This will be an exciting opportunity for writers who want to find a peaceful and inspiring place to write. The week-long session will include morning instruction, afternoons free to write or take excursions to nearby historical sites, and evening meals to share writing and the day’s experiences. We will stay in  Abergo Diffuso’s lovely hotel rooms newly restored to 15th century historical simplicity with modern conveniences.

For more information, visit http://www.ItalyinOtherWords.com

Join me and writing instructor, Helen Free, in Italy next summer, June 13–19, 2010 for a relaxing week in the Abruzzi region of Italy.

The focus of our writing will be creative nonfiction–memoir, travel and food writing. Visit http://www.ItalyinOtherWords.com for more information. 

CREATIVE WRITING, COMPOSITION AND LITERATURE CLASSES

I teach creative writing, composition and literature at the San Ramon Campus of Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area.

You may search the schedule and enroll at www.dvc.edu. Look under the SRVC location for my courses.

English 222 ~~ Creative Writing is offered in a once-a-week format, usually from 6–9 pm.
This course usually has twenty or fewer students and provides instruction and regular feedback from the instructor as well as a supportive writing community. You will learn useful techniques for getting started and completing creative nonfiction–memoir and travel personal essays, short stories and poetry. This is a good place to learn how to critique your own and other students’ writing. We also read and analyze professionally written creative writing and discuss techniques of the craft of writing.

English 123 ~~ Freshman English: Composition and Literature is a critical thinking class with a focus on interpreting world literature–drama, fiction, the novel, and poetry. The course includes extensive reading, personal responding, and literary analysis in formal essays. Students become comfortabe reading and discussing literature and writing analytical essays.

English 122 ~~ Freshman English: Composition and Reading includes extensive reading about current and historical thought regarding the subject of ethics. Students learn to read, write and discuss using critical thought.

March 24, 2006 at 6 pm
Norseman Restaurant at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, CA.
Call 925-685-1230, ext. 2241 for registration. $30.00; checks payable to the DVC Foundation.
Go to www.dvc.edu for directions to the college.

Abajian agreed to answer a few questions about the book (which can be ordered from University of Utah Press). Also note that Abajian will be involved in a series of readings and events related to the book — including the opening of an exhibit of Peacock’s work later this year at the Museum of Utah Art and History.
To read more, follow this link:
http://motleyvision.blogspot.com/2005/03/art-kathryn-abajian-on-painter-ella.html

Market for First Sight of the Desert~~
•Women will trace the journey toward independence and autonomy through the lives of two women who share an artistic sensibility in this blend of memoir and biography.
•Art lovers will discover the sense of place that gives meaningful context to portraits, woodblock prints and plein air landscape painting in a narrative linked to the themes of ten color illustrations.
•Western History scholars will capture the vibrancy in a pioneer-era desert community and the power in enduring western land.
•Artists will connect to the women’s drives to find time and space to create and will recognizethe impulse of the art ethic.
•Mormons will see their culture from the perspective of two women who struggle to meet its expectations.
•Environmentalists will connect to the women’s need for their own sense of place.
•Enthusiasts of the Arts and Crafts Movement will discover a story of life lived by the ideals of simplicity and purpose.

Order online from www.uofupress.com
Contact publicity at the University of Utah Press at (801) 585-9786,
(by fax (801) 581-3365), or by e-mail at mritchie@upress.utah.edu

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.

The University of Utah Press
Utah Art/Memoir
$21.95
ISBN 0-87480-781-6

Illustrations in First Sight of the Desert from the collection of Joe and Lee Bennion

Being Demolished

Fairview Flour Mill

Mt. Peacock

First Sight of the Desert

— Ruth Lubbers, Executive Director, Art Access Gallery, Salt Lake City

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 “Roll” on its front and the little hobs along its sides. That’s when I knew I would always love old things. And it seemed natural to me even then, at eight-years old, to begin collecting them.

I grew up in a Southern California track home that my mother decorated in a Early American style. I wasn’t very interested in the reproductions of Colonial tables and knickknacks, but I was endlessly fascinated with one unlikely combination of accessories. My mother had arranged three items on a side table: a tarnished brass candle holder, the kind I imagined a little girl in old England might carry to light her way to bed, an antique silver baby cup with my grandfather’s name, Joe, engraved on its side and an even smaller clear glass cup. Curiously—because no one in our family smoked—the silver cup held cigarettes and the glass cup wooden matches, apparently my mother’s attempt at 1950s sophistication. A stale attempt, I guess, because those same cigarettes sat in that cup for years before styles changed. I did most of my childhood reading on the end of the sofa beside that arrangement and, as I’d look up to wonder at the characters’ unusual lives in the books I read, I’d hold that baby cup and consider the grandfather I’d never known, the one who had been my mother’s favorite parent, the one whose name I carried.

I’ve always been drawn to the character in age—worn wood framing the cane seats on my Great Aunt Fern’s Victorian chairs, puzzling shadows behind old mirrors, chipped paint on the curlicues of my cast iron bed. I especially love beading—carefully-crafted raised bumps of glass, wood or metal—that details many old pieces. It borders an old mirror I found years ago at a Lafayette antiques store, it distinguishes the apron on each of three nesting end tables that came from an huge warehouse in Oakland, and it marks a silver picture frame I picked up for $3.00 in a Salt Lake City shop.

Carefully hand-carved wood on really old pieces discloses so much about the age and provenance of a piece—the open heart or simple pine cone on my friend Liz’s collection of oak bookshelves reveals their Arts and Crafts origin when books were honored as much for their cover designs as for their content. I occasionally sit on my old pine church pew, my fingers grazing the stylized Celtic cross on its arm, and contemplate its ancient years of witness to patient, hopeful pleading. A salvaged piece of a dresser—the regal-looking top of its mirror—hangs above my doorway as a nod to its storied past.

Age mellows the colors of old things, often in layers of character. The scarred black and brown stain on my sister’s 19th century Jacobean-legged English oak table creates a patina that can’t be duplicated in anything new. Tagged with faint glass rings and subtle cigarette burns, the rich finish is a hint of long evenings of friendship that probably once warmed a cold stone house. On winter nights, my friend Martha ladles hot soup from her subtly faded brown and white transfer ware tureen and senses ancient nourishment. Daily I hold a creamy faux-ivory hand mirror from the 1920s and feel its years of optimistic toilette.

Ever since my brother and I took a basket weaving class at the park the summer I was nine years old, I’ve been attracted to the texture of wicker. My first purchase as a young and very new wife many years ago was a Victorian wicker container for holding sheet music. Even though I loved its whimsy, I was unsure about spending $15.00 for something so completely useless, especially since my new husband warned that he had been “raised with old furniture and didn’t want anything old in our apartment.” The dealer sensed my hesitation and told me she could get $40.00 for it if she “painted it white and put it in the window,” smartly appealing to my natural instincts to snag a good deal. When I told her my fears of bringing it home into my new marriage, she cinched the sale by telling me, “You don’t have much of a marriage if you have to ask your husband before you buy something.”

Over the years I’ve brought home many pieces of wicker, sometimes leaving them pristinely unpainted like the seaweed-wicker rocking chair, part of a set my friend Joleen and I bought twenty years ago from a paint store in Danville just before the owner painted the whole set white. Years ago my daughters watched in disbelief when I claimed a wobbly wicker side chair at a San Francisco garage sale; it’s still hanging from the rafters in my own garage, its faded 1940s green waiting for the just right spot indoors. One of my staples is a wicker table I got for fifty cents at a church rummage sale from an old guy who said it was “worth that much for firewood.” An all-time favorite is a black wicker floor lamp in my living room, handmade by my former mother-in-law as a crafts project with her sisters in the 1920s.
So I’ve been lucky to have collected antiques when they were easily acquired for good prices or readily given as gifts. But the fact that I’ve never tired of them, that they’ve served me well, says more about their character than my luck or foresight. The old joke that “age doesn’t count unless you’re a cheese” really isn’t true. Age does count, especially so if it includes the endurance of character.
I’ve even grown to appreciate certain signs of age in my friends and myself. I watch my hands on the keyboard and see their tiny scars of experience, know the problems they’ve had to manage. As I feel gravity’s effects on my knees, I recognize too the solemnity in my past. I find of late that I’m slower to react to life’s absurdities, more measured in my responses, more trusting of my own history.
In others I appreciate a distinct and sure integrity of character. I hear my friend Bruce’s wisdom telling me to honor the good in sorrowful times rather than curse them. I observe as my coworker Randy demonstrates the merit in gauging criticisms and choosing battles. He watches and listens and considers the other side. Elayne, a college teacher and travel writer in her 70s, teaches me to keep roaming foreign lands between semesters, so I can return afresh to the classroom each fall.

As I write I notice my grandfather’s globe, now completely out-of-date but beautifully mellow with soft turquoise seas and faded Easter egg colored continents, atop the bookcase beside my desk. I imagine him coming to America from old Armenia in 1912 to escape a brewing war, his new wife alongside him in steerage on an Italian ship, both of them eating Spaghetti for the first time. I can barely fathom the determination it took for this very young couple to cross the country from New York to reach relatives they hardly knew in Los Angeles. Their character is reflected today in that old globe, but more remarkably in a large family still close, still finding comfort in each other’s company.

This patina of character is everywhere around me in my friends’ lives and in the venerable old things I use so often, treasures that enrich my shelves and enlarge my mind. It’s all over the generations of family photos hanging in my hallway; it nestles as my mother’s hand-crocheted spread covering my guest bed; it holds down my bills as a burnished 18th century doorknob. And it’s in the hope I have each time I fill my favorite green art-pottery vase with the wild rosemary growing all over the nearby hillsides.

— Vern Swanson, Director of the Springville Museum of Art