Irène Mathieu will read from her latest poetry book, Grand Marronage, at New Dominion Bookshop on Friday. Publicity Photo.
Local poet and pediatrician Irène Mathieu has been a storyteller for as long as she can remember. Before she learned to write, she would observe her mother and narrate everything she did. “She found it super annoying,” Mathieu says with a laugh.
Mathieu, who lived in Charlottesville for parts of her childhood, returned last July to begin work at the University of Virginia Health System. Already a published poet with two books, this spring she published her third collection, Grand Marronage, with Switchback Books. The title comes from the name given to communities formed by newly free, formerly enslaved peoples in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean—a name she came across while reading about the history of Louisiana. The term “metaphorically and perfectly captured,” Mathieu says, the question of “how you can be fully free when you’re still living in a society that is built on inequity, racism, capitalism, and the patriarchy.”
In the poem “maron (circa 1735),” Mathieu employs magical realism to turn a girl who is fleeing enslavement into a fig tree to escape the men with guns and dogs that pursue her, as Daphne evaded Apollo in Greek mythology. “I was really interested in that idea of transformation,” Mathieu says, “and how can we as families or society or community transform into a more liberated form of ourselves? That includes not only our personal liberation but also the liberation of others.”
The book is composed of four sections and three voices: that of her grandmother, herself, and Harlem Renaissance writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Deeply grounded in the body, many of the poems explore how family history can manifest physically at the cellular level—not only in the case of trauma, but in strength, joy, love, and liberation, too.
While writing poems in her grandmother’s voice, Mathieu was hyper aware of the fact that she couldn’t write them without filtering her grandmother’s experience through her 21st-century lens. Those poems “are the marriage of my grandmother’s stories and my interpretation of them. I’m taking a huge poetic license,” she says. Writing poetry, rather than memoir, allowed her to get to the root of “the emotional truths of the stories my grandmother was telling me, or not telling me,” she says.
In imagining the life of Harlem renaissance writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson—who, like Mathieu’s family, also moved from New Orleans to the mid-Atlantic—Mathieu positions her in conversation with her family, their shared experience of race, gender, and capitalism paralleling each other. And through her own voice, Mathieu provides a contemporary perspective on the experience of a Black Creole American woman while exploring her ambivalence about those identifying terms, particularly the term American.
“In the United States, we look at things literally and figuratively in a very black and white way,” she says, “but reality and history are much more complicated than that.”
After our in-person interview, she reflects more on the experience of passing and colorism that she explores in Grand Marronage and writes in an email, “I am interested in how race is a slippery concept, yet so materially consequential.” She describes her grandmother as “a very light-skinned Creole woman” often mistaken for being “foreign” or European, while Mathieu herself is usually perceived as black. “I have siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles who are routinely assumed to be a wide variety of races, ethnicities, and nationalities. This reality is not special, though; in fact it’s a pretty common result of (North & South) American colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade,” she writes.
“In Grand Marronage I focused on colorism and passing because so much of our experiences are defined by how others perceive us, and yet that perception is entirely subjective and a function of time, place, and culture.”
Another perception she challenges in the book is one generated by the myth of meritocracy, something she’s encountered in her own experience in higher education. She says people assume “you’re black and you made it, so everyone should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” But, she says, “This is a capitalist country that is based on racialized capitalism. We have to have a nuance to understand the forces that create the circumstances of our lives and the lives of those we perceive as other.”
In this present moment in our culture, Mathieu sees writing and reading “as a way to get more clarity for a step toward action” that will contribute to a more equitable future. Through her writing, she asks her readers the same question she asks herself every day in her work, both as a poet, and as a pediatrician: “How can we take what we know about the past and present and then commit ourselves to greater action?”
What that action looks like is giving time, money, resources, “or some other material part of your life to the struggle for greater equity.” But, she adds, it’s also about learning the practice of taking up less space and time “if you belong to a group that has historically taken up most of the space and time.”
Through her own voice, Mathieu provides a contemporary perspective on the experience of a Black Creole American woman while exploring her ambivalence about those identifying terms, particularly the term American.
Sydney Blair’s posthumously published collection, Honorable Men: And Other Stories, will launch with a public celebration of her life and work on April 12 at New Dominion Bookshop. SUPPLIED PHOTO
After writer and UVA professor Sydney Blair died unexpectedly in December 2016 due to complications from pancreatitis, her children, Tom and Abbie Swanson, found a manuscript-in- progress titled Honorable Men: And Other Stories. When they revealed their discovery to their mother’s longtime friend, Sheila McMillen, she agreed to serve as editor to finish the work.
It proved to be a challenge, McMillen says, to piece together the collection, which explores the “complicated relationships between men and women.” More than half of the stories in the table of contents Blair drafted had been previously published in literary magazines. And while some of those magazines continue to thrive, such as Callaloo and The Texas Review, others no longer exist, which made it difficult to track down all of the stories. As a result, McMillen had to make some editorial decisions, selecting other stories to round out the book. Some she re-typed from print copies when they couldn’t locate digital files.
After McMillen sent Tom and Abbie the assembled collection, Abbie says, “I laid them out and Mom’s voice came through crystal clear.” McMillen agrees. “If you know Sydney, you will hear her voice, the way she would look at things and phrase things,” she says.
In one particular story, “Route 80: Wyoming,” Blair draws on the experience of driving with her daughter from New York to Oakland. As a reporter and producer now based in Los Angeles, Abbie says, “I was always moving around looking for the next good job.” Her mother, who joined her three or four times on her cross-country drives, “was very encouraging of all of our crazy plans for the things we wanted to do with our lives,” Abbie says.In the story, that support is tested by fear when a man poses a potential threat to her daughter’s safety.
As she ordered the stories, McMillen says intuition guided her sense of how they would build to the final story, the titular “Honorable Men.” That piece examines, from the perspective of two veterans, what the past can and cannot give us.
“Her understanding of men, and writing from their perspectives, is a hallmark of her work,” Tom says.
“Some of the men are not so honorable, so there’s a kind of ironic quality,” in the title, McMillen says. The characters in these stories, “are often quite intelligent, but they don’t really know their own mind. They are easily led by their emotions, the men especially.”
For Abbie, her mother’s deftness at crafting characters of either sex stems from the person she was. “She was so patient and thoughtful, and made everyone feel like she was concerned with them and focused on them. That’s why her stories are so good. She took the time, making sure she got the people right on the page.”
In the last year of her life, McMillen recalls, Blair was busy and happy. She traveled to California and England, and bought a house on the Rappahannock River, where she intended to spend summers with her grandchildren. She had plans to climb Mount Whitney, retracing the steps of her great-grandfather, Hubert Dyer, who made the climb in 1890 and would become a charter member of the Sierra Club. She had begun writing a novella about Dyer and was at work on Honorable Men.
“I think, had Sydney lived, she would have sent the book out for publication,” McMillen says. So when she and Blair’s children had trouble finding an interested publisher for a posthumous collection, they decided to publish it themselves. Once local artist Rosamond Casey—a mutual friend of Blair and McMillen—finished designing the cover, they were ready to go to print.
Currently available at New Dominion Bookshop, the book will eventually be available at the UVA Bookstores and online. Copies will also be housed at the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library, UVA Library and in UVA’s Special Collections. The inaugural recipient of the Sydney Hall Blair Fellowship for Creative Writing, a fund established by her family after her death, will receive a copy of Honorable Men, along with Blair’s novel Buffalo, this fall.
“In today’s world when everything is so fast-paced and we’re so focused on our devices,” Abbie says, “it’s nice to have good literature in front of you and stories that make you want to stop and reread it. That’s a rare find these days.”
For Tom, the publication of Honorable Men is “an opportunity for other people to have a little bit of insight into who she was. And it’s another opportunity to remember and celebrate her.”
“If Tom, Abbie, and I hadn’t done it, these stories would’ve disappeared,” McMillen says. “We didn’t want that to happen. For all of us, it’s a way to keep her voice alive in the world.”
“There’s an incredible well of creativity that it takes to endure your humanity when it feels like you’re not in the right skin.”
Vanessa German in Avery Court, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, 2016. Photo: Allen Phillips / Wadsworth Atheneum.
Vanessa German grew up in Los Angeles in a creative household, wearing clothes her artist mother made, writing stories, and crafting creations from the scrap materials her mom laid out on the dining room table for her and her siblings.
“We were makers as a way of life,” says German, the 2018 recipient of the $200,000 Don Tyson Prize, which recognizes “significant achievements in the field of American art.”
“My earliest memories of joy and knowing and understanding a sense of euphoria in being alive was through making things—the joy of gluing lace to cardboard and realizing I could make a separate reality in a story different than what existed in living reality. That is the way we came to know ourselves.”
She speaks on the phone from an artist residency in Mexico, where she is preparing a new body of work for a solo show, opening in Los Angeles in March. This new work is her special baby, she says, because it will be installed in the city “where I came to love the feeling of making art, the process of being in materials—being in a relationship with them and activating that relationship with intention.”
The as-yet-untitled new work is a series of sculptures and wall works constructed inside the frames of tennis rackets. “There is a point of classical mechanics,” German says, “that talks about the moment of inertia, the torque that it takes to bring something back to center.” The tennis rackets represent her experience of growing up black in L.A. “when hip-hop became hip-hop and AIDS became AIDS,” she says. Like her previous work, it reckons with mortality. But it also explores what it meant “to be alive in a culture of celebrity,” she says, in which Leonardo DiCaprio and other child stars were among her classmates and she learned to play tennis in Compton where Venus and Serena Williams practiced.
It’s about “what it was to be black in that environment and creative and sort of wild…how you make yourself as a black person…and what that is to find your center, the force of motion.”
After her exhibition opens inLos Angeles, German will come to Charlottesville for a week-long residency at The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA, where her sculpture and sound installation, “sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies,” opens this week.
She created this work, which premiered in 2017 at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh—where she has lived since 2001 —in response to the “ongoing deaths” and unsolved murders of black women and girls in Pittsburgh.
“I think of it as an act of restorative justice, a healing ceremony by sight,” she says.
Some of the sculptures in the installation are heads without bodies, solemn faces, and closed eyes, adorned with headpieces made of found objects, from tree branches to ceramic figurines. Other sculptures are vivaciously dressed bodies without heads, their expressive fingers pointing, flipping the bird, or forming fists.
She found some of the materials that compose the sculptures in her neighborhood of Homewood—in the alleyway near her house, on the street, in dumpsters—and some items people left on her porch. Once, a person left an entire box of shoes—large, glittery, funny, and beautiful shoes, she says, that were likely used in a drag performance.
She is particularly moved by the lives of black transgender women, and notes the prevalence of violence against them. “There’s an incredible well of creativity that it takes to endure your humanity when it feels like you’re not in the right skin,” German says.
Vanessa German, American, b. 1976. “sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies.”, 2017. Mixed-media installation. Image courtesy of the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. Photographed by Tom Little.
“sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies” can be read in two ways. The first is the experience of someone whose loved one has been murdered in the street and she cannot go to her because the body is cordoned off by police tape. The second is the interiority of trauma itself and the dissociation a person may experience from her own body in order to survive the experience.
“As a descendant of enslaved Africans,” German says, “the soul of my culture, the soul of my people, is you attend to a body in a very special way in the space they have died. The ways bodies are tended to in a Western capitalist, patriarchal culture contributes to the trauma.”
She recalls how the body of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, lay uncovered in the street. “This continued the horror, for his body to be treated like he wasn’t a person, like he wasn’t a boy just an hour before,” she says.
Yet there is something of triumph and celebration in her installation. With its vibrant colors and the sound of dance music and uplifting voices mixed among whispers, it is, German says, “a force that can galvanize the sense of terror and tragedy and simultaneously connect that tragedy with the beauty and miracle it was that our people lived and were whole, miraculous, stunning human beings.”
“sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies” will be on view at The Fralin February 22-July 7. Vanessa German will be in residence at the museum March 25-29, and will give a public talk on March 28.
Activist Zyahna Bryant will launch her book Reclaim at The Hive on February 17. Image: Eze Amos
Zyahna Bryant became an activist about three years before she wrote the petition to remove the Robert E. Lee statue and rename Lee Park in 2016. It was the day after George Zimmerman’s acquittal for second-degree murder charges in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, when Bryant, then age 12, organized her first protest. In the intervening years she has written poems, journal entries, and essays about how activism has shaped her. This month, the Charlottesville High School senior releases a collection of writings titled Reclaim.
In three parts (Space, Identity, and Here), Bryant considers how she occupies space as a black woman, how embodying different identities can shift perception of that space, and how her sense of space and identity intersect in her hometown of Charlottesville. This last section examines the erasure of the history of activism led by black women in our city. It is to these women, and her family, that she dedicates the book.
When Bryant writes of erasure, she speaks from personal experience. Following the petition for the removal of the statue and renaming of the park, her words were quoted without attribution as news spread and “my single act was being amplified without any sign of myself,” she writes.
She learned this experience was all too common for black women in Charlottesville and elsewhere. “The reality is that black women have been doing the work of organizing and activism for decades,” she says, citing her great-grandmother, Thelma T. Hagen, who fought for integration and educational justice, and whose sons, Marvin and William Townsend, were two of the Charlottesville 12—the first 12 African American children to integrate previously white schools in 1959.
“Black women are present and have been building infrastructure for activism,” Bryant says. “But the national conversation about Charlottesville has been about white supremacy and racial reconciliation while black women have been erased.”
She writes about the idea that the white supremacists who organized and participated in the Unite the Right Rally on August 12, 2017, were all outsiders and the effect this perception had on black women. The main organizer, Jason Kessler, was from Charlottesville, she points out, and black women had been resisting the likes of him long before August 12.
Through her work, Bryant aims to re-center the narrative. “It’s important when people put their lives on the line and fight for justice, that their voices are not erased and their work is not discredited,” she says.
In addition to honoring the legacy of activism among black women in Charlottesville, Bryant was motivated to write in order to process her experience. “Writing has been kind of like self-care for me after being in the public spotlight,” she says. Consequently, some of the journal entries and poems address her anxiety and activism burnout.
Reclaim is available at The Hive in Charlottesville and online at Amazon.com.
In the short poem titled “grounding” Bryant writes, “In those moments / Where the world is whirling. / Care for your roots. / Plant yourself deeply in what you know.” Another poem, titled “Monday Mantra,” reminds, “Slow down / Smell the coffee / Have the tea / Recite the Affirmation. / Black Lives Matter. / (Repeat),” weaving a single thread of emotional well-being and activism, her self-care as a black woman reinforcing the very concept behind the racial justice movement.
Ever looking for ways to lift up the community, the activist-author will give a percentage of her book sales from the launch this week to the Charlottesville-area Black Mamas Bailout, which raises funds around Mother’s Day to support and ultimately free black mothers from local jails.
Bryant chose this cause because, she says, “when we think about mass incarceration we often think about men.” Yet according to the NAACP, African American women are imprisoned at twice the rate of white women. Bryant also cites the brutalization of transgender women by police, and the fact that Sage Smith, a transgender black woman from Charlottesville, has been missing since 2012. “People are doing the work to liberate black women, and it’s important to amplify that work,” she says.
Nearing the end of her final year of high school, Bryant says she hasn’t decided where she’ll go to college (at this writing, she’s been accepted at UVA, Howard, George Mason, and VCU). Wherever she matriculates, she plans to study urban planning or law. After that, she sees herself back in Charlottesville, continuing the work she has already begun “on systems that I see are flawed,” she says.
And she encourages others to do the same, closing her book with one last word: reflect. “I hope people take the time to think about some of the concepts and points that are made,” Bryant says. “In the end I think there’s room for everyone to join the fight for justice.”
“To me the most compelling stories will always be those investigating the complexity of emotional experience, what it feels like to be alive," says Leslie Jamison, who will read from The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath at New Dominion Bookshop on January 18.
Leslie Jamison writes in the beginning of The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, “I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart. I needed to believe they could.” The author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection The Empathy Exams struggled with alcohol dependence throughout her undergraduate and graduate education.
Accepted into the competitive Iowa Writers’ Workshop at 21, she drank among older writers and the legends of famous writers who drank before them. After losing memories of whole nights to blackouts, she tried to stop drinking on her own and eventually sought the structure and support of Alcoholics Anonymous.
The artistic result of Jamison’s entry into recovery is more than an account of addiction and sobriety—The Recovering is an exploration of narrative itself. Interweaving her personal experience with the lives of those she meets in AA as well as deceased writers and artists who battled their own addictions, Jamison gives shape to the “ongoingness” of recovery.
While questioning the draw of the addiction story, she examines her internal narration as well. “The questions at the heart of the book,” she says, “are about storytelling. What kinds of stories we tell ourselves and what their limits are.”
Whether our culture is preoccupied in a given moment with glorifying or demonizing the artist-addict, it is generally more captivated by “that darker energy of falling apart” than the journey to wellness. But in writing her story and encountering other addicts in person and on the page, Jamison found that stories about recovery can be some of the most interesting, precisely because of the effect sobriety has on perception.
“So much of recovery is about coming into sharper, more acute, more specific emotional awareness, and getting sensitized to the things that make a story interesting in the first place,” Jamison says. “To me, the most compelling stories will always be those investigating the complexity of emotional experience, what it feels like to be alive.”
When Jamison began attending AA meetings, she was humbled to learn her experience wasn’t exceptional. Having striven most of her life to distinguish herself from others, this knowledge came as relief. She was tired of the version of herself that pursued “uniqueness at the expense of a certain kind of self-possession and self-sufficiency,” she says. And she realized that uniqueness and commonality are not mutually exclusive. ”I think everyone is unique and the same at the same time,” she says with a laugh. “Most of our emotional experience is shared, and there’s value in investigating that sharedness.”
The structure of The Recovering illustrates this by supporting a plurality of stories within it. Jamison examines the art and addictions of Raymond Carver, John Berryman, Charles R. Jackson, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, George Cain, David Foster Wallace, and Amy Winehouse. Much of the book is about how these writers and artists do and don’t function creatively through addiction and sobriety. The concept evolved from the roots of her doctoral thesis, and at one point Jamison writes about having to defend the interestingness of her subject—writers writing without the influence of alcohol or drugs—to an advisor more interested in the relationship between addiction and creativity. After the encounter, she reflects on our cultural mythology: “The lie wasn’t that addiction could yield truth; it was that addiction had a monopoly on it.”
For Jamison, sobriety has fueled her writing in many ways. On the physical level, the effects of alcohol no longer impede her daily life and work. On a deeper level, she says, “sobriety is a form of waking up” that impels her to be present for difficulty and nuance, which then shows up in her writing. Her experience has also influenced the kind of work she pursues.
“The attention recovery asks you to pay to the lives of other people was part of what started to inspire my desire to bring other people’s lives into my work” through interviewing and reportage, she says. In addition to exploring the lives of addicts, her research examines the origins of AA, U.S. drug policies, and the racism embedded in policies that determine who is a victim and who is a villain.
Yet writing The Recovering also required that she address her own life in a way she hadn’t before. “The essay provides a lot of room for lateral motion and you can land where you want to land and leave again,” she says. “Drinking was lurking around the edges of The Empathy Exams even though I didn’t label it that way. People in recovery could see recovery in it even though I never talked about it.”
While the memoir form imposed “more pressure to tell a cohesive narrative,” Jamison says, “in a way there was something liberating and exciting about reckoning directly with the subject that had been a guiding force and guiding pressure all along.”
As she writes toward the end of The Recovering, “yearning is our most powerful narrative engine.” Jamison’s desire to tell a story of recovery, and to tell it well, results in a compelling and beautifully crafted book.
Leslie Jamison will read from The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath at New Dominion Bookshop on January 18.
In 2018, over 50 authors living and working in the Charlottesville area published new books. They built fictional worlds populated by talking animals, anti-terrorist teenage space fighters, and ordinary humans trying to find the truth. They documented last year’s violent white supremacist rally in our city and dug into our history of racism. They redefined Appalachia, encouraged us to question our dependence on social media, and inspired us to draw and color our inner and outer worlds. They crafted lyrical lines articulating this human moment of advanced technology and precarious climate. And they reminded us what it’s like to hope, to love, and to dream. Here you’ll find just some of the local talent constructing worlds with words.
Fiction
Rita Mae Brown
Probable Claws: A Mrs. Murphy Mystery
In the town of Crozet, Harry and her animal companions search for clues to her friend’s daylight murder, and unearth centuries of greed and corruption.
Homeward Hound: A Novel
Humans, horses, foxes, and hounds must solve the mystery when the president of an energy company with plans to build a pipeline through central Virginia goes missing during a festive gathering.
M.K. England
The Disasters
When terrorists attack a space station academy in 2194, it’s up to five teens to save the space colonies.
Talley English
Horse: A Novel
A teenage girl befriends a horse in the aftermath of her parents’ separation.
John Grisham
The Reckoning
A Mississippi community must reconcile a horrible crime with the man no one would ever suspect.
John Hart
The Hush: A Novel
Titled for the fictional parcel of North Carolina land under dispute, The Hush delves into the historical trauma of colonization and the enslavement of Africans.
Jan Karon
Bathed in Prayer: Father Tim’s Prayers, Sermons, and Reflections from the Mitford Series (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Drawing from the 14 novels of the Mitford series, Karon distills the advice and encouragement of the fictional Father Tim.
Randall Klein
Little Disasters
A love triangle in New York City comes to a head when the city’s transportation system fails.
Doug Lawson
Bigfoots in Paradise
Dark comedic short stories set in Santa Cruz, California, explore human drama amid the threat of earthquake and fire.
Inman Majors
Penelope Lemon: Game On!
Majors’ fifth novel chronicles the online-dating misadventures of a single mom living with her mother.
Adam Nemett
We Can Save Us All
Princeton students prepare for the apocalypse and spark a revolution.
Anne Marie Pace
Vampirina in the Snow
Vampirina Ballerina and her family venture outside for snow day fun.
Ethan Murphy
Blackmoore: Gifted
Divine Influence: The Fall
Screenboy: The Departure
Slate & Ashe #6
Comic book writer Murphy premiered three new series this year featuring a female mad scientist, fallen angels, and an interdimensional cop, along with the sixth issue of his golem-cop partner series.
Thomas Pierce
The Afterlives: A Novel
A man with a heart condition that left him temporarily dead at 30 explores the possibility of an afterlife.
Non-fiction
Elizabeth Catte
What You Are Getting Wrong about
Appalachia
While she’s a bit further to the west, we’re including Catte here for her important challenge to Appalachian stereotypes, as an Appalachian resident herself.
Jane Friedman
The Business of Being a Writer
Advice for navigating the publishing industry.
Lee Graves
Virginia Beer: A Guide from Colonial Days to Craft’s Golden Age
A guide to award-winning breweries and the history of craft brewing in Virginia.
Laura Lee Gulledge
Sketchbook Dares: 24 Ways to Draw Out Your Inner Artist
Prompts to inspire anyone, regardless of skill, to draw.
Jeffrey L. Hantman
Monacan Millennium: A Collaborative Archaeology and History of a Virginia Indian People
A history of Virginia’s Monacan Nation from 1000 A.D. to the present.
Claudrena N. Harold and
Louis P. Nelson, editors
Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity
UVA faculty examine the relevance of our community’s history to our present following the white supremacist rally of 2017.
Uzo Njoku
The Bluestocking Society: a coloring book
This coloring book by local artist Njoku features renowned women of color with brief biographies, as well as portraits of anonymous women of color.
Charles Shields
The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life
A biography of cult-favorite novelist John Williams.
Hawes Spencer
Summer of Hate: Charlottesville, USA
Investigative journalist Spencer gives an accounting of the white supremacist rallies.
Earl Swift
Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island
An in-depth look at the Chesapeake Bay community whose island is disappearing amid rising tides.
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy
UVA professor and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship chronicles how Facebook unwittingly became an instrument of propaganda, misinformation, and misdirection
Poetry
Paul Guest
Because Everything Is Terrible
Guest explores the end of the world and the end of words, destruction and its counterpoint, love and other things worth living for in “this emergency we call life.”
Erika Howsare
How is Travel a Folded Form?
A conversation between the poet and Isabella Bird, an Englishwoman explorer from the Victorian era, on their imagined travels together in the American West.
Molly Minturn
Not in Heaven
A chapbook of quick-paced thought with beautifully startling juxtapositions: “Please turn me deciduous. Scarlet / the parlor. My terrible arms wing up in the dark.” (A Child’s Garden of Verses)
Lisa Russ Spaar
Orexia: Poems
A collection on aging and desire, both of the body and the spirit.
Soraya Chemaly will read from Rage Becomes Her at New Dominion Bookshop on December 5. Publicity photo
Ask Soraya Chemaly why she wrote Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, and she will say with a laugh, “First, I was mad.” Chemaly works by day as director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project in Washington, D.C., an initiative developed to “raise awareness about the way women’s freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and civic and political participation is affected by violent threats.” After the 2016 election, Chemaly says, “Anger seemed to be a good filter through which to examine the state of women’s lives.”
The book, which interweaves research and analysis with Chemaly’s personal experience, opens with a vivid scene from her childhood: her mother pitching her wedding china, one piece at a time, onto the terrace. Women have a lot to be angry about in our patriarchal society: sexism and objectification, unequal pay, the burden of caregiving and emotional labor, sexual harassment, assault, domestic violence, and the double bind of a culture that trains us to suppress our emotions to keep the peace, and then accuses us of deceit or hysteria when those feelings come out. Chemaly writes, “A society that does not respect women’s anger is one that does not respect women—not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.”
“The real question I wanted to ask,” she says, “is, if anger is a moral emotion indicative of harm, injustice, or indignity, why is it culturally only associated with men and masculinity in positive ways, but we deny it of women as a function of their femininity? We need to take a step back and see how dangerous the gendered allocation of emotions is for boys and girls.”
The most surprising thing she learned in her research about the socialization of boys and girls is how wrong our understanding of the relationship between hormones and aggression is. Many people believe that hormones dictate our behavior and attribute differences between the sexes to intrinsic traits. “But that’s a very confused estimation of what’s happening,” she says.
“Boys are allowed freer rein of their environment and taught to control their environment, which sometimes includes women and girls. But girls are taught to control themselves,” Chemaly says. “A lot of the way we socialize children causes more testosterone in boys. Studies show if you act in physically aggressive ways and exert power over other people, your testosterone levels go up.”
In contrast, “If you are treated in demeaning ways, your testosterone levels go down. When men nurture, their testosterone levels also drop. So the idea that hormones are produced in men and women in extreme ways because of our chromosomes is wrong.” The impact of our social conditioning, she argues, should not be discounted.
In addition to exploring the reasons for women’s anger, RageBecomes Her examines how suppressing anger impacts our health. “Anger is implicated in a lot of illnesses that are sometimes dismissed as women’s illnesses,” Chemaly says, “as if we have no choice but to develop them,” such as autoimmune disorders, depression, and anxiety. Mismanaged anger also plays a role in heart disease and hypertension. In addition, she says, “We know the impact of discrimination on women’s health, so for black women that is really compounded. There can be terrible outcomes for those who live at the nexus of those oppressions.”
What, then, can women do with their anger? Chemaly says, “The most important thing is to acknowledge anger is a valid emotion for women. Acknowledge it, label it, give it a name, and then make meaning of it. ‘What is my anger telling me, what is wrong, and what can I do about it?’”
“Very often women attribute anger to sadness or stress, but in both we’re supposed to take care of those feelings by ourselves, do some self-care. If instead you said, ‘I’m angry,’ you’re going to hold other people accountable and that’s really important. Developing that as a form of life competence gives you better efficacy and intimacy in your life.”
She writes in her conclusion, “The anger we have as women is an act of radical imagination.” Asked to explain further, she says, “Anger helps you imagine a different course of action or a different future. In order to be angry you have to be able to envision alternatives. To me, sadness is more about resignation. You can’t be angry if you don’t have some hope.”
Because women are often charged with keeping the peace, their anger can be seen as a threat to balance. But Chemaly believes, “Anger will allow you to see how much the people around you care, or not. If you can’t say what makes you angry, you can’t have a meaningful relationship. If you can’t say, ‘I need you to be as responsible as I am for the health of this family,’ you can’t have intimacy.”
“Often women spend time dancing around men’s emotions,” she adds. “We are socialized to learn that first we are responsible for our own emotions and then for everyone else’s. It’s a pink tax and I think we need to stop paying it.”
Donna Lucey, who never expected to settle in the South, moved to Charlottesville with her husband in 1992. She says she was pleasantly surprised by the community of writers and artists she found here.
Photo: Jackson Smith
Local author Donna Lucey has made it her life’s work to research and write about “badass women.” Her stories often focus on spirited women born into conventional families, who defied expectations and social norms. But even in 2018, such stories can be a hard sell. Publishers tend to want to publish biographies about famous people, Lucey says, which leaves out women who may have done remarkable things but were ignored in their own times. “It’s really frustrating because there are endless men who are famous, but women have been lost to history,” she says.
With her latest book, Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas, Lucey says the fame of American portrait painter John Singer Sargent provided the hook she needed to sell the story of four fascinating women, three of whom he painted, one of whom he mentored. This month the book, which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, will be awarded the Mary Lynn Kotz Award for Art in Literature.
Given annually by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Library of Virginia since 2013, the award, which comes with a $2,500 cash prize, recognizes an outstanding creative or scholarly book that is written primarily in response to a work (or works) of art.
Lucey’s book beat out well-known biographer Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci, a number one New York Times bestseller, as well as Laurie Lico Albanese’s novel Stolen Beauty, about painter Gustav Klimt, and Christina Baker Kline’s novel A Piece of the World, about the woman in Andrew Wyeth’s painting “Christina’s World.”
The Gilded Age
Sargent’s Women takes an intimate look at the lives of four women in a singular age.
“I’ve always loved the 19th century and the Gilded Age,” says Lucey, whose five books touch on the epoch in some form or other. “I love that era because of the sheer exuberance and the over-the-top, eccentric characters. In some ways it was grotesque.” She gives the example of one of the male characters in Sargent’s Women, who thrusts his arm into a fire after beating a man in a jealous rage. “You can’t make this stuff up,” Lucey says. “If I were to write this as fiction people would say, ‘This is a little bit over-the-top.’ And, in fact, every inch of it is true.”
But it was Elizabeth Chanler, an orphaned Astor heiress, who first drew Lucey to the project. Lucey’s previous book, Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age, focused on Chanler’s brother, committed to an insane asylum for losing the family money. In a family that suffered the loss of both parents when the children were young, Chanler was the one, Lucey says, “who had to take care of everyone, and the one everyone adored in a family that was really unmoored.”
Her other subjects are Elsie Palmer, who grew up among intellectuals and artists and, after years as a spinster and the family caregiver, ran away to get married; Lucia Fairchild, who gave up her family’s money to paint miniatures and live in an artists’ colony; and Isabella Stewart Gardner, the New York City transplant who never fit into her husband’s puritanical Boston society but would end up contributing her significant art collection to the city.
Lucey winnowed down her selections from the over 900 portraits Sargent painted. In a way, one woman led her to another: “All of these women knew each other,” says Lucey. “It was a very rarefied world. When I was up at the Astor house in the Hudson Valley talking to the owner of the house, right next to me was a miniature by Lucia.”
The final four subjects “seemed very personal in a way that many of Sargent’s portraits don’t,” she says. That’s in part because Sargent knew these women and their families well. “He had this uncanny way of seeing into their souls,” she says, “capturing their personalities and characters…through his choice of clothing and his choice of composition.”
Take, for instance, Sargent’s portrait of Palmer, her wide eyes and blank stare set off by her blunt bangs. “It freaked out everybody in London when they first saw it,” Lucey says. “They thought she was insane. …It has this weird aura to it, and in a way her life played out in that way, ending with her marrying this crazy spiritualist.” Likewise, Sargent’s portrait of Gardner captures her plain features but bold style, attired as she is in a long black dress with a dramatic neckline. Lucey laughs, recalling that while on her book tour at Chanler’s summer home in Newport, Rhode Island, just as she began talking about Gardner, out of nowhere a black balloon floated into the crowd. “It was like she was making her grand entrance. …It was almost uncanny. Typical of Isabella that she would want to be there.”
As for Lucia Fairchild, you won’t find a Sargent portrait of her as her story is really about how, watching Sargent paint her sister Sally, Fairchild was inspired to learn to paint. “I love doing that kind of bait and switch,” Lucey says. “Sally was the golden child, the one that Sargent painted over and over again… She was the one who was going to be a star, but she ended up doing nothing with her life.” Her sister, on the other hand, befriended Sargent and became an artist in her own right. While doing research for the book, Lucey found an uncatalogued scrapbook at the Boston Athenaeum, and in it, she says, is “this incredible Kodak portrait of Sargent lying in the foreground, and in the middle ground was Lucia, the ugly duckling sister, taking notes.”
While Lucey say she has a special spot in her heart for Fairchild because her story is “just so poignant, and she was so courageous,” there was an added benefit to including her in the narrative: “She was one of the few people who actually recorded [Sargent’s] personal thoughts, his impressions and opinions about art and music and literature…She was one of the people who kind of caught his personality.” As in the moment when Fairchild fell in love with Henry Brown Fuller, her future husband, and Sargent warned her that “terrific love” could lead to “terrific hate.” (He turned out to be right.)
For Lucey, Sargent would prove more difficult to delineate than the women he painted. “He burned all of his papers. He was gay and had to hide that,” Lucey says. “He lived right across the street from Oscar Wilde,”—the Irish playwright who was convicted of “gross indecency” in 1895—“and so he knew what happened to people who expressed their sexuality openly.” But though Sargent destroyed his personal papers, he left behind “incredibly erotic male portraits,” Lucey says, some of which were found only recently in a storage unit housing Gardner’s furniture.
Lucey in Montana in 1979. In a farmhouse basement, she uncovered a trove of diaries and photo negatives from the forgotten photographer Evelyn Cameron, who became her next subject. Photo courtesy of Lucey.
The writing life
It is this sort of psychological detective work that attracts Lucey to biographical research. Growing up in suburban Connecticut, she dreamed of moving to New York City and becoming a writer. After graduating from Georgetown University, she got a job at Time Life as a photo editor. While working on a series of books about women in the 19th century, she pitched a volume on women in the American West and ended up in Montana. There, in the basement of a wheat farmer, she stumbled upon several thousand photo negatives and 35 years’ worth of diaries, all belonging to a woman named Evelyn Cameron. The discovery led Lucey to write Photographing Montana, 1894-1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron.
“That was the Gilded Age on its head,” Lucey says of her story of the pioneer artist who taught herself glass plate photography. “She was a very wealthy woman from England who, instead of embracing the Gilded Age life, renounced it and reinvented herself out West.”
It was research, too, that brought Lucey to Charlottesville in 1992, only then it was the research of a different writer: her husband, Henry Wiencek. At the time he was working on his book The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, about a plantation-owning family, the people they enslaved, and the descendants of both. The research was only supposed to take a year, but eight years passed by and they set down roots. Lucey, who never expected to settle in the South, says she was pleasantly surprised by the community of writers and artists she found here.
In her second book, I Dwell in Possibility: Women Build a Nation, 1600-1920, Lucey expanded her scope in order to explore the ways in which American women helped shape the country even before winning the right to vote. But she got such a kick out of writing the chapter on the Gilded Age, she says, that it led her to write Archie and Amélie. Throughout her writing career she has followed her research wherever it takes her, and “one thing has led to the next.”
Recalling her days at Time Life, she says, “I always had this visual sense. So I feel [Sargent’s Women], in a way, is a culmination of making use of imagery and diaries and letters, and plumbing, trying to figure out the psychology of these people.”
‘How women get buried’
In the case of Sargent’s Women, she says,“None of these women had been written about before except for Isabella Stewart Gardner, so there wouldn’t have been any interest except [for] Sargent. He was the key.”
“[All these] women did such amazing things,” she adds, “and yet nobody knows about it.”
She cites the true story regarding the fate of Sargent’s portrait of Elizabeth Chanler. After her death, Chanler’s son took the portrait with the intention to sell it to the highest bidder. His family advised him to donate it instead for the tax break. But when he approached the National Portrait Gallery, the museum didn’t want it, Lucey says. Chanler was not considered important enough. (The portrait now hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where it is a major feature of its Gilded Age collection.)
Likewise, says Lucey, the Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts—Harvard’s rare books and manuscripts library—rejected the donation of Chanler’s papers while accepting those of her husband, John Jay Chapman. Again, Chanler was not seen as sufficiently important.
It’s a vicious cycle in which women and their contributions are not recognized as important, therefore they aren’t written about and don’t develop any prominence or lasting impact on the historical record. “This is how women get buried,” Lucey says. In some of her research, as was the case with Elsie Palmer, Lucey says she was the first person to read all of her subject’s papers. Yet she was drawn to these women because, “They lived in a very conventional world and they all managed to shock in some way… These were the great museum builders, the people who helped create American culture.” It’s the discovery of them that has helped shape the trajectory of her writing career, she says. “The fun of my life is to uncover hidden stories of women who have been forgotten.”
Even when women are remembered and written about, Lucey says, they aren’t always given their due. In the case of Gardner, she says, too often it is the art student she sponsored, Bernhard Berenson, who is given credit for her art collection. He did conduct art purchases for her, Lucey says, but everything was her decision. “She was the one who bought a Vermeer, before he was even famous, on her own.” And besides, she says, pointing out a double standard, J.P. Morgan and Henry Frick had art buyers, too, but are still given credit for being great collectors. “[Because Gardner] was so unconventional, and such a character, she’s portrayed in a kind of cartoonish way and never given the credit as the serious art student that she was.”
“The fun of my life is to uncover hidden stories of women who have been forgotten,” says Lucey, who has written four books.
Recognition
Sargent’s Women has brought Lucey the most attention of all her books to date. In addition to the Kotz award, it is a nonfiction finalist for a Library of Virginia Literary Award, which will be announced October 20. Lucey says she was especially thrilled to win the Kotz award. “It’s so wonderful that they honor people who write about art,” she says. “This is a unique kind of award.”
Indeed, Amy Bridge, the executive director of the Library of Virginia, says, “There is no prize like this in the country.”
The award is named for Virginian Mary Lynn Kotz, a contributing editor at ARTNews and author of an award-winning biography of artist Robert Rauschenberg. It honors Kotz’s ability to write about art and artists in an accessible way, says Lee Bagby Ceperich, director of library, archives, and special collections at the VMFA.
Lucey will be recognized at a special event at the VMFA on October 19, and give a brief talk about her work. It’s a particularly apt setting, Lucey says: “They have a fantastic collection of Sargents in their new McGlothlin Galleries.”
The near decade’s worth of research Lucey did in archives, libraries, and private homes to complete Sargent’s Women “is not for the faint of heart,” she warns. But in the same way that Sargent was captivated by these extraordinary women and compelled to record their expressions in paint, so Lucey was compelled to record their lives in ink. Through this undertaking, she helps to ensure that their stories won’t be buried any longer.
Editor’s note: The author and subject are colleagues at Virginia Humanities.
Inman Majors will sign copies of his new novel, Penelope Lemon: Game On!, at Common House on Wednesday, September 19, at 6pm.
It might not sound like a comedy: A twice-divorced single mom living with her mother tries to save money from her food service job to move into her own apartment. But Penelope Lemon: Game On!, is just that.
“It’s hard to describe why something is funny,” says Inman Majors, an English professor at James Madison University. “Penelope’s backstory is tough. But that’s where comedy starts. You catch a person at one of their lowest points.”
For Penelope, it is all of the above plus her venture into online dating and the discovery that a private photograph from her first marriage has resurfaced into the very public sphere of the internet.
“When I’m writing comedy, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Majors says. “The best comedy happens accidentally.” While he might plot out a little where necessary, “so much of comedy is spontaneity and improvisation that builds on character,” he says. “There should be comedic tension throughout, even in the serious moments. The reader has to realize that they’re going to come out the other end and it’s going to be funny again.”
Part of the inspiration for the book was his aunt, Betty Winton, to whom the book is dedicated. She was the first person Majors knew who attempted online dating, and she had many funny stories about the experience. Betty, who died last year from the same brain cancer as John McCain, possessed “a great appreciation for the absurd,” Majors says.
Initially, he thought it would be a serious book. Observing Betty in the world of online dating, he says, was “the first time I realized how tough it is to be single and 40 or above, specifically for women.” While coaching his son’s baseball team in Waynesboro years ago, before his family’s move to Charlottesville, Majors would observe single moms in their 20s and 30s who worked hard jobs, had three kids, and managed to get them all to their extracurriculars without the help of a partner.
“It wasn’t like they felt put upon by life. This was life,” he says.
During an extended illness, he observed the same hard work, smarts, and capability in his female nurses. After regaining his health, he decided to write something funny, and had plenty of material to draw on for the strong woman character he had in mind.
Majors grew up watching Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore, Gilda Radner, Carol Burnett, and, later, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. He recalls his mother and her friends sitting around the kitchen table laughing and talking in his childhood home in Knoxville, Tennessee. “I was always the kid who’d come in and take my sweet time getting something out of the refrigerator,” he says, just to hear them talking in a way they wouldn’t normally talk in front of a child, and to hear them laugh.
In the book, the spark of a new friendship is, in many ways, the catalyst for the upward trajectory that makes it a comedy when Penelope befriends another single mom during their sons’ baseball game. “In all of my comedies,” Majors says, “the main characters are like the straight-man (or straight-person), and then they have this wilder alter ego, like the Kramer of Seinfeld.” While the protagonist may be “a little bit wilder than most, or subversive or absurdist,” the foil for her is “sort of the unencumbered id expressed,” he says.
That unencumbered id, named Missy, convinces Penelope to pursue a much younger man on a Christian dating app given to her by her mother. As it turns out, he is not as angelic as he appears. “I’m not trying to make any point about hypocrisy,” says Majors, the son-in-law of a preacher. “I’m very much a ‘live and let live’ type of person.” Through his spontaneous method, he simply followed the comedy, writing to make himself laugh, he says.
The setting for the book, a fictional town called Hillsboro, has grown into “this whole universe in my head,” he says, “like a PG-13 or R-rated Mayberry,” inspired by the small Southern towns in which he’s lived.
His life has informed his art in other ways, too, like the bartending and serving experience he gained from ages 18 to 32, which he applies to Penelope’s restaurant job. And the shorty robe worn by Penelope’s second husband, inspired by a friend Majors had in graduate school.
But in the act of writing, Majors’ life becomes the art for a time. Putting on his professorial hat, he says, “when it comes to narration and point of view, you want to become the character as opposed to observing the character from afar. When it’s going well, I’m not Inman Majors, I’m Penelope Lemon.”
Eze Amos’ photography exhibit “Cville People Everyday” will be on display in the Welcome Gallery through August 31. Courtesy of the artist.
By now you might know his name. You’ve seen it before in these very pages. Maybe you’ve started to put a face to the name. You see him on the Downtown Mall, holding a camera, watching.
He is freelance photographer Eze Amos, whose first photography exhibition, “Cville People Everyday,” opens this month at New City Arts Welcome Gallery. Originally from Nigeria, Amos fell in love with photography at age 18 when he stumbled on Photography Annual at his workplace library. Back then he worked part-time as a lab technician at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. When he first picked up the photography magazine, he says, “I was blown away by all the black and white photos.”
He started to see his world differently. Without a camera and unable to afford one, he told his friend about his interest. His friend’s father dug an old Pentax Asahi camera out of his garage and gave it to Amos. It was so old, Amos says, if you needed to use a flash you had to hold it in one hand while holding the camera in the other. Then, as if the universe was conspiring to guide him to his future career path, a new neighbor moved in who happened to be a photographer and shared with Amos what he knew. Using the only film he could find, Kodak ISO 100, Amos started taking photographs.
After immigrating to the U.S. in 2008, Amos took a job at Ritz Camera, where he finally developed the film he’d shot in Nigeria. “Some of those photos I took with those first rolls are some of my best photos ever,” he says. “Black and white kind of stole my heart from day one.”
Over the last 10 years, he has continued to develop his art. “I think it’s very important as an artist giving yourself time to discover yourself. I knew what I wanted to do but I didn’t know how to go about it, not until it was time,” he says. “And when it was time I knew it because everything just fell into place.”
After four years of steady work, Amos feels comfortable calling himself a street and documentary photographer. “There’s something about the human expression in the face,” he says. “Minute gestures and body movements tell a ton of story. That’s all I’m trying to do—tell a bunch of story with one click.” For the last two years, he has worked on a project—shared on Instagram—called “Cville People Everyday,” from which he selected the photos for his exhibition. For this particular project, he restricted his documentation to the Downtown Mall.
“It’s just a unique spot,” he says, sitting at an outdoor table at Mudhouse, a cold hibiscus tea in front of him. “There’s so much going on.” He gestures at a nearby restaurant, “Right there, right there, where they’re having dinner there’s probably someone panhandling with a sign that says, ‘Please help me I haven’t eaten today.’”
Documenting the Downtown Mall became a way to try to make sense of it. “How is it that all of this can coexist in this space?” he says. “Are they really coexisting or is it just that they find themselves in the same spot? I think it’s interesting and ironic to a certain degree. I can see a lot of wealth down here and at the same time immense poverty.”
Unlike some documentary photographers who avoid photographing buskers and panhandlers because they feel they would be taking advantage of them, Amos feels they are an integral part of the story. “They’re part of that environment you’re documenting,” he says. To illustrate his point, he pulls up on his phone a photo focused on a pensive young man sitting in a doorway with a backpack, just as a happy couple with their arms around each other enters the frame. “I don’t select who falls in my frame. If you’re in that frame, you’re part of that story.”
His documentation of the Downtown Mall is not only about what he sees, but what he doesn’t see, too. Last year he started to notice 90 percent of the photos he was taking were of white people. When he made a deliberate effort to photograph black people, he says, “I realized quickly there were a very limited number of black people I could actually photograph” on the mall. “That sparked something in me. That was when I really decided to document downtown and do it as a major project.” With “Cville People Everyday,” he says, “I’m inviting people to see the mall the way I see it, through my lens.”
