Anais Nin wasn't supposed to be writing letters in 1975. She had been recently diagnosed with cancer. But she received a letter from a young woman wandering Japan, she felt compelled to respond. Thirty years later, it surfaces for the first time in public. In this new year, may you reach out to those who have influenced your thinking. Perhaps you, too, will receive words in return.
Instead of cutting and pasting articles, we literally cut and pasted letters and images from magazines, ripped card stock to usable parts, squeaked magic markers across poster board gloss, put thought to ink, which we'll take to the streets tomorrow. This felt worlds apart from the self-congratulatory slacktivism I've worried I've become prone to. This was taking action–and this is what handwriting can do. It is personal. It is political. It is individual. It is community.
Handwriting speaks in our voice, and our voices are speaking up.
Kathleen Mangan, the Executive Director of the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation discusses the role of handwriting in Lenore Tawney’s daily life and in her artistic practice. Tawney was a regular correspondent and diarist who filled dozens of tiny journals with fine script, but she also incorporated handwriting in collages and constructions. Fine, thread-like script was superimposed upon lines of text from old manuscripts; written lines were piled atop one another so they could not be deciphered; and at other times delicate lines on translucent paper were turned upside-down. Tawney’s goal was to make “visionary” experiences “visible.”
Helen A. Harrison, the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center weighs in on the intersection between Jackson Pollock's art and handwriting, such as his "use of calligraphic imagery as an integral compositional element" in some of his drawings that contradicts the awkward, halting script used outside of his artwork for personal and professional correspondence.
As an elementary school student, Carolyn struggled with dysgraphia, a neurological disorder marked by impairment of the ability to write by hand (and spell). It's still very much a part of her every day. In this poem, Carolyn brings us closer to her handwritten world. Intermixed are italicized excerpts from a several-month exchange with her about coming to grips with the growing pains.
"Eakins learned his elegant copperplate hand from his father, a skill that was reinforced at Central in his drawing classes. To the nineteenth-century mind, good penmanship and draftsmanship were seen as interrelated skills that reflected clarity of thought."
In this essay on deleted pasts and new beginnings, Aine Greaney takes us around the world in an old composition notebook: the only one she brought with her when she emigrated to America. With the start of the new year just behind us, we find this piece more timely than ever, as we revisit filled pages from the past, and look toward the blank ones of the future.
In this micro-reflection, Mary Fratesi finds delicate words for the most difficult of experiences: watching a loved one in pain. While this piece began as a pairing of two images, which has a fluency of its own, Mary takes us beneath the tree, and between the lines.
