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When I was in my early twenties, I leaped into the strange landscape of the Deep South with a troubled, half-Mexican surfer boyfriend at my side. It took an octogenarian modern dancer, herself an ex-pat from New York City, to teach me the steps of independence. Our dance together was part rebellion, part laughter and a grand finale of love.
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When I was seven years old, I traveled through Central and South America in a homemade camper as fragile as our family. We made it as far as Bolivia before our truck collapsed, our money ran out and we had to sell our camper and everything in it. Thirty years later, the man I had just married retraced the trip with me. We were determined to find the camper and make it past Bolivia to the end of the road: Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. I was shadowing my parents, but the context had evolved. Their journey was an escape -- from the paralyzing loss of my three-year-old brother. Mine was a discovery.
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This is my first collaboration with photographer Gary Geboy, my husband. His publisher asked me to write the narrative for a collection of lyrical photographs set in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Author Pat Conroy gives it this critique: “It feels delicate and sacramental in nature – a love poem to the salt marshes, bays and rivers that define this extraordinary place. The photographs are priceless and the prose is surpassingly fine.”
Excerpt from the book:
The Gullah people have a saying “all shut-eye ain’t sleep; all goodbye ain’t gone.” The Lowcountry embodies that ambiguity. It is a place between the sea and high ground, between the past and the future. It is neither wild nor truly tame; thoughts here meander between memories and dreams. The presence of the past floats all around … the clank of shrimp nets on piers in September, the snip of pruning shears after the spring azaleas bloom. It is hummed in wretches saved and heard in hearts blessed.
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This is the story behind the memoir – told through my husband’s camera. When I was on the cusp of seven, Latin America formed the backdrop of my life. My family traveled through it by camper in 1973, from Mexico to Bolivia, and my father documented our nomadic existence with 35mm slides. I wanted to follow the same route, to see the things I didn't see before.
Through Gary’s lens it all came rushing back. These were the same views I strained to glimpse from the back bench seat of my father’s truck. The people I gaped at as a little girl now stared back at me. The stark and beautiful agony of the landscapes rendered me inconsequential once again. Impressions that were vague and unimportant to me as a child, took on planes and textures and depth. Naïve questions I must have asked my parents were answered by the details in Gary’s photographs: stooped backs, averted eyes and calloused hands. Repetition I inured myself to as a child exposed patterns of truth. The settings that served as simply colorful flag plantings for my self-absorbed family became central characters themselves. I began to see that the where is also the who and what and why it matters.
Buy the book at: www.blurb.com.
See the photographs at: www.garygeboyprints.com
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This delicate volume again pairs my writing with my husband’s photography. We discovered Laos together and return as often as we can. Here’s an excerpt from the opening: “There are moments in Laos when you forget to breathe. When the jungle mist lifts from the surface of a swollen river, revealing the arch of a temple roofline, it is a curtain rising on a scene carved in the very bone of beauty. A whisper-thin monk, balancing on a temple wall, looks for all the world like there are wings beneath his robe. The sun drizzles through the canopy of monsoon forests and slithers through stands of quivering bamboo. Surrounded by such serenity and mystery the heart wants to stop, the lungs can’t bear to exhale the air they have taken in.”
Buy the book at: www.blurb.com.
See the photographs at: www.garygeboyprints.com |
