A Pearl in an Ocean

The Pearl in the Ocean

Despite the tidal waves of information posted, commented upon and hopelessly lost as the sea of time flows by on the internet, I have always been always able to find small gems in the most unlikely of places. And since I had expressed disappointment and skepticism about social networking, I feel that I should also, on balance, highlight a few of these pearls rolling along in the oceans of data. Any bit of pearly light is as much so for what it inspires as for what it is in itself. For me this little illuminating fragment was my reading in Facebook about someone who had a collection of monsters (toys I presume) and wondered why it was so difficult to find representations of monsters in our culture of the female kind. This started a dialogue which resulted in my writing a chapbook of poetry entitled “My Women, My Monsters,” which I have just begun to send out to publishers. I have also begun to illustrate the book with detailed pencil drawings and hand lettering - almost like the medieval Bestiaries I so loved to see in the libraries in Great Britain and in Europe when we lived there. The illustrations are still works in progress and the writing itself still needs to find an interested publisher. The former is just a matter of time and effort but the latter will be a series of leaps of faith, divisions and revisions.

“My Women, My Monsters” was fun to write, and included a cast of characters that readers found both engrossing and amusing, like Mother Puffer, the Empress of Clones, and The Queen of Bones. The poetry might be difficult to publish, as it may not have a fully defined audience - straddling the boundaries of juvenile fiction and adult satire. But I will continue to work on it and post works from it from time to time.

To end my cycle of small paintings, “Thirty-three Days of the Big Cats,” I am posting number thirty-three, the grey terrible she cat, in keeping with the completion of the book of Monsters.