Thank you for your concern Stacie, and all of you who wondered where I’ve been. Just needed to spend time writing other things.

I’ve had two assignments due this week so I’ve been very busy. I decided to write a term paper for my Japanese art class; the topic statement and bibliography were due Tuesday. Since I am only auditing the class doing the work is optional. In fact, in most of the audit classes I’ve taken the profs don’t want me to do the work. It just makes more work for them. But Karen Gerhart is exceptional; she always encourages me to do as much as I can. I came up with a topic that really interests me and which I will post about at a later time.

Thursday, I will give my Emily Carr presentation to the travel writing class. Creating a Powerpoint show with her paintings was simple. Now I’m adding, I hope relevant, quotes from her writing to each slide. I have selected a charming piece about ravens in Sitka to read to the class:

But I do see the barracks flagpole, tall, with a shiny gold ball on its top, and over that ball always, always three or four of Sitka’s great black ravens–circling, hovering, trying again and again, each in turn, to maintain a foot hold on the slithery gilt ball. Generation after generation of ravens has tried; it is a tribal game, old as the flagpole. No resident of Sitka has ever yet seen one raven succeed.                                  Emily Carr, The Heart of a Peacock

Here is the beginning of an outline I will work from as I show the presentation:

• Emily Carr was born in 1871 in Victoria, British Columbia, an isolated backwater
• Family came from England and maintained English manners and values
• Studied art in San Francisco, then England and France
• Learned her own bold, colorful, post-impressionist style of painting
• Returned to British Columbia in 1908 and for the next 10 years concentrated on nature and native peoples, realizing that their way of life was disappearing
• Unable to live by selling her art she spent the next 15 years as the landlord of a small apartment building in Victoria
• She wrote many stories about her experiences but was unable to get them published
• Resumed painting at the age of 57 after her work was discovered by an ethnologist working in BC and she was invited to participate in a show of Canadian artists
• Carr’s reputation today is largely based on work she created after finally receiving this recognition
• She continued painting until she suffered the first of several heart attacks, then went back to her writing as being less physically demanding
• Her first book was published when she was 71 and was followed by the publication of 4 other books, 2 of them posthumously