Dear Bread Fans,
Tis the season for resolutions and I’m remembering the best one I ever made. At some point in my twenties, I realized I was Wendy, surrounded by some mildly domesticated boys. I needed female friends! So I set out to make them.
I was living in Seattle, where all the rebels had fled. The horizons, cloudy and watery were unreal. When Mount Rainier appeared, it seemed like a cartoon. If I saw the Olympics over Puget Sound, I gave them my doubt. But I always believed in people, and I found some women who remain solid in my landscape.
We spent the holidays in Seattle. I got to visit most of my pals, and want to tell you about three of them. I met artists Mary Shea and Nancy Kiefer when I was volunteering at and then running a thrift store for Chicken Soup Brigade, an AIDS service agency. Nancy and I would meet up at other thrift stores on my days off, prowling through neighborhoods that had dainty treasures from the 1920s-60s. Then we’d go back to her house and write exquisite corpse style, building poem-stories of phrases and words we free associated on top of each other.
This trip, we got to hang out twice! One time we collaged in her studio, and the other time we wrote together. The openness I feel being with her is terrific.
Seeing Mary Shea gave me the same lift. Mary and I lived together in the Laurelton, an old apartment building that was kind of like a pauper’s palace, with cheap rent and thick concrete walls. Mary and I never made things together, but we ate together, and walked, and I observed her configure her life as an artist. Her garden was all flowers, and she prioritized painting and drawing, centering her workspace.
When dahlias bloomed, we visited them at the Volunteer Park garden, and trekked up to Northgate, where a man had a fabulous yardful & sold them for a dollar a stalk. We came home with buckets of these lush planets, and Mary’s lasted longer than mine, probably because she lavished them with the attention of her gaze as she painted them.
Frances McCue gave me thunder too. I met her when I took a writing class, where she had us trace our bodies on big rolls of kraft paper, and imagine details about a fictional character’s life with coloring, writing and collage. Frances is a firecracker, and has started loads of cool things — most recently Pulley Press, a wicked cool poetry imprint focusing on rural America, with books by Ted Kooser and Wilma Mankiller.
I hope you, my bread pals, feel full of friends, too, and are ready to find more.
Amy
NOTE: My flour pal Andrew Janjigian is taking a break from his newsletter, Wordloaf, while he focuses on writing his book! I’ll be subbing for him over there, covering some fun ground I’ve wanted to explore. Learn more & sign up here.