PaperGirl Blog by Mary Fons

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19 Apr 2017

All The Ridiculous Things I Want.

by | posted in: Day In The Life | 12
Gold! It's gold!! (Actually, this is chocolate.) Image: Wikipedia.
Gold! It’s gold!! (Actually, this is chocolate.) Image: Wikipedia.

 

Yesterday, I gave a big, honkin’ presentation in my Oulipo class on a famous Oulipian named Harry Mathews. Today, I gave an even bigger presentation for Anne Wilson’s class on seminal 20th century artist Miriam Schapiro. (I’ll be posting about her before long, especially in light of your intelligent, important comment yesterday, Kathryn Darnell!)

During my research on the late Ms. Schapiro — who I selected to research because of her use of fabric and quilt motifs in her art — I found an early painting of Schapiro’s for sale through a gallery in Canada. There was a button on the gallery’s website that said: “Send Me Information About This Artwork”.

I clicked. I was curious and clicking didn’t cost a cent. How much would an early (smallish) painting by Miriam Schapiro be? She is a really big deal in the world of fine art, but how much would it be? I had to know. I’m not in the market for high art at this point in my life, so I really had no idea. What if it was a lot but not like, so much that I couldn’t take out a loan and buy it?? I’m already in debt for student loans. What’s an extra $100 bucks a month for the next few years, right? I connect to this artist’s work and though I do spend a lot on shoes, I don’t have a car, I use plain soap in the shower (as opposed to fancy body wash, not that I’m judging), and life is short.

The painting is $55,000.

My calculator tells me that if I paid $100/month for that work of art — this is the limit of what I could afford right now — it would take 550 months to pay it off. That’s 45 years. I’d be 82 when that artwork was mine and I didn’t even count taxes or interest on the loan I’d need to secure it in the first place.

So…that is not going to happen. Not yet, anyway.

Boy, do I want that painting, though. I keep thinking about it. I keep picturing myself as the kind of person who owns an early Miriam Schapiro, you know? She seems so cool, that person. Except that I’d probably have to get a new condo just to make sure I had the proper wall for it. Then I’d have to make sure I always wore something that complimented the painting, of course, and I’d have to be perfectly coiffed in case someone popped by for Champagne, dahhling, just to see “my Schapiro.” As I fantasized, the painting kept doubling in price.

C’est la vie. It was fun while it lasted. And in the spirit of that sort of fun, I thought I’d make a short list of other things I want that I cannot have because they cost too much money. What about you? Do we overlap?

Wait, wait.

Before the list, of course, more than any of these things, I want health and happiness for my family. I want a long life for myself and for my kith and kin and I want a savings account that will provide for me and all of them, too. I want world peace immediately. I want to start a theater with my friend Sophie. I want to build a library in my mother’s name. I want to make a foundation for quilt studies. I want all the broken hearts to have peace tonight. I want to forgive and be forgiven. All this is what I really, actually want. But now that I’ve made that clear, let’s talk ridiculous, material fantasies. I’m pretty sure it’s harmless fun. Pretty sure.

 

Fantasy (Material) Want List

  • That Miriam Schapiro painting.
  • Like, so many other pieces of art.
  • A full-time housekeeper.
  • A full-time chef.
  • A VIP/Platinum-whatever pass thingy for all the airlines so I can fly first class and go to the nice lounges in the airports (I’d just be doing homework in there but wow.)
  • New Oriental rugs! (Have you priced legit Oriental rugs lately?? Insane.)
  • New luggage (Nevermind!)
  • WARDROBE OVERHAUL! I mean, hello.
  • A new condo so I can get my little doggie, Philip Larkin (but I would keep this one and rent it out because even in my fantasy life, I know the value of a dollar and having rental income would help pay the bills.)
  • A lifelong vacation plan. Not a lifelong vacation, mind you: A plan that funds a vacation every year for the rest of my life. And for my sisters. A lifelong sister vacation plan. [This last thing might go into the list of things that I would want first, you know? It seems less material and more… More important.]

 

18 Apr 2017

Being Open vs. Staying True to a Vision.

by | posted in: Art, Day In The Life, Tips | 16
Making artistic choices. It's like buyin' veggies at a farm stand. Photo: Wikipedia.
Making artistic choices. It’s like buyin’ veggies at a farm stand. (Please note the label on the box of shallots reads “Tooty.”) Photo: Wikipedia.

 

Learning is exciting and fun when you learn something you didn’t know before and you’re instantly excited about it. My experience in grad school so far has consisted mostly of this kind of learning. More often than not, it’s like, “Wow, a new author I love! Wow, a fascinating person I’ve just met! Wow, a school of thought I never conceived of before! Wow, world!”

But that’s not the only way to respond to learning new things. Responding negatively to new information is important, too. It doesn’t feel fun to not like a book you have to read for class, but really, this kind of learning is every bit as exciting when you take the long view. Finding out what you don’t like, e.g., the kind of work you don’t want to make, the books or authors or ideas you reject, this definitely help shape who you are as a person, a student, a maker, whatever.

And there’s another kind of lesson, I guess, that I’ve been thinking a lot about. It hasn’t been fun to learn it. It’s been uncomfortable and painful. But it’s been very important. Let’s see if I can explain.

If you’re a person who strives to to better, learn more, and do exciting stuff in collaboration other people, which is all of us, you need to be — nay, you want to be! — open to other people’s comments and contributions. Maybe you’re working on a project for work. Maybe you’re making a quilt. Maybe you’re writing a book. Maybe you’re a parent and you’re trying to raise your kids. Getting outside input is important. Listening to someone who has been there before is wise (especially if that person just got a raise doing the job you have, won a blue ribbon on her quilt, got a Pulitzer for her last novel and raised six kids.) The right advice can save you a lot of time. It could even save your life.

But.

There is also a time to listen to yourself. There’s a time to get advice from this guy, that guy, her, her, and him, and then do nothing that they told you to do.

And I was going to say that “it’s so so so hard to know when to trust yourself and when to take advice!” but the thing is, I’ve been dealing with this recently and I think… Sometimes, I think it’s easy. Sometimes, you absolutely do know the right thing to do, and the hard part is admitting that and then going for it.

Here’s my example.

My advisors are amazing. They’re embarrassingly talented. They’re wildly accomplished. They’ve won awards, they’ve published in the fanciest places. They’re successful and brilliant and they are genuine fans of mine who want the best for me. I’m pretty sure that when I’m not in school, we’re all gonna hang out because we like each other.

But over the course of this semester, without meaning to do harm or lead me astray, both my advisors were steering me away from writing the essays I’ve been writing and toward writing a chronological memoir. And what do you suppose I started doing? Yes! Because they are so great and smart and fancy, I slowly started change everything I was doing to fit that vision. I thought, consciously and subconsciously: They know better that I do. They’re older. More successful.

The problem is that I don’t want to write a chronological memoir. I want to write something that doesn’t look like that. And when I lost sight of what I set out to do, when I was changing what I was learning to fit someone else’s vision, all the joy fell out of my project and I didn’t write on my book for a long time. I miss it.

Life and work, it’s all a negotiation. You must listen to others. You must learn. You would be well advised to be well advised. Folks who can’t be told nothin’ are frustrating and lame. (And believe me: Writers who think every word they write is gold and precious are not going to get very far.) We all need editors, we all need help and input from other people.

But you also know things. You do. And you matter as much as anybody else.

 

17 Apr 2017

And Now For Something Completely Different: Oulipo!

by | posted in: Word Nerd | 17
Don't you just want to live inside a great Paris bakery? Like, inside an actual pastry? Me, I call the almond croissant. Image: Wikipedia.
Don’t you just want to live inside a great Paris bakery? Like, inside an actual pastry? Me, I call the almond croissant. Image: Wikipedia.

 

I’ve been learning about this fascinating (and, to be honest, frequently exasperating) group of writers who formed in France in the 1960s: the Oulipo. The word “Oulipo” is a shorthand mashup of letters from “Ouvroir de littérature potentielle,” which is roughly translated: “workshop of potential literature.”

There’s a lot to say about the group and what “potential literature” is, but for now, just know that the Oulipians were/are writers who like to play with writing. Specifically, the Oulipians play with constraints in their writing, many of which are born from math. The Fibonacci Sequence might be the guiding principle in a story, for example (Italo Calvino did this.) Or a writer might “translate” a text following an algorithm, like one called N + 7, where you take every noun in the piece of writing and find the noun that comes seven nouns later in the dictionary and replace the original noun with that word. Weird, right? Yeah, and silly, but also sometimes wonderful — or at least wonderful enough to inspire something you would never have considered if you didn’t try it.

Mostly, the Oulipo is something most folks who don’t dive real deep into literary movements and stuff will ever know about and honestly won’t ever need to know about. But there’s one work so far that has come out of the Oulipo that broke into the mainstream consciousness enough that some folks have heard about it. It’s a 300-page-ish novel by George Perec that does not use the letter ‘e.’ At all. Not once. No ‘e’ for 300 pages. It was written in French but was translated. The title: A Void. (<– See what he did there?)

When you write a piece of text that eliminates one vowel, it’s called a Lipogram. And you know what? They’re really fun. Well, if you’re me. I mean, some people think rollercoasters are fun. I think rollercoasters are horrifying, terrible, not-funny-at-all, why-would-you-do-that, why-would-you-stand-in-line-for that, nightmares. But some people love them! That’s fine. Enjoy. Me, I like barring myself from using an ‘e’ in a piece of text.

And now, my Lipogram! A piece written without the letter ‘e’. (I couldn’t choose to eliminate ‘i,’ for reasons you are about to discover.)

Oh, and this is NOT an official assignment or contest, but: I urge you, if you choose to comment, try to write your comment without using a certain vowel! I’ll let you pick your vowel. Example: “My name is Emma. This entry is interesting and PaperGirl is the best website writing experiment ever! I like Mary.” See? No ‘o’! So Emma couldn’t say “your” or “blog” or “post” or “love.” Cheap thrills, people. Cheap.)

 

Not Without An I (a Lipogram)
(c) by Mary Fons 2017

I can’t do this without an “I.”

Without an “I,” nothing I want to craft can or will stand. To my mind, without an “I,” nothing can bloom — nothing worth looking at, anyhow, nothing worth announcing or proclaiming. I’m a nonfiction author. Proclaiming is what I do.

It is a bit tiring, though, on a bad day, if I’m straight with you. My constant “I” has it’s drawbacks. It blocks a man or woman from my soul, occasionally. A constant I, I, I, is blind, off and on, to plights not its own. This is troubling, particularly if an autumn wind blows and it’s dark by four o’clock. At such an hour as that, my “I” is painfully solo.

But still it stands: I shall hold this “I.” No paragraph I put down can do without it. I am so fond of it, in fact, thinking of its bar or ban, oh! I could cry.

You may claim all words in our world with no limits. As for this girl; as long as I clutch my I, I shall want for no sign or symbol.

14 Apr 2017

Winner of the First-Ever PaperGirl Essay Contest: Lori Fontaine of Canada!

by | posted in: PaperGirl Mailbag | 29
Included in Lori's letter, scanned in by me.
Included in Lori’s letter, scanned in by me.

Congratulations, Canada: You are lucky to claim Ms. Lori Fontaine, who has won first place in the first-ever PaperGirl Leaders & Enders Essay Contest.

Our veterinarian Kristin communicated honestly the healing power of quilts in our personal lives. Kathleen’s essay expressed the pure joy of making, the inspiration around every corner, as well as the pricelessness of quilting friends.

But Lori Fontaine, you made me weep. Mom, too. I could hardly get it together as I read through your essay the first, second, and third time. Really, the contest was yours at “plastic sheeting.” With humility and plain speech, you told the story of the power of quilts and the heart of a quilter. Thank you, and thank you to your group. May you make quilts a long time and put them in the mail.

My leaders and enders are yours, Fontaine. I’ll be in touch soon and congratulations. (I’ve left in all your funny Canadian spellings. They’re neat!)

1st Place Winner
Lori Fontaine

“Trust me when I tell you you’ll want to quilt it and hand-tie it,” she said. 

“Why?”

“Because they don’t have Maytag washers in the Third World. That quilt’ll be pounded on the rocks to be cleaned.”

Well, that made it clear. Suddenly, it wasn’t about the bright colours or the design; this was about the reality, which was scary. A stranger would treasure my work enough to clean it using back-breaking labour, scrubbing it on rocks, probably in muddy water. It would perhaps be the only treasure that person would ever possess. So my little quilt, with its wonky seams, had the ability to erase even for a second the world of not enough to eat, the constant scream of poverty.

That first quilt — how many lifetimes ago! — went to Nepal. A child receiving life-changing surgery was given a quilt rather than the plastic sheeting that was typically used during post-op. We were told to make the colours bright and happy, to make the quilts for boys or girls. 

About five months later, our quilt group was asked to attend a slideshow so we could see the facility where the surgeries had been performed by volunteer doctors, nurses, and other kind souls that wanted to make a difference. There was a handful of photos scattered on an eight-foot table at the front of the room, but I was at the back, chatting with a friend and didn’t bother to look at them. 

When the lights went down, we looked into their eyes. The eyes of strangers that were receiving our love from Canada. There were smiles reaching through a lens to greet those that wanted to help from so far away, even a little bit. 

The world became so tiny. 

I went to the front of the room and looked at the photos on the table. Then, my eyes got wet and I could no longer see clearly. My little quilt, with its bright yellow fabrics, was wrapped around a child with big brown eyes. A printed banner above the image said, “Thank you, quilters.” 

My back doesn’t ache when I’m working on a quilt that’s going overseas. It’s always, “Just one more stitch, then I’ll head to bed…”

The quilt I’m working on now is an explosion of bright fabrics featuring creatures of the sea. Dolphins, coral, electric rainbow fish. Wherever on the planet this one lands, my name will be on the back. A stranger from Canada, sending love. Beating back some of the darkness that lives in the world, the only way she knows how.

 

13 Apr 2017

The PaperGirl “Leaders & Enders” Essay Contest: First Runner Up

by | posted in: PaperGirl Mailbag, Quilting | 25
IMG_2655
Overwhelmed (in a good way) going through essay contest entries at the Merchandise Mart. Photo: Mom.

 

Real quick, before tonight’s essay:

On Monday, I got an email telling me I didn’t get this thing I wanted. It was a relatively small (but sizeable-to-me) publication grant offered by my university’s student government. I wanted to print a 16-page newspaper I made in my Design For Writers class last semester called “The PaperGirl Review: Extreme Quilt Edition”. The grant would’ve given me the funds and the boost I need to do that project and offer it to all of you. I spent a long time on my application. I wanted it really bad. But I didn’t get it.

I wanted to tell you that before I announce the First Runner-Up for the essay contest. Because if it’s not you, you’re probably gonna feel at least a little lousy; not winning feels lousy. But not winning everything (or anything) is also totally universal. Like I’ve just confessed, it happened to me last week! Don’t let it get you down if you didn’t win this time. You just can’t let it let you down. Shake it off. I will if you will.

As I said yesterday, every essay y’all sent was winning. But choices must be made. And this essay has such a lovely twist at the end and was so unique, it stood out. Congratulations due to Ms. Kurke, Lucy, and Einstein, of course.

First Runner-Up
Kathleen Kurke

It was never about the orange, one way or another. It was all about the dog collar.

I bought it because it looked like Log Cabin pattern. Lucy, the yellow lab of my dog duo, got the quilt-like collar because she was the girl. Einstein, the chocolate lab of the duo, sported a more masculine (but not resembling a quilt block) collar. I looked at Lucy’s collar many times a day as Lucy and Einstein pulled excitedly ahead of me on all our walks, day after day. It worked out well for Lucy, actually, because instead of me sternly telling her to stop pulling, I’d look at her collar and saying to myself, “That collar would make a great quilt.”

One day, I decided to do it: I’d make a quilt like that collar. I started pulling pink and purple from my stash. There was some obvious red in the collar, so I added red to my pile. Off I headed to hang out with my “WDMP Girls”** for a day of stitching and chatting. Upon settling in and starting the chatting part of the day, I unpacked my piles and started ripping strips: lots of pink, lots of purple, and a little red. 

I had started constructing the Log Cabin when one of the Girlz asked, “Where’s the orange?”

“What orange?” I asked. 

“Well, there’s obviously orange in the collar.” 

Orange? I’d never noticed! Turns out, I was orange-blind. Every day, mile after mile, walking the dog and staring at the collar, thinking, “That collar would make for a great quilt,” I’d never noticed the orange.

Generous as quilting pals tend to be, The Girlz quickly pulled from their orange abundance and added orange to my pile. I ripped orange strips and returned to creating my Log Cabin blocks. I picked up red centers and added strips. Pink, purple, red, and now orange strips. Completed block after completed block hit the floor. The collar — I mean the quilt — was coming to life. 

I returned home to lay out my blocks and compose the quilt top. Since my “design wall” is my sewing room floor, I share the space with my dogs — and they expect participation in the layout process. (Quilt blocks go down on the floor and they lay on top.) More than once, their squirming antics have resulted in a rearranging that led to a much more attractive layout than I had originally envisioned. 

The quilt blocks came together beautifully and I saw on the floor what I had dreamed about all those days I looked at Lucy’s collar, except…something was missing. 

I couldn’t put my finger on it. I double-checked my color selection against the collar, thinking perhaps my color bias was bigger than just orange, but the colors in my quilt top mirrored what I saw in the collar. I closed my eyes to rethink the vision I had in starting the quilt. I pictured Lucy, pulling ahead of me. I pictured her collar. I pictured Einstein, walking next to her. 

And then my eyes flew open, realizing what was missing in the quilt: It was Einstein! Not Einstein literally, but the color of Einstein, the spirit of Einstein. The quilt needed chocolate love! So, out came the brown — and the border came to life. 

The quilt is complete, now. My love for my yellow lab, in her quilt collar, and her brown buddy Einstein is now immortalized in my quilt.

**WDMP = We Don’t Match Points

 

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