In her travels, she picked up a lifelong habit of collecting textiles local to the places she visited. In Foothill Cabin (1977), she painted the room she shared with Garrity in Palo Alto, the wall behind her bed decorated with the tessellating hexagonal design of a phulkari she brought home from Pakistan. Among the many woven traditions she encountered were Panamanian mola, Pakistani ralli quilts, and Bangladeshi kantha; she was also inspired by distinctive forms such as sumukhwa, a traditional style of Korean ink brush painting, and wayang, the Indonesian shadow puppet theater.
All of these techniques and styles found their way into her developing practice. Becoming curious about her work is becoming curious about the history and practice of textile-making by women the world over.
At this time of year, you may find me doing one of two things. Either I will be standing in the garden, straining to see the first swifts wheeling in the sky above our house, or I’ll be swinging by the greengrocer yet again, in the hope of English asparagus. Officially, the asparagus season begins on St George’s Day, which falls on 23 April. But recent winters have been so warm, it has sometimes arrived as early as February. As I write, though, I’m still waiting: yesterday, the bunch I picked up and promptly put back down again came with a label that read “Peru”.
You could quibble with the likelihood of Stella’s adventure or even wonder what kind of visa she used to enter France, but who can care about odds or immigration status when total transformation is on the menu? Treats don’t need logic, and “The Paris Novel” doesn’t, either. When a waiter drops an extra dessert on the table, better not send it back to the kitchen.
When the narrator brings in other writers such as Robert Walser or Clarice Lispector, the effect is double-edged. Their words add texture (Lispector: “Before going to bed, as if putting out a candle, she blew out the little flame of the day”), but they also remind us that these writers would never deliver a line as woolly or awkward as “I felt in the present like I was living always alongside what a previous body had felt like”. Nonetheless, this is a debut that mostly delivers interesting things, and promises greater ones to come.
“What if to translate was to look for lost words,” asks Mireille Gansel in a line from her genre-defying Soul House (2023), a meditation on poetry and translation as forms of hospitality, translated from the French by Joan Seliger Sidney. I misread this line at first, mistaking “words” for “worlds,” then wondered whether it couldn’t work both ways. Might the search for words really be a search for worlds, for a world or a house—like the spiritual dwelling invoked by the title—“filled with voices which enchant you—and with words which speak a soul language”? Gansel’s book, a bilingual collection of prose poems of varying lengths—some just a few lines in all, others spanning several pages—posits “words as shelter” while seeking “to make a word habitable.” Again, the slippage between word and world—as if to suggest that translation and poetry, in trying to make words habitable, also aim to increase the habitability of our world, or allow us to find or create hospitable words/worlds.