Sharon White
HARVESTING SUBMISSIONS FROM A WORK IN PROGRESS
I’ve been writing a book about New Zealand painter Anna Caselberg. In 2019, I was a writer-in-residence in the house she lived in until her death in 2004. I loved being in Broad Bay on the Otago Peninsula in the Winter. It was a huge leap retiring from fulltime teaching to five months in New Zealand. I knew nothing about Anna before I went to New Zealand, and had a difficult time finding out more about her when I got there. I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have to her painting, hidden behind the front door above a bookcase.
Later, after I’d moved out of the Caselberg house into Central Dunedin, I was able to see more of her work at the University of Otago’s Hocken Collections and understand what an original and moving painter she was. I wrote forty pages of what I thought was an essay, but it soon became a book that grew to include the way my life turned upside down after I returned home from the Southern Hemisphere. The pandemic, and then my adventures with ovarian cancer, changed the kind of book I was writing. Soon I had two books: One a journey through my treatment, the other a portrait of Anna Caselberg and her work. I found many books that were brilliant and combined a personal story with an exploration of a writer or an artist, like A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Her book is a reconstruction of the eighteenth-century Irish poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s life, along with a record of her own life as a mother and poet.
But by the time I returned last Spring from another research trip to New Zealand, I knew the book had been hijacked by the details of my year-and-a-half journey through cancer treatment. I’d spent six weeks looking at Anna’s work and talking to people who knew her. That material was much more alive to me than the details of the months when I was sick.
I had a friend read the first part of the manuscript that I had finished before I went to New Zealand the second time. She suggested I cut some of the material about my illness. I was surprised I had 100 pages of work in a file I named Cut Pieces. The original book seemed stronger, less weighted down without them, though I left some information about my cancer in the book. Anna and her husband John had both died of cancer. Anna painted until she couldn’t hold a brush. And when she lost the use of her right hand, she used her left for drawing. A friend of hers, painter Wayne Seyb, told me she could draw just as well with the left. Her house was so cold she would paint in bed in the morning. Behind her cottage in Broad Bay, her tiny studio is just as she left it. Tubes of paint, pieces of boards with the beginnings of paintings, a paint spattered counter. Brushes in jars.
I’d been sending excerpts from the manuscript to journals and contests, but hadn’t had any luck. One day, I read through the cut pieces and realized some of them fit together into a coherent essay. A self-portrait which included details of my operations and convalescence, my excursions to the art museum near my house, and information about advances in cancer treatment. I also found passages with the descriptions of the birds on the walks I took with my husband during my time of rehab, after the long stretch of being sick. At first, I thought of the essay as a kind of collage, but strangely, the more I read it, the more the separate sections of the piece seemed to work in a more linear way. I was happy they focused on art, but not necessarily Anna Caselberg’s work, and included scenes that were from another part of my life years ago.
I was inspired by a book I’d bought while I was in New Zealand, Constellations, Reflections from Life, by another Irish writer, Sinéad Gleeson. I admired how Gleeson examined the different ways she’d navigated the challenges of being a woman and a mother in Ireland through illness and terror. Her collection was a series of essays that combined different forms, including lists and parables along with more conventional essay structures. Suddenly, I could see the other book I was writing about my illness as a series of shorter pieces, not folded into the book about Anna Caselberg. I sent my essay to several publications, and, after a month or so, it was accepted by a journal that focuses on innovative literary and visual art. I liked the kind of serendipity of this exercise. The way the images fell into place without much prodding.
My advice is to be open to harvesting smaller sections of work from a longer project. You might find that gem of an essay hiding in text you’ve discarded on your computer. In my case, when the book seemed to be stuck and the composite parts were not cohering, cutting some of the personal story sharpened both aspects.
I’m ready to get back to my search for Anna Caselberg. I was lucky several months ago to have been successful in an auction for one of her watercolors, Harbor Scene, a beautiful painting full of light that hangs above my desk on the wall now.
Sharon White is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia, winner of the AWP award in creative nonfiction. Her first novel, Minato Sketches, won the Rosemary Daniell Prize and will be published by Minerva Rising Press in January 2025. Betty Books, an imprint of WTAW, will publish If the Owl Calls, a mystery, the following fall. Her new collection of poetry is The Body is Burden and Delight. She is an Associate Professor Emerita at Temple University.
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