At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a Final Fridays celebration of truth and language

Last evening Bill and I met some 80 truth-seekers at the Johnson exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We'd built custom workbooks inspired by ten of the works on display. We'd invited participants to connect the paintings (or, in one case, the Rodin sculpture) with specific (and personal) aspects of the year past—and the year to come.

There were to have been two sessions. Thirty people were expected for each. But by the time the first session was under way, we were nearly out of our 80 workbooks and deep into conversation with a four-year-old memoirist, a priest, a high-school teacher, a fitness instructor, a young woman who went back to school to face her nemesis (math) and discovered that she's actually quite mathematical, an English teacher, a music teacher, a recent high-school grad, and so many more. We were blessed by the enthusiasm for the program and the care that so many took to write, and I will never forget walking around that exhibit space watching perfect strangers connecting with themselves.

A good way to end this year, with thanks to Cat Ricketts, who makes everything so very grand.

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Previewing The Art of Remembering, our Final Fridays event at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

We invite you to join us on December 29, 2017 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Final Fridays event, starting at 5:00 PM. We'll be using the Johnson exhibition as a way back to our own memories of the year that was, and those who join us will receive this workbook. Admission to the event is free after entry.

More details here.

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Join us for Final Friday (December) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (we're excited; we made a special workbook for the event)

Among the beautiful people we've lately come to know is one Cat Ricketts, who coordinates the evening programs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She'll hold ugly sweater parties. She'll host jazz musicians. She'll rock a room with a bossa nova quintet.

She'll also come up with some very spectacular ideas (with equally beautiful colleagues like Claire Oosterhoudt) for PMA's Final Friday events. I didn't know what Cat might have in mind when she got in touch with us several weeks ago. But when she invited us to be part of the line up for Get Your Om On (December 29, 2017), I said yes at once.

We've spent time with Cat and Claire in the meantime—developing a keepsake, memoir-twinged notebook inspired by the Johnson exhibit now on display in the Dorrance Galleries. I've done the writing. Bill's done the designing. Cat and Claire have done the fabulous hosting of our (eternally funky) ideas. Bill and I will both be there for the entire evening, giving out the notebooks, talking remembering and memoir, and listening to the stories those who come have to tell.

And so this is an invitation—a hope that you'll join us and the other artists on December 29, 2017 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The fun begins at 5:00 PM and ends a little before 9:00 PM. Admission is free after entry. For the entire line-up, check out this link.

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Art on the Hill and Crowds in the Streets, in Today's Inquirer

In today's Inquirer I write of a recent visit to the Paul Strand exhibit, and the marathoners—and winners—who crowded the streets. The full story can be found here.

With thanks, as always, to Kevin Ferris. And to the city I love.

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on teaching teachers

This week, as readers of this blog know, I am at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where K-12 teachers from all around the area have gathered for the VAST: Nature Through the Lens of Art/Science program.  For two hours each afternoon I share passages from books I love, lay down challenges, talk about Rilke and Cezanne, Stanley Kunitz and Vaddey Ratner, Joan Didion and Rebecca Solnit, ghosts in gardens and rivers that flow.  They write and I listen.  I suggest, and they counter.

The teachers surprise me.  They make me smile.  They are writers, too, many of them, and certainly they are readers—men and women with opinions about what can and should trigger memory, say, or about the color blue, or about students they'll always remember.  They are charming and determined and, most of all, curious and hopeful.  They make me wish that I was learning in their classrooms.

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teaching scale and time (and Kunitz)

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where we're working on color, perception, metaphor, and the evocative shimmers of remembered gardens as part of the VAST Institute workshops, we were, on Monday, speaking of the senses writers tend to ignore.  Smell and taste, perhaps because telling metaphors are elusive.  Sound, because what we notice first—bird songs, insect buzz—seems somehow overly heard.

Today, while searching for illustrative examples to share by writers who are in possession of all their senses, not to mention all their wonder, I came upon this passage in Stanley Kunitz's The Wild Braid.  Scale is not a sense, of course, nor is the passing of time.  But they are elements of framing and reporting that writers must finally master.  With the simplest possible language, Kunitz takes back in time.  He isn't trying to be a poet here.  He's saying, This is how it was; this is how I moved through things and saw.

During my adolescence, out in the open fields, I would sometimes pretend I was one of the insects.  I became captivated by dragonflies and imagined I could see the world as they did.  Everything had a different scale.

I reveled in the sensation of being so light and being able to go anywhere, unburdened by a body.  

Discovering the body was part of the joy, the sense of infinite possibility of being out in the woods.  I recognized that it had weight and had certain limitations—there was no denying that.  Obviously one's sensitivity was less acute than that of any other living creature in the woods.  At the same time, the body was the very instrument of exploration.

I would find a leaf or a stone in the underbrush and have the sensation that nobody else had seen quite the same thing.  And if I came across an arrowhead, that was a real triumph.

Sometimes, especially when one gets older, one gets very clumsy in the handling of delicate objects.  The hands, the fingers, are less nimble than they were.  But then, there's the compensation that one knows a bit more.  There's a quid pro quo.

In the woods, one loses the sense of time.  It's quite a different experience from walking in the streets.  The streets are human creations.  In the woods what one finds are cosmic creations.

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three things loved, three things hated: Kate Northrop's haunted poetry

Out in Wyoming, where Alyson Hagy lives and teaches and writes, there are many very real, very committed artists.  One is named Kate Northrop, a poet with whom I have enjoyed a correspondence. 

Her poems have been called "haunted."  They have been likened to "the penumbra in painting, where light and shade blend." They have been described as "inclusive and generous, yet the tension, the thrill, never slackens."  Kate herself has been hailed as a poet with a "remarkable ability to combine erudition and empathy."  Last year she sent me an early copy of what would become the Persea publication Clean.  I read it in a sustained state of awe.

Today, thinking of Kate, I returned to Clean—the manuscript she'd sent—and found this page, these words.  I'm teaching this week at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  I'm taking Kate's words with me.

The first day they had to name
Three things they loved, three
They hated

Loved:  pulling moss from the seams
Between bricks; a stone
Cracked open; Jello, when you touch it

With a spoon, how it resists

Hated: a too-visible part
On the girl in front of you, scalp;
The skin formed on house paint;

Feet; white condiments

(Miracle whip, tartar sauce, mayonnaise)

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Summer Reading 2012: Responses to a Questionnaire

Back in mid-April, while living those few glorious days beside the ocean's gentle roar, I was asked some questions about my hoped-for summer reading.  Two months have passed, and some of my predictions for myself have held true. Some predictions are still waiting to be fulfilled.  Some books were in fact what I hoped they would be.  Some (or, to be specific, one) severely disappointed.  

This beautiful girl lives, by the way, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  She's one of my teaching aides for the upcoming VAST Teacher Institute.

But here is who I was or thought I'd be, in mid-April, when contemplating these questions by the sea.

What are you reading this summer?

I have an exquisite pile of books waiting for me—Cheryl Strayed’s WILD, Katherine Boo’s BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS, Adam Gopnik’s WINTER, Loren Eiseley’s ALL THE STRANGE HOURS, and the GRANTA BOOK OF THE IRISH SHORT STORY (edited by Anne Enright and including such gems as the Colum McCann class “Everything in This Country Must”).  I like to mix it up—new and old, memoir and fiction.

What was your favorite summer vacation?

Favorite is a hard word for me.  Love is easier.  I loved my family’s summers at the Jersey shore when I was a kid and my father taught me how to dig for the clams with our toes.  I loved Prague and Seville with my husband and son.  And last summer I fell head over heels for Berlin.  Anybody would.

What’s your favorite book about summer?

Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD isn’t about summer, per se.  But all of its most lush and important parts happen within and under the summer heat.

What was your favorite summer reading book as a kid?

How boring, how obvious, how true to admit that it was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY that enchanted me, again and again, as I sat collecting sun on my face with a piece of tin.

What is your favorite beach read?

I never read on the beach.  I walk and look for dolphins.  I read at night, when my body is still.

What’s the last book you devoured on a long flight?

The last time I was on a long flight I re-read BOOK OF CLOUDS by Chloe Aridjis.  I was glad I did.  I took off from Heathrow.  I landed in Philadelphia.  And in between I’d lived Berlin.

What’s your go-to book to read when you know you only have a few uninterrupted moments of peace?

I read Gerald Stern’s poems.  They fix my migraines.

What’s a great book about discovery or travel to read on a long road trip over several days?

Steinbeck often works.

What would you re-read?

I will be re-reading Alyson Hagy’s BOLETO when it comes out in May from Graywolf.  I read it in galleys, my Christmas Day present to myself.  I was literally jumping off the couch to read phrases to anyone who’d listen.

What are you stealing from your kids’ shelf?

I wish my kid would steal from my shelves!  I have even offered enticements, but he’s refused. In any case, two of my most loved books of all time — THE BOOK THIEF (Markus Zusak) and CARVER (Marilyn Nelson) — were published for younger readers.  Which is to say, they were published for the best parts of all of us.

What book transports you to another time or place?

Anything Michael Ondaatje writes, but let’s stick with his memoir, RUNNING IN THE FAMILY, which takes readers to Ceylon (Sri Lanka).  All right.  I can’t stick with just one.  Let’s add his remarkable COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER, the fictionalized life of Buddy Bolden.  That one takes you straight to the wild songs of New Orleans.

Who is your favorite character/hero/heroine?

Hana from Ondaatje’s THE ENGLISH PATIENT.  I fell in love with her.

What’s a classic summer book?

Don’t all girls read THE SECRET GARDEN (Frances Hodgson Burnett) in summer?

What’s a book that truly taught you something?

Marilynne Robinson’s HOUSEKEEPING taught me that it was okay to be fierce with language.  I’ve read it several times.

What’s a first line from a novel that you’ll always remember?

The first line of Colum McCann’s novel DANCER, about the life of Rudolf Nureyev.  It goes on for two pages. The first bit ends in a colon.  What was flung onstage during his first season in Paris: ......

What’s a book that thrilled you/surprised you/scared the living daylights out of you?

A WOMAN IN BERLIN: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary.  Published anonymously, this heartbreaking and still somehow gorgeous diary recounts the life of one particular German woman in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russians.  It scared me to death.  

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Preparing to teach at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Later today I'll be on a train headed toward my city.  I'll deboard at 30th Street and walk the hot mile or so to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where I'll be meeting with Barbara Bassett, who invited me to teach in this year's VAST: Nature Through Lens of Art/Science program being offered to area teachers.  We'll be reviewing the collections.  I'll be hunting for source inspirations.

It is an honor to be included in this program, described in full here.   I excerpt these lines from the online description:

Each summer the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Education department offers K–12 teachers of all subject areas the chance to immerse themselves in the Museum’s collections and explore the special nature of art and its use as a classroom resource.

The natural world serves as a source of inspiration for artists and scientists, fostering inquiry and enlivening the imagination. This one-week seminar explores nature through the lens of art and science and discovers the intersections between the two disciplines. Lectures by curators and invited scholars and gallery sessions with Museum Educators enable the examination of a range of art from different times and places, including seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes, Japanese scrolls, Hudson River School paintings, and twentieth-century environmental works of art. Special visits to area institutions the Barnes Foundation and the Academy of Natural Sciences further supplement this seminar’s coursework. 

Through lectures, small-group gallery discussions, writing, and hands-on art workshops, participants will engage in approaches and activities that can be used both in the Museum and in the classroom to promote looking, thinking, and writing. Sessions will be led by Museum Educators, guest speakers, and artists. Teachers will be grouped into elementary, middle school, and high school work teams to facilitate meaningful discussion and brainstorming of curricular connections. All VAST participants will receive a resource guide with background information of artworks, discussion questions, and writing connections to bring back to the classroom.

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