In 2019, our last gathering before the pandemic, we finally got Sue Sneddon to attend the Solatido Songwriters group during Table Rock Writers Workshop, and she fit in perfectly as she did with most folks. I am sad to report that we lost Sue on January 10, 2022, to complications from ovarian cancer. Sue was a close friend and artistic collaborator to many of us on the mountain. My friendship with her spanned more than 40 years.
Sue and I worked on a high stack of print projects together, beginning in the late 1970s, when I had a graphic design business in Durham. Sue drew clever line drawings and created logos for many Triangle businesses. Once, we were hired to produce an illustrated map of Durham’s public transit routes and to prepare an image of the Durham skyline to be painted on a bus. Sue worked all kinds of clever visual puns into the map. On the bus stop at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, she drew Einstein’s face and hair using the leaves and branches of a tree. The painted bus, when it finally came out of the garage, was always a thrill to see on the street downtown as it belched and bellowed from stop to stop with images of the Lucky Strike water tower and the old CCB bank among its silhouettes.
Sue also painted the zany covers of the cotton clothing and underwear catalogs we created for a 1980s mail order business called Travis Place. For our winter catalog one season we had staged and photographed a group of Travis Place models, friends of all sizes and shapes wearing our warmest products. Sue then painted directly on the photo print to make it look like they were inside a snow globe that had just been shaken! How she gave the appearance of a plastic dome over the women and dotted them with swirling snowflakes was a marvel. (What’s more, Sue only had one chance to get the image right: those color prints were expensive, and our budget was small.)
For a summer catalog, she painted the scenery around our models who were then outfitted in cotton swimsuits and underwear. One woman appeared to be riding on an inflatable dolphin in Sue’s painted ocean while other models waved from the shore of a cartoonish island with palm trees.
There was nothing Sue could not illustrate cleverly. Cooking up these graphic hijinks, we’d laugh until our sides hurt. She also created all the detailed line drawings for the products inside the catalog, from socks to bras to futon beds for dogs!
Though she trained as an artist in college, Sue also played percussion all her life, first in the Mutettes, an all-women, “new wave” band, and then later in the Mobile City Band with Solatidoers Lise Uyanik, Mary Rocap, and Jay Miller. Sue loved to tell people how I bought her the little pair of bongos she always kept on stage among her collection of congas, wind chimes, and maracas. Sue played those bongos to calm her jitters the recent December morning that she prepared to go in for surgery. Of course, Sue could play anything. If she didn’t have a drum handy, she would flick her fingers over her jeans and click out a rhythm to a tune on the radio with only the coins in her pocket.
Over the years in galleries up and down the coast, Sue showed her extraordinary artwork, often scenes of the beach up close and from afar, rendered in oils, pastels, acrylic, ink, and sometimes pencil. Her ability to capture water, sun, and moonlight across the range of daily moments was extraordinary.
Sue showed her work for years at Carteret Contemporary Art in Morehead City and in Hilton Head—early on with her feisty mother Lil, a talented painter, and later with her equally talented sister, Nance, a painter, jewelry maker, and fabric artist. Sue developed a devoted following of hundreds at the 14 solo exhibitions she created over the years for Durham’s Craven Allen Gallery just a few doors down from Somethyme, a natural foods restaurant where Mary Rocap was one of the owner/founders. Somethyme hosted Sue’s very first Durham exhibition in 1979 and several others after that. It was also the night spot where Sue and her partner of 44+ years, Donna Lee Giles, and I performed folk music in the late 1970s.
Sue is survived by Donna and by two sisters, Nance Sneddon of Hilton Head, SC, and Jo Sneddon of Santa Fe, NM. will be a memorial service for Sue later on this year, and Craven Allen Gallery will host a retrospective of her work this fall. Here is a link to the video that Donna Campbell produced about Sue’s last show, “From Memory.”
Michelle Handler left us last year on September 22, 2021, even as she had made careful plans to attend Table Rock earlier that month with a friend who could see to her needs as a lung cancer patient. Michelle was talented at characterization, dialogue, and setting a scene. She was a prolific and gifted writer.
Like Sue, Michelle is still present through her artwork in our Little Switzerland cabin. Before she got sick, Michelle spent a few days at the cabin with a friend, photographing the area and most everything that caught her eye among the decor. When I next came to the cabin, Michelle had made a book of her black and white photos for the coffee table. If you watch the video below, one of those photos, of a white bowl and pitcher, which she also used on her business cards, is hanging on a wall during one scene. Michelle is survived by her devoted and sensitive husband Jack Apple who lives in West Jefferson, NC.
I ‘m sure that both of these extremely energetic and talented women would want to remind us that it is time to get on with our creative lives!
From the Summer Prompt
Though we didn’t anticipate it, we have a theme that very naturally follows our tributes. Here are the submissions from the last prompt, submitted in August.
Landscape at Dusk - Vincent Van Gogh
The turmoil in his head grew worse - dark, heavy, noise pressing in, accumulating. Crowds, clamor, stop the crickets - silence the birds. The clouds, the crowds, pushing in, swarming, darkening. Stop the pressure.
All Van Gogh should be seen in person. The paint is applied in thick emotional swaths; it is more sculpture than painting. This painting, of dusk, a black grey sky, shapes of trees, or are they buildings? and a large sun, bright and dim at the same time. He has the ability to paint a sad optimism, hope in darkness, life in death? I walk past, and look back at the painting when I am much further away. This room, is devoid of people except me and the uniformed guard. The painting has transformed-- it is no longer a shaded image of a large glowing sun, but a fire pit—the last glow of a fire's bright ember in chunks of blackened wood, starting to turn to ash. He had been staring into a fire. He had merged into the fire in that dreamy state, and cool-ly not, like dry ice. I walk closer and it is again the outline of a forest in a darkening sky with a large strange sun—back a few feet and it is a groomed fire. I step back further and it again changes—it is clearly a village on fire, buildings and trees darkened by heat, ready to burst into bright hot flame—waiting for the tiniest wind to turn it into an orange red inferno—but not quite. I get a sense of the taming of the raging fire in his psyche, calming warmth without destruction. His desire to soothe himself without harming anything or anyone.
The darkness passed, his psyche calmed, he heard the crickets, welcomed their high-pitched chirps. Night had fallen, his soul quiet now, he gathered his paints, brushes, canvas, and walked back home to sleep.
—D. Minish, Salt Lake City, UT
Craft Weekend 1995
We found a shady spot near enough
the fire pit and the sweat lodge, next
to where Dennis and Jerry were covering
a hollow cottonwood log with elk hide
to make a big drum. There, we set up our tent.
Gary brought his fly rod in case the farm pond
sheltered big bass under all those rings of rise.
Dennis sat down on the Jeep truck tailgate,
pronounced himself “Anishinaabe on a Comanche,”
as Alice snapped photos of our craft weekend.
Soon after, we sang and laughed around the fire,
ate stew from the iron pot, drank coffee into the night,
gathered wood for the next day’s sweat ceremony.
—Roberta Schultz, Wilder, KY
Destitute Pea Pickers in California
“Mama, is Daddy really gone forever?”
“Yes, darlin’. Yesterday, he took his last breath.
But we’ll remember the good man he was. We’ll always remember.”
The six-year-old clings to Mama’s shoulder, rests her chin on small, unwashed arms.
On Mama’s other shoulder, the five-year-old hides her face from the world.
The just-fed baby sleeps soundless in Mama’s lap.
Migrant mother, Dustbowl Madonna with
smudge-faced holy child and frowzy-headed cherubim,
stares at a muddy, endless pea field.
Nothing to it but to go on.
Alone, she might quit.
But, for these children, quit takes a back seat.
Mama stands. “Children, I got to go pick now.”
“We’ll be good for you, Mama. We’ll look after the baby.”
“You’re the best children ever was.” She kisses each.
“Pray God gives me strength today.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She puts one foot in front of the other, out to the muddy, endless pea field.
—Will Jones, Aiken, SC
Woman at the Window, after Salvador Dali, 1925
We do not have permission to post this Dali image, but you can see and read about it here:
The baby had screeched all morning, matching cry for cry the raucous shrieks from the gulls perched atop the roof’s broad ledge. The gulls watched for changes in the ripples, waiting for small fish to surface in the water below. Elena learned the first day on this nanny job that when a fish was spotted, the gulls released their shit in unison before swooping down to the water. Elena had just quickly stepped back from the window in time to miss the accompanying deluge as the gulls descended to claim their latest prize .
Peering out the window now, she saw the birds were clustered at the water level, quieter than before, but still sharply chastising each other to take their turn, or only take their share, or take it easy, or whatever else birds were saying when they fussed at each other. Elena frowned as she watched them, irritated that although she had fed them more than enough to go around, they still weren’t satisfied.
The nursery was more pleasant without the baby’s constant squalling and Elena hummed as she washed the gummy bottle the baby had emptied hours ago. She buried the dirty cloth nappies in the trash, glad to be done with that loathsome chore. Then, spying the last of the urine-soaked flannels on the window ledge, she used it to wipe the gull guano off the rotted wood and dropped it into the sea. A quick glance down assured her the baby would not go shroudless into Heaven. She closed the double window, neatly arranged the curtains, and wiped her hands on her uniform. She should hurry now; the bus home left the market at noon sharp.
—Jan Potts, Lexington, KY
NEW FEATURE
Three Books recommended by Gary Phillips
Just Us; An American Conversation, by Claudia Rankine, probably the best exposition of whiteness that I have ever read.
Voice Lessons, by Karen Salyer McElmurray; we read together at McIntyres, her Appalachian cadences and radical honesty blazing like a torch in the pandemic night.
The Legend of Auntie Po, by Shing Yin Khor, a graphic novel about race in an 1885 logging camp in California, and very good.
PROMPTS FOR NEXT ISSUE
We are still hoping to publish at least one, 500-word essay in every issue. It can be on any topic, but it needs to be lyrical, informative, and passionate writing. It can come from faculty or participants. This will be a competitive spot in the journal. You must convince our panel of readers with your very best writing. It can be an opinion, description, scene, or character study, but it must go somewhere and be compelling in and of itself. We will stop taking submissions once we have seven to use for 2022!
Poets: Your prompt is to write one stanza describing a piece of advice you got from an elder and the scene in which it was delivered. In the second stanza describe the time when you finally used the advice.
We also still welcome submissions for a listing of books you are reading and would recommend to others. For this feature, we will accept up to three sentences per book. Gary did a great job above—Your turn! The challenge is to help us understand why we should read the book.
Email submissions to: tabletockwriters@gmail.com
Subject: Journal Submission