Still riding high after my first Open House at Headlands Center for the Arts on Sunday, July 29th. Thanks to my husband, daughter and ten friends (three not down here) for gracing me with their presence, making for wonderful day.

Keep going to see the gallery of photos from my studio installation based on themes and objects from the novel-in-progress. In this case, Easter Sunday dinner table at Florida’s house. My goal was to create a small slice of southwest Georgia, complete with cricket sounds in the background.

I was as intrigued as the open house guests were by being able to walk into a physical space representing the one dimensional world of the manuscript. This gave me fresh insight into the characters, shopping for the curtains Florida would hang at her window, playing in mud to distress Cricket’s blanky, which is draped over her chair at the table. This gallery also includes video of the installation and audio of me reading.

In my attic studio, #10 in Bldg 960.

The installation: Sunday Dinner at Florida’s House, Easter, 2012

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End table, Florida’s house.

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Photo collection of characters’ cars.

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Photos of 1960s Albany Movement. In the novel, fictional Fletcher was 18 and worked with the real life, iconic Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

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Sources:
• Lee Formwalt, Looking Back, Moving Forward (Albany Civil Rights Institute and Georgia Humanities Council, 2014)
• Mary Royal Jenkins, Open Dem Cells: A Pictorial History of the Albany Movement (Brentwood Academy Press, 2000)
• Danny Lyons, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (The Lyndhurst Series on the South, 1992)

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My peeps outside the studio.

 

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Click PLAY button in the black strip below to hear “Piggly Wiggly” scene from my work-in-progress novel, Peach Seed Monkey, read at Headlands Summer Open House, July 29, 2018:

 

Reading in the East Room, Building 944 at The Headlands Center for the Arts.