Art on the Pamlico

Just before the holidays, I took a ride back east to Washington, NC on the Pamlico River, where loyal friends welcomed me in spite of my absconding, a few years ago, to the Piedmont.  Though I miss the people I was most fond of there, this is home, no doubt about it.  I'd said that about Washington, too, for 18 years, but life then was life then.  Turning corners, whether slowly or suddenly come upon, means resettling and reliving anew.  I think it was Lee Smith who once, wryly I'd guess, called it The Geographical Cure, but in this case I was returning to old ground,  and, fate directing, fell into a locus of both new and old friendship and closer family.  I've made myself at home in all the places I've lived, but you know it's the real one when the ground remembers your name.

The Coffee Caboose

But back to my Washington sojourn.  In two days, I managed quite a lot of visiting:  I rolled into town and stopped at Mary Ann's Coffee Caboose (ever the Washington history keeper, she's also begun a radio station and with her family opened her beautifully refurbished barn as an Airbnb...she calls it The Sleeper Car).

The Caboose was crowded that chilly morning, so it was easy to pick up some neighborhood gossip.  After she got over the shock of seeing me there ("Are you moving back?" somebody asked), Mary Ann and I talked in spurts as she dashed from coffee order to coffee order.

I went on to lunch with Denise at the Meeting Place--nomen adque omen for Washington--to catch up with her doings.

Out in the country, Johanna and Leonard kindly put me up for the night and were nice enough to invite friends Joe and Luci for one of their signature dinners, so I could see them, too.  (Joe and Luci presented me with a carpet...a thick, pretty carpet just in time for winter, bless them.)  The next day, Kadra and I met for coffee/tea at Rachel K's, where I picked up lunch for Libby (who'd broken her collar bone...don't ask how). Johanna and Leonard joined Libby and me, too--fortunately I'd brought along a few of Rachel's baked temptations.

Rachel K's

It sounds like a lot of eating and drinking, which is certainly part of our history together in Washington, but in between I walked about to see who was around, what's new and what's abiding, and drove home again thinking about that river town and its complicated, head-shaking ways.

I mention all these names and places because a town like Washington is most open to its charms when you're in the company of friends.  Whether or not you've once made a home there, its most important landmarks--even The River itself--are the personal ones.  If you walk along the river walk or the main streets, you pass houses and shops you know somebody in. Lunch at Libby's, with the river behind us, coffee at Mary Ann's, with the river in front of us, historic buildings that become and become and become over the eras...it's still the people one finds there that give meaning to a site.   I don't think I'm saying this quite accurately enough.  But the thought, anyway, is preface to the fact that Washington is a town where even appreciating art is a matter of artists who are friends, present and past.  Their history as artists becomes part of your own.

Irene Glover (l)  Linda Boyer (r)

 As Denise and I wandered through Main Street's galleries after our lunch, one after another illuminated the resolve, the reinvention, that making art in small places entails. Washington is a town of just about 10,000, a figure that has stayed within a thousand of that for at least a century.  People come and go, and sometimes come back again, bringing to the river their talents of all sorts.  For a small town, it has an awfully high number of people who work as artists.

I thought you'd like to meet some of my favorites.  Most of them show work in the co-ops, shops and restaurants along Main Street, as well as online, but there are wonderful artists who practice just for themselves.

Pamela Zimmerman

At our November show, I turned around to see Pamela Zimmerman and Katie Lake in the doorway. They'd dropped in on their way back from a pre-convention meeting of the NC Basketmakers Association (Katie Lake is a master organizer of just about anything, and Pamela has networked all sorts of weaving groups into being). The way Pamela Zimmerman weaves is difficult to imagine by one like me, so finger-clumsy.  Weaving began for her more than two decades ago, out in woodlands where she was a forest ranger, raising children, collecting pine straw and doing something with it.  Her talented fingers soon figured out what natural materials could become. She made not only baskets of the sort we mortals use every day, but others that entwine fascinating oddities in them...clay figures, moon-like faces, beads.  Each, and all together, they are the fantasy of a mind who can transcend the ordinary.

Libby Behr

You've already seen Libby Behr's stained glass, in a piece she made for me sixteen years ago, which I've got hanging in my front window.  She's done lots of beautiful art since then (I own a few of those, too), but this, for many reasons, will always be the one I point to.  I love the brilliance of the colors in light--she learned color, she says, from early trips to Mexico she took with her husband--the carefully chosen textures, the play of river and sky and birds.  Actually, Libby had begun with a photo I gave her when I commissioned it, but, as artists do, she made it her own.

Carolyn Sleeper

Carolyn and Danny Sleeper came to Washington from Norfolk about fifteen years ago, where she taught art in the schools, and set up shop behind the house they have shared since with Carolyn's mother.  Over the years, their Slatestone Road studio has grown to accommodate not only clay works, firing, and storage room, but class space, as well. (Carolyn has loyal students, for good reason...she's an exacting, enthusiastic and generous mentor).  Her chickens greet every arrival down the drive, and sometimes serve as models for her lighthearted but practical pottery.

At the Riverwalk Gallery this visit, Danny was manning the desk while Carolyn tried to catch up on her holiday showings back at the studio, so Danny took me on tour of the new art, and later I found Carolyn at home. The box above is one of her new ones...I couldn't resist those red hens pecking perkily atop the cleverly fitted lid.  But even moreso, I had to bring home some of Carolyn's genius, not only for its witty style, but for its technical perfection.  (For those of you who aren't potters, trust my permanently neophyte hands:  it takes exactness to make the cover on a fired, glazed, fired again clay box fit.) 

Alan Mobley

Alan Mobley was one of her students who learned to do just that and more, by spending hours of concentrated practice at the wheel, while the rest of us chatted and rolled slabs into trays and vessels. This classic of his is one of my most treasured because I watched him turn pot after pot, burning those elegant bamboo leaves into them just for his own pleasure and challenge, and was so touched when this one became my going-away present.

Alice Stalllings

 

Alice Stallings, who, like Libby and Carolyn, shows at the Riverwalk, finally got to study art after her five children left for school, taking classes a few at a time until she began to work in paints, collage, printmaking and fabric dyeing.  Over the years, her art has become as varied as her many interests; her corner at the Riverwalk seems Renaissance-like, all of those media so well-represented.  And yet all of them are Alice:  bright, clear shades splashed into figures that come straight from the imagination, bold lines, soft lines, and a sense of knowing where she's been and what matters.

Ah.  John Groesser (also at the Riverwalk), who may be surprised at my including him here, though if he and Dodi, also a wonderful painter, think about it, they'll realize I've so enjoyed both of them and their art.  John and Dodi are affectionate, sweet friends and they bring those qualities into the way they see and render the landscapes and architecture they find vibrant spirit in.

John Groesser

John's art, in particular, travels.  His pieces seem to come as comfortably from plein air as they do from his studio, and glow from that affection he finds for them near and far.  Working from memory as I am more wont to do, I wish I had his patience for being able to see at a moment the value of the place he's in and bringing it almost immediately to light on canvas.  Besides, I love his sense of just the right blue in one shade or another carried from painting to painting.

Doris Schneider

Sue Beck

Up the block from Riverwalk, in the brick corner storefront everyone always remembers as the former, famous, infamous Curiosity Shoppe, is the Lemonade Gallery, opened a couple of years ago by five artists abruptly turned out of their former space.  Doris Schneider and Sue Beck are two of them for whose talents I have only amazement.

When I stopped in this time, Doris and Sue were luckily there to fill me in on their new things.  Sue's gleaming, high-style jewelry and Doris' fantastical masks, beads, and paintings had me walking back and forth from the front desk where Sue's hands were busy allying precious metal to precious stone, to the middle gallery where I picked one of Doris' peacock masks off the wall to take home.  I knew exactly where it should hang. Besides being artists, Doris and Sue have something significant in common:  they're good handcrafters in more functional ways: both builders and adventurers on land and sea, both talented in widely different media.

Doris, also a writer (and this year the coordinator for the Pamlico Writers Conference in March, which I'll write about another time; I'm doing one of the workshops), tells me she has a new book in the making, different, she claims, from this last one which, though fiction as well, dips into the autobiographical, as did her first.

Well.  There's such a fine line between who we are and where we come from, and the fine arts we practice.  We can't write or paint (or pot or solder or cut stone or weave) what we aren't.  I think, knowing that, that it's one of the most valuable things about having artists as friends.  We admire their work, yes, and through it or because of it come to understand their lives.  (Or vice versa.)  And both their art and their lives teach us, sometimes keep us going, one way or another.

Meredith Loughlin

That's certainly true of younger artists Neil and Meredith Loughlin who graduated from art school and promptly leaped into building the Lone Leaf Gallery. Theirs is home to younger and edgier artists and crafts people mostly, often local, often on the cusp of becoming.  No one needs guess why they have my admiration; both photographers, they have used their network of fellow students, teachers, and Washington connections, as well as their youth, to expand their vision of what art can become, and to show us what a gallery can mean to a community.  Unlocked from singular focus on their own media, they find they have hands for more than what's behind the camera...a talent for choosing others' arts and other arts that matter, for framing, photo restoration, for production work.  And not least for keeping the bar of Washington art just a little higher.

Neil Loughlin

In fact, what all these artists-friends have in common...and in a town like Washington, that's key...is that they not only create art, but create places to show, too.  It's necessary and beyond admirable ...sometimes heroic.

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And speaking of heroes, the annual Friends of the Brown Library Book Sale at the Washington Civic Center is one not to miss if you're in the vicinity...or even if you're not.  People come from miles to score great books, media and even tote bags to carry the finds.  It's the best used book sale in the region, and maybe beyond (and the best organized, too...take it from me).

                                                       For more information about the Friends and all they do for Brown, go to:  www.http://friendsofbrownlibrary.blogspot.com/

January 19         Members' Night  5:30 - 8:30 pm (Psst!  You can join at the door for $15.)
January 20-21    Public Sale           9:00am - 5:00 pm
January 22         Books by the Bag!  12:00 - 3:00pm

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2017 Pamlico Writers Conference asks the question:  "Traditional Publishing...Still an Option?"
A Friday night reception and a full day Saturday conference will be held in the Turnage Theater.

For more information, go to https://pamlicowritersgroup.wildapricot.org/event-2260134

A New Year

This time of year thou mayest in me behold...Order.   As if the first day of the new year clanged its bells, Organize!  Organize!, I begin routing, clearing, ordering and re-ordering, until I can't glance into a far corner of the least used closet without digging out the old and re-settling the new.  I wonder at the impulse, for that's what it is; otherwise, you could never call me obsessive about such house- and grounds-keeping, except for January.

It's true I'm a Capricorn; so the executive branch of my sign naturally comes out strongest now.  But it's also winter, time for all of nature to dig down, root in, and hide from sight, while it nourishes itself for the flowering to come three months hence.  Likewise, I, holing up inside in the chilly weather (a lot of dreary days this week helped), find endless chores left undone since last January. This year, I began by intending to clean up my desk, and set to work shuffling through accounts, balancing (well, I can dream) this year's budget, sorting receipts for tax season, and then attacking the files themselves to find a better way.  

a filing system?

That meant pulling everything out of closets and cabinets.  Moving room by room, an infection of efficiency burning through me, I entered each space, thinking of it as new territory to conquer.  I moved dishes, books, rugs, furniture, shelves (in the process uncovering hidden stashes of dust and a few spiders I thanked for their service and swept out the back steps, Dickinson-style); I dispatched, each to its separate doom, pencil stubs, an Uno game with cards missing, dried paint, graying plastic ware, burnt baking pans, belts I haven't worn since the 70's, and notes for appointments I may or may not have made back when.  

a clean cabinet

In yesterday's 60 degrees my energies took a turn outdoors.  I meant only to bring in two extra chairs for a dinner party I'm having, and found myself attacking the storage shed itself, then the cluttered area next to the shed, then the ivy patch beyond that, pulling out junk and raking leaves and gathering fallen limbs for collection.  In this new order I'd created, I walked back and forth like a surveyor, planning a small but significant expansion of the parking area, a neatening of the trash barrel cluster, and a new garden around the stump of the sugar maple cut down last spring.  And all of that would have been done by now if only I'd had instant access to a few truckloads of stone, dirt, mulch and bulbs (I did have some bulbs--thanks, Johanna!--but Alexander and I had planted them elsewhere the other day).  Also, it was getting dark.

garden in waiting

Winter purging, tedious as the idea of the task might seem, has its advantages well beyond the proud breath of accomplishment a Capricorn thrives on this one month a year.  One begins the calendar year with some sort of system, imagining it new and improved, and--even better--rediscovering exactly what one has.   Hitherto lost things become found objects...ah-hah!  that's where that is!   This morning it was a small sewing scissors under the knitting bag in the sitting room; yesterday it was twelve chopsticks that had slipped through a slit in the drawer (I've got to fix that drawer) and three custard cups peeking behind the pie pans, which, in consequence, got moved to where the paper bags used to be, while they in turn got moved to a rolling cart I pulled out of the coat closet where it was shamefully doing nothing. 

lost and found

Interestingly, though my studio is (not tidier, no, but) freshly open to new ideas, these days aren't open to work in it, I find.  I can edit or I can create; I can root or I can flower.  One precludes the other.  Soon though, all this tendency to order will wane, and I will return to normal life in the right brain.  I've already slowed down...this post is a kind of braking in itself...and awoke this morning imagining what I'd do with a lot of copper pieces I've been storing, some with really intriguing figures stained into them.  I'm looking forward to making a mess again.

invention

             May your new year be clean and bright for as long as it takes to make peace with it.

Gifts of the Season

These days pass by so quickly, bearing gifts we might barely notice to appreciate.

I don't mean the shiny ribboned gifts from family and friends, with Happy Holidays! and Love from us all! which make us smile as they accumulate, nudging us further into an already over-bright season, but the intangibles...like today, a suddenly warm, breezy day, cloud-covered and promising rain, good for holing up inside after a busy holiday; or the quiet of the streets on a morning walk, everyone else still asleep or still away.  Leaves rattle across my path, uncovering richly ored stones among the gray driveway gravel right beneath my feet. The holiday crush passed, I look forward to spending a whole afternoon absorbing a good book sent by a friend, just the right one.

books for a quiet day

There are affectionate notes in the mailbox, reminding us how close even far-flung friendships seem; a telephone call which begins, even as you start to say the same words yourself, "I've been thinking of you and wanting to call..."  Another ends with a gentle urgency, "Let's keep in touch..."  My sister rings early one morning.  "I woke up and just wanted to say hello." My children call from their northern holiday with in-laws and pass the phone around the room to pull me into their chatter. This year, my aunt, 97 and challenged by dimming sight, says she's happier making phone calls than sending cards anyway because "people seem to appreciate a conversation more."  I know what she means...I'm still making a few cards to send and though they are each a personal vision, the words inside don't quite convey what I'd like to confide, and certainly they can't record what that one fondly-thought-of recipient responds.

wishes from friends

I  have always loved the tradition of sending holiday cards, the formality of wishes written between pages of images we hope will convey the hopeful affection we feel.  But it isn't so much the cards themselves as the message they signify: that along the way we have enfolded into our lives people with whom we share part of our souls and are grateful no matter how long it has been since we've shared a life.  Good friends, it seems, brook no distance in time or space.  Once, after 40 years, a college housemate called me out of the blue and talked as if she'd just gone off for the weekend and come back again. Because of her, there are nine of us in that recovered loop.  It's 50 years now since we graduated, and notes and e-letters come more often, but our past is still part of the present. What were we doing all that time apart?  Living our lives, so different and differently, in such different worlds. Yet it hardly took a weekend to catch up.

The same is true of friends from places I'd once lived within their reach.  When we talk or write, we trade information about daily life, children, books we've read (or written), travels, market trips, old times, new times, struggles and triumphs as if they still lived next door.  As if it hadn't been a year since the last time we heard from one another. When such connections break, they leave an absence felt as strongly as the continued presence.

Still, friends appear in the guise of strangers.  On my trip to visit my aunts and uncle last week, I'd been sitting a few minutes in front of the hearth at the lodge where we were staying, when the woman across the side table and I began a chat--the sort that strangers do all the time:  "Isn't this a wonderful fire; nice to have a few minutes of quiet; what brings you here; where are you from..."  In no time, though, I seemed to know a lot about her; she seemed in fact, a younger version of (this sounds bordering on the solipsistic, I'm afraid, but forgive me) myself.  I remembered life at that age, the worries and gleanings and pride that it brings. We had, it turned out, a lot in common in that generation-shifting way.  We left each having learned something only our chance meeting would have allowed.  "Oh, can we stay in touch?" she asked, as I wrote down the link to this blog.

Nearby, at home, abiding friendship lies at the door.  Coming back from my long, tiring trip, I find a text from a neighbor.  "We see you're back! Come for dinner."  Chanukah begins the very next day, but I know just who to call to help celebrate, and there they are bearing candles, salads and wine.

Another neighbor sends me home with a basket of treats, intuiting, I'm sure, that I haven't had time to make my own (indeed, the ones I made in haste weren't, I'm afraid, worth a holiday).  An email reaches me:  "I know it's last minute, but we would love for you to come out to the farm for Christmas brunch if you can." In the kitchen, our own or others', we assemble the secrets of holidays past and present, and at tables rich with food, conversation, and sentiment we too often take for granted, such gifts ripen and smooth as we imbibe.

pairs of pears

Can we say, on ordinary days in March or August, how much they mean to us?  Of course we can. And sometimes (maybe not as often as we think of it) do.  But there is something about the season, perhaps winter coming on, perhaps the year ending and curling toward a new one, that brings us up short, and reminds us to gather our friendships close and hold on.  This year, given the dysfunctional world, they seem more important than ever.

The other day I dropped in on my niece and her family, bringing a package for their family celebration. Two of my favorite gifts awaited me there, though I didn't know it yet.  One child, while I was busy talking, ran up to his room and wrapped a small present for me...a wrist band he'd gotten from a run at school...and presented it to me with a huge smile.  His older sister came along just after:  "This is my present," she said, and hugged me tightly.  I am glad that they, too, young as they are, know how to hold on.

Closures and Openings

Good morning...is it?  The wet, chilly day has its own pleasantries.  There are so many things to do inside, especially with the holiday season upon us.  But today I'm doing art, first and foremost finishing that linen-to-leather book I began last week in Kathy Steinsberger's studio.

If you were one of those who advised me on closures, thank you!  I might have to return to that photo disclaimer to explain that two of you chose #1 (the egret front and back), as did another of you, my sister-in-law Susan, who, however, was lucky enough to see the book itself and changed her mind. She explained that in the photo, the egret and the button look the best, but in person, the copper closure seemed to fit the cover perfectly; it was a matter of color not quite translated by the photograph.  Sorry about that.

never-ending story

I'd already decided on the copper myself, though I was leaning toward the green button pair as well, which suited it but seemed...well, too safe.  And so this morning, I found just the right ribbon.

The closure fell into place in another way, too.  Instead of the sketchbook I envisioned for myself, I saw its potential as a gift to go along with a box of children's books I'm sending for the holidays.  (Shhh...don't tell!)  This book, with all those empty pages, will be a place for the recipients to write their own stories, each signature opening to its own imaginative possibilities.  I'm really pleased about it, and hope it encourages storytelling as a gift to be continued lifelong.

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Speaking of openings,this morning's mail notified me that two of my art pieces have been juried in to the Carrboro Arts Center's Annual Community Art Exhibit.  You've seen them before in this blog:

elements of the earth

side curl

The reception will be Friday evening, during Carrboro Art Walk.  Hope you all can come!

And hope you find something to close and open (in a good way) today.  

Making Books II among Other Stories

At Blam! where Kathy Steinsberger's studio shares a light-filled old building with three other artists, we've had two productive days working on book- and signature covers to make an art journal. Mine isn't finished yet...I still have to add embellishments (pocket slips, page markers, illustrations) to the pages, but you can see how far we've come from these pictures of our process.

Kathy Steinsberger teaching at Blam!

First, you need a good teacher in a great space with endless possibilities...

the stuff of dreams

For the cover, I used a piece of old linen table runner cut, folded and sewn at the edges.   I'm afraid I don't have a photo of the cut linen piece, evidence of why I am not a photographer:  I'm so into the action, I never remember to stop and record what I'm doing.  So here is this photo, taken while I was working the runner last summer.  That, fortunately, has its own story, worth an aside:

my handwork, cut off for this project
and back in the possibilities drawer

I had found the unfinished linen in my mother's blanket chest, folded away in this bathing suit box from the 'fifties, it looks like from the tinted illustration.

bathing suit box

Remember when bathing suits came in boxes behind the counter at the department store, and, like hosiery, you chose a model and color and asked for your size from the attentive saleslady? The linen had been stored in this box with embroidery threads, now-rusted needle and oval hoop, awaiting execution. Who knows how long.  So, though I hadn't done any needlework since someone must have handed me a piece to work on somewhere in my childhood, I picked it up, thinking to finish what was someone's clear intention.  It was fun.  But somehow it never fit onto my own furniture, and my sister gently demurred when I asked her if she wanted it.  Into the drawer of possibilities it went.

And out it came for this project.  Painted with thick coats of acrylic and heavy gel medium, this is what my inside cover looked like as it was drying. (You'll see the outside cover below, in the almost finished form, because...see photo disclaimer above.)

my inside cover

Kathy's stamped cover, in progress

The signatures we folded and sewed into the cover were also fun to do and to arrange.  (Like the Barnes collection, you'll have to guess at the idea behind the arrangement.)  Signatures are the sections of papers - 6 or 8 usually - bound together with thread.  Though most books are pasted page-to-binding now, and so come apart more easily, you can see sewn signatures in older and in custom books by looking down at the top of the book for the folded sections sewn inside the spine, one signature after another.  When you put signatures together in an art book, the sheets of white or printed paper you see in a regular text book can become anything you want.  They don't even have to be white, or the same kind of paper.  One of Kathy's samples was built from odd papers she collected in France...menus, tickets, maps, bread wrappers, etc.

As here, each signature can even have its own cover, dividing the whole into parts that can be used for different things. The book I was making gave me an idea for its use as a future sketchbook.

seven signatures

cross hatch

Sewing these to the soft binding was a challenge, not, as Kathy rightly warned us, an intellectual one but a manipulative one...two large cross-hatches attached all seven signatures to the cover, using two needles at once.  I had to pull out a few stitches to redo (it was the end of the day, after all), but I liked the effect, both inside and out.

sewn signatures

inside front cover with pocket

We were working against time, so I didn't go home with the book in its ultimate form.  I wanted time to think about a closure, not finding quite the right materials at hand, and knowing I needed head space to envision this book's final touch.  I also needed time to do the interior embellishments I'd planned with some buttons from my grandmother's collection, a resource I use not only for re-dressing shirts and sweaters, but in lots of my art, so I'd brought the box to the class.

grandmother's buttons

For the inside signature covers, I chose these buttons:

Below are the three closures I came up with for the cover.  Why don't you choose the one you think I should use?  I'd love to hear your choices before I work on it today.

possibility #1

possibility #2

possibility #3

Speaking of buttons and closures (and while you're deciding on my book closure), one other unfinished project I'd found in that same blanket chest, at the very bottom of it, was a pieced crazy-quilt top my mother had bought from a woman at a farm stand near their home in New Hampshire.  She'd meant to have it quilted, but never got around to it, and there it lay for thirty years or more.  My mother was still alive then, so I asked if I could have the top to finish.  She looked at me askance.  I knew that look.  You're not going to try it yourself, are you?  (You can see how well respected my needlework is...possibly with reason.)

But I was going to try.  For advice, I called Susan Bradley in Texas, whose art quilts hang in my house beautifully and proudly, and who pretty much reflected my mother's sentiments.  Now, Rachel...  Still undeterred, I came up with the idea that I certainly was competent enough to batt and back it, and then it occurred to me that I could use buttons sewn on in strategic points to knot it instead of stitching it. (That idea coming from a famous line in an old short story, "Was she going to knot it or quilt it?"  "Knot it..."  Those of you who recognize the story, raise your hands.)

Susan, rescue in her voice, nicely offered to have the layers put together before I buttoned it.  I worked on it for quite a while, exhausting my button store, and called for familiar reinforcements.  When she heard about the project, my aunt responded generously, and her daughter sent along my grandmother's collection you see above (clearly my aunt, an excellent needleworker herself, had added to it in her time, and I keep adding to it in mine, though now and then it gets raided by others, too, most recently by my niece, who needed buttons for her cute knitted ornaments).  The once forgotten top was turning out to be a neat family affair.

What we had finished was a colorful, playful piece.  In one of those coincidences I wrote about last time, the universe stepping in to hand us a prize as if all along we surely deserved it, a lifelong friend of one of my sons announced that he and his wife were expecting their first child, a boy who became my boy's namesake.  My mother was happy, as was I; it seemed the perfect home for our treasure.   A year or so ago, after their second child, his wife wrote me to say the quilt was still fascinating little ones, on the floor for play, warm while cuddling on the sofa, or taken along in the car for a trip.  My mother would have been even more thrilled to know it's still loved and useful.

No, I don't have a picture of it.  Once again, see declaimer above.

later the same day:
Oh, yes, I do!  There in an old file from another life, I found tonight:

quilt for Jay's baby

Making Books

I've just finished, for the third or fourth time since it came out, Jill McCorkle's Life after Life.  From the first, her novel set in a retirement home in a small town hooked me practically in a stranglehold--not surprising, considering the events of this year with elderly family, whose genes and other durabilities are likely to push my generation, as well, far into the nineties.  Our family history of longevity is heartening in some ways, and scary in others, as indeed Jill's story is.  Who knows where our futures lie?  We try to predict, plan for (or fall into), and succeed in a life for as long as we can, thinking we know who we are, but then Fate or the accidents we call Fate throw some mountain in our way and we bumble off trying to make sense of the new compass point we have to navigate by.  It takes some courage, and some humility, too, to go along inventing a path on a new map, but it's the way of survival and, more than that, a way of living well as best as circumstances allow.

It reminds me of one of my grandmother's stories, one we would ask for time and again, lingering against our bedtime, about a young woman who is captured by a witch (her crime was eating the witch's parsley on the way to school) and is saved one afternoon while the witch is away, by a prince  on horseback and three magic nuts the girl wisely grabs from the witch's tree as they ride off.  The witch on their tail, the girl throws out one nut after the other, each exploding behind them, obstructing her vengeful path:  first, a hill of slippery soap, then, after she'd clawed her way over that, a mountain of pins and needles, and finally, a small cottage by the side of the road with a deaf caretaker who cleverly sends her in the wrong direction.  The couple, escaped, go on their merry way.   I wish I'd thought to ask what happened to the witch, whose journey fell off the page after the happily ever after part, but I assume she went on to learn a lesson somehow, though what it is I can't fathom.  It may be she learned nothing except not to leave the house with all that loose magic about.

I could go on about this intersection of fate and intervention, but what lingers in my mind after this last reading of Jill's book is something the author noted in an interview published with the novel.  She says, "I find as a writer that if I can tap into what [a] person loves more than anything and what he or she fears more than anything, then I know what I need to know."

 Although Jill was talking about the way she draws characters in fiction, her words rang true about character in general, I think.  What happens to us because of those two factors that determine so much of what we are and how we live:  love and fear?  Note that neither she nor I raise those words to Romantic proportions by capitalizing them.  In most of us, they appear in their most ordinary dress, sometimes invisible catalysts for the twists and turns that weave us in and out of our years.  Do we make right or wrong moves when we deviate, voluntarily or involuntarily, from what we think are our chosen paths?  How much does magic, or the timely appearance of an unexpected intervention, have to do with our fates?  Most of us don't think of ourselves as characters in a novel, but it would be interesting to imagine the stories we live turned into fiction on a page. What plot, what scene, what crises will really illuminate our lives?

Then there is the truth we eventually come to, in fiction and reality:  what one loves the most, what one fears the most...they are, when scrutinized, closer than the opposites they seem.

I wouldn't have imagined, for instance, that at this age, I'd find myself working so ardently as a visual artist, after decades of assuming it was something I wouldn't be good at.  Decades ago, I saw myself through quite different lenses...the lens of words, of literature, of the story inherent in every life and how it might be revealed if I drew words to explain things.  I wrote out journal after journal, poem after poem, tearing at what I was, both the loves and the fears.  Somewhere along the line, when words failed, there was a rock I stumbled over, and here I am, narrating life in a new dimension.

This morning, for example, I'm setting out for Kathy Steinsberger's two-day linen-to-leather book workshop.  Not a class in how to write a romance novel, but in how to turn our art skills into a physical book. Kathy is perhaps the premier art bookmaker and patient, generous teacher of classes at Blam!, her studio space in Raleigh (she also teaches regularly at Pullen Arts, as well as at Penland--you should be able to hear me sigh when I say that name; it's working heaven for artists of all trades).

As I pluck odd materials off my shelves to bring along--linen, lace, scraps of handmade paper, pearls, copper--I'm thinking about Jill's words, and wondering what, this time, will evolve.  If love juxtaposed with fear have brought me to this point in my life, it probably underlies nearly everything I make.  Somewhere in my subconscious, I'm running toward my passions, and tripping over my failures to learn something new, to make myself more visible through the next piece.  I run my hand through boxes, jars, and drawers and think:  What do I love most?  What challenges do they present?  Maybe it isn't words that represent love and fear the most, but the small bits of collected scraps I can narrate by giving them new life.  Just like Jill, who looks for the heart of those she creates, so do I, I realize, reach through my own psyche for just such inspiration, trying to find the real life in snippets once useful in a former existence.

What will my story  be today?

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It's evening now, the first day's class over, and I can tell you that if you don't believe in the synchronization of events in our lives, I offer this proof:  I'd barely gotten into the door of Blam! and laid out my tools ready to work, when blam! Kathy happened to mention what she's teaching at Penland this summer.   It's a bookmaking class called The Storyteller's Muse.  Really?  And it's co-taught by a painter who apparently wants to work with narrative in visual form.  Really?

Well, Paris in early spring will have to wait another year.  July, 2017 will find me in the Blue Ridge Mountains, busy at work discovering how to see a book of stories through both lenses, material and literary.  I can hardly wait to leap into that new dimension.

Meanwhile, we had a lovely time cutting and folding paper and fabric, painting and drying, arranging leaves into folios and folios into signatures to invent our books.  Tomorrow we finish painting and go on to binding and embellishment, some of which may be words.  What I love most about Kathy's studio is her encouragement to reap what we can and in exchange offer what we can.  It's just one more step on the way to illumination.