2021

Year-End Letter: 2021

                                                            December 24, 2021

Dear Friends,

 

I was rather dreading writing a letter for this year, thinking at first that it had been an empty time with so little travel and socializing, but then I started going back over my one-line-a-day dairy and realized it has actually been a time of quiet pleasures and surprising creativity. 

                 

I kept on working on my Woolf Herbarium and wrote essays on flowers from Pampas Grass to Rhododendrons. In August I began research on roses which I have finally finished except for the conclusion; currently it is nearly fifty pages long. I’ve found 274 mentions of roses in Woolf, so it has been a Herculean task.  I had already published an article on roses in Woolf’s fiction, but this essay adds in all references in her essays, diaries, and letters, so is much more comprehensive.  And of course, I’ve seen elaborate new patterns in her fiction as well

 

The Woolf community has been a reliable source of delight, conviviality and intellectual enrichments throughout the year. I have continued to hold social drop-ins every second Friday to complement the more academic Woolf Salons at the end of the month. The salons have been astonishing-- graduate seminars where all the students are the people who wrote the best books and articles on the subject! In June we held the annual Woolf  conference entirely on-line, and, perhaps because of all the expertise we had developed, it turned out to be not only intellectually stimulating but quite emotionally moving as well.  I did a talk on flowers and coming to consciousness in Woolf’s autobiographical “Sketch of the Past,” that I am really very proud of-- putting all that flower-by-flower research into a more integrated framework. We started holding lots of after-hours open sessions where people just got together to talk. My Australian friend Suzanne appeared one evening and injected her usual passionate energy. Ellen McLaughlin also collaborated with several people to produce a couple of performances that moved many of us to tears.

Aside from Woolf work, a lot has been going on in my house and garden.  In May I backed into my old, rotting, heavy, creaking garage door, providing an excuse for getting a newer, cleaner, lighter aluminum one. Then the explosion of my kitchen faucet due to extreme water pressure caused me to get my entire system flushed out (it had NEVER been serviced!). They also explained my thermostat to me, which has resulted in a house this winter that is a cozy 65 degrees rather than the 55 I had been living with. Buoyed by the success of these measures, I also had a ventless heater/AC unit installed on my top floor, which has made my writing space cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

 

The final icing on my cake of domestic comfort was the arrival of Jeff, the gardener I have always wished for.  I am constantly singing “You make-a my dreams come true” to him as he does just that.  The entire yard has been transformed. In the back in the alleyway behind my fence we’ve made a community garden plot, mostly planted with local wildflowers for the bees, but on the wall itself there are now three climbing Night Owl roses (dark purply with yellow centers) with clematis on either side. Climbing over to meet the clematis is a passion-flower that has exploded and been blooming into November. On the deck there are three large galvanized tin tubs, in which I grew more cherry tomatoes than I could eat, and enough new furniture and shade sails to make it wonderful for summer reading and small parties. 

 

We made a lovely little shade garden under the trees by the driveway-- lots of ferns and foxgloves transplanted from the house next door when they thought they would tear it down (apparently they are having problems with getting permits due to soil quality so no construction yet). There is a columbine and primrose path by the back stairs and the entire front yard has been weeded and paths refreshed and planted with dahlias and lilies and succulents tucked into the patio and well over 100 new bulbs for spring. We even dug the iris bed and made a miniature meditation spiral that magically turned into a snail with an iris crown.

 

In January I started a new art experiment, buying an on-line class in how to make mixed media abstractions.  I took off like a rocket, making dozens of little 4” by 6” compositions, a few of which struck me as possible models for wood cuts. I did manage to finish one woodcut, based on the image at the far right, and am working on the one on the far left.  They are quite a challenge to do as the originals are built up out of various transparent and iridescent mediums which do not translate easily into the more opaque and less fluid domain of woodcut prints.  I have learned and re-learned a tremendous amount about printmaking so far, and if I were not so obsessed by writing and gardening would be doing more.

 

 

 

        

 

I got my Moderna shots in late February and March and got an early full booster in time to feel safe for going to Santa Fe at the very end of October, my first major post-pandemic travel.  I stayed for a little over a week, hanging out with my old friend Angela Elam (she took my first lit crit course in 1978) and her husband Z at their time-share.  There was an astonishing exhibit at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture called “Clearly Indigenous,” which chronicled the development of Native American glass art.  Since the two poles of this movement have been the Southwest and the Pacific Northwest (both incited by Dale Chihuly), I found the whole show fascinating-- one of the best I have ever seen actually.

 

However, in many ways, the best part of the Santa Fe trip was the people.  I now have been going there so long, that I have a bunch of friends to visit with. Had coffee with a friend from Ghost Ranch seminars and a great tour of Paula Roland’s new encaustic studio (I have taken two encaustic monotype workshops with her). Drove up through golden ash trees to the Tesuque market north of Santa Fe for a delightful lunch on Halloween with my cousin Marie.  Because of Angela and Z, I also got to spend a good deal of time with the potters Preston Duwyanie and his wife Debra whom I had the privilege of taking to the O’Keeffe Museum for their first visit.

 

Art Museums have been among the places I’ve felt it was fairly safe to visit.  I’ve gone to SAM (Seattle Art Museum) several times, including for a wonderful Imogen Cunningham show.   

 

 

Drove down to Portland for the day to spend time with Esther Revis-Wagner and chanced on a wonderful exhibit of domestic interiors by Nabis (Bonnard, Vuillard, Vattottan, and Denis). Lots of prints and a wonderful sense of patterns. I’ve also enjoyed a couple of trips across the Sound to the Kitsap Peninsula to visit South Carolina friend Patrick McMillan at Heronswood Gardens.

 

 

Other than visual arts, I’ve listened to a record number of books on Audible.  Went on a Rhys Bowen kick for a while and discovered Niago Marsh; recently I’ve been ploughing through Louis Perry’s Three Pines series.  I thoroughly enjoyed Berndadette Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, but much of my serious reading was non-fiction.  The best book I read all year was The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow, which interrogates the simplicity of our notions of historical progress, using recent archeological and anthropological research incorporating indigenous and female perspectives. That sounds dry and politically correct, but I found the book hilarious and refreshing.  It pairs well with Elizabeth Barber’s Women’s Work: the First 20,000 Years, which explores recent advances in excavating textiles. 

 

I am happy to report that my health has been quite good. I managed to lose forty pounds last year-- ten on my own and the rest the result of a change in diabetes medication (and lots of walking). I also have one of those fancy free-style monitors which allows me to check sugars anytime and makes tracking food choices much easier and more immediate.  I’ve been off blood thinners long enough to contemplate going back on Celebrex, which I look forward to, since aching joints is my main complaint.  I manage to walk nearly everyday-- up in the woods and/ or down on Alki beach,  -- and count my beautiful, walkable neighborhood as one of my greatest blessings.

 

Hope I haven’t exhausted you with this long long missive.  Here’s hoping that modern medicine helps keep the virus under control and we all get to visit each other more.

 

Best wishes for a healthy, happy, productive, sociable New Year,

 

Love,

Elisa and Annie