Recent Publications
taking "recent" with a grain of salt, or an entire pimiento ham biscuit . . .
Remiss, I haven’t given a heads-up in this space that two pieces about which I feel strongly ran in the Curator and at Isele Magazine last fall. It’s funny: they were written about a year apart with different experiences in mind, but commonalities (my daughters’ involvement? me being a woman? location, Lynchburg?) put them together in conversation in my mind. Can you hear the back-and-forth?
“Portrait of Anna Hyatt Huntington" is an ekphrastic poem based on a painting that hangs in pride of place at our local Maier Museum of Art: “Portrait of Anna Vaughan Hyatt” (1915). Notice the size as compared to the girls, and also the girls’ masks, which speak volumes themselves. One thing I enjoy about this poem is that it’s a work of art encasing a work of art encasing an artist creating a work of art that depicts yet another woman of inspiration. The painter is Marion Boyd Allen. In the title, she assigns the sculptor’s maiden name, since Vaughan Hyatt was unmarried at the time of the statue’s creation; I assigned her married name, conceiving the entire woman and all her life experience and accomplishment in my words about the creator of the renowned Manhattan Joan of Arc statue. I particularly appreciate how the creator of this painting captures the sculptor at work on the plaster model, making the woman larger than the work of art, pressing soft clay with warm hands, rather than handling the hardened bronze of the final, larger-than-life-sized piece. In the painting, Anna Vaughan Hyatt Huntington is herself life-sized, and it is a tremendous moment to enter this dim green room in my very own city and meet her.
No womanly woman you
Hold your chisel, your smoothing thumb, you
Make not a man but
One of your own –
Joan raises her sword fist to the sky,
Alive already ready to leap into
Battle and you say
Me too . . .
Read the whole poem at the Curator.
“At the Bakery” is - well, it’s an essay. It’s a walk through a drive to pick up my daughter after school, an assay into the way my resolve says no one moment and breaks down the next. It’s a glimpse into the ways we think we need to be and the words we berate ourselves for not saying and the possibility that we might change, or that things might be different for our children, or that we might do better by them. All of those cliched phrases we cling to. It is, at the least, an affirmation if you need it that you may order the pimiento ham biscuit at the bakery, and you don’t have to answer to anyone.
Honesty: you know you are going to stop at the bakery. You are sick today and feel like nothing but hiding under the velveteen purple blanket on your lumpy living room couch, but you had promised your first-grade daughter she could be a car rider after school, and she holds your promises in a death-vise; if you don’t pick her up, she will never let it go. You slouch out the door, shift your aching body into the high minivan seat, and remind yourself: No sugar till Thanksgiving. Even as the words roll through your mind, you know they are useless and false.
Read the essay at Isele Magazine.
Congratulations on your publications and all the work you put into crafting them, Rebecca!
Really like that poem, Rebecca, the portrait, the photo with your kids, all of it!