Katherine Keenum

Four things struck me about this photograph of Pickard's Baulk in Derbyshire, England. First, all that greenness—not quite Middle-earth, but quintessentially English. Well, except, second: those stone walls instead of hedges. They locate the scene in the north and emphasize the rectilinearity of the fields. So, third, maybe a need for some rewilding? Let the trees in the middle spread? The central grove of trees is the fourth feature that delighted me, for it led me to the word baulk, one definition of which is "ground left unploughed as a boundary line between two ploughed portions" (OED). Splendid specificity!

A sentence on p. 4 of the Spring 2024 issue of Almanac caught my attention: "Charlotte Randall, a mother of six, was a photographer in the small town of Clyde, Ohio." A woman making a living as a photographer for the cartes-de-visite so popular in the latter half of the 19th C? Whoo-hoo! Of course, I knew about female art photographers from Julia Margaret Cameron to Gertrude Käsebier, but women in the ordinary, everyday commercial world offers something new area to explore. One place to start is a Wikipedia Timelime of women in photography. Another is the article Zooming in on the places where early women photographers could build a career. And right off the bat, fiction writers, what do you make of these two midcentury women with the daguerreotype camera? Just look at those facial expressions!

Image via Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Photographs like this one of a horse ranch in Ventura County can obviously be helpful to a fiction writer who wants to set a story in the present-day California countryside. When I saw it, though, my first reaction was: Strip away the vegetation and that could be a manned station on a harsh, alien planet. My second thought was: Or narrow the valley and fill it with greenery and it could be in Middle-Earth. Writing exercise, anyone?

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My husband found this jawbone back in the woods and took me to see it. So many possibilities! A prompt for a naturalist's lecture (it's a deer's jawbone). A witch's comb. A treasure for a boy's collection of feathers and bones. Ditto for a girl (with a magical twist and broken eggshells to boot). A patteran. Or that pattern of jawbone, pinecone, straw and twig—a spell laid, an artist's composition, a talisman with runes. What's your fancy?

I came across Looking down to Horsleyhope Mill a while back. It seemed to me you could convert it to a hobbit village or imaginary farm in an earlier era as the setting for a story. I never got around to trying to sketch what I had in mind, but, by golly, John S. Goodall did a wildly better version in The Story of a Farm, one of his wordless books with cunning foldovers that show transformations. Luckily, our public library system has a copy. I borrowed it, loved it, and have just ordered a clean used copy at Biblio.com.

In the week or so between Thanksgiving and Saint Nicholas Day, I try to keep Christmas frenzy at bay (with, of course, the minor cheating, like starting an Advent calendar). An annual rereading of Greer Gilman's Moonwise is a good compromise: mythic, ritual, and seasonal. So is literal walking in November woods. Yesterday, under a gray sky, I was on a hillside floored with fallen leaves and realized I was walking "in 'tCloudwood."

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From time to time, a picture goes into my file of story prompts. I ran across this photograph of a corner in Peveril Castle the other day, and flash! a fiction! If I were better at art software, I could probably combine it with this photograph of Peveril Castle for a Tiny Illustrated Story. Read More 

Maybe while New York is under a ghastly orange haze, it's wrong the wrong time to post a sepia photograph; but I got such a kick out running across this carte-de-visite , that I can't resist. According to the seller, the picture was taken in 1865 even though the card commemorates Carolus-Duran's winning of a silver medal at the World's Fair of 1878. And doesn't he look young and handsome! For Ferdinand Mulnier's sensitive portrait of Jeanette's other teacher, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, click here. For many more of Mulnier's photographs, click here.

Exhibition alert: Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow & Her Circle is on view at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site from now until October 29th. The website has loads of information and images about this female artist who was as successful in her day as the men whose names are remembered for their grand paintings of the American landscape. Simultaneously comes publication of  the first book-length study of her life and art: Susie M. Barstow: Redefining the Hudson River School. I'll be going to the exhibition and look forward to learning more!

Exhibition alert: I couldn't help thinking of Dimples for President and The Flapper Queens when I saw Frieze in the review article The big picture: jazz age attitude captured by Dorothy Wilding. Wild, Wilding, wilder, and fun!