Many of you have followed me as an artist and teacher for the 35 years of my career. I thank you for that. I’ve so enjoyed the ebb and flow of teaching and learning that the quilting community has given me. I’ve loved exploring my art as I’ve had the opportunity of offering you all kinds of new techniques to explore in your own.

But nothing is forever. The world changes and we change in response.

Several years ago, the teaching positions began to dry up.  I really can’t pin precisely when this happened. It was in response to everyone’s tightened monetary conditions. Guilds felt they couldn’t afford a teacher every month. Or a national teacher more than once a year. The gigs trickled down from twelve gigs per year to two or three. It was no one’s fault. The profession I’d followed for thirty-five years was over. I was unable to make the switch that would have perhaps helped me continue. I needed to acknowledge that in a world where I was my own employer, I’d lost my job.

My art started years ago as an obsessive hobby and then became a career. But a career wound down does not return to an obsessive hobby. It flows into something else that fits better with the changes of the time. For one thing, I don’t have the strength I used to have at the machine. Or the need to create in the same way. The need for creation never goes away. But it does shift in focus and in substance.

So I found myself writing. I’ve always been a story teller. It’s a family legacy, that run’s through my mother’s side all the way back to Ireland. We tell stories.

Now before that, the bulk of my creativity has gone into visual expression. I’ve spoken in color and creatures, telling human stories in visual ways. Right brain stuff.

In my teaching, I got very familiar with identifying right brain people from left brain people. They needed different things. Right brain people needed stimulation and permission. Left brained people needed a formula they could follow. I worked hard at providing both because I’ve always believed a good teacher teaches everyone, not just the students like herself.

So it’s been a total journey to finally just express things in words. My left brain is pretty lame. But I’ve forced it around the track enough to try to master stories strictly in words.

My family has never been known for written stories. That has been the puzzle I’ve been unlocking for the last three years. How to tell a story that makes someone howl with laughter or shiver with fear. Or simply feel the connection of how we all react to the crazy bits of our worlds.

In my irresponsible tweens I spent time in Boston telling fortunes as a tea leaf reader in a tea room. It was a crazy time full of impossibly odd people and weird stories. It was completely formative. I learned things I’ll never do again. But in the way of all story tellers, I feel a need to share the stories just for the wacky reality of it.

I have not written a memoir. These are fantasized and sanitized for everyone’s protection. But it was not a safe journey or a time of stability. It was a wild unbalanced experience of people who were truly different and also in chaos. At the time, I felt that my reading helped them. Now I know better. But it is the journeys that build us, not by coming to a destination, but by enduring the stress of the journey itself.

So forty-nine stories later I have three books ready to publish. They are the loosely told story of my youth, going into a place of possibly and danger possibly to help those around me, but mostly to find out who I really was. I could not have become either the artist I was or the teacher I was without this journey. They both were formed in the steps towards the world of the psychics and the pathway away from that later.
Since these stories are all about tea leaf reading, I’ve included a tea cup with each of them. It’s not necessarily what someone would see reading, but just to give you an idea of how it feels.

So, will you join me in my remembrance of this journey?

My first story What the Parrot Said is available on Amazon for .99. There are other stories ready for you to read on my website, Sightunseen2016.wordpress.com.

I hope to have the first book, Tea Room Tales, available on Amazon very soon.

If you are kind enough to read my stories, please tell me what you think. A review is always welcome and the stories are in the long run, there for you. So I need to know how you feel about them.

It’s my transformation, from visual to verbal, from art to stories. Will you come along for the ride?