, love and cleansing.” She claims one can, “empower anything with intention for good or protection, much like a cross around someone’s neck.” She dabbles in feng shui, paints rocks and crafts beaded eggs that she gives out to friends. Michelle is willing to try anything that makes her happy, that infuses the soul with a sense of knowing. She created a series of pastels based on New Orleans Mardi Gras krewes. She is getting more into abstracts, colors and metallics. She has done portraits of jazz musicians and Native Americans, moose paintings and trees. She has art in various stages of completion and is still working with Poseidon.

Moving forward, Michelle has a few books in her head that need to be written. She may go back to teaching, and is currently practicing somatic experiencing, using the body to facilitate recovery for anxiety, depression and trauma in her private practice out of her home. She is a member of the Jung Society which engages in dialogues like Soul and Food, using food as a means of understanding soul and what we “feed” ourselves. Michelle is also interested in how cinema informs the collective culture with movies like Wonder Woman and Black Panther and how these stories might be significant for our time. She hopes to one day return to Alaska to teach other counselors about incorporating the body in their trauma work – maybe in a conference format.  Michelle will continue to write, paint and counsel her clients always “barefoot in her living room” with her two Shih Tzu – Jacomo and Roux. She uses her creativity to enrich her own life and enhance the lives of the souls within her reach.