Happy December, Subscriber! I hope your year is heading for a peaceful close.
As I was going through my inbox earlier this week, I discovered the most delightful surprise...an email from a favorite high school teacher! Mrs Creagh taught English and Drama classes at our little high school at Camp Lejeune, NC. What an incredibly inspiring teacher she was. The kind of teacher you learn from because they make learning so much fun.
It was in her AP English class that we studied Tyger, Tyger by William Blake. She brought that poem to life and to this day it remains a favorite of mine because the language is so visual.
My college minor was printmaking. One of our projects required that we make the paper on which we printed images we had etched into metal plates. We then had to bind those pages into a book. I immediately knew my handmade book would be based on Tyger, Tyger.
In the process of making my book, I pulled several test prints, many of which turned out well. On a trip back home from school, I stopped by my high school alma mater, and gave those test prints to Sara.
In her note to me this week, Sara (now) Strassle described how both of her daughters grew up with those prints, and how her younger daughter loves them so much she's asked to hang them in her distant house to make it feel more like home.
Gosh. Sharing art cannot possibly get any better than that. Giving Sara those prints must have been 41 years ago. To be honest, I'd forgotten that I'd given them to her.
But she never forgot. And now those little test prints given to a favorite teacher seem to have become a legacy in Sara's family. A legacy of how she brought the art of the written word to life for me; and how much she treasured a small token of appreciation from a former student.
Telling stories. Solving problems. Preserving memories. Supporting each other. This is why Art is important.
