As every writer knows, home the key to our personal mythology. The name Rosebud emblazoned on a sled—a rich man’s vivid memory of childhood. Gatsby’s mansion in West Egg, a symbol of his endless striving for acceptance. Mrs. Dalloway’s musings on her soulless marriage, as she sets the table for
From Sanctuary: The Inner Life of Home In this interview from the book, Sanctuary: The Inner Life of Home, award-winning writer, filmmaker, travel guide, and storyteller Phil Cousineau talks about the joys and challenges of homecoming — the oldest tale in the world, repeated from The Odyssey to The
The Art of Chiharu Shiota These days everybody is a rolling stone. More people than ever live in a place that’s far from the town where they were born or raised. We are all, to some degree or another, on foreign ground—grappling with what it means to feel like a
By J. Ruth Gendler As an artist and writer, student and teacher, I have visited the Town of Qualities, written directions to the Land of the Imagjnation, lamented the exponential growth in the Lands of Glittering and Compelling Distractions, and most recently, become a sustaining member of the Library of
I rarely write about people. Instead, I write about the places in which they live, attempting in some way to interview their houses and offices, the gardens they cultivate, the rooms they arrange, by gathering news from the edges in such a way that the presence of places and the people who inhabit them tend to emerge. And in these interviews with rooms, my father’s words resonate. I am certain these places reveal something about who we are. I am interested in how places take their shape—why a door has been put just where it has, why a wall is painted a bright canary yellow, why things are the way they are. Eventually, some truth about how we take up space is revealed.
Through my photography, I delight in the discovery of perspective, a new relationship between light and shadow, the dialogue between the man-made and the natural. And if I am lucky, I get a glimpse into the unseen whole. This is how you, too, can pursue the art of looking.
How quilts have evolved from homely, practical bedcovers to a celebrated art form is an intriguing tale. The skills and traditions of quilt making came to America with African women brought here as slaves. They pieced together quilts for their families’ use from “Negro cloth” (mandated for slave’s clothing), and from the scraps of the garments they sewed for their owners, along with bits of sacking. Tiya Miles, who won the National Book Award for her beautifully researched volume, All That She Carried, notes that enslaved Black women crafted the finer patterned quilts that their owners draped across polished mahogany bedsteads.
When admiring art, we often imagine standing where the artist once stood. Here we share works by some of our favorite printmakers, ranging from the teeming masses of humanity by Benton Spruance to the lonely solitude of Edward Hopper. Drawn to urban sophistication and glamour, most artists embraced a romantic vision of the city even though their prints were created during the trying times of the Great Depression.
For half my life I lived to dance — across cities and waters and continents, stages and screens and studios, grassy fields and parking lots, train stations and flea markets, airports and artists’ garrets. It was my way of being in the world…Then, a shifting veil between worlds revealed to me an understanding of the dance as life itself — that the way to understand life in all its mystery is through a knowledge beyond words. This is what movement is for me now: from dance I have learned how to be grounded and to make micro-adjustments to adapt to shifts of the terrain beneath me.
I have learned to move energy in various directions and dimensions, and the internal stirring motion within what is understood as stillness. The pause between the constant rise and fall of breath paralleling the moment of suspension in a wave, then the inevitable push from pause into motion, is life itself.