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 Farwa Ali Graceful, veined hands turn the seashell over in reverent contemplation. A few moments later, artist Ann Arnold tosses the seashell back into the waves lapping against the sand at San Francisco’s Baker Beach. In the documentary, Wrestling The Angel – An Artist’s Passage, this shell accompanies Arnold through 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
By Sara Evans A wallboard at this summer’s blockbuster John Singer Sargent exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum posed an intriguing question: “Do you have to be French to be a Parisienne?” For the countless young American women artists who flocked to the City of Light in the early 1900’s
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.
In 1852, an English colonialist working in India voiced his complaints about the local workmen. He was particularly irritated and offended that blacksmiths, carpenters, and Masons squatted to work, complaining indignantly, “All work with their knees nearly on a level with their chin: the left hand—when not used as the kangaroo uses his tail to form a tripod–grasps the left knee and binds the trunk to the doubled limbs.” This man was not the first, or the last, to liken people who sit on floors to animals. He was more explicit than many about why he found the posture inferior: it suggested “indolence and inefficiency… especially irritating to an Englishman,” but even more so to one who hires and pays such workmen.
An old house has an old soul, and you get the sense that all the souls that have passed through its doors since its construction are speaking to you, the current beneficiary of its many gifts—and, sometimes, its troubles. They speak to you every time you decide to alter the house in some fundamental way—and especially vocal is the architect. You wonder, “How would he or she react if I add this, remove that, or cover over this?” The responses are heard deep within.