Interview with Anne Anthony

Anne Anthony is…

Anne Anthony is a writer and a digital collage artist living in North Carolina. Her digital collage, Mother Follows, appeared in the December 2022 issue of Anti-Heroin Chic. Her photograph, Following Rules, placed third in the 2024 Carolina Woman’s Magazine’s photograph contest. More recently, she exhibited two digital collages—Surrender and The Deep End—in the Orange County Arts Commission Coalesce Art: A Collaboration of Poetry and Visual Art held in January 2024. Her digital collage, Forest Hawk, was displayed in the 2024 North Carolina Botanical Gardens’ Saving Our Savannas Community Art exhibit. Her photograph, Lonesome, was selected by phoebe literary journal for 2025 Best of the Net. She currently works as Art Director for the online literary magazine, Does It Have Pockets. Check out her Beguiling writing prompt featured by Cleaver Magazine

  • Feels like years and years, actually. I’ve taken photographs of odd things —cloud configurations, knots in trees, or grease spots in a parking garage because I could visualize something else within them. In recent years, I’ve been turning these photographs into giants or gentle beasts living amongst us. I’m nearly certain if I’d been born centuries ago, I’d be considered a witch or worse yet, totally mad. Who sees their dead mother’s face staring out from a knot in a tree or an eyeball in the curve of a river?

  • For about a year now, I’ve been creating graphic representations of everything the online literary journal, Does It Have Pockets, publishes so working with other people’s stories isn’t new to me. I typically assess the vibe, the overall feel that I'm left with after reading a piece several times. The artwork isn’t intended to replicate the story but to uncover elements within that reflect its mood.

  •  I typically start with a single image, a photograph or a photograph of one of my paintings and apply layers of other images over or under it using the software Smart Photo Editor, and play with filters to alter its lighting or color or texture. The choices made, the combinations used, and the thump in my heart when I recognize it’s complete is the ‘art’ of my process. Oh, how I love that thump. 


Do you have themes and motifs that recur in your work?

Excellent question. (Isn’t that an answer everyone uses to stall?)

I know in my writing, I find the experience of growing up in a large Catholic family where religious practices were revered pops up now and then. Also, the feeling of standing on the outside looking in, feeling apart from the rest, and the loneliness it brings creep into both my visual and written art. I’ve also recently noticed how much I lean into the images of eyes. Windows of the souls, perhaps?

  • Digital collage, I suppose. I’ve found creating them to be a kind of meditation. The piecing together of one image with another blocks out the noise of the world. I get lost in the dream of it in the same way I get lost in the depths of writing a story.

  • Take a look at my portfolio of published or exhibited artwork. Or follow me on Instagram @anchalastudio where I post works in progress or other random work. You’ll find the 100-day journey of my two protagonists, Mary Pat and Katherine, sisters forced back together after drifting apart. It’s my work-in-progress, an as yet untitled, flash novella. Feel free to browse the Does It Have Pockets’ Instagram account which includes artwork from every issue.