Memories of a Memoir Class

This blog entry was written by Katherine Catalano of Old Lyme about her experience in the Memoir Class taught by Sue Levine and Lary Bloom last fall.

Read examples of students' work and learn about spring class at http://www.florencegriswoldmuseum.org/MemoirClass.php.

The Florence Griswold Museum was full of surprises this fall. While a fantasy birdhouse exhibit was in place on the grounds, a memoir writing class taught by local professionals Lary Bloom and Suzanne Levine was underway in one of the gracious side rooms in the museum.

I had taken a six week memoir writing class with Lary and Suzanne last spring at R.J.Julia’s in Madison. Like most scribblers, I had been writing for pleasure since the Dear Diary days of adolescence. Now, my friends seemed to enjoy the book and movie reviews I email them when I think they would enjoy something I read or saw. I write poems and short essays about experiences with family and observations of Nature.
I told myself that I didn’t care if anything I wrote was ever published, but that wasn’t true.

I was simply unsure if I had any real talent, and knew I needed professional guidance to know if I should even attempt to submit a piece for publication in a magazine or literary review that I liked.

That first course in Madison with Lary and Suzanne was encouraging. Some of my pieces were just flat, and some were riddled with adjectives and clever sentences stuck in just because I liked them. “Darlings,” is what Lary and Suzanne called the latter, and they gotta go.

Some of my pieces were pretty well received, but I felt I was just warming up in those six weeks, so when I saw that Lary and Suzanne were teaching the memoir class at the Florence Griswold Museum, I called immediately to sign on. This time for eight weeks. The work was more demanding. My confidence grew, and I saw myself beginning to get control of my writing and to understand the discipline of the “craft.” I was better able to stay within the word limits of the assignments on scene setting, character description, dialogue—all the aspects of good prose.

Reading my pieces to the class was the first test. The comments by my fellows were honest, and even the criticism was kind. If there was a look of “huh?” on anyone’s face I knew I’d missed the mark. One piece had them laughing out loud, though. Heady stuff.

We handed in our assignments each week to Lary and Suzanne for their close reading and critique. The following week we got them back with their assessment of the piece in general, and detailed suggestions for revision. Suzanne put little check marks on paragraphs she liked. I looked for those first.

I wrote a practice query letter to a publication I hoped would be interested in my work based on my persuasive introduction. My letter lavishly praised the publication, leaving little room on one page for anything about my submission. I’ll have to work on that.

I’ll have to work on everything, (Lary says he goes back to an article eleven times to keep polishing it), but I move forward now with confidence that I can and will submit my work for publication. Even a rejection would mean that some editor actually read it.

The criticism, pro or con, by teachers and fellow students was invaluable to my development as a writer, and I was sorry to see the class end.

My writing craft moved up a notch or two, and because this was a memoir class, fourteen strangers got to know each other pretty well in a short time.

As I looked around the room the last day, remembering the tragic, dramatic, beloved, and hilarious contributions of my fellows, I realized that there is no such thing as an ordinary life, not even my own.

Name the Princess Contest Results

Introducing Princess Wrenevere

Although not one of the names suggested, this avian version of King Arthur’s Queen Guinevere, was inspired by the many creative entries. Thanks for all the terrific ideas.

Come to the Museum to see the enchanted birdhouses inspired by fairy tales in “Of Feathers & Fairy Tales,” October 1-31, 2011. The winner of the $25 gift certificate for the Museum Shop was drawn from all the entries (including those submitted online).

Here’s the list of names submitted by Museum visitors.

* multiple entries for this name

Submitted Names:

• Aethemannae
• Agustina
• Airspania
• Azuli
• Azur Bella
• Azure
• Barbara Rose
• Bella
• Bella Bleu
• Belle
• Birdella
• Birdie
• Blue Angel
• Blue Jade
• Blue Muse
• Blue Velvet
• Bonnie Blue Bonnet
• Brina
• Bubblegum
• Butafle
• Candy
• Chandra
• Chirperella
• Darling
• Dorothy
• Elegance of the Skye
• Esme Bleu
• Feather
• Feathers
• Featherella
• Fiona *
• Fiona Feather Bottom
• Firenze
• Florabelle
• Flo on the Go
• FloMagical
• Florence *
• Florence G.
• Florence of Arabia
• Florentina
• Gesele
• Glitter
• Gloriana
• Gold Griswold
• Golden
• Graylight
• Impressa
• Indigo
• Indigo Plume
• Iyanna Jasmine
• Jasmine
• Jewel *
• Julia
• Kismet
• Lady Sophie
• Laia
• LaMone
• Layla
• Lily
• Lily Laurel
• Lisianthus
• Lula
• Lulu
• Madame Lilly
• Manora
• Marabelle Queeny
• Matilda
• Merry Feathers
• Mia
• Naomi
• Of the Clouds
• Ovidia
• Pelagia
• Persephone *
• Phoenix Feathers
• Philomena
• Pressy
• Princy
• Priscilla
• Ribbon
• Roy Al
• Ruby
• Scarlet
• Sea Mist
• Sigelinde
• Silver Lake
• Silverwing Rubyheart
• Sonnet
• Sophia
• Sophie Rose
• Sparkle
• Spritzy
• Susan
• Turandot
• Vadalia
• Victoria
• Yodio-Gumball
• Zanzibar

New Arrival on Campus

On the morning of 21 June, 2011, Sheila Wertheimer, our Gardens Supervisor, arrived on campus with a beautiful Ginkgo tree to be planted in front of the Krieble Gallery.  It required the help of Randy Robinson, our Groundskeeper, and two landscapers from Wertheimer and Associates - Jerry LeFever and Brian Renshaw -to get this tree off the truck and properly planted. The ginkgo tree is replacing a Japanese Tree Lilac that had occupied that space previously -  but not altogether successfully.

A few months earlier it was noted by the Museum’s Buildings and Grounds Committee that the Japanese Tree Lilac tree in front of the Gallery was not doing well. It was decided to replace it with a species that would prove long-lived, durable and resistant to drought conditions.  After much discussion, over a period of a month or so, the Committee accepted Sheila’s recommended choice of species.

 

The Ginkgo, (Ginkgoaceae), the oldest tree in captivity, is often called the Maidenhair Tree.  Its native habitat is Eastern China where it was first introduced to the US in 1784.  One of the world’s oldest trees, it has no living relatives. It was native to North America at one time. Dendrologists and gardeners alike often refer to the ginkgo as “undoubtedly one of the most distinct and beautiful of all deciduous trees:” (W.J. Bean, Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles, variable dates).

It’s distinctive fan-like shaped leaves turn a stunning golden yellow in the autumn.

 

 (Excerpt from Wikipedia -  Ginkgo palaeontology)

The Ginkgo is a living fossil, with fossils recognizably related to modern Ginkgo from the Permian, dating back 270 million years. The most plausible ancestral group for the order Ginkgoales is the Pteridospermatophyta, also known as the ”seed ferns”; specifically the order Peltraspermales. The closest living relatives of the clade are the cycads, which share with the extant G. biloba the characteristic of motile sperm. Fossils attributable to the genus Ginkgo first appeared in the Early Jurassic and the genus diversified and spread throughout the Laurasia during the middle Jurassic and early Cretaceous. It declined in diversity as the Cretaceous progressed, and by the Paleocene, the Ginkgo adiantoides was the only Ginkgo species left in the Northern Hemisphere while a markedly different (and poorly documented) form persisted in the Southern Hemisphere. At the end of the Pliocene, Ginkgo fossils disappeared from the fossil record everywhere except in a small area of central China where the modern species survived. It is doubtful whether the Northern Hemisphere fossil species of Ginkgo can be reliably distinguished. Given the slow pace of evolution and morphological similarity between members of the genus, there may have been only one or two species existing in the Northern Hemisphere through the entirety of the Cenozoic:  present-day G. biloba (including G. adiantoides) and G. gardneri from the Paleocene of Scotland. 

Metcalf Blooms Eternal

While our new exhibition In Bloom: Mountain Laurel and the Lyme Art Colony celebrates a flower that has yet to make an appearance in nature this season, Willard Metcalf's painting Dogwood Blossoms, seen in the detail above, captures a different fleeting springtime moment, one that is now gone for another season. The dogwood on the campus of the Florence Griswold Museum (below) was last week's outdoor "exhibition," so to speak.

The Boston Herald noted both the "fresh young blossoms" and the "fresh young girls" in a November 1906 review making mention of the dogwood painting. In this detail we see Metcalf's aspiring Impressionist brushwork as he reduces the delicate blossoms, as well as the face of the woman, to thinly applied smudges of color. Compared to other painted details we've examined in this series, Metcalf's handling is sparing and dry, with the weave of the canvas clearly visible.

Though Metcalf frequently dated his paintings, marking the year they were completed, we can actually construct an even more precise chronology of his work based on the blooming cycle of his subjects. Metcalf made his dogwood painting in the spring of 1906, the season after he painted the FGM's latest Metcalf acquisition Kalmia, a work featuring an explosion of mountain laurel blossoms along the marshy Lieutenant River. (You can read more about Kalmia here.) In 1905, he also painted The Poppy Garden while visiting in Old Lyme. If you stroll through our historic gardens behind the Griswold House this weekend you'll find the poppies haven't bloomed yet, but are not far off. With dogwood, mountain laurel, and poppies to occupy him, late May and early June must have been an incredibly busy time for Metcalf.

A Nineteenth Century Field Trip

The "phantom" woman I pointed out a couple of days ago is far from being the only thing mysterious about the Charter Oak. The legend of the tree and its place in Connecticut history has continued to grow over the centuries. When Frederic Church painted his version of the Charter Oak around 1846, the tree was still standing in Hartford. In his rendering, several figures can be seen visiting the tree, which was a historic landmark even then. This pair, a woman who appears to be writing and a young boy, may be on something like the equivalent of our educational field trips today.

Why take a field trip to see a tree, you wonder? The tree was the legendary hiding place for a very important colonial document, the Connecticut Charter. Granted by Charles II in 1662, this document ensured the inhabitants of Connecticut the right to a popularly elected governor who ruled in the king's stead. The charter also acted as a constitution for the colony, a service which it continued to perform into the nineteenth century. When King James II demanded the return of the Connecticut Charter in 1685 in order to create one giant royal colony in America the citizens of Connecticut took action.

The newly appointed governor arrived in Hartford (along with 60 armed men) to seize power in 1687, but the colonists resisted. In a move likely orchestrated to cause chaos and confusion, the candles of the meeting hall where the handover was to take place suddenly went out. When order was restored and the lights blazed again, the charter was gone and so was Captain Joseph Wadsworth.

Wadsworth spirited the document away and allegedly hid it in the hollow of a tree, now known as the Charter Oak, on the property of Samuel Wyllys in Hartford. There it stayed, secreted away for more than two years until William and Mary restored Connecticut's right to again rule itself under the original charter.

For its role in, literally, defending the constitution of the colony, the tree itself was honored for the rest of its days. When a storm brought the tree down in 1856, mourners gathered at the site, collecting souvenirs of the venerable oak. One of the "souvenirs," so to speak, exists to this day at the Florence Griswold Museum. Not the painting by Church, but an actual tree; a white oak on the grounds is a descendant of the original tree (at left). Acorns gathered from the Charter Oak have been planted, with ensuing generations of trees known as the "scions" of the Charter Oak.

The Phantom of the Charter Oak

The Charter Oak was one very big tree (by some accounts it was 22 feet in circumference!), immortalized by one very big artist (Frederic Church). I promised to tell some of the secrets of our paintings in this series and Church's The Charter Oak is literally a painting about a secret.

I’ll tell you the legend of the Charter Oak in a few days, but right now I want to look closely at one small detail of the painting. Certainly Church intends for us to pay attention to the historic tree, but he learned from his teacher, Thomas Cole (who made a very famous painting of the Connecticut River), that including fine details can make his landscapes all the more grand. Look carefully to find a dog resting in the foreground, a cupola silhouetted in the distance, and bird perched on a branch of the tree on the right.

But it’s the woman under the tree you might find intriguing when stop to notice her. She’s not quite all there, is she? You can see the whitewashed fence in front of her right through her body. As fun as it would be to turn the tale of the Charter Oak into a ghost story, there’s actually a scientific explanation for what you see.

Oil paint is made up of pigment mixed with linseed oil. As the paint ages, the properties of the linseed oil change due to oxygen exposure. Light actually travels through the paint more easily now than it did 150 years ago. The result is that you and I can see “through” the woman standing under the tree. She would have looked completely solid to Church as he was painting it.

A Barnyard by Another Name

The detail above is captured from John Twachtman's painting Barnyard, on view in our current exhibition. In the painting, dozens of impressionistic roosters, chickens, and doves gather around a small child. Barnyard entered The Hartford Steam Boiler Collection in 1992, but lately I've been tracking it's history, or provenance, further back.

In his lifetime, Twachtman exhibited the painting in Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York. A critic from the New York Tribune, writing in 1901, had mixed feelings about Twachtman's paintings. "The bright, almost staccato note of "The Barnyard" is wholly captivating. But if the collection embraces these lucky hits it also contains things that are amorphous and uninteresting." (You can read the full review here by zooming in.)

The critic from the New York Times agreed, writing about the same exhibition: "The point to be made is whether Mr. Twachtman's quality does not sometimes lead him too far." (See the article titled "A Trio of Painters" here.)

The painting has also been exhibited under the title Feeding the Chickens, a helpful fact to know when looking for it in archives and other records. Searching by this alternate title, I learned much more about the Florence Griswold Museum's painting.

After Twachtman's unexpected death in 1902, nearly 100 of his works were auctioned at the American Art Galleries in New York, among them Feeding the Chickens, which sold for $170. According to the New York Times, the sale, which netted $16,610, attracted many vociferous art students. "Long-haired men and short-haired women uttered exclamations of surprise when a picture brought a good price."

Feeding the Chickens was purchased that night by George DuPont Pratt, whose family held the painting for over forty years. Only ten years after buying the Twachtman, Pratt built his home, Killenworth, on Long Island for a reported $500,000. In 1946, the home was sold to the Soviet Union for a song at $120,000 and remains the retreat of the Russian delegation to the United Nations. Lucky for us the financially-strapped Pratts sold their Twachtman at auction in 1942, where it was once again titled Barnyard.