Implosion
Page 27
It took decades of work to heal from my childhood. I couldn’t have written this book without thirty years of skill and loving support from these three remarkable women: my acupuncturist, Vicki Pollard; my mentor, Alexandra Merrill; and my therapist, Judith Grace.
My old friends, Alvin McClure and Chuck Krumroy, helped me remember vivid details from the 1970s in hours of delightful conversations. I’m grateful for reconnecting with old friends as I wrote: Linda Findlay, who lived across the field from the glass house; Kimble Perry and Pogo (Roy) Stevens, from the year on the Ship; and my friends Lee Smolin and Professor Greg Nagy, from my time at Harvard.
I re-entered the world of architecture as I spent years immersed in research, rereading Le Corbusier, studying commentary on Modernism, and reconstructing my father’s rapidly disappearing legacy of buildings. I became friends through lengthy correspondence with a University of Cincinnati architecture professor dedicated to documenting my father’s work, Patrick Snadon, along with his colleague Udo Greinacher, who is photographing and filming their research. We spent several days documenting Woodie’s work in Cincinnati and Nantucket. The Mexican architect owner, Ana Gomez, generously showed us her remarkable post-modern renovation of the “Glass House” in Glendale. I am grateful for Eleanor O’Neill and family, who let us spend hours exploring the “upside-down” house in Wauwinet on Nantucket.
I researched and explored many of my father’s buildings not mentioned in this book. I want to thank those who assisted me: Wendy Gradison in correspondence about her family’s house in the Smokey Mountains; Geoff and Marilyn Stokes, Gregory Spaid, and Kemp Roelofs for my visit to the Roelofs house in Gambier, Ohio; Will Sawyer for my visit to their island cottage built for Miss Mary Johnston near Pt. au Baril, Ontario; the staff at Christ Church Glendale, where I explored the Woodie’s modern addition before it was demolished; the staff at The University of Cincinnati’s College of Nursing & Health, before Woodie’s design was updated beyond recognition; the renter of the house in Indian Hill, Ohio built for the Klausmeyer family; and a worker who let us explore the remarkable design of what was once the Johnson Harding printing plant off Red Bank Road in Cincinnati.
Additional architectural assistance came from Beth Sullebarger, Susan Rissover, and especially Jayne Merkel’s writings, research, and support for Cincinnati Modernist architecture. I’m grateful to the UC architectural librarian Elizabeth Meyer for archiving boxes of my father’s materials and scanning copies of articles and photographs for me. I am profoundly grateful for my father’s last architectural student and friend, Mike Dingledine, who stored boxes of invaluable materials for twenty years in the belief that someday someone would be interested in Woodie’s work.
I wrote many architects who had once worked or studied with my father. When I sent out emails with the subject line titled “A Question from Woodie Garber’s daughter,” I received emails back from a taxi in NYC, and from offices and homes in Oregon, Ohio, and Georgia. I deeply appreciated my long conversation with Bob Frasca, who had been my father’s coop student for two years, “hanging out” with my parents from when I was a baby to a toddler. He was enthralled with the passionate commitment of my father’s teaching and for Woodie taking his students to Mexico in a VW Bus to see Félix Candela’s buildings in the early 1950s. I also heard from Woodie’s old architectural partners and colleagues who had made peace with their painful dealings with my father. Charles Shoenberger wrote extensive notes about his experiences working with Woodie. My deep gratitude to Hayden May and his wife Cynthia for our long family friendship since the 1960s and for our day spent walking through Proctor Hall, talking about Sander Hall, and lunch afterwards at Lenhardts.
I’m grateful for the generous research of R. Dale Flick, librarian for The Cincinnati Literary Club, who searched through decades of archived papers to find and send me copies of my father’s papers that I didn’t have. I also thank the Glendale Historical Society for maintaining the records from the Glendale Literary Club, where I found detailed reports on meetings at my grandparents’ and parents’ homes.
So many writing teachers encouraged me. The unwinding of memory took years and patient mentoring. It took years as well to move from writing poetry to finding my voice as a prose writer. During my MFA at Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine, I worked with the poet Tim Seibles in the Writing about Race Seminar (with Patricia Smith & Richard Hoffman). Tim encouraged writing the hard truths about race in memories of my childhood and teens in southern Ohio. Richard Hoffman supported my writing of the painful memories of childhood abuse from his having done the same. Two week-long writing seminars at Haystack under the skillful teaching of Baron Wormser (in addition to a year of mentoring) as well as Meredith Hall deepened the process of re-entering memory. Seminars with Debra Mar-quart, Suzanne Stempek Shea, and rigorous critique from Jaed Coffin propelled my writing.
A two-week artist residency at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts gave me a community of memoir writers and a writing friend, Annette Gendler. During a month at Jentel’s Artist Residency on a cattle ranch near the Big Horn mountains in Wyoming, I experienced a depth of concentration I’ve never known that propelled me into memory, allowed me to complete the first draft, and gave me shared walks and conversations in the foothills with the remarkable artist Christel Dillbohner. Working with editor Nina Ryan helped me focus the memoir on my relationship with my father. I continued working on self-created retreats in the studio on Great Spruce Head Island, thanks to Anina Porter Fuller and the Porter family, and in Rose Cottage on Bear Island, thanks for the Fuller family.
Through this entire process my stalwart friends kept reading and giving feedback, a chapter or manuscript at a time. I am forever grateful for their thoughtful attention: Linda Buckmaster, Martha Derbyshire, Annette Gendler, Alexandra Merrill, Lauren Murray, Vicki Pollard, Coleen O’Connell, Diane Brott Courant, and Barb Klausmeyer. Many other friends and family members read and commented on the numerous drafts. I am so grateful for their generous encouragement.
Near the end, when I despaired of ever finishing, Monica Wood’s skillful teaching and her referral to Polly Bennell helped me transform the manuscript. Polly’s skillful coaching directed me to the hero’s journey, and to map the three-act structure through the memoir. I could not have made it to the end without our work together. My writer friend Elizabeth IlgenFritz and I traded chapters and writing struggles for years. She was my skillful copyeditor, and her sudden early death propelled me to make sure my memoir would be published after I’d almost given up on it. My husband’s friends, Alan and Gail Venable, were encouraging readers and editors for a last edit. My old friend Maya Christobel appeared at the last moment with great ideas for the cover.
I am grateful for my former literary agent, Wendy Strothman, who over seven years looked at the manuscript four times before accepting it, and asked tough questions that needed to be answered. She believed in this project, and worked diligently as she tried to find the right publisher.
I am so grateful my book found a home with She Writes Press. I deeply appreciate their dynamic publisher, Brooke Warner, who encourages a fine community of supportive and responsive writers. Thanks to Cait Levin for overseeing the editing process, and Julie Metz for her elegant cover design. I felt comfortable from the start with my sensitive and thoughtful publicist, Caitlin Hamilton Summie, who has helped me steadily through the process of bringing my book out into the world.
Finally I thank my husband Dirk, who appeared in my life three years ago. Fortunately, he missed the six intense, consuming years of birthing this book! Now he brings his steady loving support to my life as I bring this story out into the world.
BOOK GROUP DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. This memoir explores not only a family’s life but also the life of their modern home. How do you think the family changed when they moved into “The Glass House”? Do you think that living in the house worsened the father’s mental instability?
2. How aware are
you of the design and architecture of your home and where you live, and do you have a sense of how it influences your life?
3. Was it shocking for you to imagine what happened when the students moved into the mirror glass dormitory, Sander Hall, on the University of Cincinnati campus? It’s hard to remember the radical disruption of American culture that happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Can you imagine a college where the students would commit acts of arson multiple times a week in their dorm?
4. You can watch a video of the implosion of Sander Hall described in Implosion on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Euuoof1TN-U. After reading this book, how did you feel watching the building collapse? Have you ever thought about architects and their feelings about the buildings they design?
5. This book follows the descent of a creative brilliant man into a violent, abusive father and then his emerging into a more stable older man struggling with depression. Has this book affected how you think about mental illness and how it affects a family?
6. Was it hard to imagine that the author at nineteen could reach a point of such desperation that she would decide she had to kill her father to save her family? Did this memoir help you to understand the emotional torture that can happen in a family held hostage by a parent with a mental illness?
7. What do you think of the author’s mother, Jo? Is it difficult to imagine her not defending her children for so long? This is not only a coming-of-age story for the author but also for the author’s mother, who grew up alongside her children, and who waited until she was finally brave and financially stable enough to leave her marriage and create a safe home for her children. Do you think it was wise to wait for so long? What did you observe about how she changed once she moved out?
8. What do you think of the author’s brothers: the middle brother, Wood, living with his mother, and the younger brother, Hubbard, with his father? How did sending Wood and Elizabeth away to the school on the ship affect them and the family?
9. So often when people think of mental illness they think of the negatives, but in the book you could also see how Woodie was filled with intensity that led him to race cars, study wines, enthuse over jazz, and design gardens, as well as become a world-class architect. The author describes her father “as the most alive person she’d ever known,” and yet in a moment, he could flip into a raging tyrant. What do you think of his psychiatrist’s decision not to give him medication that would have tamped down his creativity but might have saved him from harming his family?
10. Was it difficult to understand the author’s loyalty to her father as she tried, for years, to help him as he struggled with depression and rage? What do you think of her not calling back the last time he called?
For more information about the author and her family, the buildings her father designed, and information about Modern architecture and design, you can go to:
www.elizabethgarber.com
About the Author
photo credit: Iveta Holden
Elizabeth W. Garber is the author of three books of poetry, True Affections: Poems from a Small Town (2012), Listening Inside the Dance (2005), and Pierced by the Seasons (2004). She collaborated with Michael Weymouth, combining her poetry and essays with his paintings and photographs, to create Maine (Island Time) (2013). Three of her poems have been read on NPR by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac, and her poem “Feasting” was included in his Good Poems for Hard Times. She was awarded writing fellowships at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Jentel Artist Residency Program in Wyoming.
Garber studied Greek Epic in the Mythology and Folklore Department at Harvard and received a BA from Johns Hopkins, a MFA in creative non-fiction from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Masters Program, and a Masters in Acupuncture from the Traditional Acupuncture Institute. She has maintained a private practice as an acupuncturist for over thirty years in mid-coast Maine, where she raised her family. Visit her at:
www.elizabethgarber.com.
SELECTED TITLES FROM SHE WRITES PRESS
She Writes Press is an independent publishing company founded to serve women writers everywhere. Visit us at
www.shewritespress.com.
The Sportscaster’s Daughter: A Memoir by Cindi Michael. $16.95, 978-1-63152-107-2. Despite being disowned by her father—sportscaster George Michael, said to be the man who inspired ESPN’s SportsCenter—Cindi Michael manages financially and heals emotionally, ultimately finding confidence from within.
The Coconut Latitudes: Secrets, Storms, and Survival in the Caribbean by Rita Gardner. $16.95, 978-1-63152-901-6. A haunting, lyrical memoir about a dysfunctional family’s experiences in a reality far from the envisioned Eden—and the terrible cost of keeping secrets.
Fourteen: A Daughter’s Memoir of Adventure, Sailing, and Survival by Leslie Johansen Nack. $16.95, 978-1-63152-941-2. A coming-of-age adventure story about a young girl who comes into her own power, fights back against abuse, becomes an accomplished sailor, and falls in love with the ocean and the natural world.
The S Word by Paolina Milana. $16.95, 978-1-63152-927-6. An insider’s account of growing up with a schizophrenic mother, and the disastrous toll the illness—and her Sicilian Catholic family’s code of secrecy—takes upon her young life.
Veronica’s Grave: A Daughter’s Memoir by Barbara Bracht Donsky. $16.95, 978-1-63152-074-7. A loss and coming-of-age story that follows young Barbara Bracht as she struggles to comprehend the sudden disappearance and death of her mother and cope with a blue-collar father intent upon erasing her mother’s memory.
Don’t Call Me Mother: A Daughter’s Journey from Abandonment to Forgiveness by Linda Joy Myers. $16.95, 978-1-938314-02-5. Linda Joy Myers’s story of how she transcended the prisons of her childhood by seeking—and offering—forgiveness for her family’s sins.