Dean Robertson's Blog, page 14

Notes from the Road: First Stop, Texas

Mansfield, Texas, by way of Dallas/Ft. Worth (Non-Stop: Believe It Or Not)

 

 

 

 

 

 

I thought I wouldn’t count this trip as part of my book tour,  because one problem after another seemed to dictate no schedule of talks or book signings.  I was disappointed and frustrated.  Call them again!  Push harder!  Insist! Then it came to me: Four days and nights–lodged unexpectedly in among several book signings at home and more, on the road again, starting at the end of the month–a break!  a rest! Four days and nights full of family and morning coffee on the patio and catching up on New Yorkers.  Four days and nights free of marketing.

My cousin, Jane, who was my Relentless Editor on Looking for Lydia; Looking for God, long before I ever submitted the manuscript for publication, is my host.  She lives in the older section of a quiet, family-friendly neighborhood, next door to her daughter, Grace, Grace’s husband, Jeff, and their daughter, Malena.  Jane, Grace, and Malena met my plane yesterday.

 

I haven’t seen Jane’s daughters, Grace and Elizabeth, in over twenty years, and I have, of course, never met their children, Malena, Caleb, and Carter, who are-respectively-twelve, ten, and six.

I have now met Jane’s shy cat, Miss Evie, who came to sit in my lap; her rescue dog, Peaches; Malena’s black cat, Sara; and their chihuahuas, Ginger and Jazzy.  I am comfortable here in this world full of animals and children.

 

And, of course, I am working:

I am writing this blog and drafting a few others for the Sundays ahead when I’ll be in Michigan and then in Kentucky: so far, I have started a blog on grief with a friend; have set up a guest blog on forgiveness; and  completed, around midnight, the final work on the monthly Classic Movie blog which is published, as scheduled, on this first Wednesday of the month.

I am about to publish this report from Texas.

I am still “paying it forward” and doing editing jobs for a friend’s son on the long essay that will accompany his application to graduate school, and for a cousin who has written what he calls an “inter dimensional romance.”  Both of these jobs involve a good deal of conversation via Track Changes and telephone.

I will complete a long handout for a four-week class I am leading in November on John’s Gospel and getting that off to the Director of Christian Formation to make copies.

I will be outlining my presentations for several venues in both Grand Rapids and Louisville, making the significant changes in focus now that I am no longer on home turf with the obvious local connection.

Yesterday, I participated in a one-hour conference call with a remarkable professional marketing consultant.  I have spoken with Shari Stauch before and already knew she was the best.  I posted a blog here on August 6 about my first consultation with her.  She covered a staggering amount of material in our call yesterday, and my head was reeling when we hung up.  But, the magic is that she sent me a tape of the entire conversation and I can go back and take my old-fashioned notes a bit at a time.  This is a wise woman.

And I hope to at least be dropping off copies of Looking for Lydia at the Mansfield Public Library, looking ahead to their book clubs’ 2016 scheduling. 

 

Three generations of great women. 

And a couple of very fine boys!

Today I will spend time with my cousin, Malena, while she shows me some tricks she’s learned on YouTube.  There seems to be no end to what I don’t know about the Internet.  This, I’m hoping, will just be for fun.

The icing on today’s cake will be the icing on today’s cake.  My twelve-year-old cousin is a baker. I am promised a custom-made “Aunt Dean” cake,  and I don’t have to share!!  

Laugh and You Might Live Longer

Classic Movie Review by Ellen Bunton
(and her eager assistant, Meatball)

                                     

A Regular Monthly Feature
The Classic Movie Review
  The first Wednesday of the month.

October already?  As promised: Heeeeerrrrrres ELLEN

Men, Women, and Comedians

I know women generally outlive men but still I think it’s strange that so many leading men of the classic era died young while their female co-stars lived much longer. Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, and Gary Cooper all died of natural causes by the age of 60. However, their female leads–Myrna Loy, Lauren Bacall, Olivia de Havilland (alive at 99 as I write this), Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis and Greta Garbo lived into their 80’s and 90’s.

!

 

Maybe it’s just the life expectancy thing.

But wait a minute! Look at Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin, Milton Berle, Jonathan Winters, Mickey Rooney, and Jerry Lewis (still hosting telethons for the Muscular Dystrophy Association until 2011; alive today at 89). They all lived into their eighth and ninth decades.

Bob Hope and George Burns even made it to 100! I know there are exceptions. Vivien Leigh and Veronica Lake died relatively young while Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart were octogenarians, but I think overall the numbers bear me out.

 

Many in the film world would say drama is easy, comedy is hard.  And, I guess it might be easier to make an audience cry than laugh, but I don’t think this is about hard work. I really think this is about the ability to laugh at yourself and not to take yourself so seriously (and Errol Flynn being drunk doesn’t count).

It’s sometimes hard to separate Clark Gable from Rhett Butler or Tyrone Power from Zorro and they had a reputation to maintain off screen. They were expected to look tough and act tough whereas the women weren’t held to the same standards in the culture of that era. And the comedians could laugh at themselves even when their jokes weren’t funny and then make a joke out of that!

So, the moral of the story is laugh, especially at yourself, and you might live longer!

Lydia’s Bloopers: The Finale

On June 29th of this year, my friend, Terri, her daughter, Rhonda, and I convened at my house with the intention of producing a well-scripted comic video to publicize my book, Looking for Lydia; Looking for God.  We had settled on comedy as it seemed to stand the best chance of everyone’s video fantasy–“going viral” on YouTube.  At this point, we were serious about our comedy.  At this point, none of us had any idea of how to get from our homegrown video to YouTube, but we were confident.  Three or four hours later, we had given up on ever getting even a couple of minutes of video without errors.  We quit, and Terri and Rhonda went home.  I had five or six very short clips, each one worse than the one before.  I don’t recall how many days I spent just ignoring the whole project before I decided  to try my hand at “uploading” a video to YouTube.  I am not certain to this day what the difference is between uploading and downloading.  But no matter.

I got up on the morning of Saturday July 25th–the day after Looking for Lydia‘s official release date– and spent most of the day watching YouTube videos teaching me how to make and edit YouTube videos.  At the end of the day, July 25 2015, according to YouTube’s records, “Lydia’s Bloopers” was published.

“Lydia’s Bloopers” never went viral, but we had a respectable number of views and comments (yes, mostly from friends and family, but still).  And now Looking for Lydia; Looking for God is available for purchase on amazon.com and barnes&noble.com, in hardcover, paperback, and ebook; the numbers don’t look too bad so far.  I have had my big book launch at the Slover Library (see home page and earlier blogs);  I am scheduled for book signings in a couple of states to the west and north of here (also largely due to the kindness of friends and family); and by Thanksgiving I will be back home, trying to figure out the nuances of marketing when friends and family have run out.  I have faith I’ll get there–with a little help from my friends.

But “Bloopers” has run its course.  Terri and I got together for some taping of what we thought would be “Lydia’s Bloopers 2.”  We didn’t have much energy for it and, except for an impromptu riff by Terri about a neighborhood pole dancer who liked the book and another grand moment when Terri put her teeth back in, whipped off her hat, and revealed herself in her true blond, blue-eyed gorgeousness, our efforts that day weren’t enough to get me back into the YouTube uploading business.  Until now.

The neighbor:

And the bombshell:

Thanks, Terri, and for Bloopers yet to come.

Dear Snowflake: What happens if I stop reading?

I am a retired English teacher.  I made my living for over thirty years reading and talking about books.  In addition to my profession,  I read compulsively–everything I could get my  hands on.  When I wasn’t reading “Hamlet” for the twentieth time or the second section of Faulkner’s The Unvanquished before teaching it every Fall, I read British murder mysteries, biographies, poetry, the Bible, and The New Yorker, Bible Review, The NY Times Book Review, and would literally find myself at the breakfast table reading the back of the oatmeal box.  I had no point of reference for not reading.  About every five years, I would begin a re-reading of: all of Jane Austen; most of Trollope; and Great Expectations.  When one of my favorite modern authors, like Margaret Drabble, published a new novel, I started with her very first one and read them all through again before allowing myself the luxury of cracking open the most recent.

A couple of years ago, I sank into a paralyzing depression from which I held out little hope of recovering.  Then I remembered Middlemarch, and for one week I was back.  Eventually, I realized I would come through, though not unscathed.

In March of last year, I woke up one morning and started writing.  For nearly seven months I did nothing but write.  For many months after that, I edited, I wrote book proposals for the submission of the manuscript, I wrote short pieces for a friend’s blog, eventually I started writing for my own blog.  In all this time, I didn’t read one book and I got weeks and weeks behind on The New Yorker and my daily issue of The New York Times online.  I began to be afraid I would never be able to read again.

I count on books; I have always counted on them.  Now I sat down to read and never made it past the first few pages.  I was restless; I needed to be either writing or just moving around–cleaning the house, walking, anything but the sitting still that reading required.  And, even if I could manage to stay in the chair, I couldn’t concentrate on the words on the page.

During the time when I was writing, I struck up a friendship with an unlikely person-a Baptist preacher (incidentally, the smartest person I’ve ever met)-and we decided to form a book club of two which would meet at my co-op once a month.  He expressed a desire to read something “not religious,” and I suggested Middlemarch, a book he hadn’t read.  Once again, that novel saved my life.  We have read a good many books together since then.  We have just finished Ishiguro’s Buried Giant and are embarking on Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being.  I am only one issue behind in The New Yorker.

So, dear Snowflake, I don’t have a list of five reasons not to read.  It’s too soon for me to understand what all that reading blackout was about or whether it has damaged or improved or just changed in some as-yet undefined way my reading life.  I honestly don’t know.  It happened; it lasted an awfully long time; it frightened me nearly to death.  Who am I, after all, if I no longer can see the world through the eyes of Hamlet or Bayard Sartoris or Elizabeth Bennet or Dorothea Brooke?  I don’t like to think about it.

Now I have written my own book and the larger book club to which I belong has decided to read my book as their next selection.

Franz Kafka once wrote that a book “should be an axe for the frozen sea within us.”  I wonder if my book will be an axe for even one reader’s frozen sea.

Meanwhile, I have just read one of the most charming books I’ve ever encountered which was irresistible to me the moment I saw the title.  This book alone, my very dear Snowflake, could make a sixth reason on your list.

The Slover Book Talk #2: More Photos; alas, the video

Well, folks, I am sorry to report that insurmountable problems with the Phantom Video dictate a new approach.  For the Slover Book Talk #2 I offer a bountiful serving of more and more and more fabulous photographs!!  

Everything you always wanted to know about who was there: what they wore, what they ate, with whom they schmoozed,  and all about the place, the people, the occasion.  Video would have been great, but not without sound!!

 

 

[image error]

 Friends, Angels, Babies, Children, Ropers

Ropers, Albums, Houses

More Ropers.  More Friends Bible ladies, Family, Friends, Stroller.         It really couldn’t have been better!!  And, OH THAT FOOD!!!!!

A Snowflake from the Blizzard: Why Read?

FIVE THINGS THAT MAKE BOOKS UNIQUE

 

Today I am welcoming to The Sunday Blog a very special guest blogger: my friend and colleague, Darrell Laurant, who describes himself this way on his own blog, Snowflakes in a Blizzard:  “I am a 40-year veteran of journalism who retired two years ago to do freelancing full time.  My first novel, The Kudzu Kid, was published last October, and lots of people are not buying it.”

Darrell is, in fact, doing a great deal more than “freelancing full time.”  He is the creator and guiding spirit of Snowflakes, where he devotes his time to finding, encouraging, and recruiting authors who are having trouble, in today’s market, either finding a publisher or selling their books once they’re published.  He selects two writers a week and features them and their books.  These pages are beautifully laid out and the descriptions of the authors and their featured books are written by the authors themselves and reflect their voices.

My recently published book was a featured page on Snowflakes, and I was very excited at the quality of the spread.  Everyone I know was impressed.  In between putting these pages together, Darrell writes a regular “Weather Report,” in which he shares his own experiences in writing and publishing and the experiences of a variety of experts in the field.  His generosity with his time and his knowledge is inspiring.  He is helping writers to write and he is helping writers to be read.

He explains that he, “chose the name for this blog because getting noticed for a writer in this market–especially a new, unknown writer–is like a snowflake trying to stand out in a blizzard.  This project is designed to help that.”  You can take a look at the Snowflakes blog and, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be making your list of books-to-read directly from the featured titles.  Check it out at:  https://snowflakesarise.wordpress.com.

For this week’s  Sunday Blog, Darrell has taken off his writer’s hat and has written about his life as a reader.

Welcome, Darrell, to The Sunday Blog!

For a very long time, I got away from reading for pleasure. Sure, as a newspaper columnist,  I read a lot, but it was almost exclusively magazines, websites and other newspapers. The goal was to ferret out specific information, and picking up a novel seemed a luxury.

Then I retired from the newspaper business, and my wife and I moved to Lake George, NY., with my 90-year-old mother so she could return to her house there. Within a few months, we were assaulted by our first Upstate New York winter in 40 years (we both had grown up there, but then moved south).

The upside was, as a homebound writer, I didn’t have to challenge the rather grim elements if I didn’t feel like it. The downside was a full-blown case of cabin fever. So I started reading again, novels as well as non-fiction, and I haven’t stopped since. In the process, I remembered some of the reasons why books are unique as entertainment.

1. Books add to your life experience, albeit vicariously.

No one has the time, the resources or the opportunity to sample everything that intrigues them, “bucket lists” notwithstanding. Nor can any one person possess all the skills and knowledge required to open every door that’s available. Through reading, however, we can incorporate these things into our memory banks through the words of someone else. This summer alone, for example, I have learned what it’s like to walk the teeming streets of urban India, survive in prison, struggle with bi-polar disorder, climb Mount Everest, and serve with an engineering unit in a combat zone. Chances are I will never do any of those things myself, but thanks to these authors,  I don’t have to.

2. Books are bite-sized.

I always enjoy movies, but it’s hard to watch 10 minutes of one, then return to it over and over. Books, on the other hand, lend themselves to our time-challenged culture. Five minutes with a novel or work of non-fiction while grabbing a tuna sandwich or spending quality time in the bathroom, another 10 minutes the next day, and before you know it, you’ve digested the whole thing.

3. Books offer a one-way conversation.

If we admit it, most of us are not always good listeners. Sure, we might make the requisite eye contact  and honestly try to listen to what other people are saying. At the same time, however, we often catch ourselves zoning out, thinking of what we’re going to say in response. Reading a book, you have to listen to the author without comment on your part — he or she can’t hear you, anyway.

4. Books force us to listen to new ideas.

This is a corollary to No. 3.  When someone with whom we are talking espouses an idea or position with which we disagree, the tendency is to immediately counter with our own arguments. As a reader, however, we have no choice but to quietly ponder what is being said. Sometimes, in the process, we find our minds being changed — or, at the very least, we gain a bit of insight into why someone else thinks as they do.

5. It’s easy to find out if this is a book we don’t want to finish.

Because we are all different, and what we like is largely subjective, we will occasionally encounter books that simply don’t interest us, or turn us off for some reason.  Unlike movies, where we tend to keep watching “in case this gets better,” you can sneak a peek ahead in a book to see if that will be the case. And if not, there is an infinite number of other books to read.

https://snowflakesarise.wordpress.com

The Slover Book Talk #1: Photographs

 

 

On Saturday September 12 2015 between 2:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon, the new Slover Library in Norfolk, Virginia, sponsored a book talk and signing for me and for my book, Looking for Lydia; Looking for God.  

 

Slover Library 6th floor Community Room

 

Views from the 6th floor of The Slover Library

 

 

It was a splendid gathering of family and old friends, of new friends and friends I hadn’t even met.

                                                      

                     Old Friends from Richmond                              New Friends in Norfolk

 

It was a time to celebrate the women who participated in a Bible study for nearly two years at the Lydia Roper Home which is the setting for much of the book.

 

 

It was a time to celebrate and thank the Roper family, especially Lydia Roper’s great-great-grandchildren, Molly, Al, and Bruce, who have been so supportive of this project through good times and bad.

 

It was a time to “schmooze,” as my publisher John Koehler calls it.  In fact, it was a time to honor John Koehler for the work he does with new authors and for understanding from the beginning what Lydia is about.

 

It was a few hours I could offer, with the help of the Slover Library, to the many people who have helped along the way.  When Troy Valos of the Slover’s Sargeant Memorial Collection first asked me to send him my agenda for the afternoon, my response was, “My agenda is that everyone leave having had a good time.”  I hope that happened.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I spoke about Lydia Roper.

 

 

 

And I believe we sold a few books.

The Sales Team at Work

 

The Sales Team Working Harder

 

 

 

              

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                  Signing Books

 

 

Sydney Scrogham’s Dreams: Introducing a Special Guest Blogger

 

A Young Adult Fantasy Novelist on Writing from the Heart

The Dark Alicorn is a character in Sydney’s new fantasy novel for young adults, Chase, just released by Koehler Books.

 

 

“My 12 year old version of a Dark Alicorn” 

 

“When I was in high school, I took a creative writing class.  The teacher was an editor, and she submitted Chase for publication.  The small press accepted it, and I started down a long three and a half year road that would end with Chase still unpublished.  Discouraged but determined, I Googled “small presses in Virginia” to launch my search for a new publisher.  That began my relationship with Koehler Books and Chase’s well-anticipated arrival into the world.”

From that experience, Sydney tells us on her blog, that “My passion is encouraging unpublished writers to follow their dreams.”

I first “met” Sydney in this strange world of online friendships, on Facebook, in the closed group for writers publishing with Koehler Books.

She appeared in the summer, just after the publication date had been set for her young adult fantasy novel, Chase.  In March, I was a new Koehler author, so I remembered just how it felt.  I don’t quite know how Sydney and I started chatting about writing as guest bloggers for each other, but last month I sent her a blog post which she published immediately.

The Home Page of her blog is gorgeous and I was thrilled to be featured.

http://www.sswriter.com

Sydney is young and earnest and she believes in what she is doing and works hard at it.  She succeeds because in so many ways, Sydney Scrogham is a writer who writes from her heart and a woman who gives us the images to see that heart clearly.

 

 

 

“If I’m not writing, I’m at the barn with my horse Snowdy.” 

 

At first, Sydney expressed some doubts as to what a young adult fantasy novelist would have to say on my website–which is about my book about old ladies and God!!

I told her to choose any topic she liked.  She has chosen to write about how writers too often let their fears override their feelings as they sit down at the keyboard.

It’s a lovely piece.

I don’t worry for a minute that Sydney Scrogham let’s anything override her feelings!

 

 

“Blue

Beloved Friend and Partner

March 31, 1999 – March 12, 2015

Want to know more about me?

Read about my best friend Blue”

 

Enjoy Sydney’s post, take it to heart, and buy a copy of her new book, Chase, just out from Koehler Books.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_12?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=chase+sydney+scrogham&sprefix=chase+sydney%2Caps%2C128

 

WELCOME, SYDNEY, AND THANK YOU!

To Be A Writer, You Have To Feel (Something) Without Worrying About Its Being Wrong.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To be a writer, you have to let yourself feel.

Be an emotional writer in a world distrusting facts.  Does that statement stir you up a little bit?  I throw my fists into the air and scream YES, YES, YES… on the inside where no one’s looking, of course.  I read the first chapter of Dwight V. Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer, and while Chapter One wasn’t full of techniques, it hammered home one brilliant idea.

To be a writer, you have to feel.

Okay, okay, maybe I’m stressing the point a little too much.  But this gets me excited.  Every day I’m surrounded by people who suppress their emotions–and to what end?  Swain is suggesting that suppressing emotion destroys creativity–and I agree with him.  As writers raised in this fact-worshipping society, we’re especially prone to have writing that (cough) sucks (cough) because we don’t write based on what we feel.

People pick up books to have an emotional experience.  A reawakening of the emotion our culture has put to death.  If people want to read facts, they can pick up an encyclopedia.  Novels die when they’re full of facts but come to life with emotion… But how can we write about something we don’t have?

Writers write because they’re excited about a story, because they feel something.  And if their job is done right, the reader feels that passion stirring in the writer.  Writers especially can’t afford to distrust their emotions.  Why would writers even start thinking feelings are, for lack of a better word, bad?

It all comes down to a fear of being wrong.

When a writer is afraid of being wrong, the emotion in the writing is going to die.  By letting yourself write what you feel, you risk someone else’s point of view being different from yours (and that will most certainly be the case).  And then, when your heart is written out, vulnerable on paper, the criticism comes.

“We’re sorry, but this manuscript does not meet our needs right now.”

“The characters fall flat.”

“The story structure doesn’t move.”

Whatever your criticism sounds like, don’t listen to it.  Shed the fear of being wrong.  Otherwise, you’ll never write another word.  What you have to say is valuable.  Your story excites YOU and that’s what matters right now.  Let those words flow from the well inside you.  Later, the technique will start to fall in place.  You can get critiques, book deals, movie rights…

But only if you write from what you feel without suffocating under the fear of being wrong.

Contact Sydney

https://www.facebook.com/sydney.scrogham?fref=ts

https://twitter.com/sydney_writer

https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=%40sydney_writer&term_meta%5B%5D=%40sydney_writer%7Ctyped&remove_refine=sydneyscrogham%40sydney_writer%7Ctyped

 

 

 

 

 

 

English Teacher Turned Author: A Guest Blog for Me

 

 

 

Woke up today to an email from my friend, Sydney Scrogham, telling me she had just published this interview.

I was so excited about putting together her guest blog for me, published today!! that I had forgotten all about this.

Writers helping writers.  It’s a wonderful world.

http://www.sswriter.com/english-teacher-turned-author-interview-with-dean-robertson/

The New Bates Webster Gallery

 

“I made that in 2008, I thinks that’s right!  It is watercolor.  The girls got watercolor sets in their stocking for Christmas so we all sat in the kitchen painting for days.  My critters in the painting remind me of all different types of people.  I use critters because animals are generally pleasant to be around. “

 

It is with enormous pleasure that I introduce a wonderful woman and an exciting visual artist,

Bates Fisher Webster.

 

I first met Bates Fisher in 1980, when she enrolled as a Freshman at the small independent secondary school where I had just begun teaching. Her reputation on the soccer field preceded her. She didn’t start that first Fall, but kept up a schedule guaranteed to put her on the field in the Spring. She ran; she played soccer every day, in all weather. She ran drills in her back yard then ran again, dribbling a ball. When the weather had frozen her inside, she used the basement wall as a punching bag for her feet.

One of my earliest memories of her was alone in the park with her Hacky Sack suspended in the air for what seemed like hours, her feet moving like a dancer’s, her concentration and her isolation complete.

That was Bates.

 

This post is about images: images in my mind from decades ago; images of the art Bates makes; images of the farm where she lives and works today; images of her daughters; images of her dogs. It is about images because Bates is about images–in my memory, in her life.  My house begins to fill up with them.

I have a bird; I have a horse. I long for a pink cat and a neon alligator. I dream of papering my walls with photographs of the Red House Farm.

 

 

There are pictures of floods, pictures of livestock, pictures of harvest, pictures of water bubbles in the cow’s water tank.

 

 

Me: “Why is the water red?”

Bates: “The water isn’t, it’s mineral deposits on the bottom of the tank.  They have a red mineral block near the water tank.”

 

 

I asked Bates why she creates these birds and reptiles, almost all dancing, all with the signature “hands.”

 

“I drew pictures of these things from the time I could hold a pencil. When I was four I made my first sculpture, a raccoon, using what I later learned was the “lost wax method”–I made it out of wax and my mom made the mold and cast it in silver.  When I moved out here and started making all these pieces in metal, she said, ‘You’ve finally gone back to what you were doing at four.’”

 

Bates is just beginning—again—and “not all that excited about doing the same stuff” but “the girls are involved, discovering color, learning to weld. Sometimes I’ll make things and hand them off to the girls to head for the paint store. I’m letting go of what I think something should look like and letting them find out what they think it should look like.”

She is moving toward something new and when we spoke on the phone on Thursday I reminded her of the final stanza of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Little Gidding”: “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”

 

Bates just said, “Yes. That’s it.”

 

 

Bates Webster is forty-nine years old. She lives on a farm in Sulphur, Kentucky. She is a farmer and a farmer’s wife. She is a mother.  She starts her day feeding seventy-five animals. She harvests vegetables against the winter.

 

 

We recall only one conversation we had at St. Francis High School. On an early morning in her Senior year, Bates arrived—as she always did—to do her homework and work out in the gym. She walked into my classroom and said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” I told her she didn’t have to. She played soccer for the rest of the year and left Louisville headed for college on a soccer scholarship. She majored in Art and Asian Studies.

Bates took one class from me, an elective in Humanities, about which she remembers one group project, on Conflict Resolution.

Until this year, Bates and I hadn’t spoken since her graduation in 1984.  One night not too long ago, we spent hours on the telephone; I saw morning light at my windows before we hung up.  We talk often.

Bates Webster makes art where she finds it. She will continue.

She wrote about this photograph, “My favorite coffee mug, break and spill, made a heron. I love blue herons.”  

BATES WEBSTER WILL BE CONTRIBUTING IMAGES AND WORDS ONCE A MONTH ON THIS BLOG.