Why Emily Dickinson?
I’m joining Folktale Week’s illustrator challenge* on Instagram, because I love a good set of prompts AND I enjoy getting my work out in a way that drops it into a community. And! I found a way that’s *very me* to join…. Cinderella X Emily Dickinson!
I’m not really at peace in my art making until I find a way to be authentic in it. Now that I’ve turned to illustration, I’ve been re-evaluating what that means. It’s not completely different than when I was doing fine art, but it’s for sure different. I had to figure out what I love in visual expression and content when it’s meant for a picture book audience.
So I think about being a girl… and what did I love back then?
And what is authentic to me? What story am I telling?
Being an artist, being female, being my mother’s daughter, being Mexican-American… these are part of what’s genuinely me.
And I want my artwork to come from a place of love, of joy… and so, what do I remember loving? Of those, which do I still love? Or, what has come to mean more & more over time? For this challenge, the added thing was… which folktale means something to me?
I’m not sure in what order I realized these things, but I thought of things my mom shared with me about what she was like when she was a girl. Only now do I look back and realize how formative those stories were to me, because they’re still with me.
Emily Dickinson, my mom, and me
How old was I when she told me the poem she wrote when she sat by herself in front of her high school on a weekday afternoon? I would picture her (in black and white, of course, because the whole world was in b&w in the olden days haha), a slight but tallish girl, awkward (her opinion), quiet. She was a new immigrant, having moved to the US just a few years prior. And there she was, composing a poem, not even in her native language?! I connected with that part of my mom, the young girl with deep feelings with vision to see beyond where she was.
Day by day the splendors vanish
from the world that I once knew.
Day by day its beauty weakens
disappearing from my view.
Day by day I age a little
leaving happy memories behind.
Day by day abandon incidents
which never again will I find.
Day by day I leave my old world
and doubtfully accept the new.
Day by day accept the strangeness
that this new world offers few.
~Estella Rodriguez Ruiz, as a teenage girl
And from that memory, I switch over to the first of many times she’s quoted Emily Dickinson’s poetry to me, times when I was sad as a teenager. She’d share it with me, and after a moment of resonance—yes! that’s exactly how I feel!— we’d both laugh at how seriously we could take ourselves.*
I’m nobody, who are you,
are you nobody too?
Then there’s a pair of us,— don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know!
I’m wondering now, though- when did she become familiar with Dickinson? I’m texting her right now to ask. She only lives next door. But I’m cozy with my dogs, it’s cold, and I don’t feel like getting up. (She says sometime in high school.)
Anyway, I love love love that my mom shared this poetry (and more) with me. She shared with me what she loved as a girl, and it helped me know who I came from, where I came from!, and who I might want to be.
OK, I gotta wrap this up. I’ll talk about *why Cinderella* later. I can’t sit here writing all day! It takes me so much longer to write things than it used to (before brain injury). I’m trying to let myself just write and let go. But I will write more! About the connection between Cinderella, my mom, having big dreams, and me.
OK, bye!
~m
Footnotes:
Info on Folktale Week is @FolktaleWeek on Instagram
Em dashes (the longest dash, about the width of an “m”)… which came first for me… loving Emily Dickinson’s poems, or being someone who interrupts myself with related things? See: The Em Dash Divides, August 2019, New York Times.