Sewing/sowing history

Posted on February 20, 2022 by maddyruthwalker

The lavender bias tape is sewn in small, even stitches along the inner edge of the richly patterned cloth. My grandmother once sat quietly, sewing this binding to finish the apron she was making for me. After wearing the apron for decades, I have been cutting it apart, incorporating squares of the purple, cream, and brown fabric into coasters for a friend, a shoulder bag for my niece, and now a quilt. These little squares and rectangles sew/sow history into new textiles.

Grandma Marguerite Walker (nee Potter) was born in 1896 in Fort Scott, Kansas. Although I didn’t know her well, I have fond memories of her. She was gentle and genteel, soft-spoken, and poised. When my parents when to Europe for several weeks when I was 8 or 9, she came to stay with us in Toronto. She taught me how to set a table during that visit because, apparently, my mother had never taught me the correct way to place napkin, fork, knife, and spoon. I once visited her in Los Gatos, California, where she lived for many years. One day, we wandered about, looking at the shops. “What a lovely colour your blouse is,” grandma said to a woman we approached on the street. That stranger lit up from the compliment, and I never forgot that simple, kind exchange. Another time we heard ambulance sirens in the distance, and my grandmother prayed aloud that nobody was hurt. This was something new for me. “Prayer” was not in my parents’ lexicon. And in her letters, grandma wrote “thot” for thought, not because she didn’t know how to spell—she was an excellent speller—but because she had her own shorthand.

In my twenties, I underwent surgery to correct infertility. I was told after the surgery that I still had only a 15-20% chance of having children. Grandma Marguerite started sending me her copies of Unity magazine and told me her church congregation was praying for me. Ultimately, I gave birth to three healthy sons. I don’t know about cause–effect, but I was forever grateful to her for the energetic and spiritual work she undertook on my behalf. All of these warm memories float through me as I sew squares of Grandma’s apron into the mix of this new quilt, which I think I’ll call “windows to a purple world.”

Windows to a purple world (quilt in progress)

This type of sewing I’m describing is upcycling, but with a difference. Take fabric that’s been in your family or is otherwise meaningful and make it into something new. If you do this, you incorporate stories into your sewing. A couple of years ago my friend Nancy gave me a large basket of textiles from her family—old linen tablecloths and napkins in pastel green, pink and salmon that her mother and grandmother had used over many years. I cut these precious pieces apart, mixed in other contemporary fabrics, and fashioned pillowcases. I gave Nancy the pillows for her birthday. She can remember her mother and grandmother and meals at the family table whenever she looks at them.

I incorporated cloth from pink and green tablecloths and napkins from Nancy’s family into pillowcases.

Scattering scraps of one fabric over countless projects feels like I’m sowing seeds of connection far and wide. When Michael and drove to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon in the summer of 2017, we visited Sew Creative, a beautiful fabric store on the main drag. I fell in love with designs by Australian Aboriginal designers: swirly organic patterns that looked like amoebas and rhizomes done in purples, reds, browns, and oranges. And there was a binder there with each designer’s photograph and profile so I could learn about them–their processes and inspiration. I bought two one-yard pieces of fabric. During the last five years, I have cut and sewn those fabrics into countless things: purses, pouches, quilts, coasters. I love the dispersal of one thing into many. Cadmus sowed dragon’s teeth and up rose an army: the fierce Sparti (which means “sown”). I sow scraps of fabric and up rises. . . delight!

Scraps of the same fabric show up over and over again. The cloth Nat and Sam chose for their aprons (animals on the Serengeti; a bright turquoise broadcloth) show up in the bookmarks I recently made and distributed to friends and family. The blue tablecloth I bought at Value Village became the lining for my blue patchwork apron. It feels, at times, as if I—and not just the fabric—am being dispersed across time and space. It is too easy these days to disconnect and withdraw. I am trying to stay connected through writing and sewing, sewing and writing. Sowing myself far and wide through words and fabric.

Write what you don’t know

Posted on September 10, 2016 by maddyruthwalker

“The writer is someone, who, embarking on a task, does not know what to do.” Donald Barthelme

I am reading Station Eleven by Emily St. Jean Mandel. Although I read Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, I haven’t really been curious about dystopian novels. But this book has me turning pages hungrily. One of Mandel’s themes is the persistence of the works of Shakespeare after the collapse of civilization. This got me thinking of what I know and what I don’t know and what to write about for story number eight.

What did Mandel know, I wondered, in order to write this so-readable novel? She looks blessedly young on the book’s back cover (b. 1979). Yet she writes confidently about Shakespeare, Toronto, BC’s Gulf Islands, pandemics, the life of an aging artist, multiple marriages, paramedicine, the end of civilization… and I am only on page 77. She mustn’t have “known” all this to start. Into the cauldron goes the writer’s research, experience, and imagination. Boil them together with a bit of newt’s eye and bat’s wing to produce fiction.

The old saw about “write what you know” keeps the writer in the silo of lived experience, starved for oxygen. You need all of it—research, imagination, experience, serendipity—to thrive as a fiction writer. One way to write yourself out of what you know and into what you don’t know is to use Peter Elbow’s loop writing methods described in Writing with Power. I decided to use the one where you sit down and write everything you think you know about a topic, then use that as fodder for a story. Mandel’s novel starts with a production of King Lear, so I thought why not use that play? I proceeded with interest.

What do I know about King Lear? Well not much. I studied the play in the late seventies with the late great Northrop Frye. I still have my Pelican Complete Works of Shakespeare with my fish bookplate dated 1978, the year I took my sole Shakespeare class at University of Toronto, Victoria College. Frye was an eminent scholar, yet I remember little from the class. I do recall his long pauses as we waited with baited breath, our pens raised, ready to record his wisdom. And the only thing I remember from his lectures was not even about Shakespeare—it was about music. He said that Bach’s Mass in B Minor was surely the voice of God speaking through the composer. As for King Lear, well I remember only that I loved that play the best. A few of the most famous lines stick with me, and I notice as I page through the play that almost forty years ago, my twenty-year old self carefully circled in pencil any mention of nature, natural, and unnatural. I must have written an essay on that theme.

But really, what do I know of Lear? I remember my father joking with me, the youngest of his three daughters, that I was his Cordelia. A rather odd comparison, as I think of it now, but I loved his rueful laugh when he said it. Then there was my first husband’s favourite line from the play, “Reason not the need,” from Lear’s speech in Act 2, Scene 4:

O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars

Are in the poorest thing superfluous.

Allow not nature more than nature needs,

Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady.

If only to go warm were gorgeous,

Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,

Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need—

My then-husband’s occasional invocation of that line has stayed with me these many years. When frugality became a constraint, he would implore, “reason not the need.” Let us not reduce our lives to need, to scrape by on the drab thrift store clothes, to make black bean soup again. Even beggars need a bit of splurge and splendor. Let’s treat ourselves. You only live once.

But there you go. What do I know of King Lear? A long ago reading for a Shakespeare class almost forty years ago. Frye’s wavering voice. A remembered association from my father’s mouth that cast me, in jest, as his Cordelia. A line spoken by my ex-husband that reverberates still. Reason not the need. And a bleak sadness when I think of Lear, a “poor, bare, forked animal” on the heath.

It was an interesting exercise. I really don’t know much about Lear. An embarrassingly small amount of material, in fact. But I was able to gather enough together to start. I wrote what I know, and that will lead me into what I don’t know. A few shoots that might sprout a story that is more interesting than my experience. Perhaps research will lead to a character based on Dr. Frye. Perhaps a re-reading of King Lear that may lead to something. Or another listen to Bach’s Mass in B Minor that might be fruitful. Or perhaps I can write a story with one character who always reasons the need and another who resists that dictum. Or a contemporary father who sees his daughters as modern-day versions of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, and those joking nicknames become more real than he ever intended. So many stories waiting to be written.

I do not know what to do, exactly (see Barthelme), but I know that limiting myself to writing only what I know is the equivalent of Goneril and Reagan’s telling their father, you don’t really need all that finery, that retinue. I join Lear in saying, “reason not the need.” Let me read, research, imagine. Let me grab from a cornucopia of ideas, thoughts, books, facts, art, beauty, and experiences to make stories. Here I go into story number eight. I’ll report back later.