letter arts review 25:4 . Laurie Doctor teaches a workshop at Cheerio . Calligraphy rekindles a love for literature Mike Gold and Judy Melvin on the spontaneous art of collaboration . An interview with Julia Vance

standing in the need of prayer . Timothy R. Botts

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1Letter Arts Review 25:4

Letter Arts Review

Volume 25 Number 4Autumn 2011

The editor’s letter: Questions of scale

Cover artistTimothy R. Botts

Not a day without a lineBy Laurie Doctor

On my way to becoming a scholar, I cried & learned calligraphyBy Laura Capp

Spontaneous CreationBy Mike Gold and Judy Melvin

A Letter Arts Review interviewwith Julia Vance

Book Reviews

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13Letter Arts Review 25:4

Laurie Doctor reflects on a week of retreat and renewal

at Camp Cheerio in the Blue Ridge Mountains

oppositeOverlooking the valley, photo by Ray Ritchie.Lettering by Christopher Calderhead.

By Laurie Doctor . In the spring of 2010, as the daf fodils were beginning to bloom and the birds were building their nests, I had the opportunity to return to Cheerio. It is a place ideal for stepping into metaphor, as the beauty of the landscape lies in every direction. It makes it easier to leave our busy lives behind.

Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina overlooking Glade Valley and surrounded by woods. There are two spacious classrooms encompassed by a veranda where barn swallows build their nests each spring. One morning I watched a pair not two feet away from me on the railing, having an argument.

They were too engrossed in scolding and hopping toward and away from each other on their little feet to notice me. It is a lovely setting for classes, with the added benefit of reasonable pricing and gourmet food that makes mealtime a nourishing and visual feast.

Cheerio has become a national and international destination for both students and teachers. Jim Teta, whose father was once the camp doctor, began to form the idea of calligraphy retreats with his wife, Joyce, in the early 1980s. Peter Thornton was the first person who agreed to teach in 1984. Soon after, John Stevens was invited to teach, and within a few

years he became a partner with Joyce and Jim in developing the programs. John is the core teacher, web master and designer for Cheerio, and he has set the high standard for excellence that is associated with his work. The quality of the program is supported by having a small venue with only two five-day classes at a time.The warmth and comfort of the experience, and the friendliness of the place, is fostered by Jim and Joyce. On occasion I have arrived a day early and been taken into the Teta home, where I was treated to Jim’s Italian cooking while we joked and laughed, sitting around a big table, surrounded by the art of famous calligraphers.

Good food is part of the ambience of the place. Martyn Armstrong, the chef, came to Cheerio for a summer break in the 1990s from the University of Sunderland in northeast England. He started out being a camp counselor and a dishwasher. Soon he began taking a real interest in the food that was being served. In concert with the cooks who had

The artwork shown in this article comes from Laurie Doctor’s Spring 2010 workshop at Cheerio and was made by her students.

Looking up at Camp Cheerio

Camp Cheerio at dawn, photo by Ray Ritchie.

21Letter Arts Review 25:4

By Laura Capp . In a scene from The Simpsons that has become legend to graduate students the world over, Bart makes fun of the pitiful lives that grad students lead. “Look at me! I’m a grad student!” Bart mocks. “I’m 30 years old, and I made $600 last year.” “Bart, don’t make fun of grad students,” his mother, Marge, scolds in her gravelly but sweet voice. “They just made a ter-rible life choice.” Though laughable, the aim of this incisive barb is true enough to wound a little, especially now that I am seeking gainful employ-ment. But when I moved to Iowa intending to acquire my doctorate and become a professor, it didn’t feel like a terrible life choice at all. To my 21-year-old self who loved books and writing and her English classes in college, graduate school seemed, simply, like the natural next step toward a vocation. What better way to spend my life, I thought, than to read astonishing literary works alongside students hungry for ways of under-standing and articulating their experience of the world? It was uncomplicated logic, not at all attuned to more nuanced considerations of job security, the dwindling status of the humani-ties on college campuses, and some of the more diffi cult realities of tenure-track life. But my deeply humanist heart wouldn’t have cared about such objections anyway. I had discovered myself

through literature—in literature—and I wanted to help others do the same. Simple as that.

However, less than a few weeks into my program, I was fl oundering. Passionate as I was about literature, an encounter with high theory, critical jargon, and the pseudo-scientifi c approach that seems to characterize literary studies today left me cold. I lost weight. I started having panic attacks. And I cried. There was far too much academic posturing for my taste, both in classes and in criticism, where the goal seemed merely to be intellectual showmanship. We were all, supposedly, writers, and yet much of the prose I encountered in articles was so turgid, I often couldn’t locate the meaning at the heart of it. For a short stint in the 90s, the journal Philosophy and Literature actually sponsored a Bad Writing Contest that entertained nominations for the worst academic writing of the year. The winning gem in 1998 was from Judith Butler’s

“Further Refl ections on the Conversations of Our Time,” published in the journal Diacritics. Butler’s prize-winning sentence?

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social rela-tions in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject

opposite:“Xantippe” (detail).

Text by Amy Levy.

The calligraphy shown in this article is by Laura Capp.

I cried learned calligraphyOn my way to becoming a scholar,

29Letter Arts Review 25:4

Some months ago, Mike Gold sent me a short draft of an article he had written describing the links between his work, his Zen Buddhist practice, and the power of spontaneity. Would I be interested in using it for Letter Arts Review? I wrote back, expressing interest and giving him some suggestions how he might expand his theme into a full-length article. I didn’t think much about it in the weeks that followed—I made a job folder to remind myself the article had been promised, and I attended to other things. One day, an e-mail from Mike announced he was done. The article had developed considerably. Mike had written much more text and invited his long-time friend and collaborator, Judy Melvin, to add thoughts of her own. In my inbox I found their attachments—26 individual text files and almost as many images. The editor in me completely freaked out. Where was the neat, linear essay, with a tidy introduction, body, and conclusion? But then I began reading through all the bits and pieces, and the artist in me—a different persona from the editor—was rather charmed. Here was an article describing spontaneous work, the use of collage, and the importance of happy accidents. And that’s exactly how Mike and Judy’s article read. It enacted what it described. Judy’s texts contained questions to Mike and uncertain dates; they were incomplete, even tentative. Reading through the whole article was like leafing through a scrapbook, or reading a collection of letters between close friends. Mike and Judy were thinking out loud and letting me in on the conversation.

By Mike Gold (whose words appear in light blue)

and Judy Melvin (whose words appear in ochre)

with editorial comments by Christopher Calderhead (who speaks in red)

and pithy quotations used by authors when they teach (in dark blue)

Mike Gold and Judy Melvin reflect on the way they work, together and alone

Fig. 1 (opposite page)Fractal Formation #1Mike GoldGree stained glass giclee, 2010

This image could not have happened by planning ahead. Only by playing around with letters that I had scanned into my iMac and experimenting with what I could do with them in Photoshop could this have resulted, for better or worse. When I saw this image, I was thrilled. It reminded me of a stained glass window in the bright sunshine. The image came about by creating layers of multiple lettering samples and painted art in a Photoshop document, then playing around with the blending modes for the various layers. It is total experimentation, and you make choices as you go along. Changing colors and layouts and adding new elements can happen with the click of a mouse or Wacom pen (my tool of choice). The most dangerous and sometimes overwhelming part of the process is that there are infinite possibilities.

45Letter Arts Review 25:4

Julia Vance is a Norwegian sculptor who maintains a studio in Pietrasanta, Italy. Her work grows out of her training as a calligrapher and stone cutter. Letter Arts Review interviewed her by e-mail.

lar : From your CV, I see you trained on a sailing ship. That sounds very exotic. What was that about? Does that experience feed into your current work?julia vance : I didn’t really know what to do after art college, so I went off on a huge full-rigged sail boat for a year. We were almost one hundred people on board living more or less on top of each other, which has been useful later on in life. In the studio now there can be huge swinging cranes and lots of noise around me, and I can mentally block that all out and work peacefully without being disturbed! Of course I learned about sailing and machinery too, and even had my first try with a huge angle-grinder. Today I use an angle-grinder daily. I guess I’ve got five or six of them! It’s fantastic how the strangest experience or skill becomes useful later on in life.

What, exactly, is an angle grinder?It’s a hand-held electric machine with a fast-

AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIA VANCE

The sculpture of Julia Vance explores letterforms in three

dimensions, playing with language, letters, and bold

abstract forms. This piece, To, combines the letters T and O

into a sinuous whole.

Left:MO RFrom outside you read

“MOR,” the word for “mother” in Norwegian.

The R is backwards, suggesting you can go inside the sculpture. From inside, the word reads “ROM,” the Norwegian word for

“room” or “space.”White Afyon marble, 2006.H 69 × W 41 × D 54 cm.