At the beach again. It is another beautiful day. It feels like summer will never end....but I know the sands will be cold someday and snow will pile up high as I slip across the ice of this very place where I swim in the summer heat today.
For now, this is enough.
Today there are two people fishing. They have their poles set up by the water just so...they can sit in the shade and watch the slight movement in the waters as the waves lap the shore..
I watch from the waters. Careful not to disturb their fishing...
Suddenly the pole moves!! The large fat man springs into action..everyone runs towards the bobbing pole as he starts to reel in a big fish...then nothing..the fish got away..
I muse....my mermaid tail of musing wags and takes me down into deeper waters..I swim into deeper waters and muse some more...thinking way back in time to when I lived on a small island off the west coast of Ireland over 30 years ago. Time passes..that project lingers...it is a memoir...a visual memoir..that project My memoir, my drawings, my organized and disorganized ideas are in boxes, in piles...I moved them around on a regular basis...but if not now, when?? there are fish I need to catch in a symbolic way....poles that need bait..Lately I have worked on a query letter....something to catch someone's interest........a publisher's
( oh so grandiose an idea) interest?? an editor??? an agent?? someone interested to help me pull this material together and post it to the world...
I muse, I swim deeper into philosophical waters ....wondering...if I am brave enough, if this project is worth it..if I have enough courage....wondering as I flop around in the waters.....wondering and musing some more...
The fishermen on the shore bait their hooks, cast a line and wait for a bite. Their presence inspires me. I will persevere..
so here, dear reader is my query letter:
WATER FROM THE WELL: My Island Memoir by Anita White
Over the past thirty years I have worked on a visual and written narrative memoir about the period of time I spent living on the island of Inisheer from 1975 to 1979. My memoir captures the rhythm of island life as well as the philosophical and inward musings I experienced living alone in such a remote area. The island was 2 miles by 2 miles, population 250. Everyone was related. I was a stranger there. While I lived there I wove belts for a living. I also kept a journal, drew and painted. My life revolved around the simple demands of living with no running water or electricity. Every day I made a coal fire for warmth and cooking. Each morning I cleaned out the ashes It was still a time of tradition on the island. A timeless place of saint’s beds, ancient buried church in the sand and old places of meaning and mystery. When I lived there I went to the spring daily for drinking water. I left the old thatched cottage that had once been the house of the storyteller and walked the narrow borreen path to get to the spring for the fresh water which filled my blue plastic bucket. That fresh spring water is also a metaphor for the time I spent there and the memories that have welled up since that have informed my narrative memoir process. While there I made friends with some of the wise old people of the island. They told me about the tides, how to gather seaweed and what kind of weather each wind brought.
. The memoir is structured on the series of drawings I made of a traditional tarred boat (curragh) that I documented during my last summer ( 1978) on the island. Essays, poems, and musings accompany each drawing. Having made friends with the boat maker I set out to document the making of a curragh from start to finish. I also have a series of colorful drawings about my relationship to the storyteller whose cottage I lived in that constitutes a cartoon graphic novel.
. My island life calls out to me like a siren from the past In retrospect I marvel at the simplicity of my island life before cell phones and the Internet This book will appeal to those who yearn to know what it is like to live a simple like that. It is a unique journey of an artists life in far away place.
I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am an artist, storyteller and art teacher (twenty five years) I have shown my art work widely in the Twin Cities area.
I look forward to hearing from you. Anita White
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