coincidence

Author, illustrator plan meet and greet

Julia Cooper , Register Correspondent

-MILFORD — Author Josepha Sherman and illustrator Linda Wingerter have seemingly been drawn together by coincidence.

Sherman, a recent transplant from Manhattan, created a multicultural collection of horse folktales titled "Magic Hoofbeats" in 2000. The book, published in 2004, came to life with illustrations by Wingerter, a West Haven resident and teacher of puppetry at Quinnipiac University.

The two women, however, did not meet during the time they both spent working on the book. It took two more years for them to finally get to know each other through Artifax, a small shop in the downtown area offering art from around the world.

"I was exploring Artifax because it looked interesting," said Sherman, who was once an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "I was wandering around and saw my book and said, ‘That’s me.’"

Sherman’s book grew out of her love for horses. She said her mother gave her a horse toy when she was three and "that was it." It was Sherman’s mother who also helped foster her writing.

"I’ve been writing since I can remember," said Sherman. "My mother was a screenwriter and short story writer. I was always encouraged to write."

Sherman chose folk tales because she said they are "a universal literature."

It was Wingerter’s own love of horses and past experiences that led her to illustrate Sherman’s book.

"The publisher told me that this was a book about horses," said Wingerter. "I grew up on a horse farm in Maine and Vermont. I love horses."

Wingerter also said that illustrating fairy tales and folklore is her "absolute favorite," and such work is hard to come by in the illustration field.

It was only after Sherman found her own book in Artifax that shop owner Ann Solomon decided the two women should get together and introduce their work to the community. In addition to a copy of "Magic Hoofbeats" on display at the store, Solomon also had additional illustrations by Wingerter, which often involve horses.

The store will hold a meet and greet with author and illustrator at 3 p.m. Nov. 25.

Solomon hopes members of the community will stop by to meet the women and have the opportunity to discuss what it means to be an author or an illustrator.

"Their work falls in line with what I try to do here in the shop, which is promote multiculturalism," Solomon said. "And I just couldn’t resist the synchronicity of the situation. It was just such a coincidence."

"At this event people are going to be allowed to ask questions," said Sherman. "We want that because all people are a closet writer or artist."

Wingerter said, "I’ll have my paintings and the book on display so I can show the process that goes on between the two."

interlude (cont'd again)

The soul within our individual souls
loves the one who runs and falls down

more than the one who sits and watches.
The soul within soul lives in a lover.

Consider this metaphor: how you love is
the open sky.


Rumi

fortune cookie #4

Be willing to be uncomfortable. Be comfortable being uncomfortable. It may get tough.

absorption

Spiral Transit
Remedios Varo
oil on masonite
1962

"Remedios Varo believed in magic. Deeply superstitious and strongly attuned to nature, she held a mystical belief in forces beyond the self that influence and direct events. She approached both her life and her art committed to this vision. Strolling along a Mexican street one evening, she noticed plants with beautiful white egglike fruits. Fascinated, she took one to her apartment, set it among her plants on the terrace in full moonlight, and carefully nestled tubes of paint around it. She felt that this conjunction of the special plant, her paints, and the moon might prove auspicious for the next day of painting."

interlude (still cont'd)

On foot
I had to walk through the solar systems,
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already, I sense myself.
Somewhere in space hangs my heart,
sparks fly from it, shaking the air,
to other reckless hearts.

Edith Sodergran

interlude (cont'd)

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.


Rainer Maria Rilke

interlude (cont'd)

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.


David Whyte

interlude

I am too tired to blog. I let the poets take over while I rest.

I have begun,
when I'm weary and can't decide an answer to a bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.

Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?

They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling-- whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,

to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy's ashes were--
it's green in there, a green vase,

and I ask Billy if I should return to the difficult phone call and he says, yes.
Billy's already gone through the frightening door,

whatever he says I'll do.


Marie Howe

Rumi

Rumi reader is probably the most questioned part of the above Antinomia description.

Jalalludin Rumi was a sufi teacher in Turkey in the 1200s, and the originator of the Mevlevi sufis, the whirling dervishes. He had a pretty normal life until he was 34, when he met the mysterious and rebellious wanderer, Shams Tabrizi, who questioned Rumi's faith and threw all his theological books into a fountain. Rumi was so struck with love for Shams that he passed out from a kind of ecstatic epiphany on the spot. Shams immediately became his beloved friend and teacher, the two were scandalously inseparable for years until Shams was killed by Rumi's jealous students. The loss sent Rumi into the deepest despair and he walked around a pole in his garden for a month, and this is the story of how the whirling, the turning, or the sema, came to be.

After he'd worn a circle a few feet into the ground he started writing poetry inspired by the absence of his friend. He wrote so much it filled a couple dozen books. He is the best selling poet in the United States.

It's easy to relate to Rumi's circular method of grieving and admire his way of turning sadness into a joyful dance. And in his poems he comes across as someone you'd very much like to know. He's relentlessly enthusiastic and optimistic, even in the worst kind of longing and heartache. To him the universe is ever playful, and he never loses his sly sense of humor. It seems like he loved life so much he couldn't contain himself. His poems are bursting with fire and wine and love without shame or apology.


Whatever you feel is yours the Friend
pulls you away from.

Decisions made at
night seem strange the next day. Where

are you when you sleep? A trickster
curls on the headboard. Restless in

the valley, you go to the ocean. Then
turning toward the light, you fall in

the fire. Who jiggles this battered
saucepan? The sky puts a yoke on you

to help with turning around a pole.
Teachers get dizzy like students. The

lion that killed you now wonders whether
to drag you off or tear you to pieces

here. There's a shredding that's really
a healing, that makes you more alive!

A lion holds you in his arms. Fingers
rake the fretbridge for music. A

compass revolves around the metal foot
point. Some grow fond of battle armor;

some, satin clothing. Others, like me,
love the word bunches called poetry.

Arden

There is a forest of Arden between the Quinnipiac University cafeteria and the puppetry classroom. Trees with cryptic messages line the path. I'm told art students put them there, but who can really say.

My friend Eliza B has been noticing the messages too.