STREET SKETCHES

Karen Bourque, glasswork artist

When a writer/poet commissions Karen Bourque to illustrate the theme of a book by creating a new glasswork, Karen responds by bringing all of her intuitive gifts to the project, and the resulting cover for the book is a masterpiece.  I know because she has rendered glasswork pieces that I’ve photographed for the covers of four of my books of poetry. Karen, who works in a studio behind her home in Church Point, Louisiana, not only creates the glass piece, she always writes an accompanying text that explains the symbolism of the stones and other objects contained within the artwork. I’ve begun to include a Note By the Artist in the books for which she creates covers, and I feel they enhance the themes represented in the poetry.

In a few weeks, Street Sketches, perhaps the only book of poetry that I’ll produce this year, will be published, and for this volume, Karen created a brilliant glass piece entitled “Lumina.” Karen says that this piece is entitled “Lumina” because it is compositionally and metaphorically about light, and “each source is a beginning point for further contemplation, a possible departure point in a meditation

on light: a red light as a signal to stop, look and listen to what is happening on or in street lives in cities and towns across the globe that often go unnoticed…the moon, a yellow jasper cabochon, a stone of endurance, perseverance, and tenacity…attracts others for friendship or to help with a goal…a street lamp, an agate cabochon which is a stone of strength and removes and releases energies of resentment and bitterness…a final source of light in the work emanating from the steeple of a church at the end of the street with a small cruciform encased in paler glass surrounding it. The steeple, the cross and the surrounding light suggest the power of spirituality or connection to a higher power…”

Each time I obtain the glasswork of this talented artist, Vickie Sullivan and I enjoy a visit with Karen and Darrell Bourque, her poet husband (former poet laureate of Louisiana) and we’re immersed in visual and verbal art for at least three hours. Each time before I visit, I say that I’m not going to write any more books, and each time I leave the habitat of these two inspirational artists, I return home, pondering a theme for another book…

Border Press describes Street Sketches in the following blurb:

“Alleyway, cobblestone, asphalt or concrete, streets are shared by all types of people who engage in diverse interactions; they are places of commerce or are residential in nature where aggregates of cultures gather. In Street Sketches, Moore captures the atmosphere and people who traverse streets that she has lived on or visited… from the busy streets of Ahwaz, Iran where she lived and observed beggar street people spreading their household goods on an Oriental rug and using it for a residence… to the elegant boulevards of Paris, Munich, and New York City, places where contrasting life in an urban environment takes place. She also probes the “Thoroughfares of the Mind,” “troubled roads winding among weeds/beside the ruffled waters of old lakes/and back alleys inside the brain. /Scandals and undisguised tragedies/mingling in closets of paranoia.” The concluding poem, “All Roads Lead to Home” reflects on her homesickness for streets everywhere she has lived and visited, lamenting that she “would probably spend a lifetime sitting at a window overlooking the streets of all those places, sketching what I viewed with words that express languishing nostalgia…”

Street Sketches is available on amazon.com or can be ordered by writing to Border Press at borderpress@gmail.com or P.O. Box 3124, Sewanee, TN 37375.

A VISIT TO CROSS CREEK

On the return trip to New Iberia, Louisiana from Frostproof, Florida, we veered off course and stopped in Cross Creek to lunch with Jo Ann Lordahl, a long-time friend and author who has again settled in north central Florida after living fourteen years in Hawaii. We passed through scrub country, marshes and oak hammocks, and met Jo Ann at “The Yearling,” a large restaurant named after the book of that name written by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Jo Ann has settled a mile or so down the road from the home site of Rawlings (now a national park) and has chosen to “woodshed” and work on her memoir in the environment that inspired Rawlings to write The Yearling.

Jo Ann’s last book, A Secret Kept in Hawaii is a novel based in Kauai, a Hawaiian island where she lived and wrote about the threats to the good life of the postmodern world – GMOs, aggressive global corporations, military and governmental misdemeanors. She also captured the magic of this garden island and continued the story of how Samantha, a haole newcomer, settled into Hawaiian life permeated with the memory of High Chiefess Ruth. When Jo Ann read and dreamed about this native woman who was filled with mana power, she became inspired to probe into and relate the history, spirit, and culture of Hawaii.

Jo Ann returned to Florida last year and says she has moved her writing base approximately 100 times. She’s a “romantic, nomadic writer,” having published 23 books based in different locales. She lived briefly in Louisiana, and her books about the Pelican State can be found on a website bearing her name that lists her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry books. In addition to being an author, Jo Ann has a PhD in Psychology and presents workshops on self-improvement and writing. She has coordinated Women’s Voices, a performance-based poetry group in Florida, a lyric play entitled Four Women Speak, and her fellowships and residencies include the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida, and the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, California; Ucross, Wyoming.

We talked about Jo Ann’s latest, the memoir she is writing entitled My Unveiled Face: A Free Woman, in which she draws on material in 93 journals that she has kept during her lifetime, some of which have provided fodder for the stories and novels listed on her site. She plans to complete the memoir by April of this year, alternately writing and leading a poetry group in Gainesville, Florida.

We had to travel fast to reach Crestview, Florida, where we had booked lodging, before dark. We were treated to one of the wonderful sunsets prevalent on the Florida landscape just as we reached our destination, happy to have stopped for a reunion with a close friend we’ve known 38 years and who always inspires us to remain committed to the writing craft.

Photographs by Victoria I Sullivan

   

WEATHERING HEIGHTS

Fallen white pine, Sewanee

This will probably be the shortest blog I’ve done during seven years of blogging. The picture on the left indicates my whereabouts during an unusual winter visit to our second home at Sewanee. What you’re viewing is an accidentally-felled pine tree (!) at the end of our drive that will join the graveyard of trees we purposely felled in our front yard in New Iberia, Louisiana last month.

Foot prints in snow

As you can see, at least three inches of snow and the felled tree impede our progress out of here. It also impedes the mobility of six students whose cars are under the trunk of the felled pine. Why are we here? We came up from Louisiana to a meeting at St. Mary’s Convent and found our home had been

entered, keys and the remote to our electronic door stolen, a smoking parlor set up in my study, and the culprits were brazen enough to return to our property (supposedly protected against public invasions) the night we arrived and sat out on our porch, smoking and chatting it up. We rattled a door knob and they scattered, but we’ve been forced to install security in a cottage set between two dormitories and one fraternity house on the campus of the University of the South. We live in a community that touted having zero crime when we thought about moving to the university campus at Sewanee eight years ago. I hope this brief entry sets the record straight about that much-advertised propaganda.

Tree smashed six cars

Not to worry – we have two eggs, a half loaf of gluten-free bread, blueberries, rice and salsa, grits, ghee, and coffee, and we are hoping to get out of here within the next day or so for a trip to Florida. We have cell service, heat, water, and Sister Elizabeth says “a sense of humor.” But as Ma Kettle once commented, “some days it don’t pay to put on your clothes” (except that she must have lived in a warmer clime because I have on two layers)…

65 Fairbanks after snow storm

Mind you, I’m not grousing or boodaying or saying that I won’t return to this community one day (if I ever leave), but I’m having second thoughts about the wisdom of owning a place at “Weathering Heights.” Meanwhile, here are some pictures of the “disaster area” (minus a snap of the desk in my study that held a quilt borrowed from one bedroom and spread with tobacco leavings – I might add this campus is advertised as a “no smoking campus” – more propaganda)! Mischief is afoot in the world.