Books...

 

First Sight of the Desert: Discovering the Art of Ella Peacock

 

The University of Utah Press Utah Art/Memoir $21.95 ISBN 0-87480-781-6	Utah artist Ella Peacock—fiercely independent and idiosyncratic in the manner of Georgia O’Keeffe, to whom she is sometimes compared—painted the desert landscape and rural setting around her Spring City home in purposeful isolation, rendering her subject matter in a subtle tonalist style. Kathryn Abajian was immediately drawn to the painter, then eighty-six-years-old, and she found in Peacock a remarkable role model for a life of voluntary simplicity, devotion to work, and dedication to an uncompromising artistic vision. But Abajian also found that in her search to understand Peacock she was seeking to know herself. First Sight of the Desert ultimately blends the multiple colors of two women’s lives onto a single canvas, reveling in brush strokes that draw beauty from even the simplest of subjects.
Demolished Mt. Peacock First Sight of the Desert

 

…and Bylines

 

The Patina of Character
San Francisco Chronicle Magazine

It started with June Chatterton, the oldest person I knew. She lived across the street from our house with her daughter’s family. Their home was full of antiques and Mrs. Chatterton gave me my first—a miniature hobnail blue glass perfume bottle, one small enough to hold in my eight-year old fist. Something about its age caught my imagination—the smoothly worn chip on its rim, the inexplicable word …Continue Reading

 

Climbing the Coconut Tree
Originally published on Salon.com

Reprinted in Left Coast Writers Anthology, Hot Flashes: Sexy Little Stories and Poems
Included in Travelers’ Tales The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2005

“I’ve been watching you all week,” he said. “You have a nice smile.” And then, inexplicably, “You are a good wife and mother.”

He was a waiter at Aggie Grey’s Hotel in Samoa and I was on my last day in the country, lying by the pool, trying not to think about leaving this paradise. He had been standing in the sun’s heat for forty-five minutes, holding his tray and trying to convince me to meet him in my hotel room…Continue Reading

 

Grandma’s Rice
San Francisco Examiner Magazine

Ingredients:

 

Preparation:

Melt the butter in the bottom of a heavy stock pot until it foams. Use at least a whole cube of butter for every three cups of rice. Even if you cook only one cup of rice, still use the whole cube. Melt the butter into a golden foam.

I don’t even consider margarine. It would be a disaster. I hide the amount of butter I use if my children are around. But if it’s others in my family—my parents, my sister or sister in law, my aunt—I melt the cubes with zeal, sometimes three for a big family dinner. They’re pretty in the pot, the sharp edges slowly rounding with the heat, the fragrance rich with promise…Continue Reading

 

from Meeting Ella Peacock, Again
Catalyst Magazine

After keeping myself busy in her quiet house for my own long empty days, I was gaining a better understanding of her determination to do her “full-time job of looking” at the desert mountains as a diversion from her isolation. Perhaps it was that loneliness that encouraged her amazing capacity for work in Sanpete County where she painted in her car both during the hot summers and white winters. But I was beginning to see that she wasn’t really painting for the love of it alone. She was also working so hard from a long tradition of duty and from a genuine need to survive. I only then realized the quiet power in her paintings was not entirely a reflection of her unassuming personality; it replicated her inner solitude as well.

 

Anthologies