J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free

All artworks by Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775-1851). Venice at Sunrise from the Hotel Europa, with Campanile of San Marco, about 1840, watercolor. Copyright Tate, London 2014.

J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free at the J. Paul Getty Museum exhibits the late works of Turner through May 24: over 60 watercolors and oil paintings produced between 1835 and 1851. On view are landscapes, seascapes, historical and architectural subjects, sketches, and palettes. During his career, primarily as a landscape painter, Turner went on many sketching tours to gather material for new works, filling a number of sketchbooks with pencil studies on each tour. Occasional watercolors captured weather effects, changing sunlight, and water reflections. He traveled throughout England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, France, Switzerland, and elsewhere. On returning back to London, he would work up watercolor and oil paintings from his on-site sketches.

Venice: Santa Maria della Salute, Night Scene with Rockets, about 1840, watercolor and bodycolor. Copyright Tate, London 2014.

He revisited Venice several times, fascinated by its combination of light and color. Many of the late works are images of Venice, created from sketches done there in 1840. They're more atmospheric, capturing the essence of a place--imaginative and painterly. Contemporary landscape painters of his time produced topographical works that were acknowledged and recognized for their verisimilitude. Turner had a personal response to a landscape, in terms of both vision and technique. He was controversial, forward-leaning, anticipating the Impressionists, and among the earliest British painters to depict nature through a poetic lens. The Victorians deplored his "indistinctness" and high-keyed color ranges.

Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London, 1841, watercolor. Copyright Tate, London 2014.

The Blue Rigi, Sunrise, 1842, watercolor. Copyright Tate, London 2014.

"J.M.W. Turner is the towering figure of British 19th century art, a ground-breaking innovator in his own day whose relevance and status as a seeming harbinger of 20th century modernism has made him an inspiration to generations of later artists up to the present day. A successful and well-known public figure in his own day, Turner produced some of his most innovative and challenging work during the last 16 years of his life," explains Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. "He was frequently mocked and misunderstood for his choice of unusual subject matters, his experimentation with different canvas formats, and his pioneering free and spontaneous techniques in both oil and watercolor. While Turner could not knowingly have anticipated future artistic trends, he is seen today by many as a prophet of modernism because of his rough, gestural brushwork and quasi-abstract subject matter. This exhibition celebrates Turner as the most innovative and experimental artist of his time, and I have no doubt that it will be inspiring to a new generation of artists working today."

Peace--Burial at Sea, exhibited 1842, oil on canvas. Copyright Tate, London 2014.

Approach to Venice, exhibited 1844, oil on canvas. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Norham Castle, Sunrise, about 1845, oil on canvas. Copyright Tate, London 2014.

Turner produced an immense body of work, left in his Queen Anne Street and Chelsea studios: nearly 19,000 drawings and sketches in watercolor, pencil, and other media, tens of thousands of prints, and 282 unfinished and finished oil paintings.

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. 

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

UK edition, courtesy and copyright Serpent's Tail 2014

Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Plume) is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (2014). Karen has written six novels and three short story collections. She lives in Santa Cruz, California. 

The novel's narrator and window into the story is Rosemary Cooke, who inhabits three ages: her 5-year-old, 22-year-old, and mid-forties selves, growing up in the town of Bloomington, Indiana. She heads off to the University of California, Davis to distance herself from a family tragedy. As a child, Rosemary talked continuously and at college she rarely speaks at all, especially not about her family, circumspect about her parents and introducing herself as someone who lost a sister and has a brother that travels frequently. The narrative zips back and forth in time over almost 40 years, focusing on a few months of Rosemary's college days in 1996, and slowly discloses how her sister, Fern, disappeared. Rosemary goes to Davis for other reasons--she's searching for her brother, Lowell, and it's the last place anybody saw him. He absconds after Fern's leaving and becomes a radical animal rights activist, a fugitive from the FBI, occasionally sending cryptic postcards from various locations. She sees him in Davis again for the first time in 10 years, where he describes Fern's current living conditions. The book begins in the middle of the story. In Chapter 1 we meet 22-year-old Rosemary.

Starting in the middle allows Rosemary to first emphasize the similarities of Fern to any other sister, delaying the reveal about Fern's identity until page 77, "I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren't thinking of her as my sister," notes Rosemary. "You're thinking instead that we loved her as if she were some kind of pet." Adds Karen, "I wanted to talk about Fern as a sister for a while before talking about her as a chimpanzee. I wanted you to first think about Fern as a human being with a stress on the being." 

During the early 1970s, they're raised as twins until Rosemary is 5 and they're part of a nature vs. nurture experiment carried out by her father, a psychology professor at the University of Indiana. Developmental milestones were being compared, as well as assessing what Fern's language capabilities were if she was raised as human. The experiment was abruptly terminated and Fern disappears; we don't learn more about her departure until the end of the novel, in the present of 2012. "She was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half," Rosemary says. "The neural system of a young brain develops partly by mirroring the brains around it. As much time as Fern and I spent together, that mirror went both ways." She's referred to as monkey girl by other children and she's taken on certain chimp traits--she's impulsive, possessive, and demanding and she sees the space around her vertically as well as horizontally.

"Most home-raised chimps, when asked to sort photographs into piles of chimps and humans, make only the one mistake of putting their own picture into the human pile. This is exactly what Fern did," Rosemary notes. "What seems not to have been anticipated was my own confusion." 

The story is about language, kinship, sibling loss, and two sisters unlike any other sisters.

An excerpt:

I always used to believe I knew what Fern was thinking. No matter how bizarre her behavior, no matter how she might deck herself out and bob about the house like a Macy's parade balloon, I could be counted on to render it into plain English. Fern wants to go outside. Fern wants to watch Sesame Street. Some of this was convenient projection, but you'll never convince me of the rest. Why wouldn't I have understood her? No one knew Fern better than I; I knew every twitch. I was attuned to her.

"Why does she have to learn our language?" Lowell asked my father once. "Why can't we learn hers?" Dad's answer was that we still didn't know for sure that Fern was even capable of learning a language, but we did know for sure that she didn't have one of her own. Dad said that Lowell was confusing language with communication, when they were two very different things. Language is more than just words, he said. Language is also the order of the words and the way one word inflects another.

Only he said this at much greater length, longer than either Lowell or I, or certainly Fern, wished to sit still for. It all had something to do with Umwelt, a word I very much liked the sound of and repeated many times like a drumbeat until I was made to stop. I didn't care so much what Umwelt meant back then, but it turns out to refer to the specific way each particular organism experiences the world.

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied.

When the Kelloggs first raised a child alongside a chimpanzee, back in the 1930s, the stated purpose was to compare and contrast developing abilities, linguistic and otherwise. This was the stated purpose of our study as well. Color me suspicious.

The Kelloggs believed that their sensationalistic experiment had sunk their reputations, that they were never again taken seriously as scientists. And if I know this now, our ambitious father surely knew it then. So what was the goal of the Fern/Rosemary Rosemary/Fern study before it came to its premature and calamitous end? I'm still not sure. 

But it seems to me that much of the interesting data is mine. As I grew, my language development not only contrasted with Fern's but also introduced a perfectly predictable x-factor that undermined all such comparisons.

Ever since Day and Davis published their findings in the 1930s, there's been a perception that twinness affects language acquisition. New and better studies took place in the 1970s, but I'm not sure our parents were looking in their direction yet. Nor would such studies have been completely relevant to a situation such as ours, where the twins had such disparate potentials.

Though Fern and I were sometimes separated while the grad students observed us, we spent most of our time together. As I developed the habit of speaking for her, she seemed to develop the expectation that I would. By the time I turned three, I was already serving as Fern's translator in a way that surely retarded her progress.

So I think that, instead of studying how well Fern could communicate, our father might have been studying how well Fern could communicate with me. That there was a vice versa here, a tabloid-ready vice versa was unavoidable but unacknowledged. Here is the question our father claimed to be asking: can Fern learn to speak to humans? Here is the question our father refused to admit he was asking: can Rosemary learn to speak to chimpanzees?

One of the early grad students, Timothy, had argued that in our preverbal period, Fern and I had an idioglossia, a secret language of grunts and gestures. This was never written up, so I learned of it only recently. Dad had found his evidence thin, unscientific, and, frankly, whimsical.

***

"When I began thinking about the book, I was intimidated by how little I knew about chimps; I consoled myself that I did know quite a lot about psychologists [her father was one]," says Karen. "So I read all the accounts of cross-fostered chimps that I could find and, yes, there are several of these. Many of them are referenced in my novel. I read a ton of other stuff as well, about chimps and bonobos in labs, in the wild, on preserves. I know I'm pushing the limits in many ways, but I wanted Fern's behaviors to be as plausible as I could make them, so I depended on these non-fiction accounts."

The story is inspired by an actual experiment in the 1930s, the work of Winthrop and Luella Kellogg, scientists at Indiana University who raised their son Donald alongside a chimp, Gua, for nearly a year, in a compare and contrast effort. Although it was predicted that Gua would pick up human behaviors, which did occur, Donald also picked up chimp behaviors, which was not anticipated and was one of the main findings. The Kelloggs wrote a book based on the experiment, The Ape and the Child, published in 1933.

Thunderstruck & Other Stories

Cover image courtesy and copyright The Dial Press 2014

Elizabeth McCracken's Thunderstruck & Other Stories (The Dial Press) is a collection of nine tales. She teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Her previous four books include two novels, a memoir, and a short story collection. The narratives in Thunderstruck brim over with loss and disaster, experienced by the characters in abrupt ways: missing people, kidnap, accidents, and stroke. "I tell myself," she says, "Your next book should try to be a little cheerier."

The earliest story in the collection is "Juliet," written in 1999 when Elizabeth was working as a librarian in Somerville, Massachusetts, based on a murder in the town. Three stories were originally part of a novel and recently revised: "Some Terpsichore," "Something Amazing," and "The Lost & Found Department of Greater Boston." "Hungry," "Peter Elroy," and "Thunderstruck" were written in the fall of 2012.

From the opening of the first story, "Something Amazing," introducing character Missy Goodby ("The ghost girl is based on a girl who died when I was in fifth grade," says Elizabeth. "Not her character, but her death was the biggest event in my elementary school."):

Just west of Boston, just north of the turnpike, the ghost of Missy Goodby sleeps curled up against the cyclone fence at the dead end of Winter Terrace, dressed in a pair of ectoplasmic dungarees. That thumping noise is Missy bopping a plastic Halloween pumpkin on one knee; that flash of light in the corner of a dark porch is the moon off the glasses she wore to correct her lazy eye. Late at night when you walk your dog and feel suddenly cold, and then unsure of yourself, and then loathed by the world, that's Missy Goodby, too, hissing as she had when she was alive and six years old, I hate you, you stink, you smell, you baby.

The neighborhood kids remember Missy. She bit when she was angry and pinched no matter what. They don't feel sorry for her ghost self. They remember the funeral they were forced to attend after she died, how her mother threw herself on the coffin, wailing, how they thought she was kidding and so laughed out loud and got shushed. The way the neighborhood kids tell the story, the coffin was lowered into the ground and Missy Goodby's grieving mother leapt down and then had to be yanked from the hole like a weed. Everyone always believes the better story eventually. Really, Joyce Goodby just thumped the coffin at the graveside service. Spanked it: two little spanks, nothing serious. She knew that pleading would never budge her daughter, not because she was dead but because she was stubborn. All her life, the more you pleaded with Missy, the more likely she was to do something to terrify you. Joyce Goodby spanked the coffin and walked away and listened for footsteps behind her. She walked all the way home, where she took off her shoes, black pumps with worn stones of gray along the toes. "Done with you," she told them. 

The soul is liquid, and slow to evaporate. The body's a bucket and liable to slosh. Grieving, haunted, heartbroken, obsessed: your friends will tell you to cheer up. What they really mean is dry up. But it isn't a matter of will. Only time and light will do the job.

Who wants to, anyhow?

Best kept in the dark and nurse the damp. Cover the mirrors, leave the radio switched off. Avoid the newspaper, the television, the whole outdoors, anywhere little girls congregate, though the world is manufacturing them hand over fist, though there are now, it seems, more little girls living in the world than any other variety of human being. Or middle-aged men whose pants don't fit, or infant boys, or young women with wide, sympathetic, fretful foreheads. Whatever you have lost there are more of, just not yours.

***

Characters are quirky, the plots move in surprising and jarring directions, and the settings are diverse--France, Maine, Iowa, and Massachusetts. The stories, full of sorrow and coping, would be unsettling in themselves if it weren't for how funny and awry they can be and how remarkable the prose is, especially in description and evoking imagery. 

Humor is an essential component of Elizabeth's fiction and the narratives, while dark and grim, have jokes in them. "Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark," she explains. "With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it. Otherwise it's just a dark room, and what you're trying to write about will be invisible to your readers." 

Station Eleven

Cover image courtesy and copyright Knopf 2014

One of Brooklyn's writers, Emily St. John Mandel is the author of four books, most recently Station Eleven (Knopf), a finalist for this year's National Book Award in fiction. It's a post-apocalyptic novel and mystery, a tale that shifts back and forth between two time frames--the life of a film actor in the present day, and a time 20 years later after a lethal flu eradicates more than 99% of the population.

Following the pandemic and societal collapse, a theater troupe and symphony roam the scattered settlements around the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan, putting on plays and performing music for the public in each town. A new culture has begun to emerge.

"It's about a traveling Shakespearean theater company in a post-apocalyptic North America," says Emily. "It's also about friendship, memory, love, celebrity, our obsession with objects, oppressive dinner parties, comic books, and knife-throwing." 

An excerpt:

No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ballgames played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out.

No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.

No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position--but no, that wasn't true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings.

No more countries, all borders unmanned.

There was the flu that exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth and the shock of the collapse that followed, the first unspeakable years when everyone was traveling, before everyone caught on that there was no place they could walk to where life continued as it had before and settled wherever they could, clustered close together for safety in truck stops and former restaurants and old motels. The Traveling Symphony moved between the settlements of the changed world and had been doing so since five years after the collapse, when the conductor had gathered a few of her friends from their military orchestra, left the air base where they'd been living, and set out into the unknown landscape. 

After six months of traveling from town to town--the word town used loosely; some of these places were four or five families living together in a former truck stop--the conductor's orchestra had run into Gil's company of Shakespearean actors, who had all escaped from Chicago together and then worked on a farm for a few years and had been on the road for three months, and they'd combined their operations.

Twenty years after the collapse they were still in motion. The Symphony performed music--classical, jazz, orchestral arrangements of pre-collapse pop songs--and Shakespeare. They'd performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.

"People want what was best about the world,"  Dieter said. He himself found it difficult to live in the present. He'd played in a punk band in college and longed for the sound of an electric guitar.

What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Twilight in the altered world, a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in a parking lot in the mysteriously named town of St. Deborah by the Water, Lake Michigan shining a half mile away. Kirsten as Titania, a crown of flowers on her close-cropped hair, the jagged scar on her cheekbone half-erased by candlelight. The audience is silent. Sayid, circling her in a tuxedo that Kirsten found in a dead man's closet near the town of East Jordan: "Tarry, rash wanton. Am I not thy lord?" 

"Then I must be thy lady." Lines of a play written in 1594, the year London's theaters reopened after two seasons of plague. Or written possibly a year later, in 1595, a year before the death of Shakespeare's only son. Some centuries later on a distant continent, Kirsten moves across the stage in a cloud of painted fabric.

"But with thy brawls," she continues, "thou has disturbed our sport." She never feels more alive than at these moments. When onstage she fears nothing. 

Shakespeare was the third born to his parents, but the first to survive infancy. Four of his siblings died young. His son, Hamnet, died at eleven and left behind a twin. Plague closed the theaters again and again, death flickering over the landscape. And now in a twilight once more lit by candles, the age of electricity having come and gone, Titania turns to face her fairy king. "Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, pale in her anger, washes all the air, that rheumatic diseases do abound." 

Oberon watches her with his entourage of fairies. Titania speaks as if to herself now, Oberon forgotten. Her voice carries high and clear over the silent audience, over the string section waiting for their cue on stage left. "And through this distemperature, we see the seasons alter." 

All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient. 

Home Style by City

All photography by Ida Magntorn, copyright Home Style by City, Chronicle Books 2014

Stylist, photographer, and author Ida Magntorn's Home Style by City (Chronicle Books) is a décor guide with a focus on vintage, antique, and flea markets. Ida visited homes and markets in Los Angeles, New York, Copenhagen, Paris, and London to discover how these homes/markets reflect city character and atmosphere. "I traveled around my five favorite cities," writes Ida. "My goal was to find homes that captured the city--nothing too exclusive, but ones that felt homey and real."

Above, Copenhagen apartment of stylist and designer Mette Helena Rasmussen. Her dining room radiates coziness or hygge, and the Nordic tradition of socializing at home. Ida's tips, "Think about Danish harmonies and bringing out that Scandinavian personality. Mix classic heirlooms with the modern. Look for comfortable chairs, preferably with frames and armrests, so that they invite deep, long discussions. You also need a large table--with lots of room, even for people who just happen to stop by. This colorful mix of furniture and décor requires a calm background. A light wood floor and a subtle purple color on the walls rein in and relax the atmosphere."

Each city section has a flea market directory and checklist of typical finds. "The more I explore flea markets overseas, the more I become fascinated by the differences and likenesses between cultures. The flea markets and what I find there, along with what's bought and sold, reflect the ambience of the homes in that location, as well as the lifestyle of the city. How do the flea market finds resemble a genuine New York loft or a Parisian attic apartment with its wrought-iron balcony? What kind of vintage items are the city's inhabitants drawn to, and how do they use their flea market finds? Most often, I wonder how the purchased objects look in somebody's home: How are they styled? Where are they placed?"

Interior designer Faith Blakeney's inspiration for her Culver City treehouse draws from the desert, Bedouin tents, and houseboats. Furniture, accessories, rugs, objects, and art are thrifted from the Long Beach Antique Market, Rose Bowl Flea Market, and other flea markets and thrift stores all over the world. The L.A. flea market checklist: Wooden crates, old windows, sculptures, disco balls, tassels, crystals, embroidered fabric, oil paintings, dream catchers, skateboards, and surfboards. "A Californian bungalow keeps the doors open to the sun, and the border between inside and outside is as thin as the horizon."

"New York's soul is artistically intelligent, bohemian, and smart. The classic New York loft is in an old factory building and has open spaces, roughcast walls. The décor is effortlessly simple, never showing off." The living area in the Williamsburg apartment of photographer Simon Howell and jewelry designer Jessica Barensfeld. 

Ida's book includes an eclectic assortment of design complemented with music, book, and film lists. DIY projects implement city style, with step-by-step tips on how to get the looks. It's an album of her photography, collages, and illustrations, full of inspiring ideas and spaces.

Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs

All cut-outs by Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954). Memory of Oceania (Souvenir d'Océanie), summer 1952-early 1953. Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, and charcoal on paper, mounted on canvas. Copyright 2014 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

MoMA's Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs is a comprehensive exhibition of the artist's paper cut-outs created between 1937 and 1954. On display are 100 papiers découpés, drawings, illustrated books, stained glass, and textiles from his late work. One of the most significant colorists of all time, Matisse was a painter, draftsman, sculptor, and printmaker.

Matisse's studio, Hôtel Régina, Nice, c. 1953. Photo: Lydia Delectorskaya, copyright 2014 Succession H. Matisse.

The exhibition highlights his three studio-residences from this period, where the cut-outs were composed: An apartment in Paris at 132 Boulevard Montparnasse, Villa le Rêve in Vence (1943-1948) and the Hôtel Régina, Nice, above image (1949-1954).

Composition Green Background (Composition fond vert), 1947. Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, and pencil. Photograph: H. Robertson, Copyright 2014 Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Initially, he had no artwork in mind regarding the cut-outs, "I am cutting out all these elements and putting them up on the walls temporarily. I do not yet know what I will do with these new découpages. Perhaps panels, wall hangings." The paper forms were utilized as maquettes to structure other projects: Tapestries, books, illustrations, ballet sets, murals, stained glass, and ceramics. When Matisse was in ill health following surgery and could not paint, he considered them anew as an independent medium--the cut-outs "were a long time in the making." By 1947 he began to work extensively with cut paper, creating over 200 découpages in less than a decade. 

Henri Matisse, Boulevard Montparnasse, Paris, 1947. Copyright 2014 Succession H. Matisse.

Cover maquette for the book Matisse: His Art and His Public, 1951. Gouache on paper, cut and pasted. Copyright 2014 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 

Hôtel Régina, Nice, 1953. Photo: Hélène Adant.

Encompassing sculpture, drawing and painting, the cut-outs grew from pinboards to murals to room-size works. As their scale increased, Matisse developed a process of cutting the gouache painted sheets into various shapes, which were then tacked to the walls by assistants on ladders according to his direction. The découpages were ephemeral and movable. He continually shifted the forms so they interacted in different ways, unpinning and repinning them. The decorative configuration might last several months as he added in or modified images. "The entire arrangement is expressive; the places occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share." In the studio interiors, the pictorial expansion could cover all surfaces--walls, doors, molding, panelling, mantels, and around windows. He mixed in works in other media: Paintings, textiles, ink drawings, and posters.

The Swimming Pool (La Piscine), late summer 1952. Maquette for ceramic (realized 1999 and 2005). Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, on painted paper. Copyright 2014 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The Swimming Pool is the centerpiece of the exhibition--Matisse's only site-specific environmental work, created for the dining room of his apartment at the Hôtel Régina in 1952 (above and previous image). He formed cut-outs of divers, swimmers and sea creatures based on a favorite pool in Cannes. The 54-foot frieze returns to the galleries after a lengthy conservation.

On view through February 8, MoMA, 11 West 53 Street.

Sightlines

Sightlines cover image courtesy and copyright The Experiment 2014

In this collection of fourteen essays, writer Kathleen Jamie explores her native Scottish surroundings and the North Atlantic. She surveys the landscapes of the Hebridean islands of St Kilda and Rona, examines whale skeletons in Norwegian museums and watches the northern lights from an iceberg-strewn fjord off Greenland. Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World (The Experiment) is part nature writing, travel, poetry, memoir, and autobiography and it extends across Kathleen's wide range of interests: the natural world, archaeology, medical humanities, and art. 

One of Scotland's foremost poets, she turned to essay writing with her previous book Findings in 2005, "Like most poets, I needed a second string to my bow and this [essay] form appealed to me. I think writers, like athletes, have got distances they're good over and I'm certainly not a marathon runner. Five, six, seven thousand words, that was the limit I could go. And you can do things in it you can't do in poems, a bit of narrative extension for one. A lot of the things I learned as a poet I put into these essays. A lot of the imagery and matching images and a bit of assonance and consonance in the writing. That's all it takes to lift it off the page." Sightlines is the recipient of the 2014 Orion Book Award in the nonfiction category and the John Burroughs Association 2014 Medal for Distinguished Natural History Book. Listen to an author reading. 

An excerpt from "The Woman in the Field," an essay documenting Kathleen's summer volunteering on an archaeological dig in Perthshire in the Scottish Highlands. 

I was a teenager when I first became aware of the past, manifest as relics in the land. A teenage antiquarian, thrilled by standing stones, tumuli, ley lines and all that; what their aficionados grandly called 'earth mysteries.' Questing after a well or earthworks was what got me out of my parents' overheated living room and off into the local byways and hills. Near to our modern housing scheme on the outskirts of the city were the remnants of two, three, five thousand years of occupation. 

There must have been an exchange of letters and directions. I must have seen an advert recruiting volunteers, applied, and been told to turn up at this mid-May date. I remember nothing of that except that I had to bring a trowel. What was being excavated was a 'henge.' The word first applied to Stonehenge, with its great stone lintels, had come to mean any Neolithic circular enclosure. This one, on a farm called North Mains. The site was already well under way. There was a Neolithic monument, it had lain in the earth for four thousand years. Mostly I worked within the inner sanctum, carefully and, with the trowel, scraping away just a centimeter's depth of the hard-packed subsoil which formed the interior of the enclosure. Several of us did this. You learned to feel, or hear, the grind of an earth-hidden stone or pottery shard before you saw it. 

What actually happened at that place so long ago, at what time of year, and who traveled how far to attend, and what they called the place, and whether they came by boat or on foot, and if there was a distinction between those deemed fit to enter the inner enclosure where we worked, and those who, like a crowd outside a cathedral, where obliged to stand at a remove, we have little way of knowing.

You could lose yourself in that minuscule landscape. It often surprised me, when I leaned up to rest my back, that I was in a field in Perthshire. There was a reason these 'ceremonial enclosures'  were constructed where they were. Prehistoric people may not have had airplanes to reveal the face of the earth to them, but they could certainly read a landscape. The director in his report calculated that a hundred people would have been required to build the henge, probably organized in gangs. A similar team, organized in gangs over two seasons, dismantled it again. It was easy to feel unhooked from time, to be uncertain which era one was alive in. In the earth, a Neolithic henge, which was now beginning to yield Bronze Age artifacts too. The past, the various pasts, were all present. 

'Features' were the great excitement. Features happen when, a something, you know not what, a true earth mystery, begins to loom up. Feature 455 began as the scratch of a stone under the edge of a trowel. An oval area, a sort of paving, had emerged about five feet long and four wide. It was in an important place: well within the ancient enclosure but not at the exact center. Each newly revealed layer was cleaned of earth, drawn on paper plans, removed. To add to the odd sensation of inhabiting several different times, there was also this process of dismantling; of running the narrative of construction backwards. The next layer down consisted in just one huge grey boulder. It had presence, and everyone now knew it was a capstone for a cist, a Bronze Age cist burial. Dig and dismantle--there would be nothing left. Evidence suggests that many Neolithic sites and chambered cairns were not merely forgotten, but ritually closed. Rings of posts were burned in situ, or stones heaped over the entrances to burial mounds. This work seemed an equivalent. A ritualized undoing.