by susan | Jul 28, 2016 | Uncategorized
this coming august 25th I’ll be the featured author at the Literacy Action Center’s annual fundraiser hosted by local Utah artist Pilar Pobil.
I visited her home and gardens last month to introduce myself and spend some time becoming familiar with the setting for the event, which is her gracious home and gardens in the avenues area of salt lake city. Pilar, born and schooled in Spain, chose utah for her home decades ago, and has become one of our communities beloved treasures.
in the presence of a visual artist, I am humbled. my palette consists of only black and white, and is essentially limited to 26 characters. I visualize color, my mind swept with vibrant hues, subtle shades, earthy depths and translucent, tinted waves . . . but on the paper, on the screen, I am limited to recognized configurations of those 26 letters.
however, when I read, I reverse the process I use to write, and words leap into color, shape, form, an explosion of visual creativity inside my mind. the pure pleasure of this process is incredible, almost inexplicable ~ because I can read, my mind is filled with images of people and places, with vistas, with kitchens and barns and great halls and roads, with rivers and mountainsides and a lookout tower in glacier national park, with creatures and mythical beasts, lovers and gnomes, secret gardens and libraries filled with walls of books and hidden passages to foreign lands.
I, too, am a visual artist.
when one learns to read, one is immediately and permanently a visual artist, a painter, a photographer, a designer of scenes and costumes, landscapes and people. an entire world opens, the mind is set afire, and nothing is ever the same.
please join me august 25th at the home of Pilar Pobil, 403 east 8th avenue, in salt lake city.
for more information: Literacy Action Center 801.265.9081
by susan | Jun 15, 2016 | Uncategorized
of all the horses, it is a paint that corrals my eye, my heart.
he stands alone, on a patch of grass twenty yards from his nearest bandmate. his stance is perpendicular to the herd, the eye that faces the others wide and deeply aware. muscles bunch under smooth hide as he shifts from one foreleg to the other. there is just enough of a breeze to dance his mane against his neck, his forelock across the far eye.
what pulls me to him I can only ponder. I many not know the truth for hours, or during my lifetime. is it his outsider role, or his patience? perhaps his inner wisdom. or maybe he is a rebel. a denounced stallion. one who wielded power in an earlier life. I supply a backstory, I infuse him with traits I wish for myself. if he is my mirror, I could be a sinner, a has-been, a separatist, a pacifist, a former pugilist, an underdog, the unloved.
one hundred fifty or so other horses drink from the watering hole, tug at grass, nuzzle flanks and shoulders, instigate or respond to what may or may not be playful attacks. I’m curious, I absorb the experience, but I remain fully committed to my paint and know that as I settle in bed this evening it is he who will visit, he who will remain in my mind’s eye, he who will become the backbone of a story that begins to weave its way from head to heart, from heart to head.
[barb richardson, a writer friend of mine, is aunt to jim schnepel, who is the president of the Wild Horses of America foundation (catch that acronym), and jim was kind enough to invite me out to see the Onaqui herd. the photo here was taken by jim.]
by susan | Jan 25, 2016 | Uncategorized
in conversation last week, a friend bemoaned the fact that he was recognized in the community as an exceptional physician and educator. he felt narrowed, constricted, by this validation from society.
I, in turn, bemoaned the fact that I was likely seen as more scattered: business school graduate and retailer, small business owner, writer, social worker a dozen years ago and now again, mom of three college students. at this stage in my life, I told him, I wanted to be a master of something, not simply someone who was quite good at a number of things, who had spent time here and there, done this and that.
my friend was envious of what I saw as a shortcoming. he wanted to be known as someone with more depth and variety in his experiences, gifts, and desires.
I wanted to be queen of something.
and then I remembered my skate skiing boots.
last winter I took up skate skiing. this same friend gave me a pair of his old skis, and I bought new bindings, poles, and boots. I took lessons. I eventually learned to stay upright (most of the time), to ski up and down gentle hills, even to glide gracefully for moments at a time. after just a few sessions, I looked at my shiny new boots with an extraordinary sense of pride and validation. I had learned to alpine ski as a child, and didn’t completely stop until shortly after having my second child. then came a dearth of ski days–almost 20 years of them–up until last winter. those skate skiing lessons helped me reclaim a long lost aspect of myself. I could once again consider myself a skier.
those boots are a symbol of just how complex and varied a person I am. which, as I reconsidered our laments, is exactly how my friend wished the world would see him.
few of us wish to be pigeon-holed, forced into narrow descriptors of our capacities. I don’t truly want to be labeled and categorized, yet I am pulled into that desire by society’s tendency to focus on what one does instead of who one is.
my friend is multi-faceted, curious, engaged with life, a thinker, a philosopher, a fisherman, cyclist, skier, runner. who happens to practice and teach medicine.
and I, well, I am multi-faceted too, a queen of many small things, a person who is validated by reminders of how richly diverse her life is. who may not have yet reached mastery of anything, but is a life-long apprentice of many things she loves. and those ski boots remind me, each time I see them, of potentials and possibilities and the fact that I am not yet done creating myself.
by susan | Nov 29, 2015 | Uncategorized
“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore it knows it’s not fooling a soul.” ~neil gaiman
yesterday I spent a few hours in Dolly’s Bookstore in park city, utah. Dolly’s first opened in the early 1970’s, and is one of those exceptional environments that evokes a smile as you walk in the door. books (of course), cards, candles, doo-dads and whatchits, large chalk signs on walls with hand-written quotes about reading . . . everything cleverly displayed and scented, occasionally, with a waft of bubbling sugar from the candy factory next door. mmm. the store is warm and filled with visual delights, behind which lie story after story, whole worlds just awaiting discovery.
although the atmosphere was pure delight, it was people who made my experience so fabulous. those who walked in the door focused on purchasing a specific book (a steven pinker, a photo book of the area, the latest and greatest chapter book for a 10-year-old), to those who needed an airplane-read, to those searching for a present for the pickiest person they know, to those just wandering through while they finished eating their caramel apple–truffle–outsized marshmallow square.
shoppers in ski coats and warm boots offered opinions on conservation, wolves, and their favorite new novel. they asked where to find good coffee. they smiled, held hands, discussed with spouses/children/sisters which calendar to purchase (“outlander” was a hot choice) or which of three books they should buy for their mom. they told me how to spell names (a-m-e-e and lynn-with-an-e) as I signed books for them. their boots tracked melting snow across the hardwood floors and the booksellers just smiled. shoppers had their books wrapped for christmas. (the snowflake paper or the red?) people in carhartts and arcteryx and designer boots, people in puffy down jackets and sweats. people with shiny faces, red noses, sniffles from being in the same space as the bookstore cat. visitors, and locals. and the booksellers themselves: gracious, knowledgeable, helpful, tolerant, always willing to share a bit of themselves with each request for help.
beautiful people, all.
I agree with neil gaiman. it’s a sad town that doesn’t have a bookstore.
by susan | Jul 29, 2015 | Uncategorized
When we make something with our hands, it changes the way we feel, which changes the way we think, which changes the way we act. ~ Carl Wilkens
I am surrounded, here, by art—natural, and human-made, and human-created collections of the natural. To my left, photographs of trees, a tortoise, a spider’s web of Amazonian girth (which, I’ve learned, one can use to staunch the flow of blood, heal a wound). Behind me, a painting of two arctic graylings surrounded by a thousand words–three hundred more–a commitment, a project of inherent tedium and unending, painstaking, attention. Across the street, framed and hung on a wooden wall, fly two trumpeters painted upon an abstract background that captures every minute and extravagant aspect of the beauty of this singular place. I am in Montana’s Centennial Valley.
I, have only words. Made of spindly lines and curves, each one, like a single brush stroke, carrying little significance. There are more words than colors, more words than tools to place color on a canvas. Infinite, meaningless words, that wander across mind and page and only by sheer luck or through great fortitude tell a story nearly as purely as a painting.
I want to paint the trees and birds, the flat lake and its impossible line of light, the bulging clouds, the rainfall during the night. The moon, growing fat, yet full of dips and holes, places I risk being swallowed.
A brush in my hand, plump caterpillars of color on my palette; anything but dark pen, white paper, the shapes I’ve carved a million times, will carve a million times more.
My desk, in this cabin, is a hingeless door, black metal table legs bolted to its belly, propped on seven-inch blocks of wood to align its height with the window ledges, rough gray boards knotted and chipped, dry and splitting further with each shift of wind. My tall chair, a throne. Gentle brushstrokes, the paint green, indicate the place where someone here before me painted–a small piece, the size of my own paper–on the left side of the desk. The green tells me only of its border, and I am left to imagine the rest—the vision, the story. For what we do is the same, we ache to tell a story, it wrestles us until it wins, whether by paint, by pen, by pencil, by arrangement of rock, feather, moss.
If I could only paint, use my hands to do more than wield a pen, I’m certain my stories would sing.
I would paint a grayling, a tamarask, a cormorant–sleek and black and curved of bill. I would paint on wood, let it dry and crackle and tell a story all its own.
I would sketch my story, trap my words inside the paint, daub and brush and seal them all, and with this, change the artist herself.
by susan | Jun 17, 2015 | Uncategorized
there once was a man whose feet hurt. everywhere he stepped, prickly things stabbed his skin. if not thorns and briars, it was sharp-edged rocks and gravel. when it snowed, the cold burned. when sun poured over the land, the heat seared. he was tired of blistered, aching, sore, painful feet.
so he covered the world with leather.
it stretched over the prickly things, the broken pieces of what were once great boulders, the icy snow, the desert sand that held heat long after the sun sunk beneath the horizon each day. he walked everywhere he wanted, his toes relaxed, his heels gently rolling with each step. the land was now predictable and safe, and never again did his feet blister, ache, suffer wounds, or cause him pain.
no more arrowleaf balsamroot with its sharply pointed leaves and bright yellow petals, no more pungent sagebrush or leafing lavender. river-worn stones and ragged rocks now lay beneath the leather, springs and creeks and glaciers, too. the world was smooth and even.
the man walked until he stopped. he sat on the leather, and thought about what the world had looked like back when his feet hurt. he thought about how it felt when his feet hurt, and how it felt when they healed from the hurt. he thought about the tickle of lichen on his soles, and of trillium leaves against his ankles. the rub of millions of grains of dry sand, the shock of snow, the hypnotic caress of warm rain puddling around his feet. he thought of his many scrapes and bleeding cuts, how the skin had gradually come back together, how the scars were now fine lines of stories, poetry on his toes. on his insteps. on his rising arches and on the shallow indentation between ankle bone and achilles tendon.
he thought about what lay beneath his leather. he contemplated his feet. and then he took his knife, and split the leather. he peeled it open, and uncovered the springs and talus, the glaciers and rivers, the pine needle covered trails, the thorns and thistles and waving lupine. he stepped onto the pebbly soil and grimaced. stepped again and winced. moved more firmly onto his path, and felt the needles, the rocks, the shells and twigs and heat and cold, the wet, the tickle, and then he felt a stone slice the bottom of his foot and he smiled.
(with gratitude to kim dastrup and bob rolfs, and to shantideva, from whom the roots of this story come.)
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