IONA ART SANCTUARY

When I exited a Sunday afternoon reading at a unique art gallery on The Mountain, and a man with deep blue eyes, wearing a baseball cap, bowed gallantly, kissed my hand, and invited me to read at a literary event in the Fall of 2014, my response to the invitation was a resounding “yes.”

Yesterday, I attended a reading by local authors of the Autumn Assembly of Authors at IONA Art Sanctuary.  I had been invited by my friend, the Rev. Francis Walter, who read from his novel, Goldilocks and the Three Bears at Mobile Bay. Following this amusing reading, I was re-introduced to Edward Carlos, a sculptor and artist I met the first year I moved to Sewanee, Tennessee, shortly after he opened his Art Sanctuary. I had been deeply impressed by his religious and spiritual art, some of which reflected visionary events that he experienced during four visits to Iona, a small island off the western coast of Scotland.

On this particular Sunday afternoon, three writers performed at the reading: my friend Francis who read from his unpublished manuscript, David Bowman who read from his book, Sewanee in Stone, and Lynn Cimino Hurt who read from her unpublished manuscript of poetry. The reading was one among a slate of Fall readings and art exhibits sponsored by Carlos, who was called to “offer a place for writers and artists to share their creative work with each other and the community, and the emphasis is to source creativity and spirituality,” Carlos says. I might add that many Sewanee writers and artists produce rich creative work that isn't read at the annual Sewanee Writers Conference, which features mostly national luminaries, so Carlos provides an outstanding service for less-recognized literary and artistic figures.

The IONA Art Sanctuary sits atop a hill off Garnertown Road and overlooks a field of dried sedge grass and seven acres of lake and woods. The building is situated on a N-S, E-W axis and offers art lovers a view of colorful sunsets as they exit the 70’x64’ building. The interior of the sanctuary follows the design of a nave with a Celtic cross shape. A 20' high gate stands in the center of the field of sedge grass and symbolizes an entrance between the physical world and the spiritual world. It reminded me of a similar gate at Rip Winkle Gardens on Jefferson Island near my home of New Iberia, Louisiana. Above the entrance on the IONA veranda the sculpt of an angel hovers, part of a scene about the Nativity, which is further carried out inside with a life-sized “Creation Nativity.”

At the reading, before Carlos introduced the first writer, he pointed out a vertical 19 l/2' x 10’ piece of art behind the improvised stage, a complex photographic work by Carlos’s son, Adam Carlos, that depicts an earth mother figure superimposed over images of a forest and a lake. Entitled “Lost Love," it contains 260 separate but overlapping 16”x20” black and white photos..  It is a stunning backdrop to reading performances, and Carlos explained that the building ceiling was constructed to accommodate this piece of art.

When I’m in New Iberia part of the year, I often read some of my poetry at Paul Schexnayder’s Art Gallery and am scheduled to read at this gallery with the new Louisiana poet laureate in November. I know that combining art exhibits and literary performances in one event results in an afternoon or evening of interesting entertainment, so I understand the efficacy of holding the Autumn Assembly of Authors at IONA, a highly creative venue.

Carlos has also sponsored the exhibits of many talented art students and area artists at IONA Art Sanctuary. The year that he retired from his position as chair of the Fine Arts Department and director of the university gallery at the University of the South, staff, community members, retired faculty members, and students helped install his two-month long exhibit, “Creation: Aurora Borealis” at the university gallery. My architect friend, Sarah Boykin, a graduate of Sewanee who now teaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, spearheaded a drive to raise funds to provide for a new gallery in the Nabit Art Building, which was named the Edward Carlos Gallery of Art.  Although Carlos lives on campus with his wife, Sarah, and a flock of dogs, he spends his meditative moments at the IONA Art Sanctuary. 

I look forward to seeing my blue-eyed host and to reading my poetry next Fall during the Autumn Assembly of Authors at IONA Art Sanctuary, another "thin" place of inspiration and beauty on The Mountain.  

FALLING LEAVES

I know it’s Fall on The Mountain at Sewanee when I sit on the front porch and hear acorns popping on the roof. Their noise breaks through a dense silence peculiar to cooler days, and I think that if the squirrels took better aim, I’d have a few knots on my head because they throw the gnawed shells from the rooftop, then scurry back into the oaks, turning their backsides and swishing their tails at me.

On cool Fall days, birdsong almost disappears, the hum of insects dies down, and I hear only the squawk of crows piercing the silence. However, some sound carries farther in the still air, and the cries of children playing in the distance reach me, a poignant noise that rises, then dies away, as if they’re at recess and then it’s over and they’re back at their desks. Yellow and brown leaves, like old memories, rustle and fall in the yard, and my thoughts turn away from the world, moving inward as the season begins. Fall time is remembering time…

Every Fall when I hear the sound of children breaking through the stillness on The Mountain, I think of my firstborn, Stephanie, going off to school for the first time. When she was six, back in the 60’s, school commenced in September instead of early August as it does now, and we had a faux Fall on the day I walked her to the small school a few blocks from our home in New Iberia, Louisiana. She was frightened… and I was anxious. I don’t know whose heart raced the fastest, but when she and her best friend, Johnna Kay, a neighbor’s daughter, entered the first grade classroom at the same moment, both girls looked at each other and burst into tears.

“You have to let them go,” Johnna Kay’s mother said, clutching my arm.

I gave Stephanie a wan smile. “I’ll meet you outside at 3,” I told my sad-faced child.” More tears, and the teacher signaled for us to leave our sobbing children to the mercies of the public school system.

It was a cool day, and after lunch I sat on the patio for awhile, listening to the children’s cries in the distance. The shrill voices sounded like separation anxiety to me, and I began writing a poem: “I delight in my child/who presses the small leaf of me/into the branch of her larger perceptions; /I delight in my child/when my false possessions possess/all but one capricious movement/tipping in barefoot daring/through the splinter of my ways./This one with the burnt corn hair,/the first robin song of each morning,/making calculated pecks at my cheek,/urging me to reduce this world/to a tiny merry go round for her hands,/whines the carefully taught noise of my name/in impish assumption of reckoning./I delight in my child/as she presses the small leaf of me/into the branch of her larger trust/and I crackle with the dry anxiety/of mother love.”

At 2, I went indoors to shut out the sound of the children’s voices and called my spouse. “We must buy Stephanie a bicycle,” I said in my no-opposition-allowed voice. “Today. Right now. Before school lets out.”

“What? It isn’t even time for her birthday, and Christmas is almost four months away. I’m at work, you know,” he said.

“I don’t care if a new well is about to blow,” I said. He was a reservoir engineer with a major oil company and had an office job, so the allusion to bringing in a well at a field site was an exaggeration reflecting my agitated state. “She needs something to make her feel better. I left her crying at school. I’ll get a taxi and go after the bike alone if you won’t leave work.” I hung up.

Fifteen minutes later, he arrived and we drove to LaBauve’s Bicycle Shop a few blocks from our neighborhood. Another fifteen minutes passed before we loaded an aqua-colored bicycle with a luggage carrier, a basket and bell on its handlebars, and rolled it into the garage, closing the doors against the curious eyes of the neighbor across the street.

At 3 sharp, I met Stephanie and Johnna Kay in front of the school, and Stephanie ran into my arms. “Do I have to go back?” she asked. “I already know how to color in the lines, can say by heart poems from A Child’s Garden of Verse, and all they do at recess is jump rope and sing something called “Pizza Pizza Polly-ola.”

“Yes,” I said. “You have to go back. You should know a little more than how to color within the lines and how to say nursery rhymes, and every girl should learn how to jump rope. But…” I stopped and smiled at her. “We have a surprise for you.”

She looked at me sullenly and followed me home, dragging her new green backpack on the pavement. I felt anxious, wondering if a bicycle would make up for the hours we’d spend away from each other, but not once had I felt foolish about the impulsive purchase or regretted that I was giving her Christmas in September. When I pulled up the garage door to reveal the surprise, Stephanie’s smile told me that I’d made a good choice – the bicycle was going to ease the pangs of separation.

“Oh!” she said. “I’m glad I went to school.”

The tone of Stephanie’s first week at school got lighter and lighter, and I learned not to sit on the patio where I could hear the children’s voices. Stephanie’s resistance to school lessened, and her adaptation amazed me. However, I knew that she kept the vision of that bicycle in her mind until the bell for school to let out rang and she could race home to ride her bike. That year, we learned to endure the pain of severing the long cord that had held us in a pre-school bond, and I attribute our maturation to an aqua-colored bicycle bought on impulse.

Now, on Fall days when cool weather approaches, and I hear the clear voices of children in the distance, I can’t help wondering if there are first graders among the voices who feel as much separation anxiety as I did on Stephanie’s first day at school. I hope not. 

ILLUMINATE

Margaret Simon, one of my New Iberia, Louisiana friends, has chosen an apt title for a slender book of finely-crafted poems published by Border Press. The poems accompany the drawings of John Gibson, her father, who used a technical pen to execute arresting pictures in the tradition of pen and ink pointillism art.

Following a church service at the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in New Iberia, Louisiana last year, Margaret told me that she had reviewed a collection of her father’s Christmas cards she had received through the years and conceived the idea of deepening her connection with her father by writing poems to express the religious verses he used to accompany the Christmas card drawings. The result is Illuminate, a book in which each poem is a “harmony creating a vision of love,” as Margaret writes in the first poem she conceived about her father’s art. The poem was an exercise she completed during a writing project retreat with former Louisiana poet laureate Darrell Bourque.

The cover of Illuminate by John Gibson features a drawing derived from a photograph he took of a small church in Salzburg following an all-night snowfall. The drawing became the basis for the first Christmas card he “illuminated.” Eleven drawings in Illuminate reflect Gibson’s passion to capture spiritual mysteries in art using the technique of pen and ink pointillism. He does not use lines, and most of the picture elements are created with small dots made by a technical pen with a 0.05-mm point – images of angels, wise men, Mary, and a manger scene that inspired Margaret to write a poem entitled “The Pointillist.”

Margaret’s poems show her command of the writing craft in the range of poetry forms she uses to deliver the message derived from her father’s ink drawings, about which he says: “it is the darkest dark that reveals the brightest light. So it seems also in life.” I was drawn to a sonnet about trees entitled “Dance of the Trees” that is a tribute to Margaret’s father and resonates with rich sound and rhythm:

Dance of the Trees

Look at trees, think of God who came to bring us love.

I watch you watching trees,

I watch you watching those trees

outside your window in the loft.

If you could walk on the roof,

if you could walk out on that roof and touch them—

you could feel their hearts beating,

their hearts beating out the rhythm of the wind.

I watch you drawing the trees.

I watch you drawing those trees

in perfect chiaroscuro, shading just so,

just so they come alive and dance.

The trees dance in the moonlight

when you draw them.

When you draw them, God’s hand moves.

God’s hand is moving.

Illuminate is a small volume, but it radiates with light and inspiration, with religious and nature themes. It’s a unique Christmas gift that celebrates the passion and faith of two family members who teamed up to create an artistic gem.

Margaret Gibson Simon teaches gifted students in Iberia Parish, has published poems in the journal, The Aurorean, and wrote a chapter about teaching poetry to young children for Women on Poetry published by McFarland and Co., Inc. She’s also the author of a young readers’ novel, Blessen, published in April, 2012 by Border Press. Margaret has a Masters degree in Gifted Education and certification by the National Boards for Professional Teaching Standards. She lives on the Bayou Teche with her husband Jeff in New Iberia, Louisiana.

John Gibson retired from medicine in 1997 and has been doing pen and ink pointillism for many years. He has displayed his work in galleries in the Jackson, Mississippi metropolitan area since 2001 and received second place in the 2012 Annual Cedars Juried Art Exhibition. He credits the “environment within which he lives for providing him with creations of nature such as trees and foliage and the magical effects of light and shadow as subject for his ink drawings.” He lives with his wife Dot on a lake in Madison County, Mississippi.

Order Illuminate online or from Border Press, PO Box 3124, Sewanee TN 37375.