PAULA WHYMAN

Boot'vil is a well-kept secret. Even though this is my third residency at VCCA, it's the first I'd heard of the go-to place for cowboy boots and hats in nearby Ruckersville, Va. I'm still trying to figure out what the apostrophe is for, but the boot selection was so impressive, I'm willing to let it go.



Ever since squeezing my big feet into my grandmother's old buckskin Dingos, and suffering in silence because I liked them so much, I've had my heart set on a pair of my own genuine boots that fit properly. Well, it only took me thirty years to get them.

The proprietor said, "These'll be good for riding." And I said, "Sure thing." I didn't have the heart to tell her I ride English saddle.

I tried a few pairs, but the consensus among shoppers and employees was that these were The Ones. They're made by Lucchese, but Boot'vil stocks Tony Lama, too.

When I asked about protecting the boots from damage, she said, "You're not going to wear these in the barn, are you?"

I said, "No, I promise I won't." But I sure as heck'll wear them on Bethesda Avenue.

Sculpture by David Garratt, artist-in-residence at VCCA, is on exhibit at the Babcock Gallery at Sweet Briar College through December 6.


David sculpts the clay by hand, using no molds and no preliminary sketches. In doing so, he captures "fleeting moments" and imagines the inner lives of his subjects.

Craig Cahoon, visual artist

Mary McDonnell,
visual artist

Heiner Riepl, visual artist and director, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus

Mu-Xuan Lin, composer

Reinhard Michl, visual artist

This past Saturday evening, we helped celebrate the 20th anniversary of a fellowship program between the VCCA in Amherst, VA, and the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, located in the Bavarian village of Schwandorf. During the past 20 years, one hundred artists have traveled back and forth between the two colonies, inspiring exhibitions, translations, concerts, events and other creative collaborations.*

On Oct. 17, 2009, the VCCA marked the occasion with art and music created by the exchange artists. The event included a retrospective art exhibition and a concert of music for piano by Bavarian composer Jens Barnieck.

The VCCA's international exchange program with seven artists' communities abroad is the oldest and largest of its kind in the country.

This event helped to emphasize not just the value of international collaboration, but also the expansive creative value of a community made up not solely of writers, composers, or visual artists, but of artists from all of these disciplines. I can personally attest, for instance, that Mr. Barnieck is not only an impressive musician; he is also a formidable player of ex libris (a card game), and fooled almost all of us on the last line of a Daphne du Maurier novel. The director of the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Heiner Reipl, a painter, spent part of an evening discussing Petrarch's sonnets with a few of us fiction writers. For my part, I was able to add value to the cultural exchange by introducing our German guests to American Twizzlers. I'm afraid they were not particularly impressed.

I've included the Petrarch sonnet we were discussing, which Mr. Reipl interpreted as an order to writers to write of their experiences, and to do so out of love of writing. I'm just about the worst at interpreting poetry, and I can't remember the last time I read Petrarch, but if the translation is true (and I'm no judge of that, either) the speaker in the poem also appears to be urging the reader/writer to write specifically about his experiences with love. The question is, does one interpret the order to write, as supplied by "love" in the first line of the sonnet, as a love of writing, or as love, in general, saying "write about what you've seen of me." I'd be curious to hear from someone who knows the answer! (My apologies for the lack of accents in the first line, which I've included in Italian.)

Petrarch's Sonnet XCIII

Piu volte Amor m'avea gia detto:--Scrivi

Love had already often told me: --Write,
Write what you saw in clear letters of gold,
How my disciples' color I make white
And in one moment warm with life and cold.

There was a time when in yourself you felt
My strength, and were a sample of my choirs;
Then you were flattered by other desires,
But I overtook you when you rebelled.

And if the eyes where I showed you my spell
And where I used to settle and to fly
When I shattered the hardness of your soul,

Return to me the bow that conquers all,
Perhaps your face will not always be dry;
for I feed on your tears, you know it well.--

translated by Anna Maria Armi

[*Note: Part of the description of this event was reprinted from the VCCA blog.]

"It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table." Johannes Brahms said that.

Soon, I'm off to a colony, where I plan to make progress on a novel and finish off a story or two. I hope I succeed in leaving out the "superfluous notes." But when one is in the midst, it can be hard to tell.

I'll be blogging, tweeting, status-updating, and the rest (but not too often!), from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VCCA), where I've been accepted for my third fellowship (yay!).

According to the program notes for the National Symphony performance the other night, Brahms also said, "I am rather lazy, but once begun I never cool down over a work until it is perfected, unassailable."

"Unassailable" is hard to enforce. And "perfected" is subjective. "Perfected" in this case is both in the eye of the artist, and, if it leads to "unassailable," in the eye of the observer. When do these ever agree on what constitutes perfection? And the idea of it can change. What writer, having once seen her work as satisfactory (forget perfect), doesn't read it again years later with pangs of regret (oh, is it just me??)? Who doesn't want to comb a project over and over obsessively until it's nearly bald from the attention? Leaving well enough alone may be as much a challenge. When is it well enough, after all? Only when the superfluous notes are shed, and those that are left ring true.

I think I should leave the music metaphors alone.

And what if you as the artist fill both roles--the perfectionist and the assailant? Which of course, many of us do.

Then you're really stuck, aren't you?

Sometimes I feel a curious need to write a serious post about serious issues. There's so much suffering in the world. I mean, there are people who've never heard of Tony Orlando, much less seen his fabulous 'stache. And it's at times like these that I wonder about the way the United States is viewed by the rest of the world, and what we can do about it. Sometimes it helps to try and see things from another point-of-view. In the interest of doing just that, I traveled to Canada recently to get some much-needed perspective. What I found wasn't too surprising once I thought about it. For those of you who haven't been, here's a photo shot from the Canadian side of Mt. Rushmore. Let's just say, the view is different from over the border.

There Will Be Bread.

So we're promised, at Mark Furstenberg's new venture, G Street Food. That tells you all you need to know, almost. Here's the rest, in a letter from Furstenberg:

G Street Food is open. It’s a new restaurant in Washington for which I developed the concept, menu and the food. Located between the White House and the World Bank on G Street NW just beyond 17th Street, it offers foods from around the world: breakfasts, lunches, desserts and breads inspired by the food found at carts, stands and stalls lining the streets and tucked into the corners of cities and towns worldwide. Montreal-style bagels, Vietnamese Banh Mi sandwiches, noodle soups from Southeast Asia and flat breads and salads from the Middle East are examples of the world's street fare that you can find at G Street Food.

The restaurant’s commitment to a varied, globally-inspired menu is accompanied by a commitment to the use of seasonal produce, local ingredients and to the environment. Produce, whenever possible, will come from local farmers. Sausages are made by Simply Sausage in Maryland, and pork and beef will come as much as possible from local farms. When reaching beyond the local area, the menu will include ingredients such as pork products from Flying Pigs Farm in New York and organic maple syrup from Mt. Cabot Maple in Vermont.

I hope you will come to see the new place and taste our food. If you would like to receive an occasional irreverent note from me about the food business, you may visit the G Street Food website. I hope to see you soon. I will try hard not to be cranky.

Mark Furstenberg

Would it be the same if he weren't cranky? Just checking...

See my baking day with Mark Furstenberg and my comments on baking and the creative process on the Baking for Writers page, and learn more in the Washington Post Chef-on-Call story.