"Lotus Opening" by L. Folk

Thursday, June 3, 2021

Tennis Lessons

Roland Garros with roses

 

For Cynthia Boyd.

I met Cynthia ten years ago when we were both taking tennis lessons on Friday mornings. I had just had my twins and was struggling with balancing my life. She had a boy in elementary school; we were both underemployed. Immediately I sensed that Cynthia had the same passion for the game as I did, and I asked her to play outside the lessons. We haven’t stopped playing since. We’ve played through injuries, job changes, aging bodies, and grief. We’ve played outside in wind and sun, inside when it’s cold; we’ve played in spring, summer, fall, winter, and lately, COVID.


Even though we are on opposite sides of the court, we are somehow a team. When I start losing my serve, she cheers me on. During injuries, she’s fitted me with proper bracing to keep me healthy. We trade secrets, observations we’ve made of the pros, how we can improve. If she wins the first set, I’ll win the second. When my serve is on and I am confident, I can win; without it, her swift, powerful forehand leaves me scrambling. I can’t help but admire how perfect her shots can be. As competitive as I am, on some level, I am rooting for her, too.


“Did that catch the line?” she’ll shout from the other side of the net. If I have any doubt, she gets the point. If not, she accepts it and we move on. Same thing can be said for my shots. We never quibble over points—that just cuts into the playing time and with our busy lives, there’s only so much of it.


We’re in our fifties now and after we play, my knees ache, and I’ve got to ice my forearm and elbow, otherwise the tendonitis will worsen to the point where I won’t be able to hold the racquet. Cynthia takes care of herself better than I do: she’s always fit with the proper braces, has the necessary water bottles, extra can of balls, towels for sweat. I, on the other hand, am often ill-equipped and run off to the court as if I am running for my life.


Two years ago, I had a cancer scare and needed abdominal surgery; it was Cynthia on the other end of the line telling me to calm down and not jump to any conclusions. While I convalesced, she’d text me, “You got to take it easy, go slow. Rest.” I knew she genuinely cared, but I also knew she was checking in to see when I was ready to play.


Last spring, when COVID hit, Cynthia lost her mother. She hadn’t seen her before she died and when we finally met on a warm day in May, she told me she was busy going through her things—her clothes, jewelry, make up. “My beautiful mother,” she’d say, immersed in grief. I knew she was suffering, and I knew to deal with it, she had to play. I tend to bring my life’s anxieties and frustrations onto the court, but Cynthia doesn’t. Those court lines act as a barrier to the woes of her life, and when she is within them, there’s nothing but that ball and me.


In tennis, as in life, you need to be confident. As a writer who is constantly in the throes of rejection, I wrestle with this. But I’m learning from Cynthia. I’ve watched her struggle through a first set: she can’t return my serve, hits the ball out or into the net. I hear her talking to herself, diagnosing what’s wrong, pointing out what’s right, giving herself a pep talk. Her attitude shines through with positivity and she starts her come back, while I flounder mentally, losing confidence. She comes back to win the set having been down 5-0 and all I can do is watch her and learn the right way to play tennis.


Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Review of Feel More Alive! 30 Brilliant Ways to Reinite Your Inner Spark by Giulietta Nardone

Feel More Alive! 30 Brilliant Ways to Reignite Your Inner Spark
by Giulietta Nardone
published by Citrine Publishing
188 pages

I started reading Giulietta Nardone's book Feel More Alive! 30 Brilliant Ways to Reignite Your Inner Spark this past October because I needed something inspirational. Having been unemployed since May due to the pandemic, the uncertainty with respect to my editing, teaching, and writing careers was starting to cripple me. 

To be honest, I am not one for overly enthusiastic self-hope books. For the most part, they seem unrealistic to me, and I find the narratives predictable and self-aggrandizing. But Giulietta's book is different. I liked the fact that it contained her art, and since I was battling the responsibilities in my everyday life to fit in my own painting work, I decided to delve in.

I found Giulietta's anecdotes interesting and relatable; her spirit of conviction shines through this book. I immediately respected and empathized with her; here is a woman out to take control of her life and truly live it. Here is a woman who would not settle for the Groundhog Day life, a woman who traveled Europe alone, learned to sing (and then re-learned to sing once her voice ruptured), created her own community television show, slept in a tent amongst lions in Africa, and starred in her own one-woman stand up show--to rave reviews. 

The book is divided into five sections Awaken, Liberate, Improvise, Visualize, and Express with each section having six mini lessons with personal anecdote on the lesson's topic and fun exercises to complete. Giulietta includes a toolkit for each chapter that lists books, movies, and songs that bring home the theme. She believes as I do that successful change is "a series of smaller, internal tweaks that anyone can implement without turning their lives upside down." In this way, Feel More Alive! works like Julia Cameron's immensely popular The Artist's Way series. While reading, I found myself writing furiously in the margins, communicating with the author; I suggest a notebook or journal to record thoughts to help the process.

Here are some of the chapters that rang true for me:

Brilliant Way #7, Slap Yourself Awake

For some of us, routine extends beyond the comfortable and renders us nearly comatose. Giulietta echoes Thoreau in this chapter and emphasizes how "[t]he mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Reading this chapter brought me back to my first job out of college; I was working as an engineer at a dull job commuting to work by the Long Island Railroad from Long Island to Manhattan. During the commute, I observed the people around me, nodding off or staring blankly out the window. I, too, remember thinking, "Is this all there is?" Giulietta writes of her first job as "days...spent in a trance" and a life led "in a constant state of inertia, fear, and loathing." This disconcerting state of mind often leads to therapy, as it did for both Giulietta and me. For me, it took a complete breakdown to recognize the artist side of me (documented fictionally in A Portal to Vibrancy), for Giulietta, it took in ad in the paper that set her on her way toward a love of singing. 

In order to be happy, we must "slap ourselves awake" and set out to find the things that ignite us. No one else is going to do it for us.

Brilliant Way #15, Astonish Yourself

In this chapter, Giulietta writes, "Most of us rarely live up to our potential because we are too afraid to try the thing we secretly want to do." All of us have things we secretly want to do. This was true for my maternal grandparents. My grandfather secretly wanted to be a policeman instead of a butcher and my grandmother secretly wanted to be an actress instead of a housewife. These dreams died because my grandparents did not believe they could balance the dream with responsibility of raising four kids. Also, the paths never presented themselves. My paternal grandmother, however, lived a full life. She loved music and played piano and accordion for the people in her community. She took art lessons and sewed her own clothes. She needed not set her sights to be a concert pianist; she went small, but big enough to satisfy her creative desires. She consistently was happy, astonishing herself and others in small ways.

I have always wanted to be a painter. The characters in my books are painters. I have books on painters. But I kept telling myself I didn't have the space nor the time to paint. And then I found some tools that helped me see things differently. I found a tabletop easel I could place on my kitchen table. I found a palette of acrylic paints that I felt I could work with, bypassing the complexity of oils. I found a book, Finding Your Visual Voice that inspired me to think about media and subject matter and technique. This all happened over a couple of years. I now have a process and with every new painting I learn and, to some extent, astonish myself.

For Giulietta, it took someone to call out her own fear. A woman who listened to her sing at karaoke said that she wasn't showcasing her talent by her song choices; she should aim higher, sing songs sung by greats like Donna Summer and Whitney Houston. Giulietta has a condition called "spasmodic dysphonia," which at one point took away her singing voice, "the core of [her] identity." With perseverance, she learned how to sing again, but stayed with songs that were safe. After meeting the woman who honed in on her fear, however, she took to singing more songs, harder songs, and it turned out that the fears of missing a note never materialized. Instead of being crippled by fear, Giulietta uses it as a spring board. She writes consistently in the book about how she does this, and I admire her for it.

Brilliant Way #22, Self-Educate

"Research some of the world's most successful people, and you'll find that many of them didn't finish high school or college. They had an idea they couldn't stop thinking about, and they pursued it with enthusiasm until is came to fruition," Giulietta writes in Brilliant Way #22, Self-Educate. I think this chapter is the most important one in the book. We must all be life-long learners to reach our potential; we must be informed citizens, and set out to find our passions, because for many of us, they won't find us. This chapter's personal anecdote is one where Giulietta recounts how she and a friend started a cable show for their community called "What's Really Going On." Neither one of them studied journalism or television production. They attended public meetings, asked questions, researched and retained documents. Ultimately, they portrayed their educated opinion of the goings-on of local government in their show and it became a hit, making them local celebrities.

"Choose to educate yourself about topics that pique your interest. Read books, research findings, interview experts and take informal classes," Giulietta says. So much of our technology supports this, from blogs to movie making software. Start small. There will be a momentum that moves you along.

Friday, November 13, 2020

Studying van Gogh's sunflower series

 

Homage to van Gogh, II


As a way of commemorating the ending of the growing season, I decided to paint sunflowers. I thought I would set them up in a still life with bottles and fruit and have a go at it. I picked a color for my under painting and drew my sketch. I thought about my palette of yellows, oranges, greens, burgundy for the wine and the layout of the composition. I thought it would behoove me to take a look at van Gogh's sunflower paintings, because I have always loved his colors and over-all style. My own style, palette, and subject choice seem to be approaching his. I looked deeply into his paintings and experienced an intimacy with van Gogh that I had not had with a visual artist before.

Van Gogh's sunflower series consists of a total of twelve paintings. I've included some of them here. He painted five in Paris in 1887 and seven in Arles from 1888-1889, according to lectures I've listed to and websites. His Arles paintings were painted for Paul Gauguin when he came to visit van Gogh in the yellow house he rented in Arles. Van Gogh wanted to welcome Gauguin with the paintings; he revered the master and was excited about having Gauguin stay with him. Also, he thought it was the start of an art colony, the beginning of a camaraderie between like-minded creative people to combat the loneliness endemic to the craft. 

I wonder what Gauguin thought walking into his new bedroom and seeing the paintings of sunflowers. Did he scrutinize them? Delight in them? The two artists traded paintings (van Gogh gave Gauguin two sunflower paintings and Gauguin gave van Gogh a river scene from his time in Martinique) and set to work. During his stay, Gauguin painted van Gogh painting his sunflowers. 



But the friendship went awry when van Gogh had his breakdown, which infamously led to his severed ear. Gauguin, instead of helping van Gogh, packed up his things and split, because Gauguin, as it is known in the art world, was somewhat of an egotistical asshole who did not extend himself for others' sakes.

Sunflowers, to me, are the epitome of summer. They mimic the sun, follow it across the sky during the day. When the sun rises in the East, they face East. When the sun sets in the West, they face West. Some grow to over twelve feet tall; others are dwarf size and grow to two feet. In Brighton, where I lived in my twenties, sunflowers grew in my neighbor's yard and in the fall, they hung their overly seeded heads portraying oppression. I thought I might paint them then, portray that feeling, because I was feeling it too from the depression I was experiencing at the time.

Van Gogh's paintings are famous masterpieces for several reasons, as I will explain below, but first and foremost, they bring out the essence of the subject. Van Gogh expresses the sunflower-ness in yellows, rusts, oranges. He literally draws with the brush, outlining petals and stems with intent. He used impressionism to depict the different hues of green in the leaves by painting pixel-like strokes with a small brush. The more I studied the paintings, the more I understood this in a very visceral sense. The two-tone vase was probably not two-tone at all in real life. This was an invention of van Gogh's to use color for emphasis: he didn't want the vase to disappear in a similarly colored background. 



For my first attempt at painting sunflowers, I went to Tendercrop Farm store in Wenham and bought several bunches of sunflowers. In September, the fields around the store have a myriad of varieties of sunflowers in full bloom and it is a personal delight of mine to go there and be among them. So I set up my sunflowers in a vase and photograph them. I put them in a still life with a bowl of peaches and glass bottles. Homage to Vincent, I is my first attempt, and what I realized from completing this painting is that sunflowers have too much energy to be in a still life with other items. This is why van Gogh painted them alone. In my painting, the bottles and fruit have a calming feel and cannot possibly balance the vibrancy of the flowers. You can call it contrast, or you can call it a painting that doesn't exactly work. Also, I painted my flowers when they were very nearly fresh from the ground. Van Gogh painted his when they were drying up, some of them had lost their petals entirely and were just the heads with leaves curling into interesting shapes. In this way, van Gogh captured the flower's essence before it was too late, emphasizing its ephemeral nature. 




Van Gogh used oils and I used acrylics and I realized first hand the limitations of the paints. It took a lot of trial and error in mixing to get hues I was satisfied with, but in the end, I still wasn't entirely satisfied. The newly available yellow oil paints were also something that made Van Gogh's masterpieces possible. Van Gogh, according to an artist website, was one of the first artists to use them. In the painting I have pictured here, there are only shades of yellow and orange with some green.




So what makes this painting a masterpiece? I have come up with four reasons.

1. Subject matter. Sunflowers are interesting; they mimic the life force of the sun in shape and color. They are dramatic. In this painting, van Gogh emphasizes their ephemeral nature by painting them in various stages of decay.

2. Filling the canvas, composition. Van Gogh presents various shapes-the circles/ovals of the heads and triangles of the leaves, as well as and strokes- from outlining to dabbing in a sponge-like pattern to what I call pixel-ing. He fills the entire canvas, which is the number one rule for painting.

3. Choosing a palette of harmonious colors. Van Gogh uses a palette of various yellows in this painting from a rust yellow to a lemon yellow. There is no one jarring color that sends the viewer out of the painting.

4. Detail. Van Gogh doesn't gloss over the irregularities of the leaves and the petals. He cares for each one and makes it its own shape. His power of observation is steadfast and acute. Detail is arduous to do, but makes a difference. I have learned to see a galaxy of stars, nebulas, and dark matter in the heads of van Gogh's sunflowers and used this technique in creating my own. 

5. Find the essence of the thing and express it in style. By the time van Gogh was painting sunflowers, his style was intact and he knew what he was doing. This is why his paintings are recognizable (reasons 2, 3, 4). 


For Homage, II, I realized the sunflowers I bought were not going to inspire reasons 3 and 4 in me, and despite numerous lovely photos, scrapped them entirely. I went online and found a picture of a vase of sunflowers that seemed more interesting via their long petals and paler yellow hue. I painted them, only to realize that the petals from flower to flower were too similar, so I violated reason number 4. This was somewhat frustrating, but deepened my appreciation for van Gogh's work. I will keep trying, though.

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Grasping Ferrante’s Female Psyche

sketch by Laurette Folk




It’s almost cliché, as an Italian American, to say you have relatives in the Mafia. Seemingly, we are all linked to that criminal patriarchal order. My grandfather, with his long overcoat, brimmed hat, and pencil-thin mustache looked like he belonged in The Godfather. It’s rumored that he moved his family from Queens to Long Island—nothing but farmland back in the fifties—to escape what some believed was his obligation. His own father pressured him to become mafioso, but my grandfather was fit with a prominent moral code and opted instead to make an honest living as a butcher, sparing his family the repercussions of a life in crime.
The Godfather movies were often discussed at the table on Sunday, and the machismo was celebrated by the men in my family. I have only seen glimpses of the movies myself because they made me anxious. I knew too well the passions of love and rage from my parents' tenuous marriage and extended family dynamics. We weren't a people who suppressed our passions and this often felt treacherous to me.

Mario Puzo and Frances Ford Coppola deserve their accolades for portraying the passions and humanity of a larger-than-life crime family, but I was alienated by these fictions primarily about men. I longed for a different kind of voice, a different kind of story from my Italian heritage. When I started writing, I wrote alone in my room, accompanied only by the authors I read. I read many books, none of them by Italian or Italian American writers. I read English writers, Russian writers, Irish, Indian, Chinese, South American, African writers. It wasn’t until my forties, after two of my own books were published, that I found Elena Ferrante. I found the voice I was looking for, and it was incredibly close to my own.

Three of my eight grandparents emigrated from Naples, Ferrante’s birthplace and the setting for most of her books. The Neapolitans in my family were working class—a practical people who favored business as a means of livelihood and were wary of education and making a living in the arts. Patriarchy was the predominant code by which they lived, from the church they worshipped in to how their families were structured. You followed the patriarch's orders because he knew what was right for you, never mind what ideas you had for yourself. My mother, who is about Ferrante’s age, expressed an interest in going to college in Boston after high school, but was ushered to a nearby secretarial school instead. She met my father and went from her father’s house to her husband’s house, as was typical of women in her generation. In the same way, my father, a bit more evolved than my grandfather, convinced me of a career in engineering, despite my interest in art, because it was more practical.

The similarity of the tropes in My Brilliant Friend and my first novel, A Portal to Vibrancy (Big Table Publishing, 2016), are uncanny. I wrote about this in the essay “Stumbling toward Selfhood: Tracking the Path of the Italian (American) Feminist in a Patriarchal World.” Both have impressionable, creative female protagonists who each emulate a model friend. Both include irreverent intellectual lovers, patriarchal specters, the pressure of the tribe, model artists, and the poverella, the lonely, crazy woman who is first and foremost, an insidious threat—someone the protagonist could become if she isn’t careful.

I went on to read all of Ferrante’s books, including Frantumaglia, A Writer’s Journey, which consists of Ferrante’s letters and the interviews she conducted via email. (The Italian writer known as “Elena Ferrante” is an “absent writer,” writes under a pseudonym, and never appears in public, as has been well-documented). Reading Ferrante’s books pushed me beyond these tropes, coaxing me to delve deeper into the female psyche. 

If the Puzo/Coppola trilogy examines the lives of men and asks the question Who’s got the power?, Ferrante’s books examine the female psyche and the challenge to find the power within. This begs the question, how does a female protagonist find her power in a patriarchal world? What are the common elements of the thinking protagonist in Ferrante’s novels? I can name three of them: surveillance, harnessing the frantumaglia, and understanding the threat of the poverella.

Surveillance. Ferrante’s protagonists are startlingly aware. They are not only astute observers of the external world and can size people up quickly and acutely, they are equipped with a keen perception of their own thoughts and bodies. This is a novel concept according to Ferrante. She explains in Frantumaglia how the “women of the preceding generations were closely watched over by parents, by brothers, by husbands, by the community, but they did not watch over themselves, or, if they did, they did so in imitation of their watchers, like jailers of themselves” (103).

My own mother nicknamed her father “the watcher.” He was very strict with his daughters, more so than with his sons, mostly because he trusted no one, especially young men. There is this image in my mind when hearing my mother reminisce, of my grandfather looming in the picture window, looking down on her as she was leaving for a date. Later, he tracked her like a spy to make sure everyone behaved themselves. 

Ferrante explains how her characters’ surveillance “displays watchfulness, vigilance, invoking not a gaze but, rather an eagerness for feeling alive. Men have transformed surveillance into a sentinel’s activity, a jailer’s, a spy’s. Surveillance is, if well understood, more an emotional tendency of the whole body, an expansion and an inflorescence on and around it.” This inherent monitoring of the body is particular to women because of pregnancy. The female psyche is wired to monitor a “swelling wave all over, and every sense is affectionately active” (104).

A perfect example of this is Delia’s relationship with her mother Amalia in Ferrante’s first novel, Troubling Love. The relationship is complicated; reverence and enmity are forever entwined in the language of bodies:

She had pulled her dress up to her waist, revealing baggy waist-high pink underpants. Giggling, she had said something confused about her soft flesh, her sagging belly, repeating, “Touch here,” and tried to take one of my hands to place it on her flabby white stomach.

I had pulled back and rested my hand on my heart to calm its rapid beating. She let fall the hem of her dress …A single step beyond the open doors and she had disappeared into darkness. Alone in the car, I had felt a peaceful pleasure. (24)


Ferrante, in dealing with this hyper-aware self, often comes smack up against the id and its primordial desires that have noteworthy powers of their own. This is not unlike the primal urges in The Godfather. However, unlike The Godfather, whose primal urges center around the violence of patriarchal competition, the power of Delia, the protagonist in Ferrante’s first novel Troubling Love, is derived from the selfish and visceral desires of a child to own her mother:

On the other hand I hadn’t wanted or been able to root anyone in me. Soon I would lose even the possibility of having children. No human being would ever detach itself form me with the anguish with which I had detached myself from her, only because I had never been able to attach myself to her definitively. There would not be anyone more or less between me and another aspect of myself. I would remain me until the end, unhappy, discontent with what I had furtively taken from the body of Amalia. (65)


Because Ferrante’s protagonists are operating in oppressive societies, self-empowerment by whatever means—hypervigilance, primal urges—is necessary for not only survival, but “feeling alive.”

Harnessing the frantumaglia. When I was in my twenties, after I had abandoned a career in engineering, I was stricken with anxiety and panic attacks to the point where I was not eating or sleeping. I sought medical help from a nearby clinic and a doctor diagnosed me with existential angst. I remember wanting an exclusive remedy, a specific medical diagnosis, and instead, I got a pat on the shoulder and a short lesson in philosophy. But the doctor wasn’t wrong. I was anything but grounded, drifting from temp job to temp job, from quasi-relationship to quasi-relationship. I was neither fully adult nor a child; I was abandoned to the land of limbo, distraught that I could not make the career that I chose work for me, no matter how many times I changed jobs. I was especially aware of brokenness, how, despite my hard work and accolades, it all fell apart. 

Ferrante got the term frantumaglia from her mother. She defines it in the book Frantumaglia as a “jumble of fragments… debris in a muddy water of the brain. The frantugmaglia [is] mysterious, it provoke[s] mysterious actions, it [is] the source of all suffering not traceable to a single obvious cause” (99).  This reads to me a lot like existential angst. You reach a certain age when you have collected enough rejection, grief, disappointment, and unfairness from the world that it attains a critical mass and starts to weigh upon you. 

Ferrante’s characters are plagued with doubt, self-criticism, and the internalized scolding voices of the tribe. Her writing may be labeled as confessional, complete with shock value, but it is anything but gratuitous. What the readers sees on the page is a sort of grappling, a processing of ideas in the frantumaglia via surveillance that ultimately leads to what Ferrante calls a “new equilibrium.” She’s careful not to use a term like “enlightenment”; her characters must still fight the old ghosts and tropes of the patriarchy; they haven’t really moved on. But the key word here is fight. The expectation these characters have to break the old misogynist traditions “never arrive,” but instead of yielding, as their foremothers had, “they fight, and they cope. They don’t win, but they simply come to an agreement with their own expectations and find new equilibriums” (203).


For the artist, the equilibrium place is a place for reflection. At this point, the frantumaglia becomes useful: its fruits can be novels and great works of art. The desire must be there, however, to express, to explore the frantumaglia and give it names and terms. It is in defining the vagueness, naming the ghosts of the frantumaglia that women can derive their power. I think here of the artist Frida Kahlo; her surrealist paintings are a visual voice for her physical and mental anguish. Ferrante, herself, is an example of this, especially with her first three novels (the Neopolitan Quartet, she exclaims, is an exception because it came out nearly whole). The existential angst that I experienced in my twenties was fodder for A Portal to Vibrancy. Through the writing of that book I realized that I was suppressing my creative power for the sake of earning money at a practical job, and it was turning into a “creativity perverse,” something that could torture me. 


Understanding the threat of the poverella. My aunt Lauretta was funny and fun-loving and one of my favorite people. She had a side to her, however, that was always in emotional turmoil due to her failed relationships with men. My aunt closed in on herself because of this, like a flower at night, and as I got older and had my own failed relationships, I understood why. In an Italian, and by extension, Italian American family, you were supposed to marry to save yourself from the difficulties of life, and my aunt did just that, but her marriage failed. It was an unspeakable thing, talked about behind her back. She was in danger of becoming a poverella. 

A poverella is an abandoned woman, according to Ferrante. In The Days of Abandonment, a poverella is defined as a woman who “doesn’t know how to keep a man,” a poor woman who is “no longer loved” and “left with nothing” (16). In the novel My Brilliant Friend, the poverella is the crazy woman Melina, who sweeps the steps, eats soap, and is rumored to have killed the child she had with her poet lover. In The Days of Abandonment, Olga, the protagonist, “dream[s] the story of the poverella’s waterlogged, lifeless body, a silver anchovy to be persevered in salt” (52) and witnesses the poverella’s ghost after her own husband leaves her. In A Portal to Vibrancy, Grandma Gracie is the hypochondriac agoraphobic afraid to go out into the world, an immediate threat to Jackie, the protagonist, whose worst fear is that her own anxiety and depression will worsen such that she too will be confined and miss out on the rest of her life. In these novels, the poverella is a prominent threat because she is estranged from her own power. She is the very antithesis these women protagonists seek to be.

But eradicating the poverella is not the answer, according to Ferrante:

Suffering derives, instead, from the fact that crowding around them, simultaneously, in a sort of achrony, is the past of their ancestors and the future of what they seek to be, the shades, the ghosts: up to the point, for example, where Delia [of Troubling Love], after taking off her clothes of the present can put on her mother’s old dress as the definitive garment; and Olga can recognize in the mirror, in her own face as a constituent part of her, the figure of the poverella-mother who has killed herself. (108-109)


What Ferrante is saying here is that to leave behind the poverella is pointless; she must be assimilated. This is a very feminine idea. We can’t demolish the hurting parts of ourselves; that’s impossible. They will rise and fade with the seasons of one’s life; we name them as essential parts of the frantumaglia, bear witness to them, create around them. 

My aunt Lauretta ended up marrying again and had a son, my cousin, with her new husband. She had a good job in a lawyer’s office and wanted to study to become a paralegal. When the boy was six, she died of cancer. It was a heart-wrenching thing to witness—to see her crawl away from the fate of the poverella, only to die young anyway. I remember her saying to the family at Sunday dinner, touching her bald head, how she was chosen for this particular fate, while we all stared into our plates. It wasn’t for nothing. I suppose it was her way of owning her pain, giving it meaning, and that made an impression upon me. 

Later, when I was writing my creative thesis for an MFA program, Lauretta appeared on paper as Etta, the character to my second novel, The End of Aphrodite (Bordighera, 2020). The Etta character immediately had a sense of power. She had the voice my aunt died with, one of certainty, conviction. Yes, there was still the dependency on men, but mostly, relationships were on her terms. It was interesting to write a character in this way—irreverent, beautiful, smart, and somewhat outrageous—so unlike any of the women in my family and more like Lila of the Neapolitan Quartet. I felt as if I had transcended something.

I no longer write alone. I have found a community of Italian American writers and we meet monthly at IAM Books in Boston or via Zoom. We women still gather and share our awe for Ferrante and what she’s accomplished. By putting the ideas, fears, struggles of a young woman yearning to be educated amongst people who did not value education nor women, telling that story, a vastly different story than what Puzo and Coppola put forth in The Godfather, Ferrante has educated the rest of the world of what it was like for the ultimate underdog. It was a major accomplishment, to have had such a voice—the voice of an Italian woman—heard and heralded by so many. 

Works Cited

Ferrante, Elena. Frantumaglia, A Writer’s Journey. Europa Editions, 2016, pp. 99, 103-104, 203.

Ferrante. Troubling Love. Europa Editions, 2006, pp. 24, 65.

Ferrante, Elena. The Days of Abandonment. Europa Editions, pp. 16, 52.




Sunday, October 4, 2020

The Evolution of a Painting

 


The Great Marsh, reworked


During this time of unemployment and uncertainty, I want to paint. My writing projects have all ended or are at stopping points, so I decided to switch mediums. I have gone back to paintings that I thought were finished, taking them out of their frames and reworking them, addressing the issues that have nagged at me. The Great Marsh is one of these. I framed it in early spring of this year and hung it above the fireplace. I stared at it for months, feeling there were things that could be further worked out. When I took it out of the frame, I looked deeply into the painting. There were shapes that weren't quite right, colors that needed silencing or fortification. I worked for hours to address these issues. 

Soliloquy in Dogtown by Marsden Hartley

What I have realized is that there are deconstruction phases and reconstruction phases to the process of making art. In painting, this is immediately evident, because painting is visual. This immediate perception brings on immediate responses like, oh no, what have I done? The fear of something irreparable arises. When I was younger and more inexperienced, I would chop up the painting and make it into a collage. But I've reached a point where I don't need to do that. I push through the deconstruction phase, look deeply into the painting, into the images I want to express to find answers. I wait. I test my patience. I take what I have learned from revising writing and use it for painting. There is always this devil on your shoulder wanting things from the work, accolades, the beauty of a finished product. You need to drown that bastard, listen to the angel that says, everything has its own time. I had a friend tell me that she wants nothing to do with old writings, old manuscripts; they came from a time when she was less skilled and need to be filed away under that heading. If I had done that, the two novels that have been published thus far would have remained in their primordial states, unknown. Everything can be reworked; it's up to you whether you want to do it or not.

From the original painting, I cut the river to a precise edge, softened the blue and used gold in the mud flats and grasses to add an ethereal element. I was happy with this. My intention for the first painting was to make the river a wild, energized thing, like Van Gogh's night sky in Starry Night. But for months, I felt as if the river were falling out of the painting. The evolved painting is more Marsden Hartley, with stylistic shaping, bold coloring, and a reflective essence. What I have come to realize in writing this, is that these masterworks were in the back of my mind, guiding my hand.

Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Gallery of Smaller Works, collage


The Stuff of Dreams, paper collage






Ghost, mixed media collage






Hot Summer in the City, paper collage






Bowl of flowers, mixed media collage






Memorabilia, mixed media collage






Of Myth and Dreams, paper collage






Ritual, paper collage






Decadence, paper collage






Tattered Doll, paper collage






Truly, Truly, mixed media collage

Sunday, April 5, 2020

Thoughts on Devastating Knowledge and the Lack of Inspiration

Heat stream hiss from the radiator. There is this pretentious pressure surrounding me. I don’t write from a deep place. I write from the air just above my skin, not my bones. The air is thin and odious. It smells of nervous sweat.

The other day I was driving home and the kids and I got talking about the body, its cells, and a memory came to me, of drawing muscle cells for biology class. Thin, orange, tube-like structures, each with a single eye. I thought about the texture of meat, and how it all made sense. I thought of mitochondria, the powerhouse, and Mrs. White who had perfectly sculpted blond hair and a nearly round nose. She had a soft-spoken manner and was generally likable, the kind of teacher the kids didn’t want to irritate because it would be too awkward. I wanted her to like me, but I went virtually unnoticed in her class. The classroom windows looked out upon the playing fields where we ran free at the base of Bowling Green Mountain.

As a child, I used to like holding up a small mirror against a larger mirror and watching the image repeat itself to a vanishing point. Mirror upon mirror, image upon image, if you moved one, they all shifted in unison, like the sweeping of a dragon’s tail.

Josie’s walking around downstairs. Now she’s slurping water. I hear her struggling to breathe. We no longer can do our long walks in the woods, because she can’t handle the hills, and her breathing becomes too labored. This labored breathing mirrors the labored breathing of the people with the virus; thousands of them extend outward to a vanishing point. Around the world, machines breathe for these people, because their lungs are turning to glass. A big red glob of a lung cell reaches a tiny, hopeful hand out, and the virus plunges a thorn into its palm. The hopeful hand has no choice but to take it in where the virus feasts on proteins and multiplies.

Breathing. To take a breath is to “inspire.” Every moment we become new with new oxygen, the same way ideas reach us and stimulate us, making our minds new.

But things are different now. When I listen to some of these experts speak, I get a lump in my throat, like I used to when anxiety once overwhelmed me. I now know the difference between the lump and struggling for breath, though. I hear Josie and I know the difference.

She won’t heal on her own, my girl. She’ll just get worse and worse until her throat closes. So I have a decision to make: have her go through the ordeal of an operation at the age of twelve or let nature take its course. The disease is called laryngeal paralysis, and it’s common in Labradors. I walk around, go about my day, knowing this, like I knew about my father’s cancer and Ralphie’s tumor, a ticking time bomb lodged in his heart. I go through my daily duties wondering if I will in the future be hooked up to a machine, or, if there will be one available, should I need it. There is all this devastating knowledge I carry around with me.

I walk in the woods alone now, and try to be marveled by the sky, by the frogs resurrecting themselves from the mud, singing. The Cooper’s Hawk perches in the Japanese maple, its soft, maple-colored breast an irregularity in the landscape, something the eye can detect. She swoops across the yard with silver wings, rapid fire. The doves around the birdseed have disappeared. They don’t hang out by the safflower like they used to, stuffing themselves under the soothing green limbs of the hemlocks, too fat to fly. The saddest thing is finding a dead dove with its breast torn open, its soft down, scattered. Eyes shut. There’s something angelic and innocent about the shut eyes. I place a shovel under it and its head lolls this way and that. I bury it with soft earth, and guard the mound, watch if creatures come to claim it, dig it up, like they did the swift I buried last fall.

The last walk in the woods with Josie was on a cold, March morning. We were coming down the sidewalk, and she was moving with the kind of grace known only to momentum. I looked up and saw it there, its striking edges prominent on the fence. It was a perfect cross, a shadow in the sunlight coming off the fence. There was no “is that a cross, or oh, there is a cross” it was more like: Cross. And I didn’t take it to mean “here is a cross, and I am protected by God.” Its edges were too sharp for that. I took it to mean: suffering. An acknowledgement, more or less, of my suffering and the suffering that is to come.