What were your favorite books as a child? Why?

As a young child, my favorite books were the Betsy-Tacy books by Maude Hart Lovelace. My mother read those novels to me before I could read, and I know those books were the start of my love affair with the novel form. I vividly remember imagining those characters’ lives, and wishing I could live the story with them. I wanted my own best friends, my own Big Hill where we could meet for picnics. Mostly I wanted a life of great adventures like Betsy, Tacy and Tib lived.

What was your inspiration for the story about Reenie Kelly and Mr. Marsworth?

Well, here we’re visiting another childhood literary influence. I think my real inspiration for Until Tomorrow, Mr. Marsworth came from a book I read in fourth grade called Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster. It was an epistolary novel written in 1912 for “college girls,” and while I was a good eight years from college, and a long way from 1912, I was a great fan of the form. So my dream to write an epistolary novel was formed young.

Describe some of the challenges of writing an epistolary novel for children.

The challenge with the novel, regardless of audience, is the need to show rather than tell, and the primary device for showing is the scene. The scene is really a method of narrative execution, and I had to have a narrator—Reenie Kelly—for whom that method would read naturally. Beyond that, there was the literal passage of time because life continued while letters were waiting to be written and answered. 

Also, in the letter, there is as much unsaid as said, and it’s that withholding of information that gives the letter its power. You have to trust the reader to read between the lines, and I did. I have great faith in young people’s ability to read between the lines.

Gardner Hill in Wayzata, Minnesota

Is Lake Liberty a real town in Minnesota? Is there a real town that inspired the setting?

Lake Liberty is an imagined town, but it was inspired by the “old town” section of Wayzata back in the 1960’s. This was the place where my father was born and raised, and my O’Connor relatives all lived. Like Reenie Kelly’s grandmother, my grandmother had a little house at the top of Gardner Hill, a house with an attic bedroom where her three boys once slept. It was just beneath the Wayzata water tower, with an overgrown woods that later became part of a freeway, and in the years before that freeway, I spent many happy days playing on that land, and in that neighborhood. When I picture Lake Liberty, I picture the Wayzata of my childhood—the movie theater, the A & W, the small cottages on the lake. I was an outsider to that town, just as Reenie Kelly is an outsider to Lake Liberty, and I was keenly aware of how deep the ties ran for long-time residents.

Your story is enriched by an interesting cast of secondary characters. Who is your favorite and why?

Oh, you know that question is too hard for a writer to answer! I truly loved them all, even the less lovable characters like Gram. I hope that each character is a fully realized human being with desires and flaws, because that’s what I want to see in my work. I love Billy for his gentleness and humility, and I love Dare for his ragged edges and his bravado. I love Skip for the friendship he extends to Reenie Kelly, and how carefully he navigates the letters that he sends from Vietnam. I love Sno-Cone for her intelligence, and her ability to expand Reenie’s world. And of course, I love Mr. H.W. Marsworth for his great patience, and his quiet courage, and his unending kindness. I love that he is willing to be changed by Reenie, and that he allows a child to teach him lessons he still needs to learn.

If you didn’t write books and teach creative writing, what would you do for a living?

My first love is children, and I think if I hadn’t been able to teach writing to adults and children, I would have worked with children in another capacity, perhaps as a child psychologist or sociologist who specialized in the lives of the children. Both of those were interests when I began college, but they were put aside for writing.

If you were an animal, which animal would you want to be?

In terms of temperament, I’m probably most like a dog. I’m happy to be a loyal companion, to sleep between walks, to enjoy the world on a sensory level. We have an adored family dog named Rollo, a Brittany Spaniel mutt, and I wouldn’t mind living his existence. Maybe in my next lifetime, I can sleep next to my owner while she writes.

Sheila O’Connor, author and educator

Biography

Sheila O’Connor is the critically acclaimed author of Sparrow Road, winner of the International Reading Award, and Keeping Safe the Stars, as well as the adult novels Tokens of Grace and Where No Gods Came, winner of the Michigan Prize for Literary Fiction and the Minnesota Book Award. A writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction for audiences of all ages, Sheila is a professor in the MFA program at Hamline University, where she also serves as the fiction editor for Water~Stone Review. You can visit Sheila at sheilaoconnor.com.

This week, as I reviewed the list of books she’s had read to her, or has looked at, over and over again, I thought about the many social, emotional, creative, and intellectual gifts she’s received as a result.

I picture her at a book party, holding a bunch of brightly-colored balloons decorated with each of the reasons why parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, older brothers and sisters, friends, teachers, and librarians—why, everybody!—should read stories aloud to young children.

1. I learn to listen.

2. I grow my vocabulary

3. I develop empathy.

4. I have fun.

5. I laugh out loud.

6. I learn a second language.

7. I find out about the world and all its diversity.

8. I realize that I can be and do many things.

9. I observe amazing art.

10. I feel the rhythm of language.

11. I encounter all the information that can be found in books.

12. I spark my imagination.

13. I see myself and others different from myself.

14. I feel loved.

15. I feel safe.

And now, for a moment I remember how, before I began reading on my own, my mother’s voice brought my favorite stories to life. How these stories created in me a sense of hope and well-being, assuring me that the world was full of possibilities; that I could do and be many things, a heroine of my own adventure.

2018 Children’s Book Week poster, designed by Jillian Tamaki

You ask yourself, are any of my favorite books on the list? Are there any books on the list that I’d like to read?

As a children’s book author, I feel the best book lists are those that are read and selected by the young readers themselves, like the Maud Hart Lovelace Book Award in Minnesota, or those in other states that sponsor such “children’s choice” award programs.

In that spirit, and upon the occasion of my granddaughter’s birthday this week, I asked my daughter to compile a list of Ofelia’s favorite books from the third year of her life.

Ofelia wearing her hand-sewn Pippi Longstocking apron

Except for the books in Swedish, Ofelia’s second language, I admit that her list held a few surprises:

Animalia and The Waterhole by Graeme Base

Aunt Green, Aunt Brown, and Aunt Lavender by Elsa Beskow

Town Mouse, Country Mouse by Jan Brett

The Gruffalo, The Snail and the Whale, and Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Alex Scheffler

Oh, No! by Candace Fleming Eric Rohman

Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth by Oliver Jeffers

Pippi Longstocking (original picture book) by Astrid Lindgren with illustrations by Ingrid Nyman

Fables by Arnold Lobel

The High Street and Grandma’s House by Alice Melvin

Maps by Aleksandra Mizielinska and Daniel Mizielinski

The Peter Rabbit Pop-up Book by Beatrix Potter

Books written or illustrated by Richard Scarry – too many to name – including my favorite, I am A Bunny

Plume by Isabelle Simler

In next week’s blog post, I’ll reflect upon what I learned about selecting books to read to young readers and the reasons that reading aloud is so very important for their social, emotional, artistic, and intellectual development.

Hunter believed that the foremost job of teachers was decision making, and that each teacher makes thousands of decisions each day.

All the decisions a teacher makes can be put into one of three categories: (1) content category—what you are going to teach; (2) teaching behavior category—what you as a teacher will do to facilitate and execute that learning; and (3) learning behavior category—how the students are going to learn and how they will let you know that they’ve learned it.

Following my author visit to Scandia Elementary School on March 28, 2018, third grade teacher Kelly Duncan asked her students to write “reflection papers” about my visit.

Their first-draft reflections provided the teacher with valuable information about how well her students can articulate a shared experience visually and in writing. The papers provided me with valuable information that I can use to plan effective classroom presentations in the future; a continuous cycle of teaching and learning.

I would have liked to have displayed copies of every child’s reflection in this blog post; each was unique and special in its own way. The three I chose nicely illustrate how the students put their hearts and minds into what they saw and heard during my presentation.

Other favorite observations written by these delightful third graders were:

• She told us about how to write a book, and make sock monkeys. I think I’m going to do that when I get home.
• She carries a journal everywhere she goes.
• She gets her character ideas from her life.
• We saw all her artifacts.
• She said to use your imagination.
• She showed us it’s pretty much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle to make a book.
• I asked her a question about why the judge (Annaliese’s father) is mean.
• She talked about how she came up with ideas. She writes whatever comes to her mind, which I like that.
• My favorite part is when Annaliese makes a costume for Great-Grandmama’s 90^th
• She is a grandmother. She was fun!
• The book is great so far. I wonder what the end will be like.

*PS: Spring has finally arrived in Minnesota! Purple crocuses are pushing through the last layers of snow. A wild turkey spent the morning wandering about our backyard. The little girls from next door rode their pastel pedal bikes with sparkly streamers for the first time. Baby birds and rabbit kittens will be here soon. Enjoy!

Photo: Julianna Funk | 123rf.com

Three Chimneys on Lilac Lane

Eileen Beha

If my mother didn’t have Alzheimer’s,
I’d walk up her gravel driveway,
lined with lilac bushes in bloom,
to the brick bungalow with three chimneys,
where I grew up.

She’d be standing on the concrete steps,
waiting for me to arrive.

We’d walk into the cramped kitchen—
room only for a table and three chairs,
the counter covered with freshly-baked pies:
pecan, raspberry, and strawberry rhubarb.

She’d claim to have forgotten my favorite
and baked all three.

She would not be lying in a crank-up bed in a beige room, 
clutching The Lutheran Hymnal with trembling fingers.
She would not tell me about her breakfast: oatmeal full of ants.

She would not look up, wild-eyed.

But even if she did, even if she did, 
Mom would remember my name.

“First Marriage” was inspired by New York City, 1975, a photo by Joel Meyerowitz, from the Howard Greenberg Gallery

First Marriage          

Eileen Beha

Fueled
by the steam heat
of fresh love.
Driven
by the power of
magical thinking.
In spite of
shadows of the past
pressed on our backs
We bought
matching gold bands.
Then Mom said, Marry
in haste; repent
in leisure. And
so we did.

Photo: Jeffrey McGraw | 123rf.com

Upon Reading James Finley in Cabo San Lucas 

Eileen Beha

I get up in the morning and touch my feet to the floor;
the sun rises pink in the sky.
In the distance a pair of flamingos honk, heralding this arrival
And I wonder:
Is this ordinary experience of an utterly ordinary event, 
this press of calloused skin on cool Mexican tile,
the mystery of God manifesting itself
in — and as — this very ordinariness?

I settle into a webbed chair, blue,
on the balcony of Pueblo Bonito Blanco.
In the manicured grass below,
the sun kisses the flamingos’ shell-pink feathers.
With inarticulate certainty in the pit of my stomach
I realize my eternal oneness with God;
the clarity of seeing something beautiful
and immediately knowing:
It is beautiful.

Ms. Maggie Myre’s 4th grade classroom at Scandia Elementary pictured with Christine Maefsky, Mayor of Scandia.

At my request, I did presentations to seven individual 3^rd and 4^th grade classrooms of students rather than in a larger assembly. Also at my request, their teachers helped the students prepare questions in advance.

After my formal 20-minute presentation about reading, writing, and publishing books for young readers, I opened it up for questions.

I’m sure that I answered at least 15 to 20 prepared and spontaneous questions in each of the seven sessions, some the same, many different.

I was impressed by the students’ astute and thoughtful questions. But I also surprised myself when my answers spontaneously released discoveries that I’ve made as a writer over the past twenty years.

Here is an unstructured, slightly random list of some of the thoughts I shared with these young readers and aspiring writers. In essence, they represent the essential core of what I’ve learned as I’ve studied and practiced the craft.

• “If you remember only one thing I say today, I hope it is this: You are unique. There is not now, nor will there ever be, another person just like you.”
• Inside each of you is a story that needs to be told and you are the one to tell it. The only one.
• Write what you know: playing a French horn, being on a hockey team, being an older sister, starting over in a new school.
• Your subconscious—what you know, but didn’t know you knew—will guide you to the emotional heart of your story, if you just let it.
• A story starts with a single spark of the imagination.
• The power of your imagination is infinite, without beginning or end.
• To write a story is to revise a story, over and over again.
• A book is never complete until it is read. It is you—the reader—who finishes the story with your own imagination.
• Writing a book is like doing a 1000-piece puzzle without an illustration on the cover of the puzzle box.

• I use my imagination to create fictional characters (human or animal) that combine what I know about myself with the traits of three others that I’ve known.
• Writers are readers. Why? For my answer I paraphrased one of my favorite quotes about reading by Esther Porter: Your brain files away lesson after lesson all on its own. Reading great books can answer your revision questions, even if you’re unaware of what you’re looking for. We pick up stylistic tools and techniques, we develop our sense of linguistic rhythm, we even become better spellers when we read. And when we return to our writing, we do so with a more complete tool best, with the ability to fix problems we couldn’t see before.
• When writing fiction, keep this in mind: Only trouble is interesting.
• William Faulkner said: The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.
• Sometimes a writer’s first idea is not the best idea. The pieces of the puzzle don’t fit. The plot threads won’t come together. You can’t find its emotional center. Be prepared to start over.

“Sometimes a writer’s first idea is not the best idea. … Be prepared to start over.”

• Writing a book is difficult.
• Our stories—my stories, your stories—are hidden, like secrets in the attics of our own lives.
• The characters for your stories are all around you.
• Writing IS revision.
• Bringing a book into the world is a team effort; the author is no longer in control.
• You learn how to write a book by writing a book.

About six weeks earlier, Tiffany had contacted me on Facebook Messenger; she wondered if I had any public author events scheduled in the Twin Cities area this spring. Audrey, who adores sock monkeys, had read The Secrets of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea and she’d loved it.

I have a couple of school visits scheduled, I told her, but nothing that is open to the public. Then I asked, off the top of my head, whether she and Audrey ever went to Wild Rumpus bookstore in south Minneapolis. I said I’d be happy to arrange a “meet and greet” there sometime in March.

We agreed to get together on Saturday, March 17th, at 10:30 in the morning. Located in the Linden Hills neighborhood, Wild Rumpus is always busy on Saturday mornings. I checked the store’s online calendar in advance and didn’t notice any special events planned.

The store was especially crowded when I arrived. Two elaborately costumed people wearing silver masks nudged past me. Rambunctious toddlers darted between the shelves chasing clucking chickens. The cats—Booker T., Trini Lopez, and Walter Dean—had gone into hiding. The caged cockatiels were squawking.

I told Tiffany in advance how to recognize me: I’d be the woman carrying a sock monkey. It worked. Audrey spied me first; the rest of the family followed. We tried to visit in a corner of the bookstore, but found it too loud and distracting. With Audrey again in the lead, the seven of us exited through the little purple door toward two sun-drenched benches on that chilly spring day.

Each member of the family wore a touch of green; they were Irish and looking forward to a meal of corned beef and cabbage. Audrey had a green and white shamrock scarf tied around her neck and a shy, but delightful smile on her face.

Looking back on it, I remembered that a few weeks earlier on a flight home from Newark, I sat down next to an attractive, well-dressed woman, perhaps in her early fifties. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said in a calm, all-knowing voice.

Her professional name, I discovered, was Guru Mata. She is a Hindu spiritual healer from New Jersey who was returning to her birthplace, in the Twin Cities to celebrate her widowed mother’s 70th birthday. I rarely speak to strangers on airplanes; however, much to my surprise, she and I engaged in a wide-ranging conversation about matters of spiritual faith and healing that lasted almost the whole flight. “In life,” Guru Mata asserted, “there are no coincidences.”

Perhaps not …

A few days later, there I was … sitting on a bench with a young reader who loved sock monkeys. Ironically, Audrey’s sister’s name, McKenna, is that of a main character in my earlier book, Tango: The Tale of an Island Dog. Dangling from Ellia’s fingers was a shiny plastic, silver link necklace with a silver heart charm. (The plot of Tango turns on the loss and discovery of a silver link dog collar with a silver heart identification tag.)

On the bench Audrey told me what she’d liked most about The Secrets of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea: ALL the sock monkeys, the details, the mystery, and the fact that the ending wasn’t a fairy tale’s happily-ever-after ending, but happy enough.

“During all the years I struggled to write this book,” I told Audrey, “I held out the hope that someday, some way, a child just like you would love the story of Annaliese Easterling and Throckmorton, her simply remarkable sock monkey, and I’m so pleased that you did.”

The family thanked me for coming. I signed Audrey’s copy of my book and also the copy of Tango I’d brought along for McKenna. I suggested that the story of the little dog’s adventures on Prince Edward Island might be a good family read-aloud. In my imagination, I can picture this book-loving family doing just that.

I walked away smiling, and waved goodbye, feeling blessed.

frame copyright: tanais / 123RF Stock Photo

However, lately I’ve decided that I did something even more important: As a child, I played. Growing up in the 1950’s I played with dolls I named Ginny, Cindy, and Saucy. I cut out Betsy-Tacy paper dolls. I took stuffed dogs named Lady and Tramp on long walks, holding their red plastic leashes tightly in my small hand. I spent hours with a family with six children who lived in a tin, two-story dollhouse.

And, it was through this act of playing that I practiced and learned the most valuable skill of all: I developed an imagination. I developed my innate ability to form stories in my mind, an ability to create.

A year after I was born, the American Character Doll Company introduced Tiny Tears^®, a rubber doll with a hard-plastic head and molded hair. Tiny Tears had a round face, blue eyes with thick lashes, a pinched button nose, and an open hole in her tiny red mouth. The diapered doll came in a box with a baby bottle, pacifier and bubble pipe. In addition to drinking, wetting, and blowing bubbles, Tiny Tears could cry real tears.

No seven year-old girl was ever happier than I when Santa Claus left a ‘crybaby’ under our family’s Christmas tree.

Tiny Tears

Tiny Tears was just one of my many dolls, carefully selected by my mother. My mother loved dolls; she kept her own until the end of her life. No doubt I will too.

Tiny Tears wasn’t my first baby doll, but she and her predecessor, a cherub-like infant named Susie, were, and still are, my favorites.

Susie-doll

Like the hand-sewn, sentient sock monkeys in The Secrets of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea, my dolls were well-loved. Wear and tear from squishy hugs and frequent handling are evidence of that.

Tiny Tears now has a break in her head and a fissure crack above her faded blue eyes. Her left arm is loose in its socket. Susie-Doll’s once soft and rubbery body feels like wood. Her right arm is crumbling, her left arm long gone. Meant to look like real human beings, these toys willingly assumed the endless variety of voices and personalities and roles that my young imagination assigned them.

Eventually another baby doll came into my life, one I’d most likely seen in Wish Book, the Sears Roebuck annual Christmas catalog. At first glance, Baby-doll was perfect every way. She had a pink bonnet, a ruffled pink party dress and pink slip and bloomers. In truth her perfectly formed plastic body was too large to carry, too hard to snuggle with, too cumbersome for quick and easy wardrobe changes. Her eyes seemed too blue and sparkly. She was a doll to be looked at, a doll who was difficult to love.

Baby-doll

A few weeks ago, the importance of play in the development of creativity was brought close to home when I spent a week in New Jersey with my granddaughter. Like all young children, her imagination is wild and fearless. The lines between the real and the imaginary are wonderfully blurred. She invites giraffes and dinosaurs to tea parties. She scrubs down Rody, a play riding pony, with a vegetable brush in the kitchen sink. She diapers Pippa, a stuffed rabbit, with paper towels.

Knowing my history, it should come as no surprise that soon after Ofelia’s birth I started thinking about the kind of baby doll I was going to buy for her. When I shared my desire with my daughter, she promptly said, “No, Mom. No baby dolls.”

Luckily my daughter has changed her mind. For my granddaughter’s third birthday in May, my present will be a custom-made Waldorf baby doll. My daughter found the doll maker on Etsy.com. We co-selected our desired eye color, skin color, hair color and style, as well as the colors, fabrics, and yarns for the doll’s first outfit, making me a very happy grandmother.

Waldorf dolls

My own precious dolls and our endless hours of play left an indelible mark on my heart and memory. In ways both conscious and unconscious, our long-ago time together leaves its mark on the kinds of stories for children that I’m trying to tell.

Eileen in front of the Emily Carr House

Settee, Emily Carr House

Parlour, Emily Carr House

Jan Ross was generous with her knowledge and time. I’d known that Emily Carr was a published author, but not that she’d first gained widespread fame and recognition for her vivid and beautifully written books. Carr’s “word sketches” (her name for the kind of writing she did) reached millions of listeners when read aloud on CBC public radio, subsequently spurring great interest in her paintings.

Emily, who kept journals and created sketchpads throughout her life, starting writing when she could no longer paint due to chronic and significant health problems primarily related to her heart. In fact, all of her great writing was done from her sick bed. She was 70 years old when her first book Klee Wyck was published. An evocative work that describes in arresting detail her experiences amount First Nations people and cultures on British Columbia’s west coast, the book won the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction in 1941.

Books written by Emily Carr, or collections based on archival material

The Book of Small, published in 1942 by Oxford University Press, is a collection of thirty-six word sketches in which she relates anecdotes about her life and times as a girl growing up in what was then the frontier town of Victoria. The last book published during her lifetime is titled The House of All Sorts: heartfelt, heartbreaking, and humorous stories about the trials of being a landlady in a small apartment house she built as a source of income to support herself as she pursued her creative calling. Right around the corner from the Emily Carr House, the building still stands to this day.

The House of All Sorts

As my husband and I toured the Emily Carr House and Gardens, Emily Carr’s presence was felt in reproductions of her paintings, passages from her books, furnishings from the time period, artifacts that once belonged to the Carr family, and sepia tone photographs of Emily, her parents and her four sisters.

The Breakfast Room

In February 1945, with no specific complaint except weariness, Emily checked into the newly opened St. Mary’s Priory nursing home in Victoria. Biographer Paula Blanchard writes, “Although she had another show in mind and unpublished manuscripts next to her bed, all her major work was done. “I used to wonder,” she once wrote to her closest friend Ira Dilworth, “what people who were facing death thought about it. They seldom mentioned it and I often wished they would. (We are rather cowardly about that thing.) Now I look at it very much as I used to look … on going out into the woods in the van in the old days, busying myself in the preparation of leaving things as straight as I can, and leaving the new camp to be itself when I get there.” On 2 March 1945, in the middle of the afternoon, she got there.

Indian Church, Emily Carr, 1929

Final note: Inscribed on her simple tombstone in Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria:

EMILY CARTER, 1871 – 1945
ARTIST AND AUTHOR
LOVER OF NATURE

A few hours later, at the entrance to the Victoria’s Empress Hotel (where Emily often endured ‘high tea’ with her parents and four sisters), Emily herself greeted us, or so it seemed, sketch pad in hand. Emily’s Javanese monkey ‘Woo’ perches on her shoulder. Her beloved purebred Bobtail sheepdog ‘Billie’ stands nearby.

Barbara Paterson, sculptor, Emily Carr, 2010

Cast in bronze, the commissioned statue is a masterful rendering of this visionary artist who captured the coastal forest landscape, generally around her Victoria home, in a way previously unseen in British Columbian art.

Over the next three days, Ralph and I walked the paths Emily once walked:  along the Victoria waterfront, through Beacon Hill Park where wild peacocks roam, past Parliament buildings, and totem poles and First Nations monuments in Thunderbird Park.

Eileen viewing totem poles, Thunderbird Park, Victoria, BC

While viewing the First Nations collection in the Royal British Columbia Museum we came face-to-face with two and three-dimensional representations of the history, art, and culture of the people to whom Emily Carr paid homage in her paintings and writings.

Documentary photo, First Nations Gallery, RBCM, Victoria

Totem pole, First Nations gallery, RBCM, Victoria

On her many—often solo—travels to Native villages in and around the northern part of Vancouver Island, Emily discovered how closely the Indians were linked not only to their traditions but to nature itself: their lives were regulated by the tides and seasons as well as by the myths that surround their guardian spirits. For her, an outsider, nature and tradition were memorably combined in “the great stillness, the solemn old grey poles towering above the tent, the shorter mortuary columns crowed with their crusted coffins, the water softly lapping the pebbly beach, & the sullen roar of the distant surf.”

According to biographer Maria Tippet, in these deserted villages Carr was able to experience the wholeness that she sought all her life: everything was part of everything else.

Big Eagle, Skidigate BC, Emily Carr, oil on paper, 1930

Picturing the Giants: The Changing Landscapes of Emily Carr was the name of the major exhibition of Emily Carr’s work at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Carr was an early and ardent environmentalist who championed the preservation of old-growth forests she portrayed in her work. Among her most famous is Above the Gravel Pit.

Above the Gravel Pit, oil on paper, 1936

About this haunting painting art critic Andrew Hunter writes in “Clear Cut,” an essay: “More boldly even than her scenes of heavily-logged terrain, the gravel pit expresses the dramatic transformation taking place around Carr: the steady growth of Victoria and its methodical encroachment on the surrounding landscape … Not a virgin wilderness but a space transformed and scarred by human presence and industry.”

While in Victoria, I was reminded that Carr had years of formal art training in British Columbia, San Francisco, London, and Paris. She began her artistic career as an art teacher. She converted the barn at her family home into an art studio in 1894 where she taught art to children. Later, in 1906, she moved to Vancouver to start a job as an art teacher at the Vancouver Studio Club and School of Art, but left to open her own studio and to teach children’s art classes. Carr dabbled in a variety of styles prevalent in the early 20th century, such as Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Expressionism. She was not, by any means, a self-taught child prodigy.

Months later and back in Minneapolis, I still smile when I think about how Carr travelled around Vancouver Island sketching and painting landscapes in a caravan outfitted for herself and her companion animals, a caravan she named “The Elephant.”

And then, from time to time I think about how incredibly interesting it would have been to travel with her.

Patricia Morley, Emily Carr and Her Caravan at the South-west End of Esquimate Lagoon, 1934