Anna Höstman: Do you remember your first experience writing music?
Linda Catlin Smith: Probably not my first because, you know, my mother was a piano teacher, among other things, and I learned to read music before I learned to read words. I used to just watch my mother's hands, and then I would sit and just pretend that I could do all that.
Some of this fooling around at the instrument started coalescing into things I would play over and over again the same way, and I started naming them, so I could remember which one was which, and the ones that were very open sounding, in my imagination they felt open, or they felt white, and I think that had to do with, not so much change of harmony, maybe they were very modal – I liked rocking between sounds, and I liked arpeggiation. They were very simple, kind of Satie-like in texture. I liked descending bass lines, like a lot of pop music does. I started writing them down when I was about 11, very poorly, and they started to get a little bit more exploratory and more dissonant harmonically, and unusual, for a child. I liked exploring their potential for spiny harmonies a little bit, like putting major seconds together, what sounded really avant-garde to me at the time.
I would say [composing] was something that I did that was just out of a place to be. Sitting at the piano – I could do it for a long time. Nobody was at all interested in it, which was kind of great. I would make these pieces and I would have friends over and then I would sit at the piano and play my pieces and they would not drop what they were doing and come and listen. My parents showed no interest at all, and I think in a way that was helpful. I didn't get overly pressured – nobody said it was good. Nobody said it was bad, thankfully! But they just kind of left me alone with it and that became something that I just did for myself. I had piano lessons, and I stopped having piano lessons with my mother because we fought, so she got me my own piano teacher when I was five or six, but I tended to only practise the things that I liked over and over again, and not the things that I should be practising, and I think that was the composer side: just wanting to hear what you want to hear, and be wrapped in it, repeating it so that you can stay in that world.
AH: And you chose to study composition in university?
LCS: I went to an alternative high school of 27 people called Elizabeth Seeger school. It was started by a number of teachers who had an idea about a high school that could be good for young people, and I was one of the experimental members of the first years of that school. The first year we didn't have a good music teacher at all, she was really, really not helpful. I would show her my piano pieces and she would say, you have to change your style, and that means nothing to me at all. So it was sort of stymieing, but then Allen Shawn came and he was an amazing teacher. He saw that I was a composer and he just gave me these lessons, every week, and took me seriously and also took me to concerts and told me to go to things and gave me recordings to listen to. I remember I was sick one year with strep throat and he sent along all of the Bartok string quartets for me to study; he's still a good friend.
So when I finished high school, I was looking around at schools. A personal friend of my family was a violist named John Graham – amazing viola player in New York, he's on a lot of Nonesuch recordings, and he told me I should look at Stony Brook. I think he taught there. So I had to audition for the Gil Kalish, and you know I was not a great pianist, but I went and auditioned and I played one of my own pieces and, to his credit, he said we need students like you at our school. So I don't know what that meant because actually, as an undergrad, you couldn't take composition, but I knew I wanted to already, so I was going to university because I wanted to study composition. (I actually, at one point, thought I should go to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger which is what Allen Shawn had done, but, of course, that was a dream. And I didn't do it.) I met these three composers from Victoria: Christopher Butterfield, Owen Underhill and Pat Carpenter. And Christopher gave me a composition lesson, which was really helpful, on one of the first pieces that I ever wrote for another instrument besides piano, and then he told me about Rudolf Komorous, and Owen told me about Rudolf, and so I transferred to Victoria and could then take composition fully, and that was perfect.
I didn't get to study with Rudolf until the second year of my Master's, so I went for third and fourth year undergrad to Victoria, and then stayed for a Master's. Rudolf had become chair of the department and wasn't taking students so I took theory with him and studied composition with John Celona and Martin Bartlett a little bit, and finally got to study with Rudolf, which was amazing for me. It was amazing because I was one of those composers that was quite insecure and he just saw something in everything I did and then helped make that thing better. He was actually talking about the notes, and what was on the page, and he was really supportive, which was important for me. I also had contact with Jo Kondo, who came to the University of Victoria and taught for a year, and I didn't take composition with him but I heard his music and I took traditional Japanese music with him which was like a composition lesson. It was extraordinary to study that music and just to be around him and hear him talk about music. And he's stayed a friend to this day too.
AH: What was it about Japanese music that really affected you?
LCS: Well, mostly gagaku, in terms of its spaciousness, the way it unfolds. The sense of time in that music is very slow and you feel you have all the room you need to hear everything that's going on, and it requires a kind of slowing yourself down. I really love how it opens up the feeling of time. But also the harmonies are very beautiful because of the shō instrument, which is often playing these cluster chords, and there's a slight looseness about how things line up, so attacks can be slightly off each other. It doesn't feel overly metrical. And I remember Jo talking about pulse as a completion of a circle: if you think of a pulse, every time you get to the same point in the circle as you go around, that's a repetition, but in that music, every circle is a different size. So the notion that pulse could be irregular in that way was really inspiring to me. Because I never liked things that were – well, I guess I liked them, but I couldn't do them – things that were super-repetitive and metrical, and sometimes I find that kind of thing oppressive. I still love that music, gagaku music, beautiful.
AH: And with Rudolf, what were you drawn to in his music, or in his teaching? How do you think it changed you as a composer?
LCS: Well, aside from the feeling that he was looking intimately at the work I was writing, so he was looking at every note, he is a phenomenal orchestrator. I remember my grad piece was an orchestra piece and he would just say, this would sound so much better if you put this note in the bassoon, and this one on the … whatever. And, he just had this feel for it. And that taught me. Just the way he would sometimes suggest something that I wouldn't have thought of would open up a world; it would just be remarkable.
He also directed me to a lot of artists and a lot of literature to look at. He would bring me books to take home: art books, or poetry. And I get the impression that he was really paying attention to each student as individual, because when I talk to them their experiences are very different, even though there are a lot of us who've studied with him now. And he never pressured. I could bring in the tiniest scrap of a few notes, and he would work with that. And he would take it seriously, and see what its potential was.
AH: So you were in Victoria for …
LCS: Four years.
AH: And you finished your Master's there, and then you moved to …
LCS: Toronto. So I didn't go back to the States.
AH: What made you decide to come here?
LCS: Well, by then Christopher Butterfield had moved to Toronto and started a rock band, and told me that he wanted RickFootnote 1 to play in it, so Rick moved to Toronto for the rock band, which was called Klo, K-L-O, and so I moved here because that's what they were doing. We all thought it was temporary, we just assumed we'd go back to New York, but as it turned out, Toronto in the eighties was a great place for composers and musicians to be because there weren't that many, and there was work. One could put on concerts and people would come, and you could be part of things right away. So the rock band lasted about five years and then they went back to doing what they were trained to do, which was classical percussion in Rick's case, and in Christopher's case, composition.
I was just trying to do my own little compositions and I put on a series of concerts with Anna-Marie Cobbold, who was a painter here. We became very good friends, and she was a member of Mercer Union Gallery artist-run centre, and we convinced them to let us put on a series of concerts, so we did that for three years. It was called Five Solo Concerts, which was five solo musicians. And it would be Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday in a two-week period, so it was a little mini-series. And there was no money involved, really. We got the space for those two weeks; there was art on the walls but we got the evenings. We basically asked musicians. I didn't know very many people yet my first year so Christopher did one, and Rick did one, and my piano teacher Kathleen Solose did one, and a bassoonist that we knew from Stony Brook did one, so they were people we knew. And the idea of it was that each of them was invited to do something they had never done before. It was that kind of invitation, open-ended, but the suggestion was, use this as a chance to try something. So they chose their programme, or they did an improv, or they made their own pieces.
Owen Underhill did Rudolf Komorous's Anatomy of Melancholy. What that piece is, is tape decks; it's a bunch of recordings of scraps of recorded material that Rudolf has that the performer puts together in their own way. And it's a historic piece because Owen has done it, Martin Arnold has done it, I have done it, Eric Chenaux has done it. John Abram transferred all those reel-to-reel recordings – it used to be done on reel-to-reels – to a bunch of CDs, so you can have multiple CD players: it's a bit of a disc jockey piece, really. And it's totally different, and the sounds are amazing, they're crazy.
So we did that concert series for three years, everything was by donation, and it was through that that Henry Kucharzyck came to one of them and basically invited me to join Arraymusic, because he saw that I was doing stuff, and so I became a member of the board first, and, within a year I was artistic director.
AH: What was involved with this?
LCS: It was coming up with concerts, and it's a lot of work being an artistic director. Back then, it was a little less grant-heavy. Now it's incredibly bureaucratic, but still it was a lot of work presenting concerts and programming, coming up with ideas, overseeing rehearsals. I did a lot of research; basically I programmed things that fascinated me. But I went to Darmstadt to see what was going on with composers in Europe.
AH: What was that like?
LCS: Darmstadt was really intense, because it was kind of a competitive situation for composers, but what was wonderful were the lectures, and I went to as many as I could and learned a lot, and heard a lot of music, and there were some great musicians there, and just came home with a lot of ideas. Met the Arditti quartet, met some wonderful composers from Czech Republic and Italy. I ended up bringing home a lot of scores. I didn't programme a lot of pieces from that but one thing kind of led to another and by that time I'd also met Martin Arnold, who had been at UVic after me, and he had a lot of knowledge of composers too, so I just started programming composers I was curious about like Kevin Volans and Gerald Barry and did a whole concert of Rudolf's music and commissioned Christian Wolff.
I think my first concert was actually a hangover from something I learned at the Art Gallery at Mercer. I did a concert called Horror Vacui (Fear of Blank Space), which in the visual art world is referring to work which fills up the canvas completely, very, very busy, and there had been a show at Mercer called that, and I decided to borrow that idea or steal that idea and do a concert of music in which there is no blank space: very dense, continuous, busy music, just to look at it. So the concert had Volo Solo by Cornelius Cardew, which is everybody playing as much and as fast as they can, and a piece by Charles Wuorinen – very busy, New York Counterpoint by Steve Reich; there were two other pieces on that concert that I can't remember, but it really was like a concept concert, and that was very satisfying. Basically, it was my training ground for working with musicians, so learning how to listen to what the musicians know, and work collaboratively, because they often knew far more than I did. I was very young to be an artistic director, and to voice my own opinions and to take charge. And you know, it's political too, talking about work, defending the work you choose to do and not being pushed to do work that you don't want to do. There's a lot of trade-offs in the field, I'll programme you if you programme me; I didn't really enter into that.
AH: What role was Array playing in Toronto at that point?
LCS: This was in the eighties, so I was director from 1988 to 1993, and I started the Young Composers’ Workshop in 1986 when I was a board member. My feeling of what Array was about was supporting composers in their work, and to hear work from other places – Australia, Japan – and to record it. It started as a composers’ collective, and my feeling was that it was really trying to nurture the work of composers and to allow them a place to try stuff. The Young Composers’ Workshop was part of that, but also the rehearsals were part of that. And then put that in relief with the occasional major composer, like we did the horn trio of Ligeti, and we did quite a bit of Cage.
AH: Did Cage come to any of those concerts?
LCS: He did not, though he had come to Toronto quite a bit; we didn't commission Cage, so there wasn't a new piece from him. But we did work with Terry Riley, we did work with Christian Wolff, which was amazing, and Gerald Barry, Kevin Volans; there used to be a grant at the Canada Council for the Arts called the Visiting Foreign Artist Grant and that would help you bring someone from afar.
AH: And these don't exist anymore?
LCS: No, same with Explorations Grants – what a beautiful name – allowing people to try things that they've never done before; that was a really wonderful programme. The financial support was a little different than it is now and we could afford to pay for more rehearsal time. So that was amazing because … I mean, performers are amazing now and they do incredible work with very little time, but having more rehearsal time means you can actually have a magnificent experience. The musicians can really know the pieces inside out and that meant that some of these performers were extraordinary. And the music required it, required them to know each other's parts that well, so that was kind of exciting about that time. That doesn't exist now. I feel like we've all gotten really good at doing amazing things with less, so there's always this feeling of being constrained, or people doing a lot for free. Sometimes it's better for the community if you can actually really support excellence.
AH: Can you tell me about your own composer–performer collective, Urge?
LCS: Well, Urge was a little bit later and was really started by Fides Krucker. She put out an invitation to a bunch of women to work together using sound, movement, theatre to create work. And I think she was coming out of the opera tradition, which is very hierarchical, and she wanted to work in a non-hierarchical, co-creative way. So we first worked vocally, and did some training with Richard Armstrong, who's a wonderful vocal teacher, and that kind of filtered us down into a smaller group, and we started working on what could it mean to create a piece. My role was not as a composer at all, everybody was composing, everybody was performing, and we developed a way of working that had to do with training in each other's disciplines. We trained with breath, voice and body in the morning; so that would be yoga and breath work, vocal technique, and dance training with the choreographer Marie Josée Chartier, who was in the group from the beginning. And then the afternoon was our creative period and we did a lot of improvisation, usually based on three visual artists whose work we kind of riffed off of: Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo and … oh, her name just went out of my head – very famous – flowers?
AH: Georgia O'Keefe?
LCS: Georgia O'Keefe. Good. I gave you the right hints!
AH: Flowers!
LCS: So we started off working that way. We would choose an image and do an improv on it. But later we worked with other themes. Our first piece was kind of an experimental work, workshop piece really, with movement and sound and text. We did a lot of writing. And the second piece, I had an Urge to Write You, was based on a series of letters. We were going to be apart for six months, so we did a letter-writing chain, a very complex chain, where you would write a letter to this person and then you would get a letter from that person and then you would respond to that letter to a third person, and so these letters went around. And a lot of things happened during that period: Fides had a baby, somebody else had somebody die, somebody else had a romance split up. But these letters became an urtext, we called it an ‘urgetext’, for a piece.
What I learned there had to do with collaboration: how to work in a group, how to listen, how to improvise, how to do things that I don't know how to do, so what does it mean to sing when you're not a singer? I brought in six violins, and everybody played the violin for one piece, and nobody plays the violin in Urge, so that was fascinating: being creative with something you're not good at but then also working within your virtuosity, learning how to go dark, to go into sort of scary places as a group, and not shy away from difficult subject matter.
AH: Can you talk about that a little bit more?
LCS: Things would come up. I remember one improv took us in this direction, and I ended up playing this concertina wearing you know, almost nothing. We had done an improv using all these clothes, and I just got tired of all the clothes and I took the dry-cleaning bag and put that on. I was playing the concertina, and they were staring at me and said, that has to be in the piece. That was in I had an Urge to Write You, and there's a moment where I climb up on this dresser and the women come running over and I fall into their arms, literally, I had to learn how to do that. They run with me across the stage and take off this thing I'm wearing and underneath I have this dry cleaning bag and it's like coming out of a shell. And to me that was a metaphor for Urge, about taking a leap, if you have the trust, take the step off the cliff and go somewhere new, and I never would have done that but the group convinced me the piece required it and not to shy away from that, and I didn't, and I'm glad I didn't.
And many of us in the group had that experience of sometimes going into some personal material, and I think the way I translate that is in composition. If I get into something that is really hard for me, to pursue it, as opposed to backing away, and to just see how far I can take it. And to learn how to do what I can't do. And that pieces need their dark and their light. You need to have the grit and to allow some of that in there.
Often in Urge we would have a point where everything would be reduced to some kind of essential text that we would then speak in unison. So it would be a tiny thing that would require tons of rehearsal. Or we would walk across a stage in unison in silence and we had to practise that every day; certain things that were minimal but were kind of very difficult actually, tight-rope walk, and I think that willingness to go that far was something that I felt really happy to learn about. And there's safety in numbers and of course when you're composing you're by yourself. But to learn the courage part was useful. And also the messiness of Urge. I love how messy we were as creators: messy emotionally, messy with materials. You know we had one piece called She promised she'd bake a pie and we were whipping cream at the end and spilling it onto our clothes every night and stamping flamenco rhythms. I mean, it was, you know, crazy! And it was making a real mess. But the audience loved it because it was a release. It was beautiful.
AH: It sounds like you found this tension between the discipline, the intensity of discipline, and then the release of it, as a kind of balance.
LCS: Well, I think that's so useful in creativity, you know music is so disciplined, but I think it can get … I think why I like this idea of a little bit of messiness. I think I could have gotten very perfectionist about it all and that might have sort of killed something. I think perfectionism is really dangerous and it's better for me, it's healthier for me to make work that has a little bit of looseness to it and can take a little bit of … almost like it's made by hand, so like a child's drawing or something, that has some aspect that isn't perfect, that keeps me feeling at ease instead of feeling that I have to make a perfect thing, which I don't think I'd be able to do. That would get airless for me, I would feel locked in.
AH: Can you talk a little bit about Les fleurs anciennes?
LCS: Les fleurs anciennes was for Vancouver New Music's Millenium concert, September 2000. And the idea of that concert, wonderful idea: ten pieces created, one based on each century from 1000 to 2000. I was assigned the fourteenth century, which was an incredibly happy accident because I was engrossed in listening to the subtilitas, ars subtilior composers, Solage, and people like that. I wasn't really studying it, I was listening to it. And because I got assigned the fourteenth century, I looked into a little bit of their methodology.
Example 1: Linda C. Smith, Les fleurs anciennes
What I took from that was the idea of how they got their polyphony, just by taking something and offsetting it by a beat or two beats, like it's canon but not, like stripped, and having the new melody come in but it would be closely off. Maybe I'm getting it totally wrong, but that's how I perceived it. I was given a group of 14 strings to write for, which is perfect for me because I love string sound. So that piece was built out of trying to create this interwoven texture. I wasn't terribly systematic about it. I did do some of this offsetting of a beat here and there, and there is this little feeling of it being slightly canonic or imitative, but it's written by ear, and it's not strict. But it got the texture that I was after, which I've been intrigued with since.
AH: And your Piano Quintet?
LCS: … is similar, though it has fewer instruments so the weave is a little bit … and Wilderness too, and a lot of pieces I've been writing lately. I really like to make a loose kind of messy texture if I can.
AH: I was intrigued by the sentence you have on your website, that you're drawn to the ambiguity of harmony and narrative.
LCS: I mean ambiguity in both senses of the word. So I like things that are slightly obscure that you can't quite make out, but I also like the idea of something that has multiplicity of meanings, which is the other side of ambiguity, so something could mean one thing and another at the same time. And I like how in music that's so applicable. You know, is this the end of the phrase or the beginning of the next phrase. Is this in this key or that key, or both. There's so many ways things can be slightly mysterious. I like things to be more suggestive than obvious, that there's a way each listener could have their own meaning or experience, and it's not a one-to-one thing, and it's not about listening to it and getting it right, it's more experiential.
And I guess that goes to the idea of narratives. So I don't work with story-telling, for instance, though I think we're in narrative because pieces have beginnings and middles and ends and you can't get away from narrative very easily unless you make a piece that stays the same and cuts off. So I'm not really interested in pieces that are about something that you could speak about in words. It may seem sometimes that I am because I give pieces titles, but the titles are really … I want them to be loosely suggestive, as opposed to explanatory.
AH: And they are often very texture-driven.
LCS: Yeah, they're usually a reference to the texture – so I have nature titles and fabric titles – but not event-driven. I think that's what I mean by ambiguity of narrative, it could mean this, it could mean that, so there's an open-endedness for the experiencer, and even an open-endedness for myself.
AH: What might you be thinking as you begin a piece?
LCS: Sometimes it's a tone almost, or a mood. Sometimes it's textural, like the weave idea, or can I get close to something like fog, or mist, or waving grasses in a huge field. That's what Wilderness was trying to do, a lot of pieces of nature moving at once. But not specific … What can I do with getting as close as I can to how some painters use their backgrounds, layer upon layer of colour, and how they show through, and what shows through? So creating that kind of multi-layered texture, but it will be a scrap of a sonic image that I'll start with, like the tiniest little shadow of a thing, and then I just try to pursue that thing.
Example 2: Linda C. Smith, Wilderness for orchestra (strings only)
It's very sensuous for me, sound; I feel like it's something I want to drape myself in. And then sometimes working with material is a bit like looking in a tide pool, those beautiful tide pools out west. And there's the rocks there and there's a little pool of water and there might be a starfish and a piece of seaweed and then the tide comes in and then there's like … a fish there. Tide comes in and there's a broken shell, or the stones have moved, and that's just the material rearranging itself and I like to create a world and then stay in it a little while, so just rearranging the bits like a tide pool.
AH: So materiality seems to be at the heart of everything, materiality of sound?
LCS: Yeah I guess so, and harmony's at the base of it, because I work more harmonically than not. I don't set up systems of pitches very often, so I like to see where I can go with it, what it can take. I'm very curious about that actually. And I'm really curious with other composers. I like harmonic movement; if I feel a piece is just in a kind of frozen harmony, sometimes I find myself having a desire for movement. But if I'm observing somebody else's piece, I accept it, and I try to understand; their focus is something else.
AH: What is your relationship of harmony to form? How do you come to form?
LCS: Well I think they're probably related, but I don't think it's very conscious. I'm fascinated by form, and I think it's kind of an intuitive sense I have about how the shape needs to change, if it needs to change, or how it needs to come to its conclusion. So the form is a discovered thing, as opposed to a manipulated thing. Even the Nocturnes and Chorales piece for EveFootnote 2 – it took a while before I thought that this was going to be movements; I just didn't know what I had, I didn't know what I was going to keep of this material I was exploring.
I often want to write a piece that has no divisions, no sections, that the material just stays the same from beginning to end, but I very rarely have done that in a work. If I do it, it's in a short piece. Moi qui Tremblais doesn't really change. In the Piano Quintet, it just seemed necessary at a certain point that the piano should be playing by itself. So then it's a question how long, how long can I do it, how long can I push that, how long can it be, how long does it need to be, and sometimes I get it right, and sometimes I get it wrong, and I don't realize it's wrong until a way later.
AH: I wanted to ask about your relationship to voice a little bit, because Thought and Desire is a piece I've heard many times in Toronto, and your approach to text is …
LCS: Well that piece is kind of separate from how I set text in other situations. It's one of my rare pieces where everything is determined by the text. I made up rules and I followed the rules: if there's a capital letter, then there's this grace note, if there's a comma or a period, then it's this kind of fermata, or it's this high note, if it's this vowel, it's this pitch, if it's that vowel, it's that pitch. So things are very, very, very systematic.
I was making the piece as a gift for Austin and Beverly Clarkson's forty-fifth wedding anniversary so that's why I used Shakespeare's forty-fifth sonnet. I made the piano part, and I realised that there was this inner voice movement of the pitch that was changing in the chord. Because the instruction for the rhythm of the piece is to ‘play it as you would speak the text quietly to someone nearby’, there would be this slight undulation of rhythm. And then it was just natural to sing it. When I heard other people do it, it struck me that it's kind of a vulnerable sound, and there's something beautiful to that.
And now I feel even the title encapsulates something about the whole enterprise of creativity, that it's a brain thing and a desire thing (which is more physical), and that it's intimate for me. It's the intimate sounds that I really like, like this quiet singing at the keyboard, and this quiet playing – I am very drawn to that, I don't know why, but you know, maybe busy city, New York, growing up there it's loud, I don't know. I've always liked paying attention to the small things, like the tide pools, and the small things in the garden, small changes, and even those small moods that don't have names, those particular solitary qualities of feeling that you can have at any point in your day that are not momentous; I'm drawn to that.
AH: What are you working on now?
LCS: I'm just about to start a Baroque string orchestra piece.
AH: You have such a large body of work for Baroque instruments.
LCS: I know, I've been so lucky to do that. Well I studied harpsichord. I have a harpsichord. I switched to harpsichord because my piano teacher was late getting back that year, and somebody said, why don't you study harpsichord with Erich Schwandt. I fell in love with it. I'd always loved playing Bach, and then I learned all about Couperin, and these beautiful suites, and the unmeasured preludes of Louis Couperin. What I love about it is, again, the sound, like the transparency of the texture, and the lightness of the texture, and I love the slow movements. Not so much the ornamentation, which is what people think of with Baroque, but the style of playing. I love the Baroque flute sound, and overall it has a feeling of something delicate and varnished, and yet sort of solid at the same time. It's a beautiful … it's like a piece of wood you know, beautiful, old, shiny piece of wood, the Baroque sound.
Example 3: Linda C. Smith, Piano Quintet
***
I love composing in the summer, because then we can go out, weed the garden, and solve problems in our mind. To move the body and to go out and do things, even taking a walk is a great way to compose because something gets loosened, and things roll around a little bit, and you come back and the problem is resolved. It's like the work needs to have … it's almost like developing a photograph, you have to wait until the thing is in the solution for a little bit, and let the thing materialise. I love that word: materialise.
Nature is not perfect. There's symmetry involved but it's asymmetrical symmetry. And the other thing is, every colour in the garden works together, which is how I think about pitches, you know, they can all work together, that's how fascinating harmony is, you just have to get them in the right place. But I love the garden for that sprawling, messy, textural, overgrown quality. My garden is not pristine.
And it has its dark and light. I mean it has things that die. It has, you know, horrific insects you come across, scary things, and the beautiful things, the rotting things. It's all in there, growth and decay. I've been so influenced by having a garden, just the way a morning glory climbs up a wall, it's like a melody to me, it's going here and there, over there …
Fall 2016
