See a photo of Megan, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Q&A with Megan Hicks, Question 5:

Q: On your Web site, you talk about achieving all three of your childhood 
ambitions, noting that you are “telling stories around the world, writing a
lot of the stories I tell and, when I’m not performing, making art that
 people want to play with.” How do you balance your story-performance and
 writing lives with your creative pursuits with origami and crafts with found
 objects? Is the craft side more of a hobby, or do you feel you give all
 three areas (performer, writer, toymaker) equal time? To what extent does
 your art contain elements of storytelling?

A: I don’t sell much art. Barely enough to cover studio rent. It doesn’t put groceries on the table, but it feeds me, and if I live too much in my head, if I spend too much time stringing words and ideas together, I start to feel out of kilter. The act of making — inventing, figuring out how to assemble something, composing with color, finding a creative re-use for commonplace objects — puts my soul at rest. Order out of chaos. I create faces and limbs and torsos — call them dolls, call them icons, call them ancestors — and they all have a story, whether I know what it is or not (see a piece pictured at right).

I don’t feel as though I am particularly creative with origami. I incorporate simple folds into some of my storytelling programs in order to illustrate short little stories I’ve learned and created expressly for this purpose (they don’t stand by themselves), and I teach origami workshops. I’d say my persona as Origami Swami is responsible for about a third of my income. I don’t invent new figures, I don’t add to the knowledge base or discover new ways to fold paper. But I am perpetually in awe over the endless possibilities latent in something as ubiquitous, as simple, as pedestrian as a square of paper.

Balance? I tend to binge on one activity or another. Lately I seem to be writing more than anything else.