False starts, Stone Soup, the Shakers, writing one paragraph at a time
An antidote for the season of overwhelm.
I intended to write about Mildred Thompson, her magnetic fields, and her relationship with Audre Lorde, but in my research I reached an unbreachable impasse. When Thompson worked on a project about German expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker, she found the more the learned about Becker the less she liked her.
The more I learned about Modersohn-Becker — whose diaries and letters I read while pregnant, both of us filled with similar artistic ambition and maternal ambivalence — the more I liked her.
“Strange,” Paula wrote on December 1, 1902, almost exactly 120 ago:
“It’s as if my voice had totally new sounds and my being a new register. I feel it growing greater within me and broader. God willing, I will become something.”
But perhaps I could understand Amy Stechler, first wife of Ken Burns, inventor of now-canonical PBS documentary style. I thought I would pass the dark evening hours watching the documentary she co-wrote on the Shakers as well as her final film on another famous wife, Frida Kahlo. But I couldn’t find the Kahlo documentary streaming, only the DVD on sale. Instead I read Amy’s obituaries and old interviews.
“I don’t think you’d have ever heard of me had she not been there,” Burns told the New York Times.
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