Score for Memories and the Weather in Montenegro’ is a graphic score. The visual language of the score is based on “Saint Agatha Mother Redeemer,” an illustrated book of erasure poetry. The book is Saint-Michel’s effort to navigate the multi-temporalities of healing after trauma. What the piece and players are exploring is a Venn diagram of the perception of time: events as shifting lenses of history, revision, and prediction, or individually experienced as memory, cognitive dissonance, and hypervigilance (or anxious worry).
Each of the movements in the score correspond to a chapter in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s collection of essays. The movements are offered with little prescriptive instruction to the players other than to begin the first movement by checking the weather forecast in Montenegro.
1. Check the weather in Montenegro.
2. Try not to think about it.
3. Don’t recall the weather and then
4. Don’t question whether it would’ve changed anything.
5. Check your surroundings.
6. Check you’re still now.
7. Check you’re right when you are supposed to be.
8. Think about immortality.
9. Be only now.
10. Be
- Michèle Saint-Michel
Michèle Saint-Michel is an artist, filmmaker, and author. Designed to promote healing, her genre-bending works encourage healthy coping and recovery from difficult experiences. Often incorporating pressed botanicals, preserved insects, seeds and leaves, her works examine the overlap between the environmental, the cultural, and the emotional, creating a conditional and reactive multi-temporal space where new futures can be imagined.
She’s the author of two books, a coloring book, and three journals. After the heartfelt reception of Grief is an Origami Swan, Saint-Michel released the highly experimental poetry collection, Saint Agatha Mother Redeemer, and the accompanying Saint Agatha Mother Redeemer Coloring Book upon which her graphic score, “Score for Memories and the Weather in Montenegro” is based. She’s also released a set of journals based on the poetry of Walt Whitman.
When she isn’t creating art books, she is filming, tending her land art piece [poetry forest], and pressing flowers.
Saint-Michel’s artistic journey has taken her from the rolling hills and river bluffs of Missouri to the bustling streets of London. You can always find her work online at
michelesaintmichel.com, and anywhere books are sold.