EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever stopped to think about yourself and your story? If someone were to write your memoir what would it say? We all seek some level of authenticity but have trouble removing the labels and finding our whole story. Welcome to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. In this program we’ll explore diverse stories on identity to help determine what is truly yours. Now here is your host Diane Dewey.

Diane: welcome to the show one and all. We’re glad to have you with us in the virtual community that is internet radio. Before we turn to the genius of writer Barbara Linn Probst. I want to address what’s going on in our world to express gratitude for the caregivers and to say our hearts go out to those who are sick or unemployed. I want to offer Hawaiian aloha because today’s guest also takes us back to Hawaii. Aloha, the kindness and respect everyone for riding this out together. Because of the corona virus pandemic and our emotional rollercoaster these days when we say to ourselves oh no not that person or oh no not that place to close or that business to stop employing.

We are like Victor Frankl author of man’s search for meaning no longer able to affect our environment or control our environment. That in and of itself is a loss to be mourned even aside from the loss of death. As a holocaust survivor and someone who lived in a concentration camp for a couple of years Viktor Frankl knew what he was talking about. He went on to note that in some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning. In searching for meaning I think we have to ask ourselves who are we as a people, as a human race what is our identity.

On Dropping In, the subject is always identity. Can we make sacrifices for the common good and still protect ourselves, our community and our work. That’s part of our identity. There is a time and a season for everything sang The Birds in 1965 in their song Turn, Turn, Turn. There is a purpose to this too although it’s hard to see sometimes the social distant thing. We can either be cranky or use the solitude in our favor. As a friend of mine said it feels like being a kid when we were sent to our room to think about what we did wrong. I’d like to think it’s a time when we can figure out how to make things right or at least better for now and after this to try to close the inequalities that we have in our systems in health care, the disparities in wealth, corporate gain over community prosperity that even the world’s biggest banks acknowledge to be unhealthy and to curb the violations to our planet which might just be so angry with us that has unleashed this virus.

Each of these scenarios and challenges to our identity requires the triumph of science over greed. The Covid 19 causes us to stay at home and some of us like writers or artists are used to being home and alone most of the day with our work. We find our thoughts in quietude even loneliness. Look at the creative isolation of Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico. She’s the subject of the book Queen of the Owls and our guest is the author Barbara Linn Probst. The book is coming out in April next month from She Writes Press. I couldn’t be more excited about it. Here’s a little bit about the author and you’ll see why.

Barbara Linn Probst is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction living on an historic dirt road in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her debut novel Queen of the Owls April 2, 2020 is the powerful story of a woman’s search for wholeness. Framed around the art and life of iconic painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Queen of the Owls has been selected as one of 20 most anticipated books of 2020 by a working mother. It will be the May 2020 selection for Pulpwood Queens, a network of nearly 800 book clubs across the United States.

Her second novel The Sound Between Notes will be published next year in April 2021. Barbara is also the author of the groundbreaking book on nurturing out of the box children When Labels Don’t Fit Random House 2008. She has a PhD in clinical social work. She blogs for several award-winning sites for writers and is a serious amateur pianist. To learn more about Barbara and her work please see www.barbaralinnprobst.com B-A-R-B-A-R-A-L-I-N-N P-R-O-B-S-T.com. Welcome Barbara. Thanks for being with us with all you have on your plate and for taking the time to drop in from California where it’s very early. Thanks so much for being with us.

Barbara: well I’m honored. Just listening to your opening I’m just so grateful that you’re giving voice so beautifully to what we’re all feeling. It’s a very strange thing to be talking about one’s book when there’s so much that seems so much more important going on but I thought about this and in a way if I can see this as something I can actually give. It really helps me get out of the whole sort of self-promotion box and feel that maybe my story can bring something to people that in a strange way might even help.

Diane: it’s true. I mean it does feel like a parallel universe even to me but here we are secluded and sequestered in some cases in isolation and actually needing not just escape through reading but also a sense of unity and a sense of your book is about developing wholeness. It’s a wonderful debut novel. I totally understand your misgivings about talking about it but please understand that I think for all of us we can’t exist without one another. One’s messages and stories become all the more important. It’s hard for me to believe that this is a debut novel. It’s really got everything going for it story, character, desire, a message and a gorgeous title.

I just have to tell you the other day so Queen of the Owls, the other day I had to do some essential travel by plane earlier in the week. The man in the row behind me ran up and tapped me on the shoulder after we deplaned. There were very few of us on the flight. He asked me about the manuscript I was reading Queen of the Owls. He said what a great title. What is it about? I told him it was great. I told him it’s about a woman, a bookish owl of a woman finding herself as a whole. He said great, I’ll buy it for my wife. She loves owls.

Barbara: there’s no owls in the book you know.

Diane: I know. I told him she’ll love it. She will just the universality of it. Even the title connected to people. How did you originally become interested in Georgia O’Keeffe Barbara? Was that an obsession for you somehow or how did this all begin?

Barbara: it’s actually very funny Diane that in thinking about how to talk about the book I’ve sort of things have appeared to me that I forgot. I can’t even remember when the idea first came to me because I always liked her work but I didn’t really know that much about it. It wasn’t until I was giving another interview. I was sitting in front of I have a huge poster of her famous poppy painting. I was giving this interview and all of a sudden it hit me. When I got divorced and my ex departed there was a big blank spot over the fireplace where he used to have his TV.

I wanted to put something up there that really represented me and the me I wanted to be. I got this giant O’Keeffe poster. This was years ago. When talking about the book 12 years later it suddenly hit me that image that what O’Keeffe brought always had been a kind of image beyond words for me of what it meant to be a really whole, embodied, glorious woman but I hadn’t made the connection. It’s really kind of wild so these things happen.

Diane: they happen and I love that you were filling a void. That’s another thing that I just think is beautiful. I think you made a really articulate case in the book about how these flower paintings are not to be taken literally. There’s a lot of alliteration about in comparison to female form with O’Keeffe’s flower paintings but I love how you just described it as kind of an emboldening and opening, a kind of flourishing and that happens in the book too with the protagonist Liz, a doctoral student in art history. She feels her way out of her trapped self and her life of perfunctory routines as the wife and a mother of two. These needn’t be perfunctory but in her case they were.

Liz is studying Georgia O’Keeffe and she finds herself transfixed and instinctively drawn to her. O’Keeffe becomes a kind of an avatar for her own latent desire. I guess I wonder would we have seen oh, you’ve got a little one.

Barbara: she just decided to start meowing during the recording.

Diane: oh well okay, we’re here with the felines, the cat. Okay this is good.

Barbara: we ignore her.

Diane: no problem. We have a dog in the closet and she actually likes it there but O’Keeffe you know she becomes a kind of an avatar for the latent desires of Liz. Maybe Liz doesn’t quite understand them in the beginning either kind of like what you were describing. I just wonder would she have known, would she have been able to feel her way out of this box without somebody like Georgia O’Keeffe.

Barbara: it’s a really great question. What’s so interesting is you know as I was thinking about this interview and some of the questions I knew you would be posing I realized that there were things in the book that I did that I didn’t even realize I was doing. I think I’m just going to take a sidebar for a second that what I love about writing fiction is that it really lets you connect the subconscious and the conscious. That is there’s material that you understand in a sort of wordless way and somehow it connects with the word making part that’s able to give it a form.

I say that because in the very beginning of the book it starts with Elizabeth wanting to take Tai chi. She was tired of watching from the outside how the people and admiring how people were so fluid in their bodies. She wanted to understand it from the inside. That it suddenly struck me that that was exactly what her journey was with O’Keeffe’s art. That in starting out admiring it as an observer cerebrally, intellectually she had to let the art enter her or she had to enter it. I’m not sure which way. Maybe both and really come to know that what this meant in a way that was much more than mental but truly embodied.

I think that that’s really the journey. Now could it have been a different artist? Who knows? O’Keeffe is was perfect. Of course once the idea came to me I began to research O’Keeffe. I learned so much about her that also informed the story and at this point I can’t imagine it any other way.

Diane: I think this idea of observing versus inhabiting or allowing something to inhabit you. I mean it really, it can be anything but it’s because we’re always changing as well but these are things that worm their way into ourselves. Like we walk away from the painting in the exhibition. I love the red poppies. We’ve even got one here in St. Petersburg in the museum. It’s like you’ve left the image but the after image is already embedded in you or when you’re standing in front of the painting you walk through it. You go into and you feel as though you can capture or you can go into the mind’s eye of the artist. I think that that communication, that illusion is exactly it could be prompted by many things but I mean it’s really and I loved I mean, well first of all I really enjoy that you give this kind of candid disclosure that some of the things that come out in your book you look at afterwards and their discoveries of unconscious things that you did unwittingly.

I think that the conscious, the tai chi for example where your body is giving form and through that comes an energy a power through doing Tai chi. There’s something really emblematic about that as well. That was amazing and immediately had my attention but then right away after if that wasn’t enough in tai chi is Richard, the ultra-attractive photographer. We learned he’s a photographer because Liz and Richard go out for coffee after tai chi class. A little bit of an x-may when you’re a married mother of two with the dad waiting for you to come home but okay. She goes there and they start having this conversation about O’Keeffe because of course Richard knows all about Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz photographs O’Keeffe in this groundbreaking series of nudes. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I mean that’s the counterpart to the paintings. How was that in your journey?

Barbara: you mean about did I pose nude?

Diane: let’s not rule it out.

Barbara: that’s what I say. I think not yet.

Diane: not yet. Exactly, thank you.

Barbara: but actually the counterpart well we take, as a writer you take things that you’ve experienced and you find the kind of emotional essence. Then I like to say that you re-embody it in an invented scene. This idea of being seen, of being revealed or revealing oneself right which is what that’s the epitome. What actually happened to me that was sort of helped me write those scenes was that I’m somebody who always hated to have my picture taken.

I mean all the albums with my kids they have no mother because I’m always the one taking pictures of everybody else. During the course of starting to write the book and I wanted to redo my website. I hired a professional photographer to do the headshot. He was amazing. We spent the whole afternoon. He must have taken a hundred shots and a certain point I stopped posing. I just was there. The whole thing changed. The headshot we ended up using was one of the last ones. There was something about letting go and giving. Just letting myself be seen from the neck up indeed but there was the emotional experience of that that I thought I could enlarge and understand what it would be for Elizabeth to really let herself be seen.

Now with O’Keeffe it was much more complicated. It’s a big controversy about whether she…

Diane: it is complicated with O’Keeffe. We’re going to come back to her. We’re just up at the moment where we need to take a short break. It comes up very quickly but I do love the whole release of self, release of essence of self in photography. I wonder if we can come back from the, we’ll come back from the break and we’ll talk about Georgia O’Keeffe and we’re going to talk about Kim Kardashian. Maybe she wouldn’t even exist without Stieglitz’s nudes of O’Keeffe. We’ll talk about selfies and acceptance of our body image and all of it. We’re with Barbara Linn Probst on Dropping In. Don’t go away.

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

Diane: welcome back. We’re here with Barbara Linn Probst, author of Queen of the Owls, a great title and a great book. I can attest. We had just touched on the subject of nudity in photographs not in a sensational way I must say but as a way of self-expression for the subject who then of course as Barbara just alluded with Georgia O’Keeffe and her series of photographs by Alfred Stieglitz. There was the sense and the controversy over whether she was objectified, exploited, manipulated. All of these questions are wrestled with in your book Barbara.

If you’d like to go there you’re welcome to. I just feel as though there’s a certain feminist refusal to be objectified that maybe has evolved since the time that the photographs were taken.

Barbara: you mean since O’Keeffe’s photographs were taken.

Diane: correct.

Barbara: it’s complicated and in fact that Elizabeth is teaching a course on feminist art.

Diane: Elizabeth is a protagonist.

Barbara: yes which has many permutations. Again that was something else that I had to learn about different interpretations of what it means to be a feminist. I mean O’Keeffe was a very complicated character and she enjoyed being a bit mysterious. In the end she says basically let the paintings speak for themselves. Refuse to let anyone else’s interpretation of her life or her work. I mean they could do it if they wanted but she would not let anyone else define who she was. In a way that’s what Elizabeth comes to as well. She needs to forge her own identity not an imitation of Georgia O’Keeffe but who she is.

Diane: there’s a lot of power in that owning it and claiming it for yourself, the interpretation. I think that what you touched on with Georgia O’Keeffe’s mysteriousness. I mean she really paved the way. Artists continuously say let the work speak for itself. I don’t want to write wall texts. I don’t want to write catalog essays. I want the person, the viewer to come in and interact with the art. That’s it. The experience. I mean I think that’s a very interesting point. It clearly originated with her.

Barbara: oh absolutely. She was just adamant. She hated being called a female artist. She said I’m an artist. I’m a female. How are the two related? I mean we don’t talk about people as a male artist. In a way she was the quintessential feminist who wanted to be beyond gender. It’s really fascinating.

Diane: it’s totally fascinating. There’s a slight glitch in the works when you allow yourself to be photographed as a woman by a man who becomes your husband. I really don’t discount Georgia O’Keeffe, if anything I think the paradox that she embraces is absolutely central to all of our beings. We have these paradoxes going on. I think about the feminist Gloria Steinem she, with her aviators and her hipster bell bottoms. Look she was fabulous looking, is fabulous.

Barbara: there’s also a story that I have to tell you. I don’t know if it’s true that Steinem went to visit O’Keeffe with a bouquet of flowers and O’Keeffe refused to let her in.

Diane: because of her symbolic I mean not that they weren’t kind of soul sisters in a way. I mean here’s Steinem, she really combines the physical, mental consciousness. I think your book really kind of argues for a holistic approach to this without being pendantic. That’s very, very cool. You reveal a certain philosophy. I’m quoting from your website. Life is a mosaic. Each piece contributing to the design helping us to discover who we are and where we belong. How beautiful is that? I wonder if you can comment on this idea of a mosaic rather than a fragment or a cerebral part or a physical part but not a combination of all these.

Barbara: I’ve forgotten about that but it’s true. I don’t think we kind of forge itself in a linear way. Different experiences, people that we meet, things that we do, places we travel whatever. It all kind of comes together in you might even call it a kaleidoscope rather because we change all the time. I’ve done a lot of really wild things in my life and I feel like I feel glad for every single one of them because they’ve all helped to make me the person that I am. The older I get the more I don’t buy into a linear approach to really anything.

Diane: we’re not going to let you off the hook because if you said you’ve done wild things we want to know all about them.

Barbara: well maybe not that wild.

Diane: I am aware of the fact that you’ve lived in a variety of places. I know that let’s see. I find that also you’re just fascinating as a person not surprisingly being the author that you are. You’ve lived in a cabin in the California Redwoods, a firehouse, a converted sauna in the heart of Greenwich Village and lots of places in between. You now live on a historic dirt road in New York’s Hudson Valley. Tell us about that. How does home and place weigh into your identity? How’s that woven in?

Barbara: I mean right now I’m really lucky because I live in a place that’s pretty secluded. It’s really important to me to have quiet. My office is like very Zen. I have a glass desk. I really need to it’s just I need to not be suggested to by external. Some people like to have music and objects that inspire them. I really need to have a very pristine setting. That’s how I mean I’m fortunate for sure but I mean I had a very busy full house at one point when I raised my kids who were wild. They were completely nutso kids. I did that at one time.

Diane: that’s a real contribution I think yes.

Barbara: I mean right now I find that I do need that stillness in order to let that creativity emerge. The other thing I want to say for myself about the piano. I really, one of my writing teachers is also a serious amateur painter. I think we both felt that to have another form that is not based on words is really restorative. When I go to the piano and study it’s a different part of me and that helps a lot. I’m also a believer that every person you meet is a potential teacher. You can’t be a good writer unless you’re totally fascinated by people and by life. That’s the flipside to the stillness of the desk.

Diane: I think your character Liz. She’s a teacher for all of us and you’ve made her a teacher because we’ve gone on the path with her. I think this is the value of it but I love this idea of focusing on something completely different, non-verbal. You’re a writer but you’re now transferring to the piano, the keys of a piano or as another wonderful author that I know Anne Hood she knits. Knitting, it’s another thing that requires manual dexterity. You are a PhD. You can tell us more than I could but this sense that your hands tell you something. The way you learn through your hands is different than the way you learn from creating words. This physical sense through your hands. It’s very key and it’s something that comes up a lot in in talk about kids being on computers all the time because look, they’re not doing things with their hands. Is there sort of part of the brain that is even kind of going to rest as a result of focusing particularly on language. I think that’s a beautiful point.

I wonder if you would talk about, there was a dialogue between Richard and Elizabeth and at one point I thought oh let’s read it but talking to you is far more interesting. There’s this dialogue between them. He’s the photographer. He believes that a person’s essence can come out in a fragment. These fragments, you have to get a lot of them or she believes that there’s a composite. He believes that you can see it through a fragment. This dialogue goes on. Georgia O’Keeffe herself said when you take a flower in your hand and really look at it. It’s your world for the moment. How do you relate to that the sense of the whole or a fragment translating into a whole somehow?

Barbara: it’s funny. Again, I’m loving this interview Diane because now I’m seeing the connection with this mosaic idea that I put on my website two years ago. I didn’t even see the connection until right now. To answer your question and then slightly enlarging it Elizabeth’s relationship with Richard is meant to be a little bit enigmatic. I mean I did not want them, spoiler alert but I did not want it to be an affair. That is so cliché and uninteresting. It’s seductive but in a whole bunch of other subtle ways. This kind of dance that they’re doing about wholes and parts is part of the dance that they’re doing.

Of course Elizabeth is looking for the whole. She’s talking a good talk about it intellectually but it’s only later in the book that she comes to understand it truly. When they’re having the conversation initially it’s a theory. Her theory becomes her reality by the end of the book.

Diane: even though you gave a spoiler alert I of course was flipping the pages. I did not go ahead to find out if they actually got to bed together.

Barbara: I’m sorry.

Diane: because I tell you why, because the journey is half the fun. Their dialogue is sizzling. Elizabeth was acutely shockingly aware of Richard’s fingers on her skin. I mean he did touch her, a place that she never paid attention to that was now the most intensely alive part of her. I mean this is pretty sensual and pretty intense. I think that you can go through this book and their relationship and just feel it. I mean really feel it almost better than if you actually tried to cap your copulation which is really difficult thing to do but also these parts are maybe even much more poignant. It’s very, the heat rises up in her face. She had to keep talking or she’d lose herself in the sensation of his touch. I mean these are things that I just, scenes that I just loved.

Of course she can go back and quote O’Keeffe to bail herself out of this tongue-tiedness. She says I often painted fragments of things because it would seem to make my statement better than the whole could. There you have it. The fragment of this relationship rather than the culmination was more expressive.

Barbara: exactly. He’s touching her elbow in fact in that scene. It’s an elbow which is a really unerotic part of one’s body in a way. It’s an interesting question and the other thing I just say is that when I wrote those very sensual passages and there’s no sex. I mean there’s nothing. You can be sensual without describing people having sex. It’s also of course in contrast to the very unsensual relationship with her husband. That’s part of the contrast there but the other thing I really try to do when I’m writing something like that if I actually try to sense it in my own body write what I am experiencing.

It’s the same processes as what my protagonist is describing. You can’t write just from the mind. You have to be in touch with your emotions, your body, your instinct, your whole self to write in a way that’s alive.

Diane: you have brought this forth from yourself so exquisitely that I mean there are times in the book that you can just get completely lost in it. I really think that it’s clear that you were summoning yourself. Also it’s very clear that the protagonist Liz has, she’s become somewhat arid, somewhat dry. She’s gotten lost in the roles that she plays. She has just lost contact, that contact with her sensory self, the contact with her emotional self. I think that there’s a temptation or I wonder if you agree with this there’s a temptation sometimes towards over-mentalizing and perfectionism that we women sometimes in an urge to get things right forget that we have bodies.

I’ve spoken with women who’ve had big careers in finance and they’ve said to me. I thought my body was a vehicle for my brain. I forgot I even had a body. If you want this to come back alive read this book. It really does put you back in touch with yourself. I really want to delve into this. We’re going to take another break here in a few minutes but maybe you could just comment on that. There’s a passage where Elizabeth says to her class could we say that attitude is an aspect of identity, a set of beliefs that lead one to embrace a specific identity. This is a very mental compartmentalized thing. You went from there to where. 60 seconds we have left. What happened after that?

Barbara: that was who she was in the beginning. The only thing she trusts is her mind. Your question of wholeness, authenticity, who am I. That’s the whole. I mean that’s why I relate so much to your show and to where you stand for.

Diane: thanks. I think that when we come back from the break we’re going to talk about the ways that Liz was empowered by showing herself and taking the risk that she took. I think defying herself, defying the boundaries that she previously had in place and becoming a woman that subconsciously she always wanted to be. We’re with Barbara Linn Probst and we’ll be back in just a second. Don’t go away.

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

Diane: welcome back everyone. We’re Dropping In with Barbara Linn Probst, the author of a beautiful new book called Queen of the Owls. It’s just as enticing as it sounds. It’s coming out next month April 2020 from She Writes Press. Before the break the previous thought was about being seen. There’s a fine line right Barbara? I think this is something you really picked up on. There’s this fine line being seen on the one hand Liz, your protagonist. This is a novel. It’s a work of fiction but so lifelike. You’ll be gripped by it. Liz, she’s drifted away from herself. She has to come back to herself. She’s empowered by showing herself in a series of nude photographs that she does outside of her marriage obviously with a photographer that she meets in her tai chi class.

There is the tension between the viewer and the gaze of the person who has the power on the other side of the camera. I wondered if you wanted to talk about that and how that interacts with the person, the sense of self for Liz or for any of us.

Barbara: I mean between the person who is being seen and the one who is seeing.

Diane: yes because you were describing and I thought so well you were describing your own photo session not nude but and from the head up of releasing yourself into the camera of the observer who’s taking your picture. I think we’ve all had that experience where we find ourselves dropping our guard. Once we do it something happens.

Barbara: I would reframe what you said a little bit differently that we’re usually trying to present a persona, a role. Here I am brilliant scholar. Here I am devoted mother. We’re trying to pose in as a certain image of something. This funny word pose isn’t it because the best models are people who are not posing. They just are being. If this in dropping the effort to try to look like something and just look like myself. Just be me. That’s where the liberation comes. Again in a way the book is also about finding her authenticity behind the roles.

The roles are it’s important. You want to be a good mother. You want to be a good daughter, good whatever but there’s something else that’s missing that real identity, that real sense of the children have before they learn to pose. There’s something about that. That’s really how I see it.

Diane: absolutely and I think that’s right. Where something, it falls away. Something falls away from you and I think the pose, the posture, the position, the role, all of those things are so closely tied together. I think we do see it when someone’s in repose as opposed to posing.

Barbara: I like that.

Diane: the interesting way a person looks when they’re in repose I think that’s the subtlety. I guess there’s a way and I think you’ve just been so articulate about that but there is a way in which the male gaze has this now cliché kind of power. It isn’t necessarily male. It’s really just an other. It’s in how others see us. In your book you’re talking about Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe and you say if Stieglitz was creating his art Georgia couldn’t create hers. By giving him her time and body she found her own beauty and out of that her art changed in beings she saw, in being seen she saw. There’s also a role, an appreciation of being observed as well. It’s a very interesting tension to me.

Barbara: I mean we don’t really know what O’Keeffe felt. There’s a sideline to this here too. I take certain perhaps the liberties. O’Keeffe is not a character in the story. She doesn’t walk into the room and have coffee with the protagonist as if this were a historical novel. We’re seeing O’Keeffe through Elizabeth’s eyes. It’s certainly possible that O’Keeffe scholars might get annoyed that I’ve taken liberties with her but it’s important to remember that this is what she means to Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s interpretations of O’Keeffe are telling us about Elizabeth but O’Keeffe herself, I mean we don’t know what she really felt.

She said very little all. That the only thing we really know there was a letter she wrote to her good friend Anita Pulitzer when she said that she thought that the photos that Stieglitz took actually had very little to do with her.

Diane: they had to with him.

Barbara: she didn’t feel like personally identified or you know with them. It’s kind of fascinating.

Diane: it is fascinating.

Barbara: the nude models do feel that way too. They don’t take it personally.

Diane: it’s kind of hard not to though when you’re there and you’re naked but I do understand what you’re saying. I think the other detail about the dynamic is that Stieglitz was Georgia O’Keeffe’s dealer in the beginning. He was the one who discovered her work. Other people say it’s promotional that he took these photographs of her. I don’t think that, I have a fair amount of art history background. I worked at the Guggenheim Museum for half a dozen years or more. I know a little bit about appropriation and I don’t think there’s much in this book that would be in conflict because as you say O’Keeffe is an avatar. She’s a symbol for Liz. It’s really through Liz’s eyes that are totally subjective that we see O’Keeffe and what she comes to symbolize for her.

I think that’s the ability of an artist to speak to us and it’s something that happens through that subjectivity through the experience of the artist’s work. In that way I can only say I think O’Keeffe would kind of approve of this internalizing that went on. It’s kind of great and also much less the liberation because we know that eventually O’Keeffe did go off to New Mexico and live quite separately from Stieglitz.

I wondered here I know we talked about unconscious things that cropped up in your book. Aside from the things, these are spontaneous things I wondered about. Aside from the beautifully constructed things Liz, when she was for example doing these nude photographs and I thought this was a good kind of omission because it allowed the reader to visualize the whole scene themselves. You don’t go into a very graphic description of Liz’s physicality. I wondered if it was to give us that that allowance, that space.

Barbara: intentionally. We never really, I mean there’s her sister and I think maybe Richard also says you don’t realize how beautiful you are but I deliberately did not describe her. I just felt it would take something away by filling in all the concrete. Like we don’t even know what color her hair is. That was intentional.

Diane: only that it was highlighted after a while.

Barbara: that’s right.

Diane: I think that’s brilliant because it gives the reader the freedom really to visualize the whole, just to visualize to go into another dimension completely. I think it’s also you were talking about Liz before this photo session. She’d been afraid not of experiences that she’d had. There was a specific flashback that she had with a young man when she was still 17. She was afraid of sleeping with this boy, this man not for being hurt by him but of finding out who else she might be. The way that she and all of us unconsciously imprison ourselves in the roles that we assign ourselves and as you said before the brilliant scholar that’s also a trap.

I just appreciate the fact that you’ve opened a lot of these doors for us. I wondered you’re living in the Hudson Valley unlike what I took erroneously said earlier but okay so you’re in the Hudson Valley, a great place, a rich vein for artists historically writers and artists to be. Marina Abramovic is in Hudson, New York. She is the performance artist who sat at MoMA and encountered people one-on-one for her show called The Artist is Present. These are incredibly empowering ways where people use their bodies as part of their art which has its own impact on us and brings us to a completely different level. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this kind of performance but you really come very close to describing it in your book called Queen of the Owls which I hope everyone will pick up next month when it comes out.

One more point for you Barbara Linn Probst and it’s fascinating talking with you. We’re probably coming to the end of our segment here but you talk about naming. I took a peek at your website because you have also this professional identity. Not that it seems to be a trap for you so much as almost a porous opening into your fictional work. You have a PhD in clinical social work. You talk about labels and the fact that labels are so inhibiting. That diagnosis can be something where a person is labeled as bipolar. Some of these labels free people up and say welcome to the tribe. For some people it’s something that’s very dismissive and you advocate for the use of understanding each individual’s interpretation of labeling and metaphor. How has your professional work informed your writing? It’s so interesting.

Barbara: actually the title Queen of the Owls, this is a secret. It came from my work as a clinical social worker because I started out working with families of kids who were different, who were out of the box and got pathologized. I also did a lot of research talking to people of what it was like to live with mental illness. This whole thing about do you want to be beyond the label or with some people as you said the label gives them a sense of their tribe.

There was a woman that I interviewed years ago who was Asperger’s syndrome. This was a long time ago. She was an amazing person because she told me I’m not like the other birds. I’m awake at night. I turn my head differently. I see differently. I’m like an owl but I’m the queen of the owls.

Diane: wow.

Barbara: that’s where that title came from. She embraced who she was. This was from my earlier profession. I taught at a university and I did all that research and stuff like that but my research was about talking to people. It wasn’t number crunching. This this image of this woman…

Diane: I’m so glad that you brought it forth and that your work informed you and us in such a beautiful way. I’m going to leave us with a passage from Queen of the Owls. “Making your unknown known is the most important thing Georgia O’Keeffe says and keeping the unknown always beyond you.” Barbara Linn Probst, it’s been a pleasure. Queen of the Owls is available next month wherever books are sold. It’s barbaralinnprobst www website. She’s on Facebook and Instagram at barbaralinnprobst. Thank you Barbara for being with us and everyone please be safe out there. We’d love to join you again next week. Thank you.

Thank you so much for dropping in. please join Diane Dewey again next Friday at 8 AM Pacific Time and 11 AM Eastern Time on the Voice America Variety Channel. We’ll see you then.