VISUAL STORYTELLING

Yesterday, after morning services at St. Mary's Convent, Sewanee, Tennessee, we decided, on impulse, to visit the Hunter Museum in Chattanooga, which is an hour's drive from Sewanee. When morning temps in early June average 60 degrees, travel is pleasant, and temps were still mild at noon when we arrived and took a table at the Rembrandt Cafe. Fearless sparrows and grackles were busy on the patio, daring to land underfoot to pick up the crumbs of early lunchers. The cafe's specialty is a tomato-artichoke soup and fresh bread from a bakery located on the block beneath the cafe area, so we dined well, sitting near a large fountain that provided an added attraction for the brown sparrows at my elbow.

The Hunter Museum, across the street from The Rembrandt Cafe at Bluff View, was only steps away, and we renewed a lapsed membership before viewing the exhibit that had attracted my interest: Eudora Welty and the Segregated South, a gallery of photographs by one of my favorite southern writers. The photographs were billed as explorations on both sides of the color line in the "Jim Crow South" of her native Mississippi and were on loan from the Knoxville Museum of Art. I wasn't allowed to photograph the exhibit, but the running texts documenting Welty's experience in a segregated South provided material for some memorable storytelling.

By Jay from Birmingham, AL 

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), 

via Wikimedia Commons

During the 1930's Welty worked with the WPA (Works Progress Administration) conducting interviews in her home area near Jackson, Mississippi. Welty's keen powers of observation and what is described as "sly humor" delineate the color differences in arresting photographs about the effects of Jim Crow laws on Mississippi's majority African American population during this time in the deep South.

One gelatin silver print, dated 1935, that Welty snapped is entitled "Saturday Strollers," a photograph of three southern African American women dressed in chic gowns, high heeled shoes, and stylish hats, strolling on their afternoon off. Their stroll is impacted by a farmer dressed in worn-out overalls leaning against a storefront, as Welty catches the woman in the left side of the photograph stepping behind her companions so that she can create a space on the sidewalk between herself and the white farmer. She is carrying out the Jim Crow rule of "giving whites the wall." The text accompanying this photograph explains that Welty has cropped the photograph to emphasize the farmer's posture, and he is described as "casting a shadow over the women's leisurely stroll."

As my great-grandmother Dora Runnels Greenlaw lived in Copiah County, Mississippi during the early 20th century, I was drawn to a photograph shot in that area entitled "Tomato Packers' Recess, Copiah County." The print showed migrant workers, who were often displaced sharecroppers, gathered around a central guitarist, looking as though they needed the music as a respite from harvesting seasonal crops. The men's bent legs are described as a "rhythmic pattern...creating a sense of unity and uplift."

One of the most arresting photographs in the exhibit, "Preacher and Leaders of the Holiness Church," shows a picture of worshippers at the Church of God in Christ Holiness Church. In this picture Welty shows the spiritual aspects of the church by capturing the sunlight glowing in the window of the church and the incandescent light that illuminates the glowing faces of the women who are known as "Sanctifieds." This photograph appeared in an article in Vogue magazine, and Welty's text included inappropriate remarks that reflect the prejudices of the time as she described the appearance and behavior of the preacher: "The preacher shown here at top, was a little man, jet black, with monkey features and antics."

A stark photograph shows African American workers going home before sundown to avoid the "sundowner laws" that forced these workers, who were employed in town, to go home before dark or risk being arrested, sometimes lynched. Welty shows a long road in the foreground leading to the cart carrying the workers, and the photograph frames a barren landscape with only one tree showing in the distance.

A print of a houseboat family on the Pearl River that brought back memories of fishing trips I once took on this river, a haunting photograph of an abandoned lunatic asylum, and Welty's famous photograph of a bottle tree in a barren-looking yard—these were among the stories Welty told in this visual narrative of the segregated South.

I returned to Sewanee with a copy of Art View, the Hunter Museum's quarterly magazine underarm and opened it to a page that featured a cutline by the photo editor Kathy Ryan: "Often the best creative work happens when there is a crossover between different disciplines." An apt phrase to describe a Pulitzer Prize winning writer like Eudora Welty, who was not only one of the South's premier authors, she was recognized as an accomplished photographer. 

BETWEEN PLANTS AND HUMANS

If you're interested in humanistic botany or the inter-connectedness of plants and humans, you might enjoy this latest book of poetry that will be available from Border Press by month's end. The collection is entitled Between Plants and Humans and contains new and selected poems that I wrote about cultivated and wild plants and color photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan, a botanist and writer. 

The landscape of plants is centered mostly in the southeastern United States, principally in Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, and the Carolinas. Plants range from Japanese Magnolia to Rapeweed, and my mentions of them are often fleeting but indicative of the inter-relationships between plants and people.

Included in Between Plants and Humans is a particularly arresting story in the poem about the pitcher plant, a specimen for which we searched and found on the grounds of the Chattahoochee Nature Center in Roswell, Georgia. Of course, I'm partial to the lovely Japanese Magnolia that flourishes in the lush environment of southwest Louisiana and forms the design for the cover of this new book, shown at the top of this blog. Martin Romero, a landscape designer, did the artistic design work for Victoria's stunning photograph on the cover.

Between Plants and People, New and Selected Poems is not a textbook edition about plants, and readers who sometimes attribute anthropomorphic characteristics to members of the plant world should enjoy a stroll through this unusual "garden." Perhaps you'll recognize a few favorites.

Available in print from Amazon.

PINYON REVIEW #2 IS HERE…

It’s fast approaching – the date that marks the end of the Great Mayan Cycle, according to Gary Entsminger, publisher and editor of Pinyon Publishing. “To some this suggests the end of something, to others a beginning, perhaps, of a New World Age,” he says in the introduction to the latest issue of Pinyon Review.

For Gary and Susan Elliott, artist and designer at Pinyon Publishing, it seems to be the end of a successful year in independent publishing and the beginning of a New Age in literary publications as they launch Issue #2 of the Pinyon Review, a literary and arts journal they established this year. Gary is already busy collecting work from artists and writers for the third issue, and he says the Review has attracted a growing number of happy readers.

In addition to poetry and short stories, the November issue of Pinyon Review features a plethora of art and photography, including the outstanding work of Stan Honda, who spent over a week at Grand Canyon and two weeks at the Petrified Forest National Park as a National Park Service Artist-in-Residence. During that time, Honda worked on night sky settings, photographing the Chaco Canyon: “The East Sky at Pueblo del Arroyo,” “Moon and Venus,Casa Rinconada,” and “The East Sky, Casa Rinconada,” my favorite being “The East Sky at Pueblo del Arroyo,” which features the stars making odd-shaped trails across the night sky. The photographs are accompanied by an essay about the Chaco Sky photography written by Honda that showcases his facility with the written word, as well as with the camera. Honda’s arresting photograph of the eclipse, when the sun, moon, and earth align, appears on the cover of Pinyon Review #2. He’s a photographer with Agence France-Presse based in New York City and does astronomy-related photography in his spare time.



"The East Sky at Pueblo del Arroyo"
by Stan Honda



Publisher Gary Entsminger ‘s own photograph of “The Colorado River From Dead Horse Point” follows Honda’s essay, and his love of mesas and rock formations is reflected in a photograph that captures the mesa and the river in vivid color and features the sharp detail of a fine painting.

Pinyon Review #2 is rich in poetry by regular and new contributors, including two of my own, “The Final Sleep” and “Life Support.” Robert Shaw, author of Aromatics, a collection of poetry published by Pinyon, provides the opening three poems, the most cogent one entitled “Her Mother’s Seashells”: “Sometimes I feel flung up by the tide/or Sometimes I feel empty inside?...Too late now, though, to experiment./The shell was gone, shattered by someone’s/slapdash dusting. It would have listened/in calm, mother-of-pearl inertia/yielding back its never-lapsing sigh.”

Readers who have seen issues of the Pinyon Review and Pinyon’s recent books, have been extravagant in their praise, and after a look at the cover and interior, usually respond: “What a beautiful presentation.” My reaction is always “Read further.”

May this year be the beginning of a New World Age for a small press that celebrates the arts and sciences and spotlights the work of a diverse group of artists and writers. Again, Brava, Gary and Susan!

Copies can be ordered from Pinyon Publishing, 2384 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.