Katherine Keenum

Exhibition alert: I've just learned about Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939 from an article in the Autumn 2024 issue of American Scholar: Reborn in the City of Light. The show, which is up through February 23, 2025, is built around portraits of American women who found freedom to explore their art, beliefs, and sexuality in Paris in the early 20th C. They didn't necessarily know each other; but together they illustrate a time and place. Naturally, for this post, I chose a painting from my magic year of 1908. Ethel Mars, moreover, is new to me and I hope to explore her life and work in future—possibly in the exhibition catalogue if it becomes available in our library system!

A friend who is working on a scholarly article asked whether I knew of any Christian images of humans ascending to heaven. I didn't, but a little poking around turned up this one. Weird! I suppose it illustrates moving from darkness into light. And I've read of people who experience a near-death experience as resembling a tunnel that leads to light beyond. All the same, what would one do with this narratively?!?
Image via Wikipedia

Normally, I like to honor Labor Day with a focus on unions, women, and work. As early voting gets under way this year, however, the really big idea seems to be VOTE. (For Harris-Walz, of course.)
Image via Encyclopedia Virginia.

Here at the end of summer, perhaps one last run to the beach? For sure, a joyous book for us childless DOG ladies—Doug Salati's Hot Dog! I borrowed it from the library, read it, and went out to buy my own copy (from a local independent bookstore, naturally).  I've walked dogs in the city; taken them on country outings; known their stubborn moments, their devotion, and their joy. Salati's 2023 Caldecott award-winning book lets me relive vicariously the sweetness of life with a dog. That's one of the pleasures of children's picture books: they let you experience moments of delight over and over and over.

Exhibition alert: An upcoming exhibition, Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (at which viewers can elect to release odors that correspond to the imagery in a painting) set me thinking about how hard it is to evoke smells in words. A Simplified Guide to Using the Fragrance Wheel provides some vocabulary to set you thinking. But if colors are hard, how much harder are aromas to put into words!
 
For more about the Pre-Raphaelite show and other museum olfactory explorations, click here. And for another article on the evocation of smells in art, click here.

I'm rereading the four Fallow Sisters novels I discovered last summer. They're better with each rereading, and here's great news from Liz Williams in an article, How Running a Witchcraft Shop Helps Me Write Fantasy Book: "The Fallow sisters contain elements of me—they are not me, but they are also like people I know. The house in which they live, magical Mooncote, is not my house—but its orchard is my orchard, its beehives are my beehives. I'm definitely not done with it just yet." More to come? Yea!

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Exhibition alert: A show opening at Mass MoCa on August 25, 2024—Osman Khan: Road to Hybridabad— combines folklore from Southeast Asia and the Middle East with the immigrant experience and modern technology to explore how people form new identities these days. Flying carpets? Drones. Storytelling Scheherzade? AI. Djinn? A robot. The exhibition spreads out through several galleries so that viewers will experience a kind of narrative as they move through. I'm in the old-fashioned school of fantasy writers who rely on Northern European traditions for inspiration, but I'm eager to come at new stories and new thoughts viscerally in three dimensions.

Blog post alert: Material culture matters in historical and fantasy fiction. Rare survivals of decorative paper cutting by schoolgirls in the 17th century found under floorboards at Sutton House could prompt a telling detail in a story, but it would matter whether you were writing about a curator's discovery, life in the 17th C, or an imaginary world. Particularly for historical fiction, it would be important to know just who had access to such cut-outs in a world where paper was expensive.
 
For three more delightful examples, click here. And for context, click here.

I've just been introduced by our Western Massachusetts public library system to Astrid Sheckels and her Hector Fox books. I can't tell you how delighted I was to come across Ebenezer Moose, shown here, in Hector Fox and the Giant Quest! For many years, my husband and I vacationed at a lake in Maine, where we almost always saw at least one moose and especially loved spotting them in remote marshes. Sheckels' evocation of that landscape is evocative.

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This week, for fantasy work-in-progress, I wondered how—or whether—a couple of characters should be shod for a summer spent on foot. I've borrowed the banner title from Shoes in the Middle Ages because I love seeing its example of bare feet and a possible shoe. It was one of a handful of websites I looked at for the lazy author's approach to research. Two others were Medieval Shoes and Pattens and Cordwainer, Shoemaker, Cobbler?

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