Mary T. Wagner

Running With Stilettos

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Shop Girl!!

January 21, 2019 By Mary T. Wagner 2 Comments

Red Breasted Nuthatch

There are any number of things that I never saw coming before I jumped right in. Law school. Blogging. “Live Lit.” Sketching pictures of cats and mice and circus wagons for my own children’s books.

And along the way, all of the unknowns turned out to be just the entry points for some incredible adventures, happy thoughts, fond memories, and genuine “eureka” moments.

To that list, I’ve now added “Shop Girl.” As in, I now have a little shop in cyberspace called BooksBirdsBeauty where I sell porcelain birds and plates and knickknacks. I can genuinely say I had no idea how much fun I’d have and the learning I’d embrace!

As usual, I stepped into the great unknown sideways, or even backwards. After selling my empty nest with the fourteen acres and moving to a smaller place, I discovered that there was literally no place for me to set up a bird feeder to watch the feathered visitors that brightened my day every time I’d looked out the kitchen window. Blue Jays, Indigo Buntings, White Breasted Nuthatches, Goldfinches, Cardinals, Rose Breasted Grosbeaks… the list went on and on. And they were so close to my window I didn’t even need to break out the binoculars!

And so, in a fit of compensation, I began to collect porcelain birds at thrift stores and estate sales to sprinkle around my new digs, to remind me of my former delights. It grew into a habit. Did I mention that I live in a small space? There are only so many niches I could put my new acquisitions in, and they filled up in a hurry.

As I rotated through new “favorites” and other, earlier, birds fell from favor, I set up a little shop on Etsy to sell the extras. It was a nice little hobby, I thought, as I continued to upgrade my expectations as to what would make the strings of my heart go “zing” when I saw it sitting on a shelf. It also gave me a reason to actually walk into the occasional garage sale by myself without feeling self-conscious about it. Prior to my bird-collecting binge, I’d only ridden shotgun to these events with a friend who has a bona fide antique shop, and my primary aims were to get in some female bonding time, and to see how much fun I could have spending, oh, a quarter.

But life threw an unexpected curve ball, in the form of my elderly mother breaking a hip, and suddenly in the months that followed full of serial crises and emergencies there was no part of my life that was my own. I felt like a marionette, jerked by invisible strings at any given moment from brushing my teeth in the morning until falling into bed at night. Creativity and writing and inventiveness went out the window. In their stead I found that hitting a thrift store or two on my lunch hour still gave me a surge of endorphins as I searched for that inexpensive, elusive treasure that had been someone’s discard. It kept me amused, it kept me just a little bit busy, and it came without a deadline.

Along the way I managed to score dozens of interesting books to read to the grandchildren, some knockout vintage “clasp” bracelets for myself (I used to joke that they were my very own brass knuckles in a courtroom), and my all time favorite indulgence, a faux fur coat from the 1970s that makes me think I belong in some scene from Doctor Zhivago with a young Omar Sharif involving a horse-drawn sleigh on the snow-covered Russian steppes.

My “Doctor Zhivago” coat!

Little by little, as I looked up the backstamps on every porcelain cup and bowl and knicknack, every bird and squirrel figurine and vintage planter shaped like a fish or a deer, I added to that complicated ball of arcane knowledge in my head, and it was fun, and sometimes it was even inspiring! Some of it was just darned…entertaining. I now know what a “whistling sake” decanter is, and can recognize “dragon ware” (which looks just as dramatic as it sounds!), and know that an Imperial Cart of ancient Japan was drawn by an ox, not a horse. But some of these lessons have been far, far more important.

While researching some images painted on Japanese porcelain, I came across an image of “The Great Wave off Kanagawa.”

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

It is an iconic image of a giant wave cresting, published between 1829 and 1833 by the Japanese artist Hokusai, and it was the first of 36 fabulous woodblock prints he created featuring views of Mount Fuji. And he was in his seventies when he began this enormous project! I immediately added a book with the Mount Fuji series to my own library, both for beauty and inspiration.

Several months later I was in a thrift store and came across some porcelain plates featuring nature studies of game birds by the British artist Basil Ede. I had never heard of Basil Ede before, but I could certainly recognize that these were gorgeous renditions of birds in their native habitat. And seriously, anything with a bird on it will catch my eye from across a room.

Game Birds by Basil Ede on porcelain plates

And so I bought the plates, of course, but more importantly when I got home I began to pull on the internet threads concerning Ede. I learned that he was widely considered to be about as thoroughly and scrupulously talented an avian artist as John James Audubon. But the really inspirational lesson in human perseverance came when I discovered that he had suffered a stroke when he was in his late fifties, and it prevented him from painting with his right hand. And so he retaught himself to paint using his left hand and within three years was back to painting with considerable detail. I was awestruck by his resilience…and immediately added a book of his bird portraits to my own library.

And so it goes. For every piece of porcelain I pick up, there’s always a backstory to find and a bit more knowledge to absorb. And on occasion, there are examples of human endurance and creativity and resilience and courage that shine through as well.

I’ve finally resumed writing, by the way. But there’s absolutely no way I’m giving up this new habit. So onward…to the next estate sale! Who knows what the next piece of porcelain will teach me?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: antiques, endurance, growth, hobbies, inspiration, learning, lifelong learning, new frontiers, new horizons, personal growth, reinvention, starting over, thrift shopping, vintage

Collaboration, Inspiration!

July 10, 2016 By Mary T. Wagner Leave a Comment

Inspiration can come from so MANY places! It can spring from something that we experience—love, loss, passion, emotions—or from things that we see—beauty, nature, patterns, bodies, machines. The combinations and ignition points are infinite, but one thing that doesn’t necessarily spring to the head of the list is that incredible creative spark that can ignite when two or more creative people springboard their art off of each other. Absolute magic can happen!

Gina Covelli reads her poem "Still Standing"

Gina Covelli reads her poem “Still Standing”

I had the extraordinary opportunity to have this kind of fun a couple of times now in a collaborative setting through the community arts group I belong to, Sheboygan Visual Artists. As the name makes plain, we’re a (continually growing!) bunch of folks who like to create visual arts. There are painters (oils, watercolors, acrylics), photographers (digital, film, video), sculptors, paper-makers, jewelry designers, fabric artisans, and folks who enjoy expressing themselves with collages and mixed-media works of art. Pretty much, though, the name still says it all. It’s all stuff that you LOOK at.

But a couple of years ago, and then again this spring, an extraordinary collaboration took place that paired up more than a dozen poets from a local “poetry circle” with the same number of willing visual artists from our group. The experience was absolutely galvanizing, and the connection between our 3-D works of art and the written word was mesmerizing.

The rules of the game were simple. Each artist and each poet submitted a trio of works they had created previously. The poets submitted poetry, the artists submitted photos of their art. Then each artist was randomly assigned a poet, and each poet was randomly assigned an artist. The mission: for each artist to create a NEW ART WORK based on one of the three poems we were handed, and for each poet to create a NEW POEM based on one of the three photos they received. The results would be unveiled at an “art and poetry” show months later, and combined into a book showcasing the fruits of our labors.

I was so thrilled at how this all worked out that I have to give a shout out at least for the parts that I was involved in.

As the starting point, I picked out three of my earlier photos that I thought might provide a little creative fodder. Two were of nature—flowers and plants—but the third was of an old barn in the stages of magnificent ruination and deconstruction. I’d lovingly watched it for several years as I drove past it on my way to work, and rued the day that it would finally fall. I had even written a photo essay about it, chronicling its impending demise and the way it continually surprised me by simply remaining upright after a night of storms or epic winds.

Still Standing

Still Standing

And it was the picture of the barn that caught the eye of “my” poet, a young writer and teacher named Gina Covelli, and spurred her to write her poem “Still Standing.” And boy, how she NAILED IT!

Still Standing
I carry tradition in these bones.
Bones that stood a century
on this land that owns me,
between here and nowhere.

A land once wild and ideal for dreamers
But tamed and measured,
Systematically cut into row upon row
By straightforward Hollander logic.

They say it’s stubbornness
The way I face the sun every day
In the same pressure-loaded silence
And old-fashioned humility

Of those that came before me
Of those that built me
Of those never to return.

Time and frost have stripped me
To nothing but raw marrow
And yet—
Even now that my work is done

I stand
Still.

My own artistic task was to pick from poems supplied by Dawn Hogue, and I was immediate drawn to “Barn Quilt.” I was absolutely captivated by the description of an elderly woman, in the twilight of her life and whose family had largely written her off as frail and old, who feels “a young girl awakens” instead. The poem contemplated the arrival of winter, and snow covering long grass and raspberry canes. And I was at first consumed with the notion of finding a snowy, artistic scene of a vintage barn after a snowfall, while the flakes still clung to ivy around the windows and the blanket of white lay undisturbed.

Barn Quilt

The deep purple evening star
fades on Aunt Gracie’s barn
and spent raspberry canes wither,
ready to be cut down for mulch.
Soon the stone walk will disappear
as will the still vigorous grass
she hasn’t the time to mow
under downy blankets of snow
that only birds
or her snowshoes will disturb.
It is an autumn sky,
the morning haze lifted
to a light yellow afternoon.
In the fruit cellar, she rustles
through yesterday’s bushel
for twelve unblemished apples for us.
Seven bushels line the wall,
the best for pies, the others to press,
the fallen she has left for bees,
and if she’s lucky,
one evening, a doe.
Later, in our own home,
we speak of her. We say
perhaps this is her last year,
that she’s getting so frail,
unaware that in her bones
a young girl awakens
with each step up the ladder,
each glint of russet catching her eye.

Well, the best laid plans… As the deadline for submitting our artwork for the show drew near, the weather first just plain refused to cooperate. It didn’t snow. For a very long time. And then when a blizzard finally dumped several inches of white stuff on us, I was too busy shoveling the sidewalks of my sizable corner lot to think of breaking out the camera and hunting for picturesque snow-covered barns on snow-covered byways. If I could even get the car out of the driveway.

And yet…the snow came through for me anyway, in the form of a stand of nearby birch trees that were half-coated along their lengths with snow driven sideways by the storm. Among the photos I took, I began to see the shape of an eye peering out between the trees, as if a ghostly woman was partly hidden. It seemed mysterious, and haunting, and it captivated me. And so into the pairing it went.

Eye of the Storm

Eye of the Storm

The night the show opened the gallery was packed as artists and poets and friends and family jostled around to view the new synthesis of words and art. Pictures were taken, handshakes were exchanged, introductions were made, and congratulations filled the room.

Dawn, Mary and Gina meet on opening night!

Dawn, Mary and Gina meet on opening night!

And then at the appointed time, we all piled in, standing room only, to a makeshift darkened theater where the poets and artists took turns reading from, or talking about, their new works as images were cast behind them on a screen.

It was magical. It was reverent. It was an evening full of awe, and anticipation, and wonder, and of so much more than the sum total of what we all could have created working alone.

When it comes to jump starting a creative process…I can’t recommend it highly enough!

 

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: art, collaboration, creativity, hobbies, inspiration, photography, poetry, writing

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About Mary

About Mary

Mary T. Wagner is a former newspaper and magazine journalist who changed careers at forty by going to law school and becoming a criminal prosecutor. However, she never could step away from the written word entirely, and inevitably the joy of writing drew her back to the keyboard.

A Chicago native, this mother of four and recent new grandmother now lives in rural Wisconsin, where she draws much inspiration for writing from daily walks in the countryside with her dog, Lucky, and the cat who thinks he's a dog...The Meatball. Wagner's ongoing legal experience has ranged from handling speeding tickets to arguing and winning several cases before the Wisconsin Supreme Court...sometimes in the same week!

Her first three essay collections--Running with Stilettos, Heck on Heels, and Fabulous in Flats--have garnered numerous national and regional awards, including a Gold E-Lit Book Award, an Indie Excellence Award, and "Published Book of the Year" by the Florida Writers Association. Now her latest book, "When the Shoe Fits...Essays of Love, Life and Second Chances" rounds up her favorites--and reader favorites--into a "best of" collection now available on Amazon in paperback and ebook formats.

Mary’s Books

Mary’s Books

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