Journal of an Itinerant Artist
Sunday Columns which became a Book
Employment offered the usual 15-minute "coffeebreaks" morning and afternoon. I didn't particularly enjoy those times in the snack bar, trading stories with fellow employees, unreceptive to many of the subjects discussed. Rather casually I adopted the habit of remaining at my desk during the breaks, began again to write. The essays seemed good enough to submit to a local newspaper, the Santa Fe NEW MEXICAN, and one, then two, then more were accepted and published. When the editor of the Sunday supplement VIVA asked if I'd like to do a weekly column, I was at first hesitant, not certain I could meet the schedule. But I found that if I used every coffeebreak -- ten a week -- for the purpose, I could not only write, but revise, polish, edit a piece to where I felt it merited publication. The editor agreed with me that we should title the column Coffeebreak Journal .
The column was immediately popular, gained a wide readership, and won for me, over its 4-year existence, the highest profile I'd known in Santa Fe. Most gratifying was the endorsement received from other journalists and authors. During the course of its publication, the column survived as many as half-a-dozen different editors, as Santa Fe has always attracted, and moreso in the 70s than now, transient workers and professionals. Eventually, family and studio demands made it more and more difficult to use employment breaks -- the coffeebreaks -- for writing. Art commissions at home were growing, work for the State was more complex and time-consuming, children were in high school and college; the coffeebreaks were more and more used for catching up with myriad chores related to domestic or business chores. The weekly deadline for the column was difficult to meet. As always, I was reluctant to surrender quality, would rather not write at all than write hurriedly and not well. When one more change of editors produced, for the first time in those 4 years, someone whose editorial policies differed with mine, I decided it was time to bow out.
It hadn't proved difficult to come up with a subject each week. I was at the time also involved with multi-media work, presentation of slide-shows for a Catholic parish, requiring close advance study of the Sunday readings. I chose the morals of those readings for my weekly columns, employing them in a thoroughly secular way, never quoting scripture, avoiding polemics, simply writing stories of people I'd known, events or experiences which reflected , often in obscure, even hidden, ways, those scriptural themes. Oral or written comments I received about the columns suggested that no reader had equated them with what he might have heard at that Sunday's morning church service.
But perhaps someone had. I received a letter from Father Albert Nevins, editor of the national weekly Our Sunday Visitor , Huntington, Indiana, asking if I'd consider having a collection of the columns published as a book. Admittedly, throughout the four years of newspaper publication, I'd hoped such an offer might be made. I prepared a manuscript with twelve chapters headed by the name for each month of the year, beginning with December, the season of Advent and Christmas, start of the liturgical year. Within the chapters, I placed selected columns which I felt best represented not only the season but most strongly documented whatever experiences I had to share. For instance, January would include not only a personal tale which veiled association with the Epiphany, but a war story from the Battle of the Bulge, that awesome spectacle set against the brutal winter of late 1944, early 1945. The book, perhaps inevitably with me as author, while advocating the search for spiritual growth, did not neglect the profane.
Fr Nevins and his staff approved the book, liked the format, but wanted an illustration to head each chapter. I have never considered myself an illustrator -- looking on that skill as distinct from painting or sculpture -- but Nevins persisted. He finally came from Huntington to Santa Fe to personally look over any drawings, of my choice, which might work. I considered none of my drawings specifically illustrative of the chapter headings, so selected some on merit alone, believing them to be among my best. Most employed sensual line drawing, a few were overtly sensuous, and -- in the 1970s -- I did not expect endorsement from a member of the Roman Catholic clergy. To my surprise, Fr Nevins liked and approved my choices. We had a book! I did not agree with Our Sunday Visitor's editorial decision regarding its title -- Journal of an Itinerant Artist (convinced I'd never been itinerant) over The Coffeebreak Journal . But I understood rationale behind the choice: the stories ranged in locale far and wide, throughout the US and Europe, were in no chronological order, their protagonists of differing cultures spread across two continents. Besides, who was I to argue with publishers more knowledgeable about titles and their contribution to better advertising and marketing.
The book's had a good life over the past few decades. Though no longer available in bookstores, I still retain copies for visitors to my studio. Extracts from the book have been published in regional and national periodicals. Fan mail occasionally still arrives via postal service or e-mail. I hardly dreamed such consequence when the first column appeared in a Sunday newspaper. Like so much else in the arts, we do , never knowing what might follow. Sometimes what follows is good indeed.
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© 1997 drewbaci@santafe-newmexico.com
