rapportage vol xvi

8/19/2019 Rapportage Vol XVI

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Volume XVI Literary Essays, Interviews, and Proles

Adentures on the

Big ScreenChildren’ s LiteratureIn Lancaster County

$10.00

Literary Travel

DestinationsHeiress Huguette Cand Empty Mansio

An Invitation to the Writers able

Books As Collectibles


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E V E N T STHE LANCASTER LITERARY GUILD 2014-2015 S EASON OVERVIEW

WAKE UP AMERICA!Original Poster Art ofthe First World War

F IRST F RIDAY E XHIBIT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC October 3, 2014 5-9p.m.November 7, 2014 5-9p.m.The Guild House

RICHARD RENALDI

October 8, 2014 7:30 p.m.Millersville University- Lancaster Campus Questioning ethnic, racial,and cultural barriersthrough photography

MARK KURLANSKYOctober 23, 2014 7:30 p.m.Millersville University- Lancaster Campus American journalistand writer

DONALD DAVIS November 4, 2014 7:30 p.m.Millersville University- Lancaster Campus Dramatic Storyteller

HOLIDAY BOOK S A wonderful assortmen graphed books and numsigned prints from Caldewinning books.

November 15, 10 - 4Guild House 113 N. L

D e c e m b e r 5 , 2 0 1 4

Marty Crisp Ephrata

Chet Williamson Lancaster

Linda Oatman High Bowmansville

Barry Kornhauser Lancaster

Barry Root Drumore ownship

Kimberly Bulcken Root Drumore ownship

Libby Sternberg East Hempeld

Maria VElizabe

Sandy ALancas

Karen RLancas

The Guil113 N. L

Lancastwww.litg

412-48

festL A N C CO L ITHE LANCASTER LITERARY GUILD

Rebecca Tatcher Murcia Akron


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Thanks to Candice O’ Donnell andfamily, Mayor Rick Gray desig-

nates a special day in thanks ofthe life and work of The LancasterLiterary Guild Director.

BETSY HURLEY DAYD AY OF O BSERVANCE October 4

A PREMIER LITERARY MAGAZINE

RAPPORTAGE features in-depth proles of our visitauthors, essays, literary feature stories, and a superb aoriginal art and photography. Each issue involves exteresearch, interviewing, and travel. The result is a thouful and provocative publication that engages the readebrings a unique collection of literary insight.

RAPPORTAGE is free to members of the LancasterLiterary Guild and on sale at Barnes and Noble.

OF TH E LANCASTER L ITERARY GUILD

www.litguild.o

T.S. ELIOTF IRST F RIDAY E XHIBIT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC April 3, 2015 5-9p.m.May 1, 2015 5-9p.m.Or by appointment717.431.4433The Guild House

ARTHUR MILLERF IRST F RIDAY E XHIBIT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC October 2, 2015 5-9p.m.November 6, 2015 6-9p.m.Or by appointment717.431.4433The Guild House

STAIRCASE PLAYERSA reading honoring Playwright Bertolt Brecht October 4, 2015 5-9p.m.Members Only Event The Guild House

Cynthia Charles,Pat Lemay,

Joel Lesher,John Rohrkemper,and Diane Carroll

(accompanist)

EDITORBetsy Hurley

MANAGING EDITORSusan Cherie Beam

GRAPHIC DESIGNIan Brownlie

RAPPORTAGEis published by

The Lancaster Literary113 N. Lime St.

Lancaster PA, 176717.431.4433

www.litguild.org© 2014. All Rights R

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Lancaster Literary Guild would like to thank our members wsupported the many literary programs and projects during the las

Merle Gingrich and Little Mountain Printing Inc. for printing thi

Susan Cherie Beam for her professional editing of this journal.

Ian Brownlie and his lovely work as graphic designer.

Theresa O”Donnell for keeping track of all the loose ends.


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F R O M T H E E D I T O RDear readers,

Since 2001, it has been the privilege of The Lancaster LiteraryGuild to bring youRapportage, a publication which has alwaysendeavored to maintain the highest standards in publishing originalliterary essays, author proles, and unique artwork and compositions.

For your dedication and attention over the past 16 years,

dear readers, I offer my thanks and appreciation. Without you,this publication could not have been what it is.Additionally, I offer the utmost gratitude to thosewho have contributed over the years. I am delightedthat Rapportage was the showcase to display suchremarkable talent.

I have received many kind handwritten notesfollowing the newspaper’s announcement of ourclosing on Sunday, November 29, (2015) and agreat many more verbal expressions of appreciation for the qualityof our literary programming, our journal and the visiting writers.I will remember your words and keep your lovely letters. You haveshown such thoughtful support for whatever may come next and Ilove these friendships.

None would have been at all possible without the love andsupport of my son, Matthew and the kind, patient, love of myhusband, Michael. They both knew this was a ‘literary experiment’though could never have imagined its duration. Our son was sixwhen the idea was put into motion and seven when the guild becameincorporated a year later on his birthday—February 28, 2000. Hewill be twenty-four in just a few months. Thank you Michael forall your patient help on event nights, you have been by my side fortwenty-ve years.

I want to acknowledge, Shirley Price. She was a Literary Guildvolunteer for a decade and was responsible for entering everymembership and sending out renewal letters. She knew how to

navigate the computer program and kept accurate records for manyyears. She was one of the pillars of our programming and workedsteadily behind the scenes.

Ian Brownlie was our very talented graphic designer. He hasdone the layout of 7 journals beginning in 2006. What you may notknow is that Ian also did the design work for our postcards, posters,

our website at www.litguild.org and the sixteen literary exhibits. Oncehe had matted and framed our exhibits he drove toLancaster from Myerstown and placed them on thewalls of our gallery space for First Fridays. As fatewould have it, my retirement and his wife’s new jobwould mean a new life for both our families. Ian,Stacey and their two children are moving close tothe University of Maine where she has accepted anew post. I could never nd anyone to replace thequality of his work. The timing of both events, as

they were unknown to the other, was providential.

We have a wonderful last issue for you with proles offascinating people including authors Seamus Heaney and Janet Frame,photographer Richard Renaldi and graphic artist Alison Bechtel.Additionally, I invite you to linger over our pieces on literary travel, rarebookstores, and writers and their (unusual!) dining habits.

I wish to thnak my managing editors; Ellen Brown, Emily Shenk(who now works for National Geographic), Sara Felice and mostrecently Susan Cherie Beam – you are the best and the brightest.Special thanks to the Shenk family for your love and support.

Readers, it has been our pleasure to walk this literary roadwith you, and it is my wish that, as our paths diverge, you continueto reap the benets of astounding and stimulating texts and ideas.Happy reading!

Sincerely,

Betsy Hurley, Editor

©Dan Marschka LNP Staff Photograper


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P R O F I L E S

ON THE COVER:Photo by Deborah Linder. For more on the complex relation-ship between the written andculinary arts, see page 76

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SUSAN CHERIE BEAM 6 Touching Strangers, Touching Lives: A Prole of Photographer Richard Renaldi

JILL ALTHOUSE-WOOD 12 Alison Bechdel: The Author to Watch Out For AARON HAMBURGER 20 Discovering Janet Frame ROBERT SCHROEDER 26 Seamus Heaney:

An Irish god of small things BONNIE DORSEY 32 Meet Our Lancaster County Authors

SANDY ASHER 38 Ambassadors, Advocates and Laureates:Celebrating Children’s Literature in Lancaster County

IFRA ASAD 46 Murder, Solitude and Literature: Adventures on the Big Screen

CONSTANCE RENFROW 52 Celebrating the Printed Word:Books as Collectibles

ASHLEY DIVELY 60 Oh, The Places You’ll Go!Literary Travel Destinations

CHRISTINE KELLEY 70 A Generous, Reclusive Life:Heiress Huguette Clark and Empty Mansions DEBORAH LINDER 78 An Invitation to the Writer’s Table

F E A T U R E S

R E V I E W S

CONTENTS6

MARTHA PEASLEE LEVINE The End of Your Life Book Cl KELLY MASON Magnolia City CANDACE O’DONNELL Rules of Civility

PRISCILLA OPPENHEIMER Black Aperture CARLA RINEER Mrs. Poe KAREN ROOSA Wonder NICK ROSE The Ocean at the End of the L BEVERLY SCHNELLER One Summer: America, 1927 SAMANTHA SHEWMAKER In One Person NORMA SIGAL The Signature of All Things LIJA STOLTZFUS Dear Life

JOYCE ANDERSON Book of Ages:The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin

BEN ASHER Are You Experienced? LEE ATKINS The Lowland SUSAN CHERIE BEAM Great Possessions CALEB CORKERY Men We Reaped: A Memoir ASHLEY DIVELY This is How You Lose Her LOCHRAN FALLON The Trip to Echo Spring

– On Writers and Drinking CHARISSA JELLIFF 7 Menand the Secret of Their Greatness

ELIZABETH LAPCHAK Cotton Tenants: Three Families


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JILL ALTHOUSE-WOOD is a writer, artist, andworkshop provider. Her novel,Summers at BlueLake (Algonquin 2007), is available in ebook andaudiobook form. In 2013, Jill moved to the artistcommunity of Arden, Delaware, where she continuesto write and paint.

IFRA ASAD Ifra Asad graduated in 2013 witha major in Creative Writing from Franklin andMarshall, where she served as editor-in-chief ofPlume Magazine. A lover of words and collectorof beautiful and long-winded sentences, she iscurrently Assistant to the Associate Publisher atSkyhorse Publishing in New York City. This is hersecond time appearing in Rapportage.

SANDY ASHER is the author of 25 books,including the award-winningToo Many Frogs andits companionsWhat A Partyand Here ComesGosling , and the editor of seven anthologies, amongthemWith All My Heart, With All My Mind, winnerof the National Jewish Book Award in children’sliterature, andWriting It Right: How SuccessfulChildren’s Authors Revise and Sell Their Stories.Herplays have been honored with an NEA grant, threeAATE Distinguished Play Awards (for A WomanCalled Truth, In the Garden of the Selsh Giant , and Jesse and Grace: A Best Friends Story), the CharlotteChorpenning Award for a distinguished body ofwork, and an Aurand Harris Fellowship grant fromthe Children’s Theatre Foundation of America. Six ofher plays are included inTell Your Story: The Playsand Playwriting of Sandra Fenichel Asher. Visit Sandyat http://www.sandyasher.com.

SUSAN CHERIE BEAM is the editor ofRapportage and freelances for a number ofpublications in the Lancaster-York area. She is alsoadjunct faculty at the University of Baltimore andHarrisburg Area Community College. In the fall, shewill pursue her PhD in English at Temple University.During her free time, she enjoys reading, writingcreatively, and spending time with friends.

ASHLEY DIVELY received a Master of Arts inEnglish from Millersville University and a Bachelorof Science in English/Professional Writing fromFrostburg State University. She currently residesin Garrett, PA with her husband, Levi. She teachesEnglish courses at Frostburg State University andAllegany College of Maryland, and also works asa Writing Lab tutor at ACM. Ashley also enjoysfreelance writing in her free time. This is her rstappearance inRapportage.

BONNIE DORSEY is a former teacher, journalist,and editor. Currently, her writ ing focus is on memoirand memoir poetry. From 1994-1995, she taughtEnglish at the University of Sousse, Tunisia, NorthAfrica, as a member of the U.S. Peace Corps. She haa bachelor’s degree in Secondary Education/Englishand a Master of Arts in English.

AARON HAMBURGER Aaron Hamburger wasawarded the Rome Prize by the American Academyof Arts and Letters and was nominated for a VioletQuill Award for his short story collection,The ViewFrom Stalin’s Head (Random House, 2004). His nextbook, a novel titledFaith for Beginners (RandomHouse, 2005), was nominated for a Lambda LiteraryAward. His writing has appeared inPoets and Writers,Tin House, Details, The Village Voice, The Forward,and Out.He has received fellowships from the

Edward F. Albee Foundation and the Civitella RanieriFoundation in Umbria, Italy, as well as a residencyfrom Yaddo Artists’ Colony.

CHRISTINE KELLEY is an English MA studentat Villanova, where she works as a researchassistant and plans to focus her studies on 20th

century American literature. She is a graduate ofElizabethtown College with a BA in English literaturand history. Previously, Christine worked as an internat the Lancaster Literary Guild to create an exhibitcelebrating the life and works of the late poet SylviaPlath. She has an interned with Radio Smart Talk on

WITF.

CONSTANCE RENFROW curated the exhibit “APortrait of the Brontës” at the Lancaster LiteraryGuild in 2011, and has been pursuing her love of theVictorian era ever since. She currently works as aneditorial assistant at Skyhorse Publishing in New YorkCity, and spends most weekends at the Merchant’sHouse Museum, where she is a volunteer docent. Sherecently published her rst poem in the Franklin andMarshall Alumni Arts Review, and her play . . . Out theBeast was a semi-nalist in the Drury University One-Act Playwriting Competition. She can be found writingreading, and editing on the steps of the post ofce.

Lancaster nativeROBERT SCHROEDER is awriter living in Bethesda, Maryland. He is a reporterfor MarketWatch.com, and has written for theWallStreet Journal , the New York Times Magazine, theWashington Post and many other publications.He helped Pakistani musician Salman Ahmad writehis memoirRock & Roll Jihad: A Muslim Rock Star’sRevolution (Simon & Schuster/Free Press, 2010).

C O N T R I B U T O R S

Anthony Palatta


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RAPPORTAGEOF THE LANCASTER L ITERARY GUILD

Arthur Miller as Te Death o a Salesman by John Sokol, 1980Portraits by John Sokol are available at www.johnsokol-artist-author.com.


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“I love you like this because I don’t

know any other way to love,

except in this orm in which I am not nor are you,

so close that your hand upon my chest

is mine,so close that your eyes close with mydreams.” One Hundred Love Sonnets (XVII) ranslation rom Poetry Foundation.

B S Bouching Lives A Prole of Photographer Richard RenaldiIn one o his most amous love sonnets, Spanishpoet Pablo Neruda ends his revelation o lovewith an image o physical intimacy:

All images:courtesy of

Richard Renaldi

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But what about the same sort o skin-to-skinphysical contact…only with a stranger? aught romchildhood to “keep our hands to ourselves,” and withthe lesson en orced by stories about the very real dangero predators who seek to inict harm, the notion otouching a stranger – especially a stranger whose physicalappearance denotes an existence quite different rom ourown - is o en an idea that can inspire a recoiling, bothphysical and mental.

Yet, that idea is exactly what New York-basedphotographer Richard Renaldi attempts to challenge inhis series ouching Strangers. Since 2007, Renaldi hasbeen traveling throughout the U.S., seeking out strangersand posing them as though they were amily. Bodies meltinto each other, aces touch cheek to cheek, hands rest onshoulders or clasp together in a universal sign o solidarity

With the simple image o a hand resting on a chest,Neruda illustrates a closeness – an intermingling o bodyand soul with his beloved – which many o us strive orin our own relationships with signicant others, amilyand riends. Physical contact is one o the major waysour relationships are affirmed - a quick hand squeeze, a

riendly hug, an energetic high ve, a reassuring pat onthe shoulder or arm – and perhaps, an integral part o our very humanness.

“It is the rst language we learn,” said UC Berkleypsychology pro essor and touch researcher DacherKeltner, author o Born to Be Good: Te Science o a Meaning ul Li e (2009) and co-director o the GreaterGood Science Center. “[Physical touches] are ourprimary language o compassion, and a primary means

or expressing compassion.”

Bodies melt into each other, faces touch cheek to cheek,hands rest on shoulders or clasp together in a universal signof solidarity – and yet, those faces and hands were unfamiliar

ones until that moment when the camera ashed.Ekeabong and Andrew; 2013, Venice, California Jesse and Michael; 2013, New York, New York

C h r i s a n

d A m a

i r a ; 2

0 1 3 , C h i c a g o

, I l l i n o

i s

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– and yet, those aces and hands were un amiliar ones untilthat moment when the camera ashed.

In many ways, ouching Strangers could not havebeen timelier. Over the past 50 years, scientic researchhas yielded some astonishing conclusions regarding theimportance o touching.

In a series o experiments conducted in the 1960’s,American psychologist Harry Harlowe explored love and

physical com ort by examining the reaction young rhesusmonkeys had to two “mothers” – one made o so clothand one made o wire. While shockingly cruel, Harlowe’sexperiments revealed the importance o com ort contactwhen the young monkeys spent a considerably longeramount o time with their cloth “mother” than the wire“mother,” despite the latter’s offering o ood.

In 1982, long be ore the benets o therapeutic massagewere acknowledged by science or the public, Dr. iffanyField began researching how healthy touches and massagecan sooth premature babies in distress. Now recognized asone o the premier researchers in the eld, she establishedthe ouch Research Institute at the University o MiamiMedical School in 1992.

“We do a lot o sel touching: ipping our hair, huggingourselves,” said Field. Most likely, this is because welcomephysical contact– rom ourselves or rom others - releases acalm-inducing hormone/neurotransmitter called oxytocin,

also known as the “cuddle” hormone, designed to reducestress and create a sensation o trust.

Certainly, this is true in relationships. In his best-sellingbook series, Te Five Love Languages (1995), psychologistand author Gary Chapman identies physical touch as oneo the primary love languages and one o the most power ulnon-verbal ways o communicating.

He writes, “Almost instinctively in a time o crisis,

we hug one another. Why? Because physical touch is apower ul communicator o love. In a time o crisis, morethan anything, we need to eel loved. We cannot alwayschange events, but we can survive i we eel loved.”

More recently, science has done a number o studiesregarding how touch affects interaction. Studies have proventhat a sympathetic touch rom a doctor leaves a more

avorable impression on patients, while a riendly touch roma teacher encourages greater student participation. A 2010study led by Michael W. Kraus, Cassy Huang and Dr. Keltnereven yielded results that suggested the more “touch-bonded”a pro essional sports team was, the better they played.

O course, the more rightening side comes whentouching violates personal boundaries. In October 2013,Pennsylvania sparked off a social media hailstorm when apregnant woman utilized the state’s harassment law to cite aman or unlaw ul touching o her baby bump. Commentaryon the incident was varied; some women cited their own

Carlos and Alex; 2007, New York, New York Nathan and Robyn; 2012, Provincetown, Massachusetts

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experiences eeling violated by constant touching romstrangers during their own pregnancies, while others –both male and emale – suggested that a harassment chargewas overblown. Regardless, the incident and subsequentdiscussion revealed the range o perceptions society stillcarries in regards to physical contact with strangers.

DePauw University psychologist Matthew Hertensteinsaw this bias rst-hand while pioneering a 2009 researchstudy on deciphering emotions through touch alone. During

the study, volunteers were slightly apprehensive abouthaving physical contact with a stranger, causing Hertensteinto observe, “Tis is a touch-phobic society. We’re not used totouching strangers, or even our riends, necessarily.”

Context is key when touching – who, when, where –as well as the touch itsel : the location, duration, and levelo intensity. Yet the benets o welcome physical contactcannot be denied.

“I you’re close enough to touch, it’s o en the easiest wayto signal something,” said Laura Guerrero, co-author o CloseEncounters: Communication in Relationships (4th ed. 2013).“We eel more connected to someone i they touch us.”

Long be ore he was encouraging strangers to makethose connections, Renaldi was a young boy growingup in the Windy City. Born in 1968 in the suburbs oChicago, Renaldi’s parents split when he was still a child,prompting his mother to move him and his brother todowntown Chicago.

“I was a city kid, and I grew up a little aster because othat,” said Renaldi. During this period, he was encouragedto express his creative side through musical arts.

“Growing up, I played the piano but I didn’t like it,” he

admitted. “I’m innately visual, but at the time, visual artsweren’t encouraged the way musical arts were. I took artclasses in seventh and eighth grade rom this French womanI loved, and I really, really loved working with images.”

Renaldi ell into photography in high school almost byaccident. “I went to sign up or an art class, and they were all

closed except or photography,” he chuckled. Tat ortunateincident led him to his chosen eld; in 1990, Renaldi receivedhis BFA in photography rom New York University.

From there, his career took off, and he participatedin group exhibits all over New York, as ar west as LosAngeles, and overseas in Venice. In 2002, he held his rstsolo exhibit, Project Room – Madison Ave. Portraits, at Debs& Co. New York, New York. Renaldi has continued withboth group and solo exhibitions o his work in a number o

galleries all over the U.S. and throughout Europe, includingGermany, Sweden and Wales.

In 2006, his rst monograph, Figure and Ground , waspublished by the Aperture Foundation. Described as aphotographic “road trip across America” by John Lelandin Te New York imes Lens Blog 2013-07-05, Figure andGround eatured a series o head-to-toe shots o peopleposed almost as though they were pausing momentarilyin their natural surroundings – one minute in the li e oan individual. Alone in the photographs, the energy is

ocused on the individual subjects and how they loomlarge in their world – rom “Sabrina, Philadelphia, 2005,” inwhich a young woman wields her Victoria Secret shoppingbag almost de ensively while standing in the Philadelphiabus station to “Jeff, Dixie National Forest, Utah 2004,” inwhich a camouage-clad young man, posed against a orestbackground, lowers his bow and arrow momentarily.

In each o the portraits, the subjects ace the camerawithout a smile. “It’s intentional my subjects aren’t smiling,”explained Renaldi. “Smiles change the way people look or thecamera. I a photograph is a relationship between the subjectand camera, a orced smile causes a sel -consciousness toenter into that relationship. I wanted to avoid that.”

He paused, and then added, “I like to capture peoplein repose. I get more out o person that way, rather than atrade response.”

It is characteristic that Renaldi would continue in hisother collections, including Fall River Boys, his secondmonograph, published by Charles Lane Press in 2009.

“”– Richard Renaldi

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A visual coming-o -age story, Fall River Boys eaturedblack-and-white photos o the young men o Fall RiverCity, a once-thriving city in Massachusetts which is nowexperiencing the downward spiral o a post-industrialage. Despite the subjects’ earmarks o teenage rebellion –baggy pants, cigarettes and bandanas – their youth ul aces,devoid o menacing stares or ake smiles, appear poignantand heartrending. Posed on the edge o manhood, existingin the no-man’s land between a discarded childhood and anadulthood that makes no promise o conventional success,

these subjects have their essential humanity revealed witha click o Renaldi’s camera.

Poignant visuals o humanity, in all its unlovely andloveliness, is something Renaldi specializes in as an artist.Rather than seek out conventional subjects, he looks orthose at the ringes o society; people you may pass everyday on the street and never give two thoughts or who theyare, where they came rom, and where they are going.

“People are incredibly ascinating,” said Renaldi“Te camera is an excuse to stare deeper and longer. Tepractice o photography gives me a unique connection to

my subjects on a more universal level.”O course, approaching strangers on the street to take

their photo isn’t always easy. A er nding the per ectsubject – someone who, or Renaldi, has an undeniablepresence – he still has to convince them to allow him tophotograph them. “Tere’s always ear o rejection,” hecommented. “Sometimes I have to cajole them into doingit. Certainly, taking photographs isn’t a passive act, whichmay say something about my own character.”

For ouching Strangers, Renaldi took on the additionalchallenge o nding two or more strangers who would agreeto not only be photographed but also pose intimately withsomeone whom they had never met. According to Renaldi,the idea or ouching Strangers, or at least, photographingmore than one person, was initially sparked when workingon a series o portraits called Bus ravelers, which capturedmoments in bus stations as weary travelers paused brieywhile on journeys across the U.S.

“Bus stations are a communal space, and I ound myselwanting to photograph two or more people or groups,” saidRenaldi. “Te end product was a consensual act. I had toorchestrate permission rom two groups o people or thesame picture. I considered it a photographic challenge. Itwas something to be explored.”

Later, the same idea came to him while photographingsubjects on Madison Ave. in New York City. “I was watchingthese groups o people, these diverse groups o strangersstanding together, and I kept seeing these hidden spacesbetween people. I was drawn to those spaces.”

In ouching Strangers, Renaldi’s photographs capturethe range o emotions that happen in the eeting momento the strangers posing. Teir bodies and aces reectthe discom ort they eel o letting someone within thatpersonal space. In one photograph, titled “Alex and Carlos,New York, 2007,” a Caucasian male (presumably Alex by virtue o the order o the posing and the title), dressedin an Everyman uni orm o khakis and a short-sleevedblue button-down, poses in ront o a bright green doorwith a muscular young Latino man clad in a white wi e-

beater shirt and camouage pants. Te taller o the two,Alex has his arm around the shoulders o Carlos, and yet,the le hand that could be resting casually on Carlos’s leshoulder is not. In act, Alex’s hand remains tensed in anear-st position – a striking reminder o the tension thatis, indeed, reected more subtly in the rest o their bodiesas they care ully avoid touching each other.

According to Renaldi, that discom ort is o encommon, especially among heterosexual males who areasked to pose together.

Yet, there are other photographs in the series thatcapture the un o the project, the com ort that comes romskin-to-skin touching – the simple reminder that physicalcontact is an essential part o our humanity. In “ ari, Shawn,and Summer; Los Angeles, Cali ornia, 2012,” two youngwomen – one Hispanic and one A rican-American andboth wearing dark colors - clasp hands over the heart o ayoung, bearded Caucasian man wearing a brightly colored

“ ”- Laura Guerrero, co-author of Close Encounters: Communication in Relationships (4th ed. 2013).

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plaid shirt. His arms are draped around their waists, andthey lean com ortably in to him. Without the context o theseries, one could easily assume that these are three riendsout or an a ernoon together. In “Jessie and Michael, NewYork, 2013,” tiny Jessie, her cane hooked temporarily ontoher messenger bag, clasps hands with Michael, a gentlemanso tall he needed to kneel down on the pavement to be ableto reach Jessie’s hands. While again, they gaze into thecamera without smiling, their body language suggests awarmth in their togetherness.

While many o Renaldi’s subjects are apprehensive atrst, many o them report a erwards eeling a sense ocom ort. ACBS News report on Renaldi’s work interviewedseveral o his subjects a er their experience.

“I elt like I cared or her,” said Brian Sneedan, a poetryteacher who posed with 95-year-old Reiko Ehrman. “I eltlike it brought down a lot o barriers.”

According to Renaldi, he strives to bring out moreemotion in his subjects, to juxtapose two strangerstogether who perhaps would not mix. ranscendingtraditional social boundaries was, he says, “always part othe subtext” o the project.

“We exist in a multi-cultural society where tensionsarise because o different social classes, races, and culturalroles,” said Renaldi. “I want to try to catalogue it, to beinclusive o everyone, to make people question why thattension exists.”

A monograph o ouching Strangers, which will include73 photographs rom the series, was released in (April 2014).Since then, Renaldi has continued his pursuits o “hiddenspaces”; most recently, he has been photographing peopleand cityscapes o New York City streets very early on Sundaymornings using black-and-white lm or a so er eel.

“Tis series is my love letter to New York,” he said,adding that he eels a kinship to these subjects, a ondness

or these late-night re ugees looking out o place as a newday dawns.

Presently, ouching Strangers – and the questionsit raises about our society – remains a popular andimportant discussion. Poet John Keats wrote, “ ouchhas a memory.” Perhaps, in a world such as ours, wherecontact between riends is more likely to occur througha text message than a handshake, that is the memory owhat it means to be alive.

Tari, Shawn, and Summer; 2012, Los, Angeles, California

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Alison Bechdel:T H E A U T H O R T O W A T C H O U T F O R

Alison Bechdel is an American authorand cartoonist best known for herlong-running comic stripDykes to

Watch Out For and best-selling graphicmemoirFun Home (2006).

Photo: Elena Seibert

“She asks the big question. How does one achieve full selfhoodwhen early psychological needs have not been met? ”

B J A -W

2014 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Drama & 2015 Tony Award for Best Musica

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Drawing? Writing? How to best encapsulate herexperience was the question o the day. I art school rejectionwas monumental, it paled in comparison to a dismissal oher writing by Adrienne Rich. She kept the rejection letter.(Reader, take note: As a personal li e explorer, AlisonBechdel is always looking or patterns. She doesn’t let go othings until they come around again.)

One day, she captioned a drawing she had done o“Marianne,” an unapologetically naked woman grimacingover her coffee: Dykes to watch out or, Plate No. 27 . Te tonewas that o an anthropologist who was studying lesbians in

their native habitat. Plates numbered one through twentysix did not exist, but it put Bechdel on a path, one that wouldbring her into agreement with her detractors that she wasneither writer nor artist. She was both. Public acceptance

ollowed this discovery. In 1983, a local eminist paperwas the rst to publish one o her single- rame cartoons.Te cartoons that ollowed were organic, an outgrowtho Bechdel’s li e. As such, it didn’t occur to her to ask ormoney or them until several years later, when her comics,now ully realized multi-panel strips, started appearing inthe orums o gay-and-lesbian newspapers, which were justbeginning to emerge on the journalistic landscape.

Private acceptance was harder to come by. Bechdel’smother called her out or seizing on “what seems at thistime seems to be the easiest solution.” Ouch. (Ten again,her mother probably didn’t realize that everything inBechdel’s world comes ull circle.)

“Herein lies the takeaway message of these memoirs: the artisticprocess is transformative for both the artist and the witness. Ittakes life’s pain, and alters it until it becomes manageable.

”

Alison Bechdel

Introducing the cartoonist

O pen Te Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (2008),a collection o twenty-ve years o her syndicatedcomic strip, and the author Alison Bechdelintroduces hersel —in cartoon orm, naturally. Toughshe identies as an artist-writer, I would classi y Bechdel —she will tell you her last name “ rhymes with rectal ”—as aninvestigative journalist. She is always looking or patterns inher li e and in the greater cultural atmosphere to help hermake sense o this world. Her Cartoonist’s Introduction isno exception. She explores how it is that a huge chunk o

her li e’s work came to be bound in hardcover, a collector’sedition—the big “ A-DA” o a seemingly accidental li e path.

Picture this rame: a close-up drawing o a woman inhipster glasses and a intin haircut with palms to cheeksscreaming, “I orgot to get a job!” What ollows is a comicstrip illustrating a middle-aged Alison combing throughling cabinets, labeled by year, looking or clues, markers—anything to explain the mystery o her ailure to complywith cultural norms. She is a lesbian. Tere is that. Teinvestigation o her sexuality took over her college yearsin such an all-consuming manner that graduate art schools

ound her remaining body o work less than admission-worthy. Te investigation continues. Alison produces abong rom a ling cabinet labeled “1981, post-college,” theyear that landed her in New York City a er all the reallygood cultural revolutions had already taken place—or soshe had thought.

Te eighties in New York were a study in contradictions.It was still the largest city in the county, but suburbanizationhad taken its toll on its numbers, which in turn had negativelyaffected the economics. On the street-side o things, ear andhomophobia ruled, but the city had something or everyone.Opening a door could transport you into another world.

Bechdel illustrated her past sel in a state o marvel as sheopened her own doors. She captions a rame o herselentering into a huge room lled with lesbian activists, “Yes,I wanted to be a part o this insurrection. And yes, I wantedto have sex with each and every one o these compellingcreatures. But even more compelling was a desire to capturethem somehow.”

Excerpt from Bechdel’s comic stripDykes toWatch Out For , which ran from 1987 – 2012.

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Let’s ollow the circle back around be ore we moveorward. Alison Bechdel was born in 1960 in Lock

Haven, PA, to parents who were English teachers. Morethan that—they were educators who used knowledgeas currency. In lieu o emotional closeness or affection,they relied on scholarly discourse to ready their children(Bechdel and her younger brothers John and Christian) orthe world. Bechdel’s ather also ran a uneral parlor. He was

a complex character—a deep-thinker with little patienceand a quick temper. A rustrated amily man with a shadowside, Bruce Bechdel was either bi-sexual or a closetedgay man who had a thing or his high-school students.Alison’s mother was also multi- aceted, but in a differentway. She was an actress, a woman who had the ability toslip neatly into different roles—a public masquerade thathid her private ear that her amily would be exposed. Itwas an environment ripe or the observer. In many ways,Bechdel’s upbringing was the study o human relationshipswithout the actual interactions. Asked by a New York imes interviewer what book had the greatest impact on her,what book made her want to write, it is telling that Bechdelresponded “ Harriet the Spy in both cases.” Harriet , or theunin ormed, was an 11-year-old who dressed like a boy,spied on her neighbors, and wrote down her o en cutting

observations in her journals. Like Harriet, Bechdel startedher own journal, documenting li e on a wall calendar herather gave her when she was nine.

Further blurring the lines between art and li e is theact that Bechdel’s ather was also her literature teacher

in high school. Whatever acceptance was missing in herhome li e, she achieved by excelling in the classroom. Incollege, she continued to communicate with her ather withbooks—particularly those by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, andJoyce—serving as intermediaries. It is no wonder that whenshe had questions, Bechdel turned to the college librarycard catalog rather than to physical experimentation orclues about her sexuality. She came out as a lesbian to her

parents soon a erwards in a letter. She was nineteen.Her parents urged her to keep her options open. Her

ather wrote her a letter in which he assumed that sheknew o his own homosexual leanings, though at thetime, she did not. On her next visit home, Bechdel’smother conded in her that she was going to divorceher ather. Ten, just a ew weeks a er that, in atragic punch-line, her ather died the way he lived—ambiguously—in either an accident or likely suicidewhen a Sunbeam Bread truck hit him as he crosseda street.

Te Alison o the Cartoonist’s Introduction willlead you to believe that she somehow orgot to geta real job and ell into the role o late 20th century

ringe comic/ amily archivist by accident. But evena cursory glance at her early li e is like that Sunbeamtruck—one that we all should have seen coming.

Excerpt from Bechdel’s 2006 graphic novel,Fun Home. Alison Bechdel

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One reason that Alison Bechdel agreed to haveher book Fun Home (2006) adapted into amusical is that the genre was so foreign to her.

“I didn’t feel a particular investment… I felt like I couldlet go of it.” That, and she didn’t think she could livewith a bad movie adaption.

But adapting Bechdel’s graphic memoir for musicaltheater was more of a challenge than anyone realized.If the original format of comic frames with alternatingtimelines and literary references wasn’t problematic,then the subject matter of a sexual coming-of-agein the midst of a parent’s suicide certainly was. Ininterviews describing the process, Lisa Kron, who wrote

the book and lyrics, and composer Jeanine Tesori usedthe words “ problems” and “overwhelmed.” The musicaltook every bit of ve years to create before its debutoff-Broadway in October, 2013. Rewrites and changescontinued until the contract required the creators tostop. The work paid off with phenomenal reviews. TheNew York Times declared that “ Fun Home nds a shiningclarity that lights up the night.” Its run was extendedseveral times, ending in January, 2014.

The play featured three actresses tackling theroles of Alison at different ages. Asked how she feltabout seeing herself and her family portrayed onstage, Bechdel said, “It also feels like a tremendous gift,because they got so much so right. It’s a really amazingfeeling to see my family resurrected in this way.” Theplay managed to convey Bechdel’s childhood withoutthe use of her drawings or literary references. In theirplaces, the element of music provided additionallayering to a story which even Bechdel would agreewas too big to be told with words alone. In addition,the direct experience of live theater provided Bechdelwith gifts she didn’t get in the writing of the story.Besides being able to observe audience reactions ofher creative vision, the theatrical version also providedhealing moments as Bechdel watched the show withfamily members who lived the story. “After the cast leftthe stage, [my brother and I] just kind of sat there andheld each other, which we’ve never done.” If her bookprovided a sense of catharsis release to her readers,then the musical did the same for the Bechdel family -“There were no words. We just let it wash over us. ”

Introducing the Graphic Memoirist

I t is hard to introduce a memoirist, and even more difficultto prole one. As a group, they tend to take those taskson themselves, as Alison did in the introduction o herEssential anthology. However, in Bechdel’s memoirs, theplot points aren’t the a-ha moments. Tose come when sheputs her li e’s story into perspective, orcing major eventsrst through the lens o great writers and thinkers and thenpushing the contextualized moments through the sieve oher own psyche. As her proler, my job is two- old: to ll insome o the blanks and to reveal only enough o Bechdel’sstory to entice readers out there to nd out or themselveswhat all the uss is about. In Bechdel’s case, there is a lot o

uss.While Dykes o Watch Out For was, in her own words,a “very marginal queer comic strip,” Fun Home (2006), herrst oray into graphic memoir, became ime Magazine’s #1

Book o the Year . Not Memoir o the Year . Not Graphic Booko the Year . Number One Book.

In reading Dykes to Watch Out For, you can see howBechdel made the leap to a new genre. Her comic universewas populated by an imagined posse o characters that onesuspects have roots in real people and situations. She usedthe political happenings o the day to urther anchor herstrip in reality. (Bechdel will tell you that the George W.Bush Era provided so much odder, it essentially killed thestrip.) But as Bechdel probed her environment to gathermaterial or her bi-weekly output, she was simultaneouslyprocessing her own past. She calls the pain ul amilystory o her ather’s closeted li e and probable suicide a“signicant knot that I needed to unravel.” She was intherapy, many sessions o which are chronicled in her 2012

ollow-up memoir: Are You My Mother? (As a reader, yound out a lot o her process o writing her rst book whilereading her second book. Did I warn you o the circuitouspaths? Consider Alison’s work more as a labyrinth whichbends back and orth upon itsel when you ask yoursel ,Hey, weren’t we already here? )

But be ore we continue our investigation o its creatorand the work itsel , it is important to put Fun Home, that

bestseller and critical darling, into the context o thegenre and our times. Tink or a moment about Te BigBang Teory , a hit V show about another o society’smarginalized populations— science nerds. Many scenestake place in a comic book store run by Stuart, a manwho has ewer social skills and less popular standing thaneven the character assumed to have Asperger’s Syndrome.

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Such is the reputation o comics - great i you are a kid,understandable i you are a bit o a collector, but the minuteyou take them too seriously, prepare to be the butt o jokes.

It has only been in the last twenty-ve years thatperceptions o the genre have changed, and it was becauseo one book in particular. In 1991, American cartoonist ArtSpeigelman gave us Maus: A Survivor’s ale, the graphicmemoir in which Speigelman, depicting himsel and allother Jews as mice, interviews his ather, an Auschwitzsurvivor, about the Holocaust. Tis was not some sly cape-wrapped treatment o government propaganda (Superman’srole in the 1940’s), but a raw account o that dark chapter ohistory. It rst got the attention o academia, and eventuallythe notice o the whole world, when it won the Nobel Prizein Literature in 1992.

“It has become canonical,” Spiegelman recounts ina Guardian article celebrating the 25th anniversaryo the book.”Tere’s no way out o it: i I were ablues musician, it would play in car commercials.It has entered the culture in ways that I never couldhave predicted.”

Te American public was ripe or this new genre o

pictorial literature. Te World Wide Web (our householdconnected in 1995) was ast-becoming the place peopleaccessed or their in ormation. Te Web is a graphicmedium, and or our generation and those who ollow,having a working visual literacy has become imperative.(Don’t even get me started about the trend against arteducation in school curriculums.) Social scientists bandyphrases such as digital natives and digital immigrantsto suggest the divide between those who have grown upusing the internet and those who have not. College writingcourses are becoming multi-modal to keep up with theway these natives process their world. Part o the skill set

or 21st century readers and writers proposed by ClaireLutkewitte, a humanities pro essor at Nova SoutheasternUniversity, is that readers and writers o the 21st century “beable to manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams osimultaneous in ormation” and to “create, critique, analyze,and evaluate multi-media texts.”

Alison Bechdel affirms this during a recorded interviewwith Christopher Farley at the Wall Street Journal . Whenasked by Farley what made her think that the cartoon

ormat was the best way to address this story (in this casehe is talking about her second book), Bechdel replied:

“I don’t think I could have told this storyin prose. I eel I need the vocabulary, thegrammar o graphic narrative in orderto manage all these different strands…It jumps around in chronology wildly. I

eel like one second I am an in ant. Nextsecond I am y years old on the phonewith my mother. I do explore differentpsychoanalytic ideas. I take people into mytherapy sessions. It’s a lot o material that Ithink would get very con using pretty astin a prose memoir, but having access to the visuals gives you this wonder ul shorthand

or moving through time and space. I eellike I’m able to tell two or three stories atthe same time in comics.”

Introducing the Reader

W hich brings me to the reading o Bechdel’sbooks. I was not amiliar with her work be orethis assignment came to me. Even though I aman artist and a writer, my experience o the new orms opictorial literature are slight. I had read Maus years ago,and more recently, in advance o a trip to Paris, I read thegraphic travel memoir French Milk (2008) by Lucy Knisley.(I am ever grate ul or the tip about L’as Du Falla el as alunch spot in the Marais.) I mention this to illustrate thatas a reader, I was unprepared or the density in Bechdel’swork. She is right about the wild chronology and the manystrands she was trying to weave together. wo or threestories may be a bit o an understatement. Bechdel worksoff o a cork board chart in her studio which braids about

Excerpt fromDykes to Watch Out For , one of the longest runningand most successful queer comic strips.©Alison Bechdel 2008

“ She will take us back into the dark and scary labyrinth, but likeAriadne, she provides her readers with a string so we can ndour way out again. Everything comes full circle. We nd that the

beginning and the end are the same place; only we are changed.

”

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ten such story strands running on the horizontal. On the vertical, each chapter works as kind o “synchronic axis” tohold the narrative in place.

O the many stories she has to tell: some are personal,some are political. Representations o maps, books,diaries, letters, photographs layer together to illustrate astory that includes amily dys unction, embalming o thedead, homophobia, suicide, sex with minors, Watergate,and the AIDS epidemic. In Fun Home, she used the greatworks o literature to echo the themes that were playingout in her own li e. Even the subtitle o the book, AFamily

ragicomedy , hints o ancient Greek dramas —and pleaseDionysus! —some catharsis.

In Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, Alison movesaway rom most o the literary re erences o her rstbook. Instead, she draws primarily rom the theories opediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and the

insights o her own sessions with her psychoanalysts to tellthe story o her sometimes raught and emotionally distantyet, at times, tender relationship with her mother. She asksthe big question. How does one achieve ull selfood whenearly psychological needs have not been met? Surely, wecan blame our mothers. As a reader, I was squirming. I amroughly the age o the Alison telling this story, but unlikeher, I am both daughter and mother. I I needed catharsisin round one, I required nothing short o redemption romher second book.

And so, the reading o these two books took me longerthan I imagined and squashed any remaining assumptionsI had o the genre. I had to stop and consider the relation oall the things she presented. I had to reread, ip back to apassage in book one, and consider how Bechdel’s personalexperience could be universal or me, a married mother

o two kids. I was inuenced by the way Bechdel herselreads books, not or stuffy academic analysis, but or theirrelativity and insights into her own experience. Te acto reading becomes a big theme in her works with entire

rames dedicated to meticulously re-calligraphed passagesrom inuential books.

I didn’t just nd meaning on the personal level.Bechdel’s books work on a political level too, though ina different way than her comic strips. Tose were morepointed and topical in their commentary. In the memoirs,I ound an overarching political context. I Fun Home dealswith homophobia, then the universal theme o Are You My Mother? is misogyny. Bechdel, as a lesbian, has experiencedboth rst-hand, but she has also experienced these deep-seated societal aversions as unneled through her parents.A double disen ranchisement. Because her parents weremissing the most basic orms o acceptance, they had noneto give their daughter. Pivotal in Are You My Mother? isa moment a er a phone call with her mother in whichAlison realizes she will never get the approval she seeks.It is a question that interviewers o en ask Bechdel, “Whatdoes your mother think o all o this?” She hedges in herspoken answers, but the answer is clear in her writing: hermother, never having received approval hersel , simplydid not have it to give to her daughter. But that realizationmarks the rst step to redemption or both o them—and to us as readers. A later rame shows Alison taking aphotograph o hersel recreating that pain ul moment. (Shetook more than 4,000 re erence photographs or Are You My Mother? ) Te appearance o the camera in the rame

Bechdel’s second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother? A ComicDrama, is the companion piece to 2006’s Fun Home.

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gives the reader the ability to step back rom the pain andbreathe a bit. Herein lies the takeaway message o thesememoirs: the artistic process is trans ormative or both theartist and the witness. It takes li e’s pain, and alters it until itbecomes manageable. We, as witnesses, get the shorthand.What took Bechdel decades to process and years to writeand draw, comes to the reader in a matter o a weekend.

Coming Full Circle

Bechdel says she is not nished here. As the readerwho experienced Bechdel’s sel -actualizationthrough her investigation o both parents, I ndmysel asking—You have discovered the trade route to India!What can possibly be lef? She wants to plumb more o the

amily dynamic. “I am kind o curious now about howamilies work. What makes a unctional amily unctional?

Tat is a ascinating question to me, so I’d kind o like tokeep doing more memoir about my amily.” As a reader, Itrust Bechdel. She will take us back into the dark and scarylabyrinth, but like Ariadne, she provides her readers with a

string so we can nd our way out again. Everything comesull circle. We nd that the beginning and the end are the

same place; only we are changed.

I’ll close with a story that Bechdel relates in her

Cartoonist’s Introduction . Remember the rejection letterrom Adrienne Rich? Bechdel rediscovered that missive

years later (perhaps in one o her diving expeditions throughher ling cabinets) and wrote a thank you to Rich or takingthe time to write to a “punk kid.” Rich took the time to replywith a second letter, handwritten this time, in which the

amed poet and essayist pro essed not only knowledge obut admiration or Bechdel’s work as a cartoonist. “I’vealways admired the way your work tries to explode dykeessentialism & explore our real humanity.” Te Alison othe cartoon muses that perhaps her little experiment wasnot a ailure a er all. Exploring our real humanity? In a

world where the personal is political and vice versa, I’llposit a bolder claim—that Bechdel has indeed discoveredher calling.

1352 Harrisburg PLancaster, Pa 176

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In a 1983 interview with the New ZealandHerald , Kiwi writer Janet Frame (1924-2004)noted, “I’m not a success ul novelist.”Tat might seem a remarkable statement or this author

o over a dozen novels, a three-volume autobiography whichwas adapted into an award-winning lm, several collectionso poetry and short stories, and a book or children. Addto all this the act that she has won almost every literaryprize her country has to offer, was twice short-listed or theNobel Prize in Literature, has had her work translated inover a dozen languages, including Finnish, Chinese andKorean, and is generally considered New Zealand’s greatestction writer.

But Janet Frame didn’t value her achievements inquantiable terms like publications and prizes. As shewent on to explain in the Herald interview: “I’m told that Ihave a large international reputation and I accept that, but

or mysel —I have my own judgments. My books are really just explorations. In the early days I did try to insist theyshould be called that rather than novels.”

Literary scholar and Janet Frame expert Janet Wilsonexplains that Frame’s work dees easy categorization oany kind.

“Frame’s work has very unusual poetic and evocativemetaphors, and o en works on the borderline o poetryand prose; there is a capacity to make metaphoric contentresonate with a myriad o interlinked meanings, whichgives her prose its subtlety, depth, and mystery.”

“She was not just a novelist: she was a poet who wrotenovels,” says Frame’s niece Pamela Gordon, who is also theexecutor o her aunt’s literary estate. “Te rst thing youneed to know about Janet is that she was a person whoreally would rather you read her work, than read about her.She had so little ego. Te writing was all that mattered.”

Discovering Janet Frame

Janet Frame (28 August 1924 – 29 January 2004) was one ofNew Zealand’s best known but least understood authors.

B A HPhotographer Reg Graham (the photographer has given the estatepermission to authorize the reproduction of this copyright image.)

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And yet, Frame’s remarkable li e story has o eneclipsed her writing in the minds o her many admirers,who see her alternately as a “mad genius,” a saintly sufferer,a nun who sacriced her li e or her art.

“Her ction is not documentary,” says Gordon. “Shecan be ound in her ction only as the AU HOR o it. Tat

is quite o en overlooked by those who believe she was a‘mad genius’ whose work poured out o her rom deepwithin: they see her work AS her, and they don’t attributeits brilliance to her sel -conscious hard work and planning.”

Te real Janet Frame spent her earliest years in theremote hinterlands o southern New Zealand, one o vechildren. A er several moves, her ather, who worked onthe railways, nally brought the amily to settle in Oamaru,a quiet seaside village, which Frame rechristened as“Waimaru” in her ction.

oday, one o the town’s claims to ame is its Janet Frame

heritage trail, and visitors travel rom all over the worldto pay homage to her modest childhood home on EdenStreet. But when Janet was a child, the unconventionalFrame amily was not very popular among several o themiddle-class Oamaru towns olk, who nicknamed them the“ eral Frames” or their rough manners. In the rst volumeo her Autobiography, o the Is-Land (1982)Frame writes:

“We were not civilized. We giggled at Sunday Biblereadings, we wol ed our ood, stuck out our elbows, did notcome when called at bedtime, re used to etch a shovel ocoal when asked to: we ran wild and pulled aces and saidBum and Fart and Fuck.”

Young Janet in particular stood out rom her classmates.

“Anyone observing me during those days would haveseen an anxious child ull o twitches and tics, standingalone in the playground at school, wearing day a er day thesame hand-me-down tartan skirt that was almost stiff with

constant wear, or it was all I had to wear: a reckle- aced,rizzy-haired little girl who was somehow ‘dirty’ because

the lady doctor chose her with the other known ‘dirty andpoor’ children or a special examination… I had tide markso dirt behind my knees and on my inner arms and whenI saw them I elt a wave o shock… I had been sure I had

washed thoroughly.”From an early age, young Janet loved words, eagerly

consuming books and writing poems and stories, severalo which were published in the local newspaper. In lateryears, Frame recalled her delight as a child in “tasting againand again the thrilling plunge o each rst sentence” o thestories o Grimm’s Fairy ales.

Janet viewed her childhood as idyllic until the age o12 when her li e took a dark turn: her eldest sister Myrtledrowned while swimming at the town baths. en yearslater, in a horrible echo o that tragedy, another sister, Isabel,would also die o drowning. By then, Janet had completedher studies at the teacher’s college in Dunedin, just southo Oamaru. However, she had also been taking literatureand psychology classes at prestigious Otago University onthe side.

Tough her amily wanted her to pursue the morepractical calling o teaching, young Janet had beennurturing secret hopes o becoming a poet. As she wrotein her diary, “Tey think I’m going to be a schoolteacher,but I’m going to be a poet.”

Yet as her college years came to an end, Frame’s initialsense o hope and excitement about going away to schoolgave way to deep anxiety, and she looked ahead to herteaching career with dread.

In the second volume o her autobiography, An Angelat My able (1984), Frame recalls her eelings at the time:

“In Frame’s work, the whole world is a lunatic asylum, andthe asylum, when it appears, is just one more example ofthat world in miniature, a place where the world’s largerinsanity becomes visible in a smaller setting. ”

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“So this was how it was, ace to ace with the Future—being alone, having no one to talk to, being a raid o the cityand raining College and teaching, and having to pretendthat I was not alone, that I had many people to talk to, thatI elt at home in Dunedin, and that teaching was what I hadlonged to do all my li e.”

Frame did nd a connection with psychology instructorJohn Money, who later became a li elong riend and wasone o the rst people to notice Frame’s talent. Money,who had only recently nished his Master’s degree inpsychology, saw Frame as a “mad genius” type, like VincentVan Gogh. At his encouragement, Frame was committedto the psychiatric ward o the local public hospital or “a

ew days’ rest” in 1945. It was then that Frame was rstmisdiagnosed with schizophrenia, a terrible mistake thathaunted her li e or years a erward.

“She was pro oundly affected by her childhood,” saysJanet Wilson, “the deaths o her sisters, and the other kinds

o dys unction in the amily which went along with other values such as love and nurture. Possibly one o her mostimportant themes and attitudes as a writer were developedthen. You have the rst con rontations between theindividual and authority, between the institutions o society(school, university, medical) occurring then and her senseo who she was versus who she might be--the romance owriting and o writers which became part o the mythologyabout her hospitalization and alleged madness.”

Frame would spend the next ten years in and out o various mental hospitals in New Zealand, where her mentalstate was continually misread. According to the Janet Framebiography titled Wrestling with the Angel (2000) by MichaelKing, when Frame was rst committed to Seacliff MentalHospital, her admissions notes described her in this way:

“Tis girl is most oolish and atuous in her mannerand conversation, grins oolishly when addressed and

tends to inattention… Is quite unconcerned at being hereand generally apathetic… Adopts a listening attitude butdenies hallucinations.”

In act, Frame was not apathetic but appalled by thedire scene she saw at Seacliff, which she described in detailin An Angel at My able:

“I peered into a room that stank o urine and was ullo children lying in cots, strange children… their aces wetwith tears and snot… I saw people with their eyes staringlike the eyes o hurricanes surrounded by whirling unseenand unheard commotion contrasting strangely with thestillness.”

Her letters and imaginative writing were held asevidence o her madness. For example, when in one letter,Frame described “gorse,” a local plant as “smelling likepeanut butter,” a doctor later quoted this to her motheras evidence that Frame had a “disordered mind.” In otherwords, her creativity was her crime.

During the time she was hospitalized, Frame wassubjected to electroshock therapy over 200 times. Framedescribes these episodes in An Angel at My able:

“Each the equivalent, in degree o ear, to an execution.”“My li e was thrown out o ocus… I dreamed waking andsleeping dreams more terrible than any I had dreamedbe ore… It sounds silly, but my clothes haunted me…Everything tortures me and is on re and is colored… Youwere locked up, you did as you were told or else, and thatwas that… I elt as i there were no place on earth or me.I wanted to leave Sunnyside [mental hospital], but wherecould I go?… All I had le was my desire to be a writer.”

Concerned that the electroshock therapy was notworking, Frame’s doctors convinced her parents to consentto a more drastic treatment or mental illness: a lobotomy.Luckily, as Frame later noted, “Writing saved my li e.” Daysbe ore the procedure was scheduled, her debut book o

“Everything tortures me and is on re and is colored… Youwere locked up, you did as you were told or else, and that wasthat… I felt as if there were no place on earth for me. I wanted toleave Sunnyside [mental hospital], but where could I go?… All Ihad left was my desire to be a writer. ” Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table.

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ction, a short story collection called Te Lagoon (1951)won the Church Memorial Prize, an award akin to NewZealand’s Pulitzer.

In a vivid scene rom An Angel at My able, Framedescribes the hospital superintendent making a special visitto her ward to show her an article about the award, whichshe’d never heard o . Te lobotomy was cancelled.

“I was now treated as a person o some worth,” writesFrame, “a human being, in spite o the misgivings andunwillingness o some members o the staff, who likecertain relatives when a child is given attention, warn themother that the child is being ‘spoiled.’” And in act, whenshe’s allowed to use a typewriter, a nurse complained that“she is rapidly becoming a law unto hersel .”

However, another patient is not so lucky. ‘My riendNola, who un ortunately had not won a prize, whosename did not appear in the newspaper, had her leucotomy(sic) and was returned to the hospital… Te legacy o herdehumanising (sic) change remains no doubt with all thosewho knew her; I have it with me always.”

Later, while in London, Frame would be examined bydoctors who would say that she never had schizophrenia,a pronouncement that brought both relie and someconsternation.

“I mysel had suddenly been stripped o a garment I had

worn or 12 or 13 years—my schizophrenia,” Frame writes inthe third volume o her autobiography, Te Envoy rom MirrorCity (1984). “I remembered how wonderingly, ear ully Ihad tried to pronounce the word when I rst learned o thediagnosis… and how, at rst disbelievingly, then surrenderingto the opinion o the ‘experts,’ I had accepted it, how in the

midst o the agony and terror o the acceptance I ound theunexpected warmth, com ort, protection… And even whenI did not wear it openly I always had it by or emergency, toput on quickly, or shelter rom the cruel world… Te losswas great. At rst, the truth seemed to be more terri yingthan the lie. Schizophrenia, as a psychosis, had been anaccomplishment… How could I ask or help directly whenthere was ‘nothing wrong with me’?”

In 1955, when Frame was discharged rom Seacliff orgood, she stayed very briey with her parents in Oamaru,and then with her sister June Gordon in a working classneighborhood, Auckland. Finally, New Zealand writerFrank Sargeson invited her to live in a hut in his backyard,which she did or sixteen months, though she visited her

sister on weekends. Sargeson was a noted gure in theNew Zealand literary scene who lived in a modest summercottage in the North Shore, an area home to several writers,such as New Zealand poet and novelist C. K. Stead, whodescribed it as “quiet, lovely, and not over populated, abeach suburb close to town, but removed rom it.”

Sargeson was also openly gay at a place and timewhere homosexuality was not only rowned upon but alsocriminal.

Tough his own hard-bitten, spare prose bears littleresemblance to Frame’s more lush and poetic style, Sargesondid inuence Frame by giving her a space to work in peace,and by introducing her to his literary riends and advisingher on some o the practical aspects o managing a writingcareer. As Frame wrote in a memorial letter to Sargesona er his death in 1984, “You explained how you beganwriting a novel, and how important it was to write so mucheach day no matter how many distractions there were.”

English Covers Courtesy of Counterpoint. German and Spanish covers courtesy of Pamela Gordon, Frame’s niece.

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Perhaps Frame was being kind to a late riend, as she

had already been devoted to her work even be ore she metSargeson. Whatever its source, this sense o disciplinemarked Frame’s career all her li e. Her niece PamelaGordon recalls, “She got up be ore dawn (it was quieterthen) and had her rst small break ast, worked or a ewhours, and then had her second break ast, a cooked one.Ten she worked until midday, which was the end o herwriting day. She would emerge or lunch, and that was o enshared with riends or amily or out downtown somewhere.She was shaking off the internal world and her work was a

orbidden topic rom then on. Tere was no quicker way toalienate her than to try to press her on the topic o ‘what are

you working on now?’ We all knew that was taboo.”It was in Sargeson’s hut that Frame wrote her rst novel

Owls do Cry (1957), a complex amily drama told rommultiple perspectives in various literary styles. In 1956,with Sargeson’s assistance, Frame applied or and received aliterary grant to travel to Europe. Tere she wrote her nextnovel, Faces in the Water (1961), a shattering rendering oli e within the walls o two mental asylums based on herown observations, though with a ctionalized story andmain character.

Frame remained in Europe, where she wrote several

more books, until 1963. Ten she returned to NewZealand and continued her remarkable literary output,which included the dystopian novel Intensive Care (1970),the postmodern puzzle Te Carpathians (1989), and themeta-ctional masterpiece Living in the Maniototo (1979).In act, even a er her death, several o her stories have

appeared in the New Yorker ,and three new books have beenreleased: her thirteenth novelIn the Memorial Room (2013),a story collection Between MyFather and the King , and Prizes,

a collection o published stories, all rom CounterpointPress.

“She had high standards,” says Pamela Gordon,“and typed several dra s o her work - some o whichare peppered with the exhortation to hersel to “By Godimprove!” I remember she had a horror o being caughtout inadvertently using the same word more than once.She usually cut her nal manuscripts back quite severely.Once she was happy with the work, she strongly resistedany editing on the part o the publisher.”

And yet, despite her many accomplishments, heralse public image as a “mad genius” lingered. When

Frame died in 2004, the headline o her New York imes obituary was “Writer Who Explored Madness,” which likemany headlines, because o its economy, is somewhat o adistortion. In act, the milieu o the asylum played a rolein only a ew o Frame’s many books written over a longcareer. It may be more accurate to say that the madnessFrame explored in her ction was the madness o thehuman condition, whether it took place in an asylum,small-town Waimaru-Oamaru, New Zealand, college townBerkeley, Cali ornia or big-city London. In other words,in Frame’s work, the whole world is a lunatic asylum, andthe asylum, when it appears, is just one more example othat world in miniature, a place where the world’s largerinsanity becomes visible in a smaller setting.

“Te myth o her as a ‘recluse,’ especially in NewZealand, is so deeply culturally ingrained that even istrangers met her in person, they interpreted everything

Despite her public persona as a “madgenius” and recluse, Frame loved travel adventure, and lived in Europe from 191963, when she returned to New Zeala

Left: She changed her surname to “cluththe name of a New Zealand river.

© to the Janet Frame Estate

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Frame’s literary legacy includes a dozen novels, a three-volume autobiography,collections of poetry and short stories, and a book for children.

Photographer John Money (the photographer has g iven the estatepermission to authorize the reproduction of this copyright image.)

they saw in terms o the stereotype,” says Gordon. “Shecould see through these people, and sometimes played upto their expectations. Her theory was, why bother whenthey had so clearly made their minds up.”

One major actor in the public perception o Frame’spersona was the Jane Campion lm adaptation o her

biography. Frame was able to review the script be orehandand visit the set, where a picture was taken o the author andthe three actresses who played her at various stages o herli e. Upon the lm’s release, Frame expressed her admiration

or its artistic merit, though she had some concern that thelm version o her li e might eclipse the real one.

“She was certainly not recognizable to me as the‘Janet’ in the Jane Campion movie,” says Gordon, “whichis a beauti ul art movie, and it does tell Janet’s inspiringsurvival story - which is a true story - very well, but thatlm ‘Janet’ is a ctionalized portrait. It is especially wrongin making the grownup Janet seem so ragile. I don’t think

you could meet anyone stronger or more ambitious thanJanet Frame was. Te Janet I - and the many others whowere close to her - knew well, was optimistic, practical,

un loving, bawdy, ebullient, stubborn, bossy, demanding,independent, adventurous, inquisitive, mischievous,persistent, generous, politically aware, concerned or social justice, with a heart and a brain as large as a planet.”

Tough many people eel the Autobiography is her mostnotable book, Janet Wilson, whose own avorite Frame workis Living in the Maniototo, believes that verdict may changein time. “Te academic/critical communities are just gettingto grips with some o the more un amiliar congurationsand questions her work raises. In part the problem is that

or years Frame’s work was read along the biographical/realist line, but critics are now moving away rom that as toosimpli ying o her endeavor as a writer, and being too caughtup in the myth based around her hospital treatments and

the misdiagnosis o madness. Now they are nding otherstructural patterns and aesthetics in her work more generally.For example, I have in the last year read a PhD thesis onFrame and Buddhism!”

Perhaps the last word on Frame belongs properly to herniece, who remembers her aunt as an exciting, inspirationalgure. “She loved novelty and adventure and travel. Shewas an early adopter o just about anything new, includingcomputers, but also slang. But she was no slave to thecurrent ad: she was original, and unconventional. She worecom ortable clothing in striking colors like orange or red or

bright blue, whether that was ashionable at the time or not.She deliberately chose not to con orm; she really didn’t carewhat people thought. I was lucky because she trained meup as a child, by giving me Le Petit Prince and pointing outthe message explicitly: ‘Te things that are important areinvisible to the eye.’”

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Photo by Jill Althouse-Wood

S H :An

Irish god o

Heaney was awarded theNobel Prize in Literature

in 1995 “for works oflyrical beauty and ethical

depth, which exalteveryday miracles and

the living past.”

J oh nMi ni h

a n

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Imagine, or a moment, two everyday objects: apen and a spade.At rst blush, these two common items – tools,i you like – would seem to have little in common. In thehands o the poet Seamus Heaney, however, the writing

instrument and the digging implement intertwine andemerge in verse as co-conspirators. Teir task: Nothing lessthan dening generations and rendering a brand-new sel .

“Between my nger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.”

Tus begins one o Heaney’s best-known poems,“Digging,” rom his 1966 collection Death o a Naturalist.Te poet is writing in his amily home. His ather, outside, isdigging earth, “his straining rump among the owerbeds,”bending low. Marveling, the poet watches.

“By God, the old man could handle a spade.Just like his old man.”

But, later, the admiration pauses and the poem takesanother turn as its author looks inward.

It’s hard to imagine another poet who can matchHeaney’s power to evoke packed emotional landscapes insuch simple terms. Or rather, small terms. Heaney wouldhave hated the term “simple” – in a lecture at Ox ordUniversity, he once said poetry “should not simpli y.” Andyet, it’s the Irish poet’s reveling in the everyday that makeshim so accessible and indeed, beloved. “Only by paying

the closest attention to the minutiae o this world,” wrote2006 Lancaster Literary Guild speaker Pico Iyer in one ohis books, “could one begin to make out the lineaments osome other.”

Iyer wasn’t writing about Heaney, but he may as well

have been. It’s due to such attention to minutiae (withoutever sacricing the bigger picture) that I came to thinko Heaney, who died on Aug. 30, 2013, as a god o smallthings. (As something o a global soul, who once praisedrapper Eminem or his “verbal energy” and whose workis the basis or a choral setting by composer MohammedFairouz, I don’t think Heaney would mind a monikerborrowed rom an Indian novel.)

I’ve known Heaney’s name or some time, but“Digging” was the rst poem o his I read – and re-read. Itwas sometime in the mid-1990s, not long a er I moved toWashington, D.C. Alone, nearly riendless and intendingto make a living as a writer, I can still remember pickingup Heaney’s Selected Poems 1966-1987 at Kramerbooks inDupont Circle. Kneeling by the shop’s small poetry sectionwith the book in my hand, I read “Digging” and elt a jolt.Like him, I wouldn’t be ollowing my ancestors’ careers. I’d

be breaking new ground. I was a little hesitant. Butreading his poem gave me strength. Some 20 yearslater, it still does.

Heaney won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1995,and the committee’s citation points to what evencasual readers o the poet’s oeuvre will recognize. Te

award was given to Heaney “ or works o lyrical beauty andethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the livingpast.” It’s not hard to hear those miracles or eel that depthin poems like “Digging” (“My grand ather cut more tur ina day/Tan any other man on oner’s bog”) or “Casualty,”about a pub-goer the poet knew who was killed in thenationalist violence o Heaney’s native Northern Ireland.

B R Ssmall things

“The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slapOf soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head.But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.”

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“I missed his funeral, Those quiet walkersAnd sideways talkersShoaling out of his lane To the respectablePurring of the hearse…”

Heaney’s genius, I think, is on display in verses likethese, using as he does immediately graspable imageryto push pathos to the hilt. William Butler Yeats, the rstIrishman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, was giventhe award or “his always inspired poetry, which in ahighly artistic orm gives expression to the spirit o a wholenation.” But where Yeats can be high-minded and demandmultiple readings (try deciphering “Nineteen Hundred andNineteen” in a single sitting!), Heaney’s typical directness

is certainly a reason he was described upon his death as“probably the best-known poet in the world” by the Britishnewspaper Te Independent . “And here is love/” he wrote inthe 1975 poem “Mossbawn 1. Sunlight,” “like a tinsmith’sscoop/sunk past its gleam/ in the meal-bin.”

Heaney’s own li e was ar rom uncomplicated. Bornon a arm in County Derry, Northern Ireland in 1939, the

uture Nobel Laureate was the rst o nine children rom aCatholic amily. He later moved to the Republic o Ireland,and died in Dublin at the age o 74. A er being includedin Te Penguin Book o Contemporary British Poetry in1982, Heaney made plain his sentiments about his dividedhomeland.

“Don’t be surprised if I demur, for, be advisedMy passport’s green.No glass of ours was ever raised To toast The Queen.”

Heaney’s work dealt with “the roubles” in NorthernIreland (as in “Casualty,” as in “Docker”) but certainlywasn’t limited to the division and rancor o the politicalenvironment he ound himsel living in. Te author o morethan 20 volumes o poetry and criticism, Heaney was alsoan accomplished translator, rendering into English worksincluding the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowul and the Irishlyric poem “Buile Suibhne” (about a king trans ormed intoa mad bird-man). In his Nobel lecture, Heaney said he’dtried to make space in his imagination or “the marvelousas well as or the murderous.” Seekers a er either will ndplenty in Heaney’s work to savor.

His li e began as did many o his generation’s, andended the same way. Heaney was born on a arm and diedin a city. Looking ahead 100 years rom now, when one canonly guess the ugliness that urbanization will wreak on theplanet, I can imagine that scholars or historians will havea beauti ul time capsule o country li e in Heaney’s work.His celebration o rural li e could easily veer into merenostalgia, but he imbues his work with such typical depthand empathy that to read it is to be reminded o a common, vanishing past. In “Quitting ime,” rom his 2007 collectionDistrict and Circle, Heaney’s subject is a armer.

Jemimah Kuhfeld

“Heaney shows us not just away of life that is disappearing,but through the minutiae of

his world, we can make out thelineaments of our own. ”

“The hosed-down chamfered concrete pleases him.He’ll wait a while before he kills the lightOn the cleaned up yard, its pails and farrowing crateAnd the cast-iron pump immobile as a hermUpstanding elsewhere, in another time.”

As a poet, Heaney revealed profound truths by highlightingthe minutiae of everyday life.

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Te nameless armer is pleased, to be sure, butburdened. He is a “home-based man at home/In the endwith little./Except this same/Night a er nightness.” Tepoem ends with “Te song o a tubular steel gate in thedark/As he pulls it to and starts his uphill trek.”

Such small actions; such deep eeling. Here is li e – inthis case, rural li e – as it is, Heaney is saying; unvarnished,in joy and sorrow, melancholy but satis ying in its dailydetails. Tere’s a tinge o atalism here, to be sure. But inthat clear-eyed acceptance o what is, Heaney shows usnot just a way o li e that is disappearing, but through the

minutiae o his world, we can make out the lineaments oour own.

Speaking o Yeats, Heaney said his ellow Irishman’swork does “what the necessary poetry always does.” Heaneycould just as easily have been speaking o himsel when hecontinued: “Which is to touch the base o our sympatheticnature while taking in at the same time the unsympatheticnature o the world to which that nature is constantlyexposed.”

A Catholic – or Protestant – caught up in “the roubles.”A armer closing a steel gate. Even gatherers o holly (inHeaney’s poem named or the owering plant) nding “Itrained when it should have snowed.” In all these disparatecharacters and more, Heaney nds and brings out those

very things that touch the sympathetic nature in all o usthat he described in his Stockholm speech in 1995.

And thank goodness or that. Poetry these days ispiti ully under-read. In 2012, only 6.7 percent o Americanadults read poetry, compared to 12.1 percent in 2002,according to a 2013 report by the National Endowment orthe Arts. Reading poetry is apparently a dying pastime. Butreading Heaney is nothing i not invigorating, and reasonenough, in my judgment, or that sorrow ul trend to turnaround.

And to think we could have lost Heaney be ore we won

him! It would have been easy enough or the armer’s sonto ollow his ather into cattle-dealing, living out his days inNorthern Ireland like his nameless armer and his “Nighta er nightness.” In his li e, in his work, in his travels anderudition and literary adventure, Heaney showed us howto make a new sel even as he paid homage to the past. “ButI’ve no spade to ollow men like them,” the penultimatestanza o “Digging” concludes.

Forging onward, beating his own path, the poet showshimsel the way. And just as importantly, he takes us along.Concluding “Digging,” Heaney writes:

“Between my nger and my thumb The squat pen rests.I’ll dig with it.”

Heaney at the Morgan Library Reading, November 13, 1996.

American Academy of Poets

“In his Nobel lecture, Heaneysaid he’d tried to make spacein his imagination for ‘themarvelous as well as for

the murderous.’ ”

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As a visual artist, New-York based photographer Richard Renaldi

has dedicated himsel to capturing those elusive, eetinmoments which underscore every individual experience.

Since receiving his BFA rom New York University in 1990, Renalhas participated in numerous exhibits across the U.S. and in Europe,challenging a variety o audiences to reect on social and culturanorms, and to ponder the question o what it means to be human.

In spring o 2014, Renaldi released his third monograph, comprisedo photos rom his ouching Strangers series. In ouching StrangerRenaldi poses complete strangers as though they were amily, capturingthe range o emotions which result rom breaking out o a com ozone and experiencing the intimacy o un amiliar skin-to-skin contact

Ultimately, ouching Strangers raises a host o questions about thethnic, racial, and cultural barriers still present in our multi-culturalsociety, built around what is perhaps our most revered and viliedsenses – physical touch.

Richard RenaldW PO ,

Mark worked or a variety o publications including the Philadelphia Inquirer , the Chicago ribune, Bon Appetit, and theNew York imes Sunday Magazine. He has written over 25books including ction, nonction and children’s books. His latest bookReady For a Brand New Beat: How “Dancing in the Street” Became an Anthem or a Changing America, describes how the song “Dancing inthe Streets” became an anthem or the volatile events in the summer o1964. Mark is a prolic writer and is particularly interested in ood anculture. One o his most praised books, Salt: A World History, written 2002, is a New York imes and International best seller. Anthony Bour-dain describes the book as “a must have or any serious cook or oodie

Mark KurlanskJ WO ,

THE LANCASTER LITERARY GUILD 113 N. Lime Street Lancaster, PA 17602

PRESENTED BY


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When Donald Davis speaks, storytellers listen. His honey-coated South

Appalachian vowels and consonants curl lovingly around each word otales he shares with audiences o all ages.

Materializing rom the collective soul o a traditional storytelling region—the souAppalachian mountains in western North Carolina—Davis’s stories express countless ways people experience human comedies and dramas that compose thlives. As narrator o those stories, Davis has been called “the ather o amily talA graduate o Duke University Divinity School, Davis retired to ulltime storytell1989, a er 20 years as a United Methodist minister. He currently travels throughout United States, sometimes to other countries, 10 months o the year.He is a eatured per ormer at storytelling estivals and concerts. He has appeared as ahost or NPR’sGood Evening radio program; is eatured master storyteller on BYseries: What’s Your Story ? and has per ormed at the Smithsonian Institution. He lworkshops and seminars on storytelling on Ocracoke Island, NC, where he lives withwi e, Merle. Davis per orms regularly at the Nation

rapportage vol xvi

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