Lawson's Landing

The most absolutely staggeringly beautiful and in principle deserted beach, except for a few boats and trailers, in one of which we are living for the moment, leaves me wordless and speechless except to say just that. I am looking at a grey water, have walked along the sea grass to put my spirits together before taking up my teaching  post again next week after a year sabbatical (mostly devoted to writing about my grandmother the painter, who did everything imaginable in the world of southern living, mountain living, Parisian studying at the Academie Julian and knew the Worpswede painters and writers, like Rilke) , and to getting permissions (hate that part) for my forthcoming Modern Art Cookbook (Reaktion, 2013). I would rather give ten talks and write ten more books than get one more permission to publish anything: mea culpa, I guess, but i really do hate it.
Anyway, I am here, and we, with my husband and 2 of his sons, Hal and Alec, and a wonderful chef named Maxime who is Alec's partner, all took a boat to Nick's Cove to have lunch, and now we are ensconced in blankets outside by a fire.  Life does not get better than this, I do believe.  

Amazing, being in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, 16
 gorgeous days when even the cellphone does not work -- you know, as in, you can call friends and husband and all that -- and you just might have email IF you are lucky and in your studio, where you
hole away directly whenever you can...
If I were (oh, that would be delightful, but am not) a fiction writer, I'd call something
No Signal from the Mountain
because THAT is where the only power comes from, very remarkable
what is more so is being
Surrounded by truly non-ego driven creative types -- my goodness, I did love being at the Getty for 8 months and at Bellagio twice, and once again for a conference, but this is different: cows, horses,
and that is it
trying to write a memoir (not a momoir, as in being a mother, but a plain old memoir) of and in the voice of my grandmother the painter
what alife: Worpswede, where she had a rather delightful time with Otto Modersohn, the widower of Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died in childbirth a year afteer my grandmother arrrived -- she lived with my grandfather and 3 children in Bremen, 15 kilometers away... and had left her first baby with a nurse and her husband to go study at the Academie Julian back at the end of the nineteenth century,
for 6 months, with a friend painter from Savannah, but still, all that and then settling down in the then small town of Wilmington, N.C., rising at 5 every morning to paint and then being a society hostess...
WHOA!
So how to write in someone else's voice... I am of course reading painter Paula's journal, and hope to find journals of other woman painters,and here are some right around me now...