Season 1: The Chateau Season
Episode 21: Sam Moe, Visual Artist and Writer
In this episode, I interview Sam Moe, a visual artist and writer from Massachusetts who now lives in Huntsville, Alabama. Sam creates illustrations, paintings, and writes novels using a method called ‘braiding’ – something she was already doing intuitively before discovering the name for it. After reading The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas-Gonzalez about an indigenous Colombian basket weaver who wove her memoir together like weaving a basket, Sam realised ‘I do that but I don’t know what to call it’.
She takes three or more stories and alternates them like braids in hair. In her paintings this appears as three separate columns representing three stories, or alternating colour schemes every few centimetres; in her writing, she braids memory, trauma, visual imagery, and research. Her work draws heavily on gastronomy research and represents herself through hands and body, often with metaphorical elements like faces containing animals inside them.
Sam does extensive self-archival work, having kept 91 journals since age 12. She finds inspiration watching films about survivors of sexual violence and horror, and reading contemporary speculative memoir – a genre where people tell survivor stories visually or textually without using precise language. Key influences include Shea Hui Choa’s The Story Game, an experimental memoir written like a detective story interrogating how she got PTSD. Sam has a book called Cicatrizing the Daughters that’s recently been published and three more books planned for 2026.
Her creative routine is remarkably disciplined – she writes and makes art every single day, though art is more triggering so she does less of it. At residencies she writes around 10,000 words daily; at school she completes three poems or one short story or essay in one sitting (3,000-4,000 words), collecting and editing these for submission to literary magazines that eventually become books. On weekends she writes around 8,000 words, needing to complete entire pieces or she gets nervous.
She has a ritual of transporting all her materials – about 30 books – to whatever space she’s working in, setting everything up, then cleaning it all away so nobody touches it, which she attributes to not being able to make art safely growing up. These materials also serve as touchstones, objects that call forth theory and scholarly connections. Her advice to beginning creatives is to do whatever they want and write recklessly without anyone telling them what to do. She wrote 10 chaotic, messy novels before entering an MFA programme, which she found stifling and intense, stopping her writing for about 10 years.
Sam emphasises writing for yourself rather than for the market or trends, noting that literary agents want work that’s uniquely you and different, and that prizes like the Man Booker celebrate extreme uniqueness – so being yourself is actually what’s applauded, even though the literary community can feel intense.
Connect with Sam Moe
Sam’s latest book: Cicatrizing The Daughters
