Gone Cobo-Day 6 -Minden

Bercie is a toddler and can't quite say Coboconk, so when asked where his father is he replies, "gone Cobo;" sometimes he even shouts for for his father. Dad is way out of earshot, threshing wheat in Manitoba. Every harvest season from 1891 to 1905 he is away, leaving his wife Annie to tend to the family and the farm back home in Coboconk.

My dear husband,

This snapshot of  Victoria and Haliburton county at the turn of the last century arrived today in a series of 25 letters exchanged between Annie and J.B. White, along with a few notes from their young off-spring. Of the seven children, the daughters Bessie and Viva write the most; Davie sends kisses and poor Bercie dies of Diphtheria, the Christmas after we meet him.

My Dear Annie,

I wish I had more time to write to do their story justice, unfortunately the library closes early today. I'll let the images speak for themselves and perhaps fill in the blanks later; click to make the letters large enough to read.

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Read, Read, Read, Wonder- Day 5, Minden

Today began as another Vancouver day, as my son would call it. He hasn’t been west of the Ontario border, but as an avid reader, at eight, is already familiar with the misty, overcast days on Canada’s west coast.

Even with the rain it is lovely here. The sumach trees are crimson, the beech trees sienna, and the maples, a mix of green, gold and orange—their leaves will be around for a while, as will the needles on the conifers and their rusty hues. Against the grey skies they are spectacular!

Can you sense a pitch coming?

After today I have two days left in the Minden residency. I know it’s unlikely any of you reading this in the EU or Russia will be able to make it for Culture Days or the many Studio Tours happening in the area over the weekend, but perhaps I’ll see a few 416ers or 905ers? The article on Voices at Hand in yesterday’s Minden Times is certainly having an effect and I know the lovely woman at Gravity Coffee House is spreading the word.

This is the first residency where I haven’t been stationed in a storefront, still from my seat in the centre of the library I can see out windows in three directions, so I don’t feel like I’m missing either the colours or the day. The library is definitely a community hub. There is a steady flow of visitors all day, some stay to use the facilities as an office, much like me. I get the odd comment that my overflowing wastebasket and all my stacks of papers remind people of home. 

I like the energy here, if you can call companionable silence energy. Unlike storefronts, no one has tapped my shoulder to check if I’m a mannequin— not that people aren’t curious, the code of ethics is just a little more entrenched. When reading aloud, I try to strike a balance between being audible, yet low-key enough not to wear out my welcome. Thank goodness I can rely upon my inner librarian to shush me when I get too enthusiastic. No one seems to mind though, even if I am, as one man put it, “ the messiest person here.”

As for submissions, I’m thrilled with the response. I arrived with a full mailbag and have added to it steadily—9 letters on my second day and 46 over the last two.

Of those most recently processed a Wayfinding letter written this summer and a suite of letters written by a grandfather to his granddaughter in the 40s stand out.

The letter I’ve filed under Wayfinding begins:

“It’s great to hear from you – and you’re still writing far better than the average schmuck I receive emails from.” 

And continues:

“Don’t sweat the not writing dry spell. The stress and hard times is great fodder for later. If you are serious about writing, stop trying to write new material, grab something old and work on editing it. Or read. Read. Read. Read. Anything you want but read.”

If the donor stops in again I’ll have to ask how the guy made out.

The letters from Grandpa to Susan are happily filed under The Small News—many of the others in the Voices collection written in the 40s are wartime correspondence. Grandpa is an artist and most of his letters are illustrated. Pen & Ink drawings of animals, a watercolour painting of Santa coming down the chimney and delicate silverpoint drawing of Grand Ma—Susan is a lucky girl.

Grand pa always begins with a description of his day and his love of the natural world shines through, as does his need to share it.

“Now when I look out the window in the garden...all around the edge are beautiful blue flowers called Scilla  (sil’ – ah) belong to the Lily family called squills or blue bells. They look like little blue bells waving in the breeze. Fairy bells the colour of the sky of summer.” 

When she brought it in Susan shared with me that after her grandfather’s stroke he had to work with his left hand. I was surprised to see the effects of it in his writing, but not in his pastel drawing.

I don’t always get the back-story when I receive letters; sometimes wondering is just as intriguing.

It's in the Details - Day 3 - Minden

Some days it really is all in the details.  This morning started off that way. I had one foot in the 30s and in another in the 80s in a letter written by a woman to her grand-niece travelling in the UK.

 "Yes London is fun and exciting, well do I remember in 1936 being there caught in the “great strike”—very little transportation—everyone with a car was so kind picking up strangers —which in 1983 would be unthinkable—I had one whole week of opera escorted by Cousin Duncan...one of the Scottish Cousins. His Uncle had sent tickets from Edinburgh some how or other, with money to entertain the “Prairie Flower” which they all called me. What a treat. We had to dress for dinner & opera so I was forced to buy an extra evening gown. One was short and heavily beaded—the age of the flapper. During the day all by myself I visited galleries and of course the museum—besides shopping for ideas— and buying beautiful silk & woolen undies which I wear to this day during the winter. They are so beige and pretty. — Wish they made them there now. A few were made in Switzerland, but the English know how to shape woolly vests and panties."

 Later, I was backpacking in Asia, in the late 70s.

"I sent some record albums home from Taiwan – hope they made it without breaking or warping. They are only cheap quality though and can only be played once or twice before static sounds come through. If you want to use them be sure to tape them the first time, then only use the tapes."  

I love it when I can find clues to help me date a letter. A frosh student apologizing for not writing sooner because he has “been very busy: partying the first week and doing homework this week “ could be any era. Read on and you learn of an initiation ritual involving naked guys, a chair, a rope, shaving cream and an elevator in the girl’s dorm. Sounds like hazing to me, so that puts it back a few years.

Living with his pals is "OK though". They “laugh constantly and blast the Stones, the Who and the Beatles, all the best music, on all our STEREOS all the TIME.” This helps narrow down the timeline. And two paragraphs later the mention of Harry Chapin, Rough Trade and Doucette as upcoming concerts (don’t worry...not together) brings us closer to a date; that is if you have a mind for the details given. ( Please comment below if you know the date - All I've got  to go on is September 16th.)

A letter where the writer reports a recurrence of his colon cancer and the advances in medicine in the 17 years since his first treatment is out of my realm. But a physician would know when Brachytherapy was” a relatively new type of radiation treatment”and we’d be able to date the correspondence by the details because there are no character limitations on letters!

Adult Non Fiction 340 - Day 2 - Minden

A definitive name for the hatbox full of letters has eluded me since the Picton Residency—today I think I finally got it.

An early working title, Orbiting N, served well at first. The donor had mused she liked the idea of being connected to so many different stories and lives so it seemed like a good fit. I liked the way it opened my mind to treating this series of letters as collection unto itself, but it also felt a little cold.

I’ve been mulling over At the Core as a replacement since Picton. I’m still playing catch-up working through the letters ( there are 340) and wanted to spend some more time with them before committing.  Today after reading about 50, I felt ready, and then got up to stretch my legs.

Like anyone’s collection of letters there is a bit of everything in the hatbox:  Birthday and Christmas cards; handmade mother’s day cards; love letters, break- up letters; Love Mom; Love Dad and Your Loving Grandparent letters. But today I was as taken by their uniqueness as I was their universality:

A newsy typewritten letter begins reporting someone “is having and affair, we all think with a lively co-ed-type and thinks that nobody knows, but we all do – you get the picture” and later turns to a recounting of “ the hang-up-on-each other phase” of a break-up.

Another letter recounts the writer’s sister has recovered memory over the past year implicating their father in her child sexual abuse and finishes with a description of a hate crime where the author was “slammed out of the blue” by someone “who mistook us for a gay male couple.”  

And a father’s 12-page apology  offers his version of an affair that resulted in a love child. 

“How did I keep it this long, the secret: I left it to your mother to decide...you did not 

happen to be, we decided you were to be, you are very, very special. I love you so very much.”  

As I walked around the library I thought about how true it is that real life is stranger than fiction. I tried to shake it off, afraid I might actually write such a thing, took my seat and noticed for the first time that my installation is directly in front of the Adult Non Fiction stacks. A nod to library science seemed in order and appropriate.

One Brief Shining Moment; Day 1- Minden

It always takes a bit to get into the rhythm of a residency so I shouldn’t be surprised I got my hours a mixed up today( Sept 23- Day 1). The ten-hour days don’t start until Tuesday. In a way I’ve been looking forward to keeping longer hours on-site, as it will force me to finish writing my daily summary earlier.  There is no wireless in the lakeside cabin where I’m staying and no Starbucks nearby for a late night posting. It’s rather refreshing.

Apart from forgetting that the library closes at 5pm instead of 8pm, it was a very productive first day. I got into the spirit of the autumnal equinox and spent most of the day ‘harvesting’ clippings from a backlog of scans from previous residencies.

I promised I’d try to keep those not able to visit on-site more in the loop. Here’s what I mean.  After reading a letter for the first time I scan it so that I can harvest portions of it to fit into different categories. There are nine categories comprised of harvested bits. From the scanned envelopes of letters I snip: stamps to add to the category Bearings; recipient and sender names to go into To and From respectively and addressee and return addresses to add to Home.

From the body of the scanned letters I harvest: the date it was written (and the return address when included alongside) to add to Bearings; the way the letter begins for Salutations and ended for In Closing; as well as postscripts and X’s & O’s to add to categories bearing the same names. I also have a category for “M’s”. Why M’s?  While talking about the project in the planning stages a friend exclaimed she loved the way her grandmother wrote her M’s, which for me was impetus enough to create  the category The Way She Wrote Her M’s.

   

As I determined in the Picton chapter of the project, slotting the body of a letter into a category isn’t as straight forward. Some letters, such as a submission I opened today, just want to be on their own. 

A handmade cedar box, lined with suede, scented by incense filled with letters—14 of them, each uniquely crafted. Written on various weights of paper, some were tied into scrolls, others contoured to follow the details of a drawing or flow of text. All were hand-tinted either by watercolour paints or pastels and covered with beautifully executed pen and ink drawings.

The woman who gave them to me told me they were from an old boyfriend, an artist. She confided she felt awkward parting with them, but even sillier keeping them and horrified at the thought of throwing them out. We talked about the content, so even before I read them I knew they weren’t like other letters in the category Love or its close cousins Missing You, Travails or Shaky Ground. Of course there are glimpses of all those things, but I decided to title this collection One Brief Shining Moment.

"Uncertain of what has unfolded in the past week, or maybe unravelled...two souls intertwined for what seemed to be an eternity and in a breath frayed."

"A piece of my heart,

At peace with my heart" 

I Blame CBC

I know, I know, people don’t read anymore. Or do they?

I discovered the Stats tab on my blog template a few weeks ago and was surprised by the number of hits and the breadth of my audience. Since I began the Voices blog last October I’ve been using it as a tool for daily updates, striking a tone that suggested the majority of people reading were only 45 minutes away and might visit me on site the next day. Who new I’d have a readership across Canada, or the States let alone Europe, Australia, India, South Korea or Russia?

Given that many of you will never experience the project first hand I thought I should try to make it come alive for you here. I Blame CBC is my first shot at it—a response to one of the questions I’m asked after people discover I’m not a mannequin. 

 

If you’ve read the blog sidebar you have a sense of how I might reply to “What are you doing?” which is typically the first question, followed by  “Um...why?” or, “How did you ever end up doing this?”

It’s not a short answer.

The idea for the project evolved over a number of months. In the spring of 2009, I was working on a new body of work in preparation for a show opening that summer.  My studio sits in the heated half of a two-car garage, divided by a wall, so when I’m in production mode things are a pretty tight. Add to the equation the show I was preparing for was a 15-year survey show of my work. In addition to generating 70 new paintings and drawings, I was tweaking old pieces to make them exhibition ready. On the day I could no longer find a surface to put things I realized something had to give.

I keep all my stuff in my studio; anything that might be fodder for new work is organized on shelves or stored in wooden boxes or old suitcases. Boxes. They were the most vexing. The largest held a thirty-year accumulation of letters and journals, some I’d moved over ten times. I started there.

For those of you from ‘away’, CBC is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I listen to CBC Radio almost constantly when I’m in my studio so I can’t nail down the show I was listening to that nudged me towards this project.  A quote from the Japanese poet Masahide, “Now that my house has burnt down, I have a better view of the rising moon,” was just what I needed to put me in the right frame of mind to get rid of my volumes of old journals. After I’d read them all, I did.

  

Then came the letters. On breaks from painting and drawing I started to read. For fun, I sent a few back to old friends, but I couldn’t bring myself to shift any into the recycling bin. I hadn’t read them in years, yet I couldn’t part with them. A few days into the process of exhuming, reading and carefully placing the letters back into their box I knew I was going to have to do a project about letters. I put the lid back on the box, labeled a new file folder, “Letter Project” and got back to my painting.

Days, maybe weeks later, still working towards my show and again listening to CBC, I heard another snippet on the radio that stuck with me. The radio host was interviewing playwright, Brooke Johnson, who had used journals and old correspondence as fodder for her play, Trudeau Stories. Part way through their discussion the host lamented that “the serendipitous moment of finding and reading an old letter will be lost.” I put down my paint brush, opened my “Letter Project’ file and jotted down the words “film process of reading letters.”  

Fast forward to six months later, my show “Into the Living” had closed, the letter project was still swimming around in my head, and I was preparing for a smallish display of work in a storefront widow I had rented. The Eureka moment came while passing the shop one day when I remarked how lovely a window it was—just big enough to sit and work in, almost stage like. There I decided to forego the smallish display and convey the moment of finding and reading an old letter in a live performance in the window. The idea to extend a call for submissions of letters from others came soon after, followed by titles for the first few categories. Then came letters of the day, readings on request and email updates, and eventually blog postings, tweets and a Facebook presence.    

Voices at Hand debuted in Peterborough in October 2010. Tomorrow I leave for the fourth chapter of the project—a seven-day residency in Minden, Ontario. I’m not packed yet, but I’m ready for whatever direction Voices takes me next. Damn you CBC...and thanks!

Heading North!

Picton Summary

507 letters over 9 days for a total of 2,840 letters sorted into 47 Categories is the one leg summary of the Picton residency. I confess I never did get through all the letters in the hatbox (see Day 7 – Bonjour de Clova), not to worry, they are packed and will be among the first I tackle once installed in Minden.

It was nice to have the rest of the summer to sit with the project and consider future directions. In fact time and space are the two things that set the Picton residency apart.  I don’t know whether it was the long, lazy August days, the grandness of the bay window I was seated in or a combination of these elements that caused such a spike in the frequency and quality of my interactions with the public. One Books and Company patron remarked, “All of Picton can see you.” My retort: “Ah yes, and I can see all of Picton.” 

Sometimes out of the corner of my eye, I'd catch a glimpse of a passerby with a perplexed look. Others, deep in the heart of a letter, I'd have no idea I was being watched when I'd hear a gasp followed by the words, "Oh, I was just about to touch you to see if you were real - what are you doing?"   

And I’d tell them. On one occasion a man dashed off to corral the rest of his book club for a reading from a letter similar to one of the club’s more recent reads. Those of you who know The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society will understand. I started with a letter written in Jersey in WWII, and finished with a suite of POW letters. Another time two women visiting from Germany helped me translate passages from a series of letters sent during the war.



For me the unique appeal of this project lies in the stories like these. I love that there are so many different ways to reach people and that I am there to witness it. I'm working on ways to make the project interactive for those of you who will probably never happen upon me in a store window. I hope you’ll check back in!

Reading from "Best Friends Forever"

Roll Credits...

Big Big Thanks...  

Alexandra Bake and David Sweet of  Books and Company

Rob Wilkes of Big Sky Design

Elizabeth Christie, Fine Art Storage

Rita Leistner Photography

Ian Taylor Photography

Ruth's Canteen

Chez Joan et Earle

my Picton Family

Cam & Fin 

   and

the many people who donated letters, visited me in the window & on line  or sent people my way!

Tick Tock

T minus 8 days until the Minden Chapter of Voices at Hand. More to come in the lead-up!

Picton Residency at Books & Company, August 1-9, 2011
 Photo courtesy of Ian Taylor