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Bio

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As a professional writer, editor and marketing consultant, Denise Petti assists various businesses in brand development and the creation of unified content for marketing collateral and client websites. She helps people and companies clearly define their key messaging, mission and goals. From corporate branding to copywriting, cool designs to clever taglines, businesses of all shapes and sizes have been relying on DP’s marketing and editorial expertise since 2000.

Denise is also a writer of feature articles, short stories, memoir, poetry, and greeting card verse. She is a contributing writer and editor at Wild River Review, an online literary magazine that seeks to raise awareness and compassion as well as inspire engagement through the power of stories. At Wild River Review Denise is engaged in the curation, editing and publishing of essays, opinion, interviews, features, fiction and poetry focusing on under-reported issues and perspectives.

A quick glance at her published creative writing may be viewed here.

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In the Corner and Around the Bend

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Have you ever met someone that gives you the sense that all of life has led you to this moment?

Kim and I introduced ourselves over drinks during a party at the home of mutual friends. I was immediately struck by her calm, curious demeanor, and pleased to see she was drinking Fiji water, like me. Not that bonding over pretentiously branded, overpriced bottled water is something to write home about, but I mused over the fact that we both brought our own. At first meeting, she is easily one of the most gentle, bright, cheerful and fully present women I’ve ever met, to say nothing of her beautiful face, posture and muscle tone. Her shredded physical form is impressive and awe-inspiring, but little did I know just how strong this woman really is.

Our hosts, Tracy and Scott, were in the final hours of getting ready to leave their home and move with their children to Amsterdam. Several families in town turned up with pizza, chips and beer to gather on the front porch of their mostly empty, packed-up home and bid them a final farewell. Some families already knew one another. Others were meeting for the first time, all in the spirit of friendship and support.

After introductions, Kim and I small talked, sharing some lighthearted stories about work, music, where we grew up, where we’ve lived and traveled, types of foods and drinks we do or don’t enjoy, and various other topics. She loves weightlifting. I love writing. I told her I do some ghost writing for a few clients, one of whom rescues horses which makes me feel good and purposeful. My husband, Neal, told a funny story, about his buddy, Andy, who used to crash his family’s Sunday dinner like clockwork. All the while, Kim graciously humored us, smiling and laughing in genuine amusement. I noticed she adapted deftly and effortlessly to a few drastic and dramatic shifts in subject matter, telling us about her Dad being rescued from a Panamanian prison in the eighties. Our chats ebbed and flowed as I talked about my Dad rescuing people from an explosion that claimed his own life in the nineties. Not your typical party conversation. And I loved it.

Kim talked about how she lifts weights for mental and emotional strength. I concurred, saying I write for the same reason. She said she’s more of an introvert at parties, preferring more in-depth one-on-one conversations off in a corner somewhere. I told her I had always been outgoing, and yet I find as I grow older – and having suffered hearing loss in recent years – I rather prefer smaller, quieter gatherings. Neal and I joked about how deaf I am these days, and I looked around and noticed that we were indeed in a corner, Kim standing to my left. By my bad ear.

As we pleasantly volleyed between water and whiskey, Tracy and Scott’s two young children, Owen and Grace, walked outside and presented Kim with two envelopes. I made an effort to read their lips as they spoke but could only partially make out that they had done some sort of fundraising and wanted to make a donation. I studied Scott’s and Tracy’s faces and noted the tenderness in their eyes. Kim was visibly moved and bent down to gather Owen and Grace into her arms. She then excused herself into the house. I had the immediate sense that she must have experienced a profound loss, so I turned and politely asked Scott if she was okay.

“Oh man,” he said. “Kim’s son, Sean, died five years ago. He and Grace went to kindergarten together. They were friends.You know the 5k race they have here in town every year?”

Goodness gracious. I knew the race he was talking about. I had seen the signs in town. I saw the mile markers spray-painted on the road. I even remarked to Neal one day while we were out walking the dog that I’d like to run that race sometime, and I didn’t even know who it was for or what it was about.

“Oh my God, was he sick?” I asked.

“Yes, well, I should say he got sick. It was like he was fine one minute and then he came down with this high fever and was in the hospital for five months. They diagnosed him with this rare condition called HLH and it all just took a turn for the worse and he went septic…”

As I stood there listening to Scott tell Sean’s story, I blinked in what felt like slow motion, reeling on the porch thinking back to a few short months ago when I stood by my own septic daughter’s hospital bed and watched, horrified, as her vitality took a spontaneous and heinous spiral downward. I watched her life force diminish before my very eyes.

Kim came back outside and I told her how very sorry I was about Sean. Our eyes fell heavily on each other and there was an excruciation in them that we shared, so much bigger than sadness. I told her we had very nearly lost our daughter just a couple months ago to Sepsis. Her whole facial expression intensified as she slowly repeated the word Sepsis back to me, as if it were an evil, insidious phantom. Because it is.

Three weeks into first grade, Sean had come home early from school with a fever. Over the next few days and after several doctor and emergency room visits, his fever was uncontrollably high. He was intubated and transported by helicopter to CHOP in septic shock and multi-organ system failure.

I couldn’t believe it… and yet I could. One minute we were standing there on the porch, discussing things like the way horses greet one another with a certain kind of intuitive knowing and how Take-a-Boost is a flat, unsatisfying and undrinkable colloquial beverage. Next thing I knew there we were, commiserating over the ghastly ways that systemic infections had crept up and took over our children’s bodies. Sepsis takes no prisoners. It runs the show. There, Kim and I stood in the corner, speaking to the unspeakable horrors that can happen in an instant and lead you to your child’s deathbed.

My own daughter, Michaelina, had come home from school like any other day. We played with the dog, took goofy selfies that made us both belly laugh, then I asked her to straighten up her bedroom and put her clothes away while I went downstairs to make dinner. As it was cooking, I picked up a few things around the house and carried them upstairs to put them away and noticed Lina’s room was still not straightened up. Feeling impatient, I hollered at her to get off her phone and do as I had asked, only she wasn’t on her phone. She was sitting on the floor by her dresser, piles of clothes all around her. She slowly stood up, pitched forward toward her mirror and said she felt dizzy. She looked up at me and her face was pale and drawn.

“Honey, are you okay?” I asked.

“I don’t feel well,” she answered, her eyes swollen and puffy.

The next 24 hours brought high fever, vomiting, and lightheadedness. She slept and slept and slept… and figuring she was “sleeping it off,” I let her. Every hour or two, I would bring her water, ginger ale and a popsicle, but she didn’t want any of it. I pushed them anyway. She could only take small sips and licks and then would drift off again. At one point I asked her when was the last time she used the bathroom and she replied with strings of garbled nonsense words that weren’t even remotely coherent. I managed to get her up and walk her into the bathroom, noticing she was so weak, she leaned into me. I held her on the toilet so she wouldn’t fall over, then helped her wash up and get back into bed. Suddenly, and with surprising clarity, she asked, “Mom, what if I have toxic shock?”

Perplexed by the question, I took a moment to process what she had said. Toxic shock?

“Honey, why do you say that?”

 

She replied blatantly, “Because I feel like I’m dying.”

I sat beside her, gazing at her face as she drifted back off to sleep, wondering how in the world she was able to remember what toxic shock…  i.e. Sepsis… even is. Sure, I had mentioned it to her before, the importance of being responsible with feminine product use, but for her to hone in that potential diagnosis with such crystal clear curiosity… it surely gave me pause.

She was wearing a sports bra and gym shorts. Her skin was on fire and had a reddish pink hue to it, like she had been out in the sun all day. I stirred her gently to take her temperature: 103.5. I walked into the bathroom and took the product information insert out of the tampon box. Grabbing my reading glasses, I read:

Tampons are associated with Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS). TSS is a rare but serious disease that may cause death.

WARNING SIGNS OF TSS ARE, FOR EXAMPLE, SUDDEN FEVER (USUALLY 102° F OR MORE), VOMITING, DIARRHEA, FAINTING OR NEAR FAINTING WHEN STANDING UP, DIZZINESS, OR A RASH THAT LOOKS LIKE A SUNBURN.

I called the pediatrician immediately and told them we were concerned about toxic shock. The nurse practitioner said it was possible, but unlikely, and sounded an awful lot like Scarlet Fever, which Lina had had when she was five, but she advised us to go to the Emergency Room anyway just to be safe and sure. I took her instead to the local urgent care facility, where I figured we would get the simple and quick strep test done, confirm the Scarlet Fever diagnosis, get the antibiotic script and be on our predictable way.

Walking in, a nurse came out to help me, noticing how weak Michaelina looked. They did the normal routine, checked us in, got her weight, took her temperature, but it wasn’t until her heart rate and blood pressure vitals set off critical alarms in triage that virtually the entire staff stopped everything they were doing and rushed to her side. They double and triple checked the machines. They took manual readings with the second hand of their watches.

Next thing I knew, they were trying desperately to find a vein to start her on a bolus of IV fluids. The first attempt failed. The doctor herself stepped in front of a team of two nurses, took out a fresh catheter needle and searched for the vein a little higher up while asking me what hospital I wanted. All the while, my daughter’s blood leaked out all over her arm, the doctor’s bare hands, and onto the floor. She asked me again, as she taped the catheter down, what hospital was affiliated with my insurance and, stunned, I said I wasn’t sure. I fumbled around for my wallet, searching for my insurance card, but I couldn’t read the toll free number on the back of the card because I had left my reading glasses at home. Plus it was a Saturday and the insurance company was closed. Everything was happening so fast.

The paramedics arrived within moments and we were on our way by ambulance to a CHOP affiliate on the Jersey side of the bridge. There, Michaelina’s case confounded doctors and nurses. At first they thought it was the flu. Then they thought likely a virus. Perhaps it was TSS, but probably not. They got on the phone with the infectious disease team at CHOP Main. Maybe it was a tick-borne illness or possibly something else. They simply didn’t know. More blood drawn. More tests. More fluids. All the while, her heart rate and blood pressure simply wouldn’t stabilize.

Early on, the doctor on the floor told us she would be staying overnight. He felt confident that things would improve with fluids and conservatively assured us that we’d likely go home in the morning. The fluids continued, the fever came back, the weakness and dizziness waxed and waned, the rash circled back around. As the shifts changed, the doctor came back into the room. His face was grave. He wasn’t so sure now that we’d be going home in the morning. He changed his tune and said we should pack some bags. Neal said he’d go home and do that for me while I stayed with Lina. I told him he may as well stay home and get a couple hours of sleep. We were in for a long night and it didn’t make sense for us both to be exhausted. He painfully agreed and offered to go home and take care of the cats and dog and make childcare arrangements for our son. While he was at it, he put a group text out to the family and some friends and let people know what was happening and ask for their prayers. Shortly thereafter, Michaelina was being rolled out on a gurney and onto the critical care transport unit to Philadelphia.

She and I arrived a little after midnight to CHOP Main, where she was met by a throng of doctors and nurses. There must have been a dozen people buzzing around my daughter’s bedside. After hours of watching, waiting, administering, and testing, no one could say for sure what we were dealing with. At 3:30 am, one of the attending physicians pulled me out into the hallway alone and told me that my daughter was a very, very sick girl.

He told me they were going to breathe for her. He asked if I wanted to be in the room when he inserted the breathing tube into her trachea. He guessed that it could come out if and when her heart rate and blood pressure stabilized, but that wasn’t the direction she was currently heading. They would have to insert an aortic catheter in her neck so that they could immediately take life-saving measures. I knew what this conversation meant. I knew right then and there that what they were saying is that she would either live… or she wouldn’t. My knees buckled and I unraveled in the hallway.

Standing on the porch now at Scott and Tracy’s, the wretched memory and the crystal clear clarity of it all came flooding to the forefront of my mind. I tried to find the strength in my knees once again, visualizing Kim standing beside her son in the same pediatric intensive care unit I stood in, gazing at her indescribable picture of perfection and sublime source of life’s very joy and light. I played it out in my mind, watching her lay beside him at night, just as I had done, her eyes pinned to his vital monitors like a television, the tracheal procedure, the breathing machine, the arterial line, the adrenaline drip, watching the heart rate and fever spike as blood pressure plummeted drastically in the other direction.

I am sitting with Kim now, sitting beside him, knowing first-hand how surreal and senseless the whole thing was… and is… to witness your precious, fragile, vulnerable thing of beauty helplessly succumb to the body turning maliciously and inconceivably on itself.

I twice watched my daughter’s heart rate skyrocket to the point of setting off loud, flashing cardiac arrest alarms across the hospital, while watching her blood pressure descend far below critical levels, I knew death was just beyond the threshold of her room. The desperation in a mother’s eyes, the sheer helplessness, the pleading for a solitary miracle, the exasperated urgency for someone, anyone, to please help my baby, the ferocious impulse to fly across the hospital bed and take matters into your own hands while remembering to defer to the professionals who – God willing – are doing everything they can, and more, to keep your child alive.

CHOP is easily the most advanced and amazing hospital in the world, and yet the insomnia and incomprehensible exhaustion is utterly all-consuming and makes you question everything. Attending morning rounds, allowing your observations and feedback to inform the course of treatment, the respect and awe for the physicians and nurses while simultaneously wondering if anyone really knows just what the hell they are doing. Placing all your hope and trust and terrified faith in modern medicine. Anything. Anything to save the light of your life… the love of your life.

Kim’s sweet boy, Sean, was at CHOP for five months. He sustained several heart attacks and was placed on a heart and lung machine, life support and dialysis. A rare and aggressive autoimmune disorder called Hemophagocytic Lymphohistiocytosis (HLH) was the official diagnosis. His tiny little body was completely ravaged by the disease. He was swollen and blistered beyond recognition and his limbs turned black from lack of sufficient blood profusion.

Sean had bilateral below the knee amputations and nine fingers amputated. He received chemotherapy and high doses of steroids. After one hundred days of fighting, Sean’s tiny, frail and damaged body could no longer keep up with his big, beautiful spirit. He went into Sepsis as a result of HLH and died from a severe fungal superinfection as a result of the chemotherapy, which had left his immune system wide open and compromised. Sean’s aorta ruptured on January 6, 2013 and he passed on from this realm

Kim’s broken, splintered spirit cracked opened on that porch as she told me about running to Sean’s side when she learned he was having trouble breathing. The heartache. The numbness. The out of body cries of despair. The longing to cherish forever your sweet child’s face. To have and to hold. To cradle and kiss. And to be faced with such profound tragedy and trauma.

Kim called it a spiritual crisis. She confessed that once she lost Sean, she no longer cared if and when she died herself. It sounds bleak, but it isn’t. I nodded in understanding and admitted that when my father was killed, I never felt more unafraid. I was invincible, ready to run into the fire to find him. To save him. To bring him home. Super human strength often comes when you are pushed beyond your comprehension. Not that I would ever conceive of doing the unspeakable, but it’s fascinating how un-scary the prospect of death becomes when the immense, infinite and immeasurable love you have for someone is so abruptly ripped from your grasp.

To want your father back is one thing. To want your child back, well… there aren’t enough tears in the human body or words in any language to adequately convey that impossibly unreal and revoltingly unjust yearning.

There we were. The two of us. Mothers in the corner. Mothers at the bedside. Mothers at the mercy of her child’s body betraying itself. Mothers with only one massive, palpable, excruciating difference: my child is alive.

Words threaten to fail me even as they bubble up. They are inadequate anyway. The tears are like a faulty spigot that won’t stop dripping. All I can do is keep writing, in the hopes that something worthwhile flows through my fingertips.

When our daughter woke from intubation, she turned her face her Daddy and said to him, “I met your mom.”

Rosana had died in 1995, six years before our daughter was born. Michaelina said she knew immediately that it was her grandmother and that she was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. She said she emerged from a wall of pink and red roses that stretched out across space in both directions into infinity. Rosana came to her and said, “Hello Michaelina,” to which she replied, “Hi Mom Mom.”

They embraced, and then Neal’s beautiful, kind, sweet, gracious, loving mother told our daughter it wasn’t her time. She instructed her to go back, and live.

As I shared this with Kim, perhaps stupidly, I didn’t question whether or not it was the right thing to do. I didn’t sense that I should hesitate or wonder if it was wrong or insensitive of me. Quite to the contrary, she looked relieved and filled with something not quite unlike joy at the hearing of it. She said she believed with her whole heart that it was real and true. She said she felt Sean’s spirit leave him and move through her the day he left this realm.

One might feel tempted to doubt what is appropriate to say or not say in excruciating times like this. She and I talked about that too. How some people just say the stupidest most thoughtless stuff to a traumatized mother… or worse, they don’t say anything at all. It sounds like a lose-lose proposition to someone who can’t fathom the agony, but Kim said she often found herself awestruck by the people who refused to even acknowledge what was happening in her life, as if it all would just go away if they walked away. Fade out like the end of a movie. I, myself, confided in a therapist in the wake of the trauma, saying, “People are telling me to be happy and thankful that she is okay now. But I’m not okay.”

Of course I’m grateful my daughter survived. It surely goes without saying. After some counseling, I slowly began to emerge from the thick, suffocating, post-traumatic fog surrounding that godawful experience and peel away the layers of humanity to take a look at the whole ordeal from a safer distance.

I can say for sure that I no longer subscribe to all the pat cliches like, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger or God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle or everything happens for a reason or it was (or wasn’t) meant to be. It’s all just so horrible and inescapable, and none of it even matters anyway. There are people who get it wrong, who ask all the wrong things all the wrong way. Some don’t even turn up at all. But they don’t think you’ve noticed, nor did they ever really intend to do harm.

Then there are the ones who hold you up, who ask you if you’re okay, who know you’re clearly not and sit beside you and let you be angry, or just rub your back and let you drop your very heavy head into your hands as the tears threaten to well up while refusing to fall. Those who know when to give you space and when to shut the hell up. There are the ones who text at all hours of the day and night for updates, who understand when you say you’re turning your phone off because you need to be fully present for your kid and pay attention to what’s happening, those who have their place in the room with you every minute of this hellish ride. There are those who send food, flowers, cards, notes, baskets and blankets, who call to ask if you need a razor, sweatpants, blueberry muffins or underwear.

Kim is made of some kind of gravity borne of gratitude, saying over and over that her friends are the reason she can even stand upright. She said she doesn’t believe she’d be here if it weren’t for the amazing friendship extended to her, the gracious, selfless outpouring of support, comfort and kindness that was shown to her and her family. She was compelled to create a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, called Sean Fischel Connect, whose mission is for the charitable purpose of supporting children’s health and well being and to raise awareness and funding for the research and treatment of childhood diseases. The Sean Fischel Connect 5k is the race I had previously mentioned off-handedly to Neal that I wanted to do… and now I knew why.

I don’t enjoy lifting weights or going to the gym. I’d rather type for two hours and then hit the street and run until I don’t feel my legs anymore. As I shared with Kim, there’s this thing that happens when you’re running, this feeling you get – they call it the runner’s high – and you get goosebumps on the top of your head. It’s a euphoria, an exhilarating clarity, a profound sense of wholeness and connection with some sort of essence simultaneously inside and outside of yourself. You receive insight, wisdom and peace that perhaps wouldn’t otherwise be accessible. I was running about ten years after my Dad had died when his voice distinctly came to me and somehow communicated to me that whenever I run with intention, I’m capable of accessing a place that’s closer to him and others who have gone before me. Since then, I like to think that every time I go out for a run and set an intention, that the gap between realms closes just enough for him to know I’m there, and for me to know he’s still with me.

Writing works the same way. In writing about the fragility and preciousness of life, I am called to bridge the gap and close the chasm that separates us from one another. I obtain this simultaneous inward outwardness. By going in, I am able to emerge. By retreating to my corner, I can come out fighting. That same wholeness and connection I absorb from running is accessible as I watch the words unveil across the page. In honoring the pain in the lives of people I care about, I step out onto a ledge that overlooks a wide, broad plane, a realm I wouldn’t otherwise gaze upon. It is then that I embrace the two-way frequency that allows me to transmit and receive. The top of my head opens and the same light that shines down into it also shines upward and outward into the world beyond.

Standing on the front porch with Kim that night, I was transported back to those atrocious, heart-wrenching times and I know with a knowing that surpasses all understanding that this beautiful woman’s trauma was and is horrifying and real. And yet here she stands beside me, the very picture of grace, composure, kindness, gentleness, lightness and strength. And now I know what makes her so beautiful. I know what makes her so real.

I tell Kim I will pray for her every day, and I will set my intention on Sean each and every time I lace up my running shoes. She smiles and thanks me and then asks that when I pray, could I please pray for her to have grace and strength. That is why she works out so hard. Because this cruel, crazy, incomprehensible nightmare has taught her that for all the prayers that went up for Sean, she still lost him. She had to reconcile that to herself, so she shifted the way she prays. She now knows she needs to pray, and ask others to pray, for the Holy Spirit to fill her with love, to fuel her faith, knowing that strength is ultimately the only thing that will get her through the day.

Believe me, Kim. That is the very least I can do.

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A Tribute to Jane Goodall

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Cruising at 35,000 feet, my leg bounced in the aisle as I attempted to distract myself from thinking too long and hard about how I would act once the flight landed in Houston. I had a book open in my lap, but I hadn’t read a word of it. I was too excited and I still had the drive from the airport to the zoo ahead of me, which would allow plenty of time for more overthinking.

The source of my distraction was the one and only Dr. Jane Goodall, the world renowned primatologist and the UN’s own Ambassador of Peace. I had learned she was giving a “Roots & Shoots” presentation at the Houston Zoo, so I hopped the first plane out of Philadelphia and flew clear across the country to learn more about this grassroots organization whose mission it is to increase social and environmental awareness and activism around the world. Actually, let’s be honest. I flew to Houston with the express purpose of meeting Jane.

As I obsessed about what I would say if I found myself face-to-face with her, I role-played some hypothetical dialog in my mind:

“Jane,” I would say as I eagerly took her hands into my own. “Big fan. Huge.”

No. What I wanted, perhaps more than anything else, was for her to know I was serious. I didn’t want to appear like just another star-struck fan. What could I possibly say to Dr. Jane Goodall that would leave a lasting impression or carry any real significance whatsoever?

My love for her began at the age of seven. Sitting beside my father in our family room, he and I would watch documentary footage of Jane’s pioneering work with the chimpanzees of Gombe, Africa. She was my hero. Captivated by her passion and courage, my little soul began to intuit what I wanted out of life. That is, more than anything else in the world, I wanted to do what she did – to travel to strange, distant lands, paying close attention to things that would otherwise go unnoticed and reporting with urgency and gentle compassion, the fascinating nature of little-known phenomena and the importance of preserving it.

How does one adequately express such depths of lifelong admiration and respect to the object of one’s affection without sounding like a poor sap in desperate need of a hobby?

I had plenty of time during the flight to stew about my approach, but what exacerbated the self-torment was the fact that I’d been granted an all-access pass to the event. My dear friend, Jennifer, worked for one of the corporations sponsoring the event and it was because of her fortuitous role in the coordination that I was able to join her as her guest.

Within minutes of entering the zoo, my mounting angst would prove utterly insignificant as I found myself standing directly beside Jane in a private room filled with event staff, reporters and sponsors. At last, here was my hero, and immediately next to me. This adorable, soft-spoken, graceful and dignified woman, who couldn’t have stood much higher than five feet, suddenly felt like a long-lost grandmother to me. I easily could have embraced her, shaken her hand, asked for an autograph, posed for a picture, but I was locked inside a beautiful moment in time that felt too sweet and privileged to cheapen with fanaticism.

As I listened to her address the room in her quiet, gentle way, speaking of the plight of the chimpanzees and the urgent worldwide call for more awareness and support, I remembered a conversation I’d had with my father when I was eighteen years old. We were watching the evening news together and a segment covering the violence and political strife in Rwanda was being broadcast. One aspect of the piece featured the increased poaching of mountain gorillas and how it was becoming widespread due to the lack of conservation presence and enforcement. I immediately sprang to my feet and told my father that I needed to go save the gorillas. My father turned to me and said in a very matter-of-fact tone, “Denise, even the gorilla savers ain’t savin’ no gorillas right now.”

The memory of this conversation struck me as so poignant as I listened to a 73-year old Jane speak with the same manner of conviction, the same poise, and the same compassion as the much younger Jane I can remember watching on National Geographic when I was just a little kid. All along she has maintained her tireless commitment to never let her beloved chimpanzees down, to spread awareness, to share the latest findings, to push harder, reach farther, face obstacles, overcome fears, discover something rare and accomplish something new every single day.

I’ve admired Jane’s devotion for over 30 years, and this life has taken me on journeys I’d never anticipated. My father met a tragic end in a factory explosion when he was just 56 and I was 23. I never did end up working with primates or traveling to Africa, at least not yet, but I did enjoy a few brief years as a veterinary technician. Now I’m a wife and working mother of two beautiful young children, a part-time writer/editor and a full-time marketing and creative professional. All along I’ve never let go of the values that Jane instilled in me at such a young, impressionable age. She made me want to explore the world, to continually learn and grow in knowledge, awareness and compassion. I have carried these values with me all throughout my life and seek to instill them in my own children.

If I’d had it my way, I would have become a photojournalist or documentary filmmaker working at National Geographic. My life took me down other, let’s just say, safer paths. Interestingly enough though, last year, at the age of 41, I received my BA in writing and film and media studies. It took me twenty-two years, but the pursuit of that little piece of paper somehow set me down on a new trail that found me meeting all sorts of kindred spirits. I now have the good fortune of working with the two lovely founders of Wild River Review, an online literary magazine committed to the curation and publishing of thought-provoking material that explores our great, wide world. The quality of their magazine content has been praised and compared to that of National Geographic.

Last year I became a member of the Board of Trustees for Woodford Cedar Run Wildlife Refuge, 171 wooded acres on the edge of the New Jersey Pinelands dedicated to the preservation of wildlife and habitats through education, conservation and rehabilitation.

I can honestly say that every moment spent at these two wonderful places is another moment spent living in the world of my dreams. Each day, I find myself taking one step closer to living out the life that my seven year-old self had envisioned for me. Every new experience affords me another opportunity to be a more fully-present mother as I seek to instill in my two young children the unspoken rewards that come from contemplating wonder and being stewards of the Earth. Looking back on what I should have, could have, said to Jane… perhaps a simple ‘thank you’ would have sufficed.

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Being the Flow with Zen Photographer, Claudio Basso

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By Denise Petti as featured in Wild River Review, November 6, 2012

“I believe every human is a sensual, spiritual being,” says photographer, Claudio Basso. “I use my photography to connect people and their soul.”


Claudio Basso

The mind. The memory. The soul. The body. The passion in Claudio Basso’s fine art, captivates all of our senses, inviting us to linger awhile.

As Jennifer Stockman, President of the Guggenheim Foundation, reflects, “Claudio Basso is a masterful artist adept at capturing the spirit and soul of any subject matter…. In his first landscape series, he was able to make even trees look like sensual and organic creatures. Claudio is truly a gifted artist who has the ability to change the way in which we perceive the world around us”.


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Born in Paris in 1959, Claudio received his first camera and an enlarger for his fourteenth birthday. He set up his own dark room was off shooting everything he possibly could. Soon thereafter he began dreaming of traveling the world and making a name for himself as a professional fashion photographer. At the age of twenty-one, he recalls saying to his father, “Dad, one day I want to be able to spin the globe and wherever my finger lands, go work there.”

With that, Basso relocated to Milan to seek out possibilities for work and learned that Alberto Nodolini, a well-known art director credited for re-crafting Italian Vogue and Vanity magazine, was meeting with up and coming talent. Basso contacted Nodolini and arranged for an appointment. He was chosen as one of the select few young photographers to work for Nodolini as an apprentice and it was through this valuable experience that Basso would begin to develop his own style.

Basso witnessed and absorbed the unconventional techniques of style and lighting, poring over films shot by fashion industry pioneers like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Art Kane, and Bill King. Back in the studio, Basso would attempt to replicate and reinvent what he was learning, showing his developing style to Nodolini to receive his guidance and feedback. 

“That was a terrific experience,” says Basso, “because Nodolini allowed me to be in the editorial offices of one of the most iconic magazines in the fashion industry. Not only was I seeing the magazine being brought from an idea to an actual icon of the industry, but I was having the opportunity to look at the work of all the big masters who were collaborating with the publication at that time.”

After years of apprenticeship, sacrifice and good, old-fashioned hard work in Milan, Basso went on to make his dream of spinning the globe a reality. Instead of hanging around Italy’s fashion capital with other successful fashion photographers who were beginning to enjoy the good life, Claudio packed his bags, went to Paris and started over again. Once he became successful there, he packed his bags again and did the same thing in London. “ It was hard because every time I would go to a new place, not only did I have to break into a new market, but I had to literally start from scratch. That meant putting the portfolio on my back, going on appointments all day and having most doors slam in my face until I got the first chance, then the second – all of this while surviving on french fries.”

This cycle continued until Basso found himself in demand all over the world. It wasn’t until he landed in New York City that he called his father and said, “Dad, remember what I told you several years ago about spinning the globe? Well, I wish to let you know that I made my goal a reality. Today I can travel anywhere in the world and find work because people recognize my name and the quality of work that I do.”

Such quality work consisted of creating exquisite fashion shots for magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vanity, Amica and Grazia, photographing some of the world’s most stunning and famous creatures; Cindy Crawford, Estelle Hallyday, Niky Taylor, and Iman Bowie, to name just a few.

At the height of his career, Basso stumbled upon the website of Buddhist teacher, Bodhipaksa. In his own spiritual quest, Basso tended to read a lot in an effort to, in his words, “become more awakened.” He was immediately taken by Bodhipaksa’s writing style, praising him for a style which Basso describes as “so immediate, so spontaneous.” He went on to read Bodhipaksa’s book, Living as a River, and claims the act of reading it brought him many afternoons of peace and inspired him to challenge both himself and his talent. 

About six months later, Basso suffered a career-halting aneurysm, challenging his way of life and altering forever the focus of his craft and everything as he once knew it. 

In what he describes as a “heat wave coming up from my feet,” Basso was rushed to the hospital, where doctors ordered an emergency MRI. The results showed that the extent of Basso’s brain hemorrhage was so severe that he was immediately transferred to another hospital. Within a matter of hours, Claudio underwent brain surgery, after which he slipped into a coma for eight weeks, suffered three strokes, and encountered multiple brushes with death. It was an ordeal that hospitalized him for over six months, an experience that affected him deeply on a spiritual level, and granted him a second chance at life with a new perspective on his work.

After his aneuerysm, Basso went on to create a series of images with meditative statements, infusing them with a “Zen energy” to which he is magnetically drawn. In a partnership with his Buddhist mentor, author Bodhipaska, Basso collaborated on the creation of the book entitled, Being the Flow.

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WRR: Being the Flow, brings together two talented communicators from very different fields. Many people recognize your work and your name from your celebrity/fashion work and I would just like to know how the two of you came to find one another. I know you read his blog and found it fascinating, but how did you find one another in order to collaborate artistically? 

I was already very much captivated by his writing and all of the things that he was talking about on his site. He inspired me so deeply that one afternoon during the winter – and it must have been a day when I think the temperature must have been about five million below zero – I picked up my camera and I went down to a nearby location where there were waterfalls, and decided to create a series of images. When I went back and looked at it I was so happy with the results that I decided to send them to Bhodipaska to let him know that his book inspired me to create it. A couple of weeks later I get an email from him saying, “Claudio, I find your work spectacular. It stops me in my breathing and it makes me think a lot. In fact, I find it so inspirational that I would like to ask you if you would be interested in doing a book with me where I create my spiritual writing on the inspiration of your images.” At that point, you can imagine, I was like a little kid jumping up and down the whole house. I mean, this guy was my guru that I’ve followed and he was now asking me to do a book with him.

How did you arrive at marrying your respective images with the meditations themselves? Can you walk me through your image selection process?

The meaning really was about two artists, collaborating together, utilizing two different tools to send out the same message to the world. The pictures were the inspirational source for Bodhipaksa’s spiritual writing. So the pictures came first. However, we did have a wide selection to pick from and that was a wonderful sharing process between the two of us. I would send him a selection based on what I thought, then he would give me his comments and his selections, then working back and forth we came up with a final selection of images that we both thought would be good to communicate the message.

WRR: The image called Tango is such a captivating photograph. I look at this photograph and feel it’s so aptly named.


Tango

Claudio Basso: The whole idea of the Tango dance, as you very well know, is that it is a very passionate type of dance where the relationship between the male and the female dancer is extremely tight, even physically. At the same time, it really rolls out some culture elements, like the position of the male figure in society in respect to the female, and so forth. That is why when people dance Tango, the male is holding his companion with his hand across the back, and usually with his fingers open, because they’re both striving for closeness. So when I looked at that image of those two trees I felt this is really the same vibrational emotion as dancing Tango. It was like someone pumped the music in my ears while I was looking at this image.

WRR: And what makes you choose black and white photography over color? Is it because an image like Tango – the black and white contrasts – are what make it so arresting? Is it the kind of thing that if it were shot in color, we might potentially miss it?

Claudio Basso: The choice of color or black and white is similar to the choice a painter will make when he decided if he is going to do a canvas with oil or pastels. So it is just one of the many tools I that I have available as an artist to describe my message. I find the black and white very valuable, not only for the drama it allows me to depict, but because it generates a certain type of vibrational intensity. In black and white the whole sense of the message is carried by shapes and shades of grey. There’s no color to distract. 

WRR: Did you give the photographs in Being the Flow their titles yourself or did you and Bhodipaksa work together on naming them?

Claudio Basso: The titles are all mine. They are part of the message. Everybody gets a different story or interpretation depending on what they need when they are in front of art. That has always been the intent behind my work. I enjoy the intellectual challenge of adding some words to the visuals. On the other hand, I like my work to be as open as possible in the sense that while I’m trying to offer a message to the viewer, I don’t like to impose one. To me, it doesn’t matter, the connection between the title and the picture. The purpose behind my work is to connect with the people out there and hopefully inspire them to take a moment, breathe deeply, and try to look at things a little deeper. Whatever makes them happy, is fine with me as long as it becomes a source of generating some positive energy.

WRR: That brings me to another image that I find captivating, which is the XII Station. It stops you in your tracks when you’re reading this book and flipping through these pages and these thoughts. For me this image represents so much of what is weighed down in the human experience, when we feel that we are tangled and knotted and confused or burdened. It looks like it’s a person with his or her arms outstretched, literally entwined with complexity.


XII Station

Claudio Basso: The title came from the Via Crucis where the twelfth station is the stop where Christ was crucified. In fact, when I looked at the image I sort of saw an abstract figure of a man on a cross. This is one of the images that has an incredible significance for me, as I am Buddhist. The Buddha acquired his final enlightenment one day while he was sitting under a huge tree called the Bodhi Tree. That very famous Bodhi Tree was a particular type of fig tree that is now called a Banyan tree and that’s exactly the tree that I photographed in that image. When I actually completed the image and I started looking at it – I had this huge print next to my bed, so I had many opportunities to really stare at it – I was captured by the meditative zen qualities of the image. I would get lost and find myself moving into a different realm of reality. I found myself often meditating on that image.

WRR: There’s so much you can take from it. There are vascular elements, and just these really human qualities. So, in terms of where Buddhism meets Christianity, if one element of this image is suggestive of Christ on the cross and another element is of enlightenment through Buddha, where do the two meet for you in your meditative assessment of it?

Claudio Basso: Buddhism is not a religion, rather a way of life. However, to me, any form of expression, be it religious or meditation, that allows you to get in touch with your inner self, is a good thing to have. It produces positive results. It’s like if you give a bunch of kids white paper and colored crayons and ask them to draw a house, you’re going to end up with a bunch of houses that look different with different colors and all of that, but they are all a house. It’s the same way with religion. In fact, if you really analyze the word of the most renowned profits – be it Jesus Christ, be it Muhammad or whatever – you will realize that in the very end they all speak the same language and the same concepts. That goes back to the critical Buddhist concept of oneness. That we are all one, part of the same universal energy. It doesn’t matter if you are Christian or Hindu or Buddhist or whatever.

WRR: In your biography, you refer to yourself as being a very sensual being in that you enjoy scent and smell and surfaces, music, food, wine and enjoying beauty wherever you see it. Do you feel this is something that has developed or is this something you’ve always gravitated to even as a youth?

Claudio Basso: I am indeed a very sensual man. I can tell you for a fact it has increased vertically over time. I think that is a direct consequence of acquired wisdom in the sense that you become more and more secure about yourself and therefore you can set the path where you are walking and allow yourself the freedom to be who you are and to experience the things you want to experience without any form of shame or guilt. 

I never really cared much about how the world perceives me as an artist. What I really care about is to be able to touch the world with my art. As long as I know that if someone looks at one of my images and receives its stimulating energy, that eventually transforms into something positive in their life, then I’m a happy man and I think that my mission is fulfilled. What I care about is that they get my message and that my message helps make the world a better place.

I came to the point of understanding that I am a man with very alerted senses and now I am totally at peace at letting those senses fly free whenever I have an opportunity, whether taking a walk in the woods or being in front of food or touching a nice surface or what have you. For me, it’s not even a matter of seeing it. When I’m presented with a situation, the universe sends me the message through energy and my senses alert me towards it.

WRR: At the top of your career at the age of XX, you experienced a life-altering event and suffered an aneurysm. Tell me, how did that experience affect your health, your outlook, and your career?

Claudio Basso: Let’s just say I had a lot of time to think and I took the whole ordeal very spiritually. The question that kept bombarding me was, “Why? Why does God, the Source – call it whatever you want – think I’m not ready to go? Why does he think I still have work to do on this planet when I’ve worked so hard all my life? What is it that I have to do?” These questions were bombarding my brain every day until one morning the lightbulb went on and I heard this little voice inside me that gave me the answer, “But you see, Claudio, you spent your entire life making pictures to please art directors, fashion editors, and advertising executives. I think it’s time for you now to make pictures to please people.” So that got me thinking a lot. I came to the conclusion that it was time to start thinking about messages that I want to communicate to the world to make it a happier place. 

WRR: Did you battle at all with doubt or fear? 

One of the things that was a consequence of the aneurysm – and the hospital afterwards – is that I gained an incredibly intimate relationship with mother nature – to the point that I can now walk outside and literally feel the energy of the Earth. My friends think I’m crazy because I talk to the birds or I go out at night and I talk to the moon and I talk to the stars because I feel they are all my friends. I truly feel their energy. Although I’ve always had a connection with Mother Nature since I was very young, it was never as deep as it is now because of a spiritual component in it. What happened was that I learned how to train my senses to become more and more alerted and more receptive towards universal energies. That stimulated the creation of my latest work.

WRR: Tell me about the transitional process away from high fashion celebrity photography.

Claudio Basso: I’m not in the fashion industry anymore. I’m not even in advertising anymore. As an artist, I now depend entirely on people purchasing my fine art from my website. That is my only source of revenue and my my survival depends on the income I earn selling my fine art. 

WRR: Do you feel more isolated?

Claudio Basso: Actually I don’t. I’m very often alone, but I’m never lonely and that is because I believe my spiritual awakening has played a big role, so I’m constantly feeling this connection to “The One” and to Mother Nature. So whenever I go through moments of difficulty, I resort to meditating and that helps me a lot. Every morning I go down to the ocean and I do my own meditation because moving water has a terrific beneficial impact on me. I developed a tremendous friendship with the ocean because I use it as a conduit to the universe.

When I go out and I create fine art, it’s not like “Alright, I’m going to pick up the camera today, get out there and do some fine art.” It’s a much more involving process. To start with, my fine art projects are all collections so there is always a concept behind them and a very clear message that I intend to describe to the world through images. That being said, I usually do a meditation session to get balanced and in tune and then when I am out there with my camera I don’t use much of my brain anymore. I let my senses drive me. It’s the universe itself that shows me the things that I need to capture and the message that I want to tell.

WRR: You have an image called Change that shows water flowing behind ice. It struck me as perhaps an autobiographical statement of yours – how through your medical setback, your personal change might have served to have you to flow deeper into your artistic expression. I feel that image really captures how you are able to be in the flow. And I noticed that you chose that particular image as the book cover.


Change

Claudio Basso: I look at my artistic process as an extremely dynamic one and, as such, is always changing. With this image, I had a very clear idea in mind: to debate and create some discussion about the fact that the general public looks at water and ice as two completely different elements: one being solid and the other fluid. So my intent was to stimulate a different approach to understand that they are both very fluid elements for the fact that without water there is no ice. One morning you wake up and you look out the window and you have an icicle that is three inches long, then two days later it’s two feet long. Ice itself is an extremely dynamic element.

WRR: You talk about how “exhibiting your work is the most humbling experience for a photographer” and how it is “the ultimate break away from the intimate relationship between the creator and the creation.” You liken it to the cutting of the umbilical cord. Can you elaborate about this kind of creative humility and intimacy?

Claudio Basso: For an artist to create, to go through the struggle – the emotional and intellectual turmoil – to produce something, it’s like the gestation of a baby inside the belly. Then it comes to the delivery point where you have to expose your work to the judgment of the public, be it a book, an exhibit or whatever. That to me, is comparable to when the baby is born and you have to cut the umbilical cord so the baby stops feeding from the mother and is out in the world on its own. So an artist has to come to that point of inner security and spiritual balance to be willing to let go of the project and deliver it without fearing what sort of response will come back. The work was created to be given to the world, so give it to the world!

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View Claudio Basso’s fine art at www.claudiobasso.com.  Inquiries regarding the purchase of prints and/or the scheduling of photo sessions may be made via email through the contact page of the website. Prints are museum quality standards and come with an original Certificate of Authenticity signed by Claudio Basso.

Unknown's avatar

Googling Dad

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Googled my Dad’s name just for the heck of it tonight… surprised to find this sixteen-year old article in the philly.com archive. Pardon the morbidity, but to me, this is a story worth reading. Miss him every single day.

Supervisor Dies While Saving 2 In Factory Fire

January 08, 1996 | By Analisa Nazareno, INQUIRER CORRESPONDENT

RIVERTON — An iron factory supervisor died a hero yesterday while saving two co-workers in a double explosion and three-alarm blaze at an industrial complex, Cinnaminson fire and police officials said.

Shortly before 9 a.m., an explosion set off a fire at the Hoeganaes Corp. facility. The supervisor, tentatively identified as Robert Donnelly Sr. of Delran, helped two workers escape the burning 900-square-foot tin facility, said Cinnaminson Fire Chief Walter Miller.

He then returned to the building to see if there were additional people, Miller said. A second explosion prevented his escape and set off additional flames. Officials said they believed the man died instantly.

“He died a hero as far as we’re concerned,” Miller said.

Three men escaped the blaze with minor injuries, were treated for smoke inhalation and released from Rancocas Hospital in Willingboro.

None of the survivors would comment about the fire.

The body of the supervisor was burned so badly that his facial features were unrecognizable, officials said.

A dozen fire trucks and 75 firefighters got the flames under control within 45 minutes, but it took 2 1/2 hours to extinguish the blaze, Miller said. Because of the blizzard and gusty winds, the firefighters were rotated to combat the blaze, Miller said.

Police officials said that a gas leak might have been the cause of the fire, but that investigators from the Burlington County fire marshals and Cinnaminson Fire and Police Departments were continuing their investigation. The plant manufactures powdered metals.

Unknown's avatar

Interview With Brian Selznick

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The Award-Winning Author on Art, Storytelling and Recovering What is Lost


To open a Brian Selznick novel, to hold it in your hands and revel in its sumptuous weight and the beauty of its illustrations is to bask in the heft of, say, a newborn baby, and marvel at perfection.

The first time I sat down to read The Invention of Hugo Cabret – which takes place in a train station in 1930’s France where a young boy named Hugo lives secretly within its walls – with my then six-year old daughter, I felt a mixture of awe, inspiration and a rather overwhelming sense of inadequacy. There’s nothing like an acknowledged work of “complete genius” to trigger a simultaneous dose of sheer delight and artistic inferiority.

Night after snuggly night, my daughter – a budding artist herself – and I would nestle under the covers of my king-sized bed and pore over Hugo’s pages, scanning each meticulous detail and studying every nuance of word and image.

Hugo, the story’s hero, keeps the train station’s clocks running not only because he inherited an interest and fascination in clockworks and gadgetry, but also so that no one will discover his secret: He is an orphan, hiding and surviving on his own. The only connection he has to his deceased father is a broken automaton which he is determined to fix. However, the automaton requires a key to unlock a secret Hugo believes could be a message from his father.

One day, Hugo tries to steal a gadget from an elderly, curmudgeonly toy booth owner and is caught. The owner punishes Hugo by taking his father’s notebook containing sketches related to the automaton’s inner workings.

In an attempt to regain his beloved notebook and find the key to the automaton, Hugo embarks on an adventure that leads to the discovery of French silent filmmaker, George Melies. We travel with Hugo on a journey through the invention of cinema and ultimately surprising connections to his father and the automaton.

Selznick spent two and a half years composing The Invention of Hugo Cabret. In 2008, he and Hugo received the Caldecott Medal, named in honor of nineteenth century English illustrator Randolph Caldecott, and awarded to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children. Shortly thereafter, Selznick spent another three years crafting his most recent novel, Wonderstruck. Hugo has since become a full-length feature 3-D film directed by Martin Scorcese. It received 5 Oscars at the 2012 Academy Awards.

WRR: Hugo and and your latest book, Wonderstruck (Scholastic Books, 2011) are arresting in their visual presentations – likened to a silent film on paper. Your work has been said to “evoke wonder, raise the bar, and shatter convention.” The Horn Book Review dubbed it “complete genius.” Can you take us through your personal creative process?


Brian Selznick: I just try to tell a story in the best possible way. For Hugo I had the story first and had written most of the main outline of the plot before I had any idea how I was going to illustrate it. Eventually, as I was researching the book and watching films from the 1920s and 30s – around the time the book takes place – I began to wonder if there was a way that I could make it feel like a movie, you know, since the book is so much about the history of cinema. So I was thinking about picture books and what happens when you turn the page.

You can think about something like The Wild Rumpus and Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (who died on May 7, 2012), where the pictures take over the story and it’s up to the viewer to move through the narrative visually. So I, basically had this idea to try and combine what picture books can do with what movies can do in terms of editing, zooming in and out, panning and telling a story visually. I went back and I took out as many words as I could and replaced them with the picture sequences.

WRR: So you wrote the full manuscript first?

Selznick: Well, [chuckles] there’s actually no real “thing” that was the full manuscript, but I had a full outline. I had a lot of text written before I went in and took out words. If anything had conversation in it, anything that a character was thinking or smelling or anything that couldn’t be gotten across in pictures, I knew that it had to stay as text. But if it was just a description of an action or if we were just looking at something, I was able to take the words out and replace them with the pictures. So the book grew from what I thought was going to be like a 100-page novella to a 530-page brick. [laughs]

WRR: And Wonderstruck?

Selznick: With Wonderstruck it was sort of the opposite because after finishing Hugo I knew that I wanted to take everything I had learned but do something different with it. So right away I had the idea to separate the words from the pictures and try to tell two different stories – one with text and one just with images. So then I had to find a story that would make sense being told visually. That’s when I remembered a documentary that I saw about deaf culture and deaf education and thought that it might be interesting to tell a story about a deaf person with pictures. Because when you can’t hear, what you see becomes even more important. Telling a story about a deaf person in pictures might, in a way, kind of echo how that character might live their life.

WRR: How did/do you divide your time between the computer and the drawing table?

Selznick: Basically, I write the narrative first, then I try doing some pictures – sketching things out and seeing what works, what doesn’t work. Then I do all the first drafts by hand in a notebook with a Bic pen, and then I go back and put the text into the word processor and do all of the rewrites on the computer; and that, basically, is the process from beginning to end. Throughout the rest of the time I’m working on the book. I’ve got drawings under way and then I’m going back to the text and polishing and trying to figure out the plot. Generally the pictures come much easier than the words.

WRR: Is it like left brain, right brain and back again?

Selznick: [Laughs] Yeah, I think it might be. I don’t know. I just think in pictures, so even though I start everything with language in my head, they really start with images. I just don’t know how to write, so I have a really good editor – Tracy Mack at Scholastic – and she helps me craft all of the text into something that somebody might want to read.

WRR: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I understand it took you about two years from beginning to end to write Hugo?

Selznick: Two and a half.

WRR: And the same for Wonderstruck?

Selznick: Wonderstruck took three.

WRR: Do you work a full eight and half hour day?

Selznick: You know, I have a lenient boss so I try to make pretend that I have a regular job where I work a full workday, but I just work at home so I’m very flexible. But, yes, I generally try to work at least eight hours a day. Sometimes it’s more than eight hours a day, sometimes it’s a little bit less. Sometimes I’m working six or seven days a week. It’s a lot of work.

WRR: You’ve known about George Melies for a long time, but the idea for writing Hugo implanted itself in your mind after you read a book called Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life by Gaby Wood. How did that book inspire you?

Selznick: I was in this period where I got a little stuck. I felt like I wasn’t excited about the projects that were being offered to me and I don’t have a lot of my own ideas. Most of the books I’ve done have been brought to me by other authors or by editors. Once I have a project I have a thousand ideas about how to illustrate it, but I don’t have a lot of ideas for new projects, necessarily. So I was taking a couple months off and reading and reassessing my life.

I came across Edison’s Eve and there was a chapter about George Melies that talked about how he had this collection of automatons that were destroyed and thrown away at the end of his life. I had seen A Trip to the Moon a very long time ago and one idea I had in the back of my head was making a story about a boy who meets George Melies. But I didn’t have any characters. I didn’t have a plot. I didn’t know anything.

When I read that story about Melies having this collection that had been thrown away, I imagined a boy climbing through the garbage and finding one of those broken machines. I thought, okay, I don’t know who that boy is, I don’t know what he is doing in the garbage, but this seems like it might be the beginning of a really interesting story.

WRR: Ah, but then it became about Hugo’s dad and the museum.

Selznick: Yeah, the dad didn’t show up for another year and a half.

WRR: Wow. So you were working with a different idea.

Selznick: Yeah, well, I had the main idea, I just didn’t know what any of it meant or why any of it was happening. And my Dad had died right before I started working on this so for a really long time I was trying to keep Hugo’s dad alive. I realized at a certain point that his dad had to die… in order for the story to work. And so I killed Hugo’s father [laughs] and suddenly everything in the plot made sense because I didn’t know what the automaton was going to write when Hugo wound it up. When I started writing the book, it was going to write a poem and the poem was going to then lead to some connection to George Melies but when I realized it had something to do with his dad, I realized it doesn’t write, it draws and I figured out what the automaton drew, what this all meant and why it was important to Hugo.

WRR: That Hugo’s father dies in a fire deeply resonated with me because I lost my own father in a fire. I find your courage to write about the tragic death of a parent wonderful because the characters are trying to reconcile the loss at such young, impressionable ages. Did you struggle at all with crafting the storyline?

Selznick: I struggled with crafting it the entire time, but I can’t say that I was really thinking about readers while I was putting the book together. I mean, obviously I’m aware that most of my audience is kids so I know that most of the people who would be reading this book would be about ten years old – and that’s in my head – but when I’m working I’m not really thinking about them. I’m just trying to figure out how to make the story work and how to make all the parts of the plot come together and I definitely thought about putting Hugo together in the same way that you might think about putting a machine together, which was a natural metaphor for the book anyway, because of all the connections with machines.

So really all the stuff with the dad, which was all the emotional stuff, came last. What I had was, first, all of the literal mechanical plot points: Okay, if Hugo goes here at this point, we have to set up these three things. And, and if this happens here this other thing has to happen later. So that’s why the book’s divided into two sections, so everything that is brought up in the first section is answered in the second section. The book is divided into 24 chapters, like 24 hours in a day, so that the book itself becomes like a clock. When I realized that Hugo’s dad was going to die and all this stuff was going to happen, it definitely was very emotional to put all of that in, but the character traits for Hugo started coming together with more clarity for me as I was writing it.

Of course, there is a long history of orphans in children’s literature, and a lot of times you just need to get rid of the parents so that you can let the kid have their adventures on their own and guide everything themselves.

WRR: Round out their character?

Selznick: Yeah, and of course there’s a big difference between a literary orphan and an actual orphan because I think it’s a very natural fantasy for all kids, no matter how happy their home life is, to wonder what it would be like to be on your own, to not have parents.

WRR: We’ve all fantasized about that.

Selznick: Exactly. So I knew that was serious and that the emotions that I was writing about and connecting to my dad were serious. But, ultimately, I wanted it to be a fun story about a kid in a train station and an automaton and an old man and movies. I definitely wanted the book to feel magical without there being any actual magic in it because that’s something I really like and I felt like I wanted everything that’s in this book, no matter how far fetched, to be within the realm of possibility.

I mean, most of the things in this book actually did happen. Everything about George Melies is based on something true. But I wanted everything relating to Hugo to be potentially true or potentially possible. It’s been satisfying to me, since the book has come out, people have told me they have responded very well to the sort of emotional crisis that Hugo goes through in dealing with his dad, and then finding a new family, and creating a new safe place for himself… because ultimately that’s what we all hope to do when we grow up. We grow up and move out of the family we were born into, generally, and form a new family whether it’s with friends or lovers or whatever it is.

WRR: And he handles it with such grace.

Selznick: Thank you! I was aware of a lot of these things but, again, still it was like, now I need to make Hugo end up happy and safe. The fact that Hugo ends up saving Melies and Melies ends up saving Hugo, it sort of seemed like it was the way that the plot wanted to go as I was hammering it together.

WRR: I love how Hugo’s eagerness to make a broken thing work balances against the brilliant, inventive work of an aging man who’d rather forget his accomplishments, who preferred to let it go because it breaks his heart to bring it back.

Selznick: Exactly.

WRR: What are your thoughts about creative potential and the fact that some of us are inclined to give up on our creative ideas. How life can challenge us enough to surrender those pursuits, yet how joyful it can be to reclaim them and make them work?

Selznick: Yeah, I mean that was definitely an important part of the story to me and was exemplified by the fact that the person who ended up modeling for George Melies in my book is the author and illustrator, Remy Charlip, one of my favorite authors when I was a kid. He did a book called Fortunately. He also did books called Arm and Arm and Thirteen, which are really great.

By coincidence, he turned out to be friends with a friend of mine so I met him right around the time I was beginning work on Hugo. Besides being this amazing author and illustrator, he was also a choreographer and a dancer. He danced with Merce Cunningham and John Cage. He designed the programs for John Cage’s first public performance. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College for many, many years; and he really lived his life with the idea that everybody is an artist and everybody is creative.

So when I met Remy and he asked me what I was working on and I told him about about this French silent filmmaker, I looked at him and realized that he looked just like George Melies. He had the same face shape, the same white goatee, and I was like, “Oh my God, Remy, you look like George Melies! Will you pose for him in the book?”

So he did. And the fact that Remy, whose entire life has been dedicated to art and to reminding everyone that they are an artist, ended up posing for the character who gave up on being an artist, but who was ultimately was reminded of it again by this little boy, was very resonant for me. Obviously that’s not something that anyone is going to consciously get from the book because that’s just my, sort of… you know, secret knowledge that went into making the book, but that kind of connection and that kind of… [pause]


George Melies and Remy Charlip

 George Melies as depicted by Brian Selznick

WRR: Irony?

Selznick: Yeah, that kind of lovely irony really meant a lot because I wanted part of the statement to be even if you try to give up on this, in fact it’s still there somewhere – that creativity, that ability and desire to make art, to be an artist is still there, dormant somehow.

WRR: There are so many people out there who have really beautiful art and creativity and might fall off the map if someone doesn’t notice them. I learned about George Melies in film classes, but otherwise I never would have realized that the reason we have all this wonderful art in film is largely credited to a man who was courageous enough to make it.

Selznick: Yeah, and I think that’s really exciting. I love the fact that there’s a generation of kids who are going to grow up now knowing who George Melies was. And Remy is 83 or 84 now. He had a stroke a couple of years ago, and he’s hanging on. He’s in San Francisco. I think he made some of the best picture books in the world and the people who know him really, really love him. But he’s not really as well known as others from his generation like Maurice Sendak and Ruth Krauss.

One of the things I love about talking about Hugo is bringing attention to Remy again because it feels like, in a certain way, while Remy never completely disappeared the way Melies did, there are a lot of people who don’t know about Remy and they should.

WRR: That’s beautiful, and a very cool way to bring it into something tangible: out of the book and into the world.

Selznick: When Hugo won the Caldecott Medal in 2008, I invited Remy to come to the ceremony and I think I spoke to two thousand librarians at the Caldecott event. In the speech, when I told everybody that Remy Charlip was the model for George Melies and that he was in the room, two thousand librarians leaped to their feet to give him a standing ovation. I cry just talking about it. And I thought, oh my God, this is why I won! So that Remy Charlip could sit here surrounded by two thousand librarians from around the world giving him a standing ovation.

WRR: I know we’ve spent a great deal of time talking about Hugo – and with just cause – but let’s talk now about Wonderstruck. How were you inspired by the deaf culture to create this book?

Selznick: I think that I was sort of in the same place with Wonderstruck that I was with Hugo. I was writing it not knowing, in any way, how the audience would respond to it because, again, I found myself writing about something that was a relatively unusual topic for a book. Of course, there’s been many deaf characters in children’s books and YA books, but I was very conscious of not wanting the deaf characters to be there as some kind of lesson or some kind of metaphor. A lot of times deaf characters show up as metaphors or as a device that teaches the hearing main characters some kind of lesson. I didn’t want deafness to be the issue in the book. The issue in the book is: what does it mean to not be loved when you’re a child. Or, what does it mean to lose your parents and go on this kind of quest? Those are the issues that the kids are dealing with.

I worked very closely with a couple of deaf academics who helped me make sure that I got everything as accurate as possible. My boyfriend happens to teach with two of the leading deaf scholars in the country: Carol Padden and Tom Humphries. Carol was the first deaf person to win a MacArthur Grant a couple years ago. And so they both made sure that everything I was talking about relating to deaf culture and deaf education was accurate.

But also what was hardest for me as a hearing person was trying to get across the experience of being deaf. One of the things that they kept saying to me was they really appreciated the fact that the deafness in this is just part of the fabric of the character’s lives as opposed to being the single thing that defines them within the narrative. That was something I worked really hard to achieve. I loved working with Carol and Tom and I had other readers, who were deaf, read the book and give me their feedback.

I wanted to have a general sense of accuracy, but then ultimately I also needed to be true to the two specific fictional characters I was making up. Is it likely for a ten year old boy to get on a bus and go across half the country by himself soon after becoming deaf? Is it likely? No. But he does it! That’s what he does. It’s part of the situation, part of what he needs to do.

I wanted the deafness to be a part of that story and I liked the way that the pictures helped to tell Rose’s story and then the two different ways of communicating – pictures and words – eventually come together in a way that also echoes some of the other themes relating to how characters communicate, how they express ideas to one another. There are scenes in Wonderstruck where… in one scene, in one conversation… characters are signing, speaking, lip reading, writing and gesturing. Figuring out how to make that clear – and clear to the reader – was one of the bigger challenges of the book.


WRR: Hugo and Wonderstruck are categorized in the genres of YA and Historical-Fiction and therefore have the potential to cross boundaries and appeal to all ages. How does one define children’s literature and does it speak to issues that literature written for adults cannot?

Selznick: I love the fact that grown-ups are reading my books. I love the fact that Hugo is being used in college film classes and other classes with older students. Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that. I didn’t really write Hugo as a children’s book. I just wrote it as a book.

I know that, generally, my audience is about ten and I love that audience. I think they are the best readers in the world. But if grown-ups find something in it that is meaningful, I think that’s really wonderful and really exciting, but it wasn’t an intention of mine. I really spent two and half years trying to write the best book I could and, to be honest, I also spent two and half years thinking I was writing a book that nobody was going to read, because it’s a book about french silent movies for children, which is not a guaranteed best seller. It doesn’t actually sound [laughs] like it makes any sense at all as a commercial vehicle because nobody watches silent movies.

I was writing about issues that meant a lot to me and I think that when you read a book you respond to very strongly, a big part of it is because the issues in the book meant something to the author as well, and the author was writing about something that they feel very powerfully about. So if some of that comes through, it makes sense that it will come through to any age reader, not just a young reader, but to older readers as well. In the end, a good book is a good book.

WRR: Yes, and it’s ageless, really.

Selznick: One would hope!

Unknown's avatar

Movin’ and Groovin’

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My bucket list is large, so if I ever intend to put check marks in the boxes, then forward movement is critical. Experientially I have begun to absorb the value of concentric circles. If it’s true that accomplishing anything of value in this life is all about “who you know,” then it’s absolutely crucial to consider what kinds of conversations we choose to have with, well, everyone.

For the last several years I have been maneuvering through the hallways of the Ivory Tower of Academia.  I can say, with confidence, that I love learning. I cherish it. Still, we can get so involved in our own self-gratifying pursuits, that we can actually lose sight of the intrinsic value of of a keen intellect. I have a great many things on my list to accomplish and only one chance at life in which to to cram it all. Assuming reincarnation is just a pipe dream, time management has evidently become the most important factor here:

  1. Publish all three picture books
  2. Publish my collections of poetry and essays
  3. Finish and pitch my screenplay
  4. Direct and produce an independent film
  5. Direct and produce a documentary
  6. Enter a film festival
  7. Learn how to animate
  8. Do Script Frenzy (April)
  9. Do NaNoWriMo (November)
  10. Submit to NPR
  11. Write for magazines and local papers and blogs
  12. Tour Pixar HQ
  13. Tour National Geographic TV HQ
  14. Travel to Ireland, Africa and Alaska
  15. Volunteer at (and donate to) the Burn Center
  16. Make my husband and children laugh daily

I often remind my daughter (and myself) that there are four things to be aware of as we navigate over this terrain of life:

First, our health. The condition of our bodies must never be abused our taken for granted. We don’t know how much time we ultimately will have to accomplish the things we imagine we’ll eventually “get around to doing.”  There’s no such thing as retirement.

Secondly, our brain. The common myth stands that humans function utilizing a mere 10% of their total brain capacity. To the contrary, it’s not that we use 10% of our brains, merely that we currently only understand about 10% of how it actually functions. The point being, regardless of whether we have a measly 10% or a whopping 100% of a useful brain, we must take full advantage of each and every precious percentage. There’s too much to know. Too little time. Knowledge and awareness are incredible gifts.

Next, our relationships. The people in our lives have been placed there to teach us a great many things about ourselves. Good, bad or otherwise, they are shaping our present and future selves. We must honor and cherish their reasons for being.

Lastly, the Big Man Upstairs. I do, very firmly, believe that I am being guided by a force much larger and more intuitive than myself. I do believe there is a mission for me. Like the film, Mission Impossible, each day we are offered a choice to either accept our mission or reject it. With each challenge, obstacle and setback, we are faced with a decision to retreat or to press onward and upward. Action begets action, so it’s time – once again – to move.

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Back at it

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Back at blogging. Back at working out. Rose with the dawn this morning at 4:50 and did some circuit training at the high school with a friend who met me there. It was amusing, the two of us attempting to do push ups, sit ups, dips and chin ups in the twilight. We ran about 1.5 miles, around the fields and into the woods (and spiderwebs). It was soupy outside, humid and muggy, but we managed to pull it off. Running on the trails is really nice on the knees!

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Leon Rainbow: After the Rain

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As featured in the Trenton City Museum’s annual newsletter publication, Ellarslie Muse.

Early one cold and miserably rainy Monday morning in March, I met with local mural artist Leon Rainbow for a guided tour of his commissioned and permissioned graffiti artwork. We drove deep into the neighborhoods of Trenton, chatting casually about his craft as we passed dilapidated homes and abandoned buildings, a relatively bleak backdrop rife with societal disadvantage.

Quite suddenly, in the midst of cracked sidewalks and boarded up windows, we came upon an explosion of three-dimensional color. From out of the nozzle of a spray paint can, Leon Rainbow has laid claim to his own canvas of brick and mortar. The neighborhood walls on which you’ll find his vibrant work come alive with character and mystery.

Image

Half Native American by birth, “Rainbow” is not an artist’s alias or pseudonym. It is his given name. “My father is a Native American,” Leon says. “We’re from the Quechan tribe. Our reservation is in Yuma, Arizona, but I didn’t grow up there.”

Leon spent his first thirteen years in San Jose, California with his mother and stepfather, who encouraged his interest in drawing from the age of four. He saw his first graffiti movie at age six when documentaries and films such as Style Wars, Breakin and Beat Street first arrived on the screen and showed what kinds of things could be done with a few cans of spray paint.

Leon credits certain graffiti innovators with encouraging his artistic growth and helping to hone his skills. “Pose 2 has influenced me the most up to this point. He’s been writing as long as I’ve been alive. Guys like him are legendary to me because they brought the concept of doing productions with complicated backgrounds to the masses.”

Tagging, or the act of writing one’s name on random walls or structures, is how a graffiti artist in his formative years finds his own personal voice and style. “I did a lot of tagging when I was younger,” Leon said. “Basically just writing your name. People hate it. We used to cut school and ride the bus and bring a marker and just tag. I was thirteen.”

Largely perceived by society to be defacing property, the budding graffiti artist is no stranger to the penalty of the law. While Leon Rainbow has had his fair share of answering for his youthful vandalism, he graciously chalks it up to character- and career-building.

“When I was brought home tagging, I had to learn there are consequences to your actions. If you didn’t ever get into any trouble, you’d never know what it’s like not to be in trouble. Graffiti is a very powerful art form in that it can be very creative or very destructive. Right now in my life, I’m focusing on the creative.”

That creative focus has paid off. From creating the art for advertising campaigns for business giants like Staples, Bloomingdales, Louis Vuitton and Infiniti to designing art backdrops for roller discos, magazines, photo shoots, and CD covers, Leon’s impressive roster of clients is only one aspect of his work. He works by day as a web designer at Inforest Communications in Princeton and also works for the Princeton Arts Council after hours, working with children in an after-school program to help focus their artistic urges in a positive direction.

“There are some young kids coming up who are making a mess of the highways. The after-school program is a way for kids to express themselves in a positive way. We run events after school and every summer.”

Leon and other artists rotate space on the cinder block walls donated by the sustainability recycling center, Terra Cycle, on New York Avenue. These walls change often, allowing artists to hone their skills and discover their own unique aerosol voices. As to the fine line between creating art and defacing property, Leon remarks, “People have their idea of how things should be and that’s fine. I understand that concept. At the same time, as long as it’s a positive thing I don’t see the issue. It’s a way for people to express themselves in a positive way. What a lot of people don’t understand about graffiti is that it’s its own living, breathing thing.”

In one such instance, a graffiti mural was created to help a neighborhood grieve the loss of a young woman who was shot and killed in a gang-related incident. An image of her smiling face graces the side wall of a corner store, reminding all passersby of the tragedy of her death. It is a palpably haunting image, and perhaps a vitally important one, for in eliciting the natural human response of confusion and heartache the art serves far more than just an aesthetic purpose.

While the piece wasn’t created by Leon, he still appreciates the sentiment behind the art. “She was shot in this area. She was actually in one of my classes. Some people take offense. But to me they should be taking offense to the fact that a young girl was shot.”

So how does one carry out his art in areas like that, where gunfire and gangs, drugs and crime are so commonplace?

“In all reality, the people in these rougher areas, they don’t bother us. The police don’t bother us. The gangs don’t bother us. The little old ladies like us. The community really respects what we do. People can trip about the different areas, but I’ve had people come and hold a flashlight for me or bring me lemonade. One of the things I really like is being in different areas and neighborhoods and getting a feel for the people. A lot of these walls and these neighborhoods have texture. It makes use of all your senses. It keeps things real.”

In an effort to bring that reality into a larger public focus, the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie Mansion reserved the Tom Malloy gallery for a special mural project devoted entirely to Leon Rainbow’s aerosol art.

“Ellarslie was one of my most exciting projects. I’d been waiting ten years for that project. I used to bug Brian Hill, so it definitely meant a lot to me for him to come and say, ‘All right, let’s do something at the museum.’ It’s not every day that they let you run around with spray paint in a museum.”

And just how does a museum host a graffiti artist and allocate hundreds of delicate square footage to the relentless barrage of a spray can?

“They took real thin hardboard, similar to masonite, and tacked it to the wall. We primed it with house paint and then masked the windows and floors with tape and tarps. I don’t think that piece would have turned out as good as it did if it weren’t for Brian. That piece took forty hours in four days.”

The final result was more than worth the hours of meticulous preparation. An impressive, loosely-based autobiographical chronicle of Leon’s life played out across the gallery walls.

Image

“The first part of the piece showed the baby in the spray can. It’s sort of like I was born to do this. The next part was the Native American person, my heritage. Then there’s the kid on the tricycle riding with the dreams. That was like my childhood — the imagination you have when you are a child. Next there is a lion, which I’m named after, followed by a half skull and some drug stuff. I went through that when I was nineteen, twenty — around that age — before I moved here. I’ve been lucky enough to get clean and be able to do positive things. I attribute a large part of my success to that. Next are all the things I’m doing now: painting, different positive words, a dude sitting on a stack of books. Teaching is the next phase. Right now, everything I do is based in art.”

After the exhibit was dismantled, Hill chose to keep the picture moulding spray-painted, just as Leon had designed it. “That’s really exciting to me. Every time I go in there, it reminds me of that weekend.” The mural is now available for sale or for installation in a museum or art center.

Leon’s signature is “Rain.” Aptly, we took the driving tour of his work on a rainy day; however, it wasn’t long before the dreariness of the weather was replaced by Leon Rainbow’s gentle charm. Combine that with his impressive graffiti portfolio, and soon all of Trenton begins to pulsate with a renewed depth, perspective and complexity. Elements become fascinating in their intensity and color, in the way they play off one another to create an art form that vibrates with life and magic. Driving through sopping wet neighborhoods and encountering the sheer delight of Leon Rainbow’s art in sure but silent action, I couldn’t help but think that he does indeed bring the light after the rain.

See and learn more at http://www.leonrainbow.com.

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Steady As She Goes: A Villanelle

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As featured in Venture Literary Journal of Rider University

Fear not those demons that claw, so wicked and severe.
I hoist my tattered sail in vain aboard this forsaken ship.
Travel slow and steady now. Forget not what brought you here.

Mercy come and swiftly soothe this suffering I bear
Bitterness, bind me not unto your toxic, lethal grip
Fear not those demons that claw, so wicked and severe.

Pay not a mind to these gashes and tears
As from this fragile shell my fractious soul may rip
Travel slow and steady now. Forget not what brought you here.

Though light of day fades and dark horizons near
Surrender will be the cost of this long, wayward trip
Fear not those demons that claw, so wicked and severe.

Braver men were conquered on their wretched journeys here
Feeling doomed and ever worse, shamed repentance on our lips.
Travel slow and steady now. Forget not what brought you here.

While men set their courses, so detailed, strong and clear,
Even their best-laid plans do swiftly dissolve and slip.
Fear not those demons that claw, so wicked and severe.
Travel slow and steady now. Forget not what brought you here.