{"id":38923,"date":"2018-04-02T15:20:53","date_gmt":"2018-04-02T21:20:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=38923"},"modified":"2025-11-12T08:05:40","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T15:05:40","slug":"cracking-the-nut-of-okeeffes-genius-jennifer-sinors-letters-like-the-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/cracking-the-nut-of-okeeffes-genius-jennifer-sinors-letters-like-the-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Cracking the Nut of O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s Genius: Jennifer Sinor\u2019s Letters Like the Day"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>Georgia O\u2019Keeffe was an artist of such compelling vision that an entire region of the United States redecorated to match her aesthetic. I don\u2019t mean that as snark. Contemplation of O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s art actually changes the way we understand erosional geomorphology, flowering plants, sun-bleached bones, deep blue skies, and the physiography of the desert Southwest. If O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s paintings seem a bit familiar or formulaic to the modern eye, perhaps it is because she has trained us all to see the world her way. In any case, this experience of shifting perception triggered by O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s images is a unifying theme in Jennifer Sinor\u2019s idiosyncratic book of personal essays about the artistic experience of place.In her book of essays,\u00a0Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O\u2019Keeffe<\/em>(University of New Mexico Press), Sinor poses the question, \u201cHow can I use words as O\u2019Keeffe used pigment to convey an emotional truth?\u201d As a writer and professor of writing, Sinor makes a deliberate decision to approach O\u2019Keeffe through the written word \u2013 reading through O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s voluminous and well-preserved correspondence mostly held by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, and released to public view in 2006.A selection of these letters has been published as \u201cMy Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O\u2019Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933,\u201d (Yale University Press, 2011). In 2015, Sinor received a fellowship to travel to Yale to read the letters in the original. It must have been an amazing experience, handling these intimate and physically beautiful letters in the translucent, temple-like architecture of the Beinecke. A plate in Sinor\u2019s book shows O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s elegant, flowing penmanship, flamboyantly punctuated with flourishes and curlicues instead of standard typographical marks. Yet none of these essays focus on the monastic experience of archival research, and Sinor writes, \u201cwhen I initially tried to write essays that responded to the letters, to move out from her language into my own, I was paralyzed. \u201cWell, you can see the problem here. O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s letters aren\u2019t about an abstract relationship to spirits of Earth and Sky; they are largely about her own somewhat messy relationship with Alfred Stieglitz. By grounding her research in words on paper, Sinor shuts herself out from expression through color and form and finds herself seeking clues to O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s genius between the lines.<\/p>\n

Since Sinor is, according to her essays, the kind of relentless person who runs every day even when she is on vacation, she persists in this word-based exploration, trying out different angles to discover something profound that she is sure is concealed within O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s writing. In various essays, Sinor writes her own letters to O\u2019Keeffe, inserting herself into the correspondence (\u201cCleaving, 1929\u201d); She imagines O\u2018Keeffe as an actual friend along for a hike in Green Canyon near Logan (\u201cHoles in the Sky\u201d); She rents a cabin in New Mexico, the better to commune with O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s landscape (\u201cMore Feeling than Brain\u201d); She engages in girl-talk, commiserating with O\u2019Keeffe about unfaithful lovers (\u201cTaking Myself to the Sun\u201d); She ponders the contrasting visions of O\u2019Keeffe the landscape painter and Robert Smithson the land-art bulldozer (\u201cSpiral\u201d); She travels to India in search of enlightenment (\u201cI Must Speak to You\u201d).<\/p>\n

In this context of not quite reaching the goal, the essay \u201cMore Feeling than Brain\u201d stands out as pivotal. During a family trip to New Mexico, Sinor\u2019s 6-year-old son wants to see a coyote like his favorite stuffed toy. Every day, the family goes out walking, looking for coyotes. They never spot one until they are making the long drive home. Then, late at night under a starry sky, a coyote darts into the road and is killed by their car. To Sinor, this is the worst possible thing that could happen. She writes,<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have been waiting and waiting to see one,\u201d Aiden sobs, \u201cwaiting and waiting.\u201d And this, I think, is the coyote he is given.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sinor says that she was compelled to write these essays because, \u201cO\u2019Keeffe\u2019s letters took up residence inside my body and refused to leave.\u201d But at the end of the day, words alone don\u2019t offer sufficient explanation for the transformative magic of O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s artwork. It seems that like so many of us, Sinor has underestimated the raw power of O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s superficially accessible artistic vision.<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t say this book is a failure, though. Sinor\u2019s essays delve into a deeply personal experience of letting art get under your skin. She may not crack the nut of O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s genius, but she does allow herself to be awestruck and transformed by her encounter with genius. After all, if it were that easy to convey emotional truth through pigment or words, we would all be doing it.<\/p>\n

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Years ago, O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s letters took up residence inside my body and refused to leave. They shaped how I saw the world. They challenged my understanding of narrative. They made me question the limits of writing and ultimately of art. They reminded me of the intimacy created in putting pen to page, as well as the solace found in fashioning a sense of self on sheet after sheet of paper. For so long, I thought the letters were what I was writing about. Given how loudly they clamored inside me, I wanted others to see their beauty and wonder. But such a response would be akin to feeling satisfied with O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s use of the color blue. It misses the real magic. To really appreciate O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s literary and visual art, you must move out from what is actually on the page or the canvas and risk the journey across the empty space. (pg. 15)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O\u2019Keeffe
\nby Jennifer Sinor
\nUniversity of New Mexico Press. 168 pp.
\nPaperback, $19.95<\/h5>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jennifer Sinor<\/em>\u00a0is the author of three books, including\u00a0Ordinary Trauma: A Memoir<\/em>and\u00a0The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray\u2019s Diary<\/em>\u00a0(<\/em>2002).\u00a0<\/em>She is a recipient of the Stipend in American Modernism, as well as the winner of the Donald Murray Prize and the Utah Original Writing Competition for both the novel and book-length nonfiction. Jennifer\u2019s work also has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, as well as a National Magazine Award. Her essays have appeared in\u00a0The American Scholar<\/em>,\u00a0Creative Nonfiction<\/em>,\u00a0Gulf Coast<\/em>,\u00a0Ecotone<\/em>,\u00a0Fourth Genre<\/em>,\u00a0Utne<\/em>, and elsewhere. Her essay, \u201cConfluences,\u201d can be found in the 13th edition of\u00a0The Norton Reader<\/em>. She teaches creative writing at Utah State University, where she is a professor of English. She lives with her husband, the poet Michael Sowder, and their two young boys at the foot of the Bear River Range in northern Utah.<\/p>\n

You can watch a video of her 2012 reading with Sowder at City Art here:\u00a0https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/index.php\/jennifer-sinor-and-michael-sowder-at-city-ar\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Georgia O\u2019Keeffe was an artist of such compelling vision that an entire region of the United States redecorated to match her aesthetic. I don\u2019t mean that as snark. Contemplation of O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s art actually changes the way we understand erosional geomorphology, flowering plants, sun-bleached bones, deep blue skies, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1518,"featured_media":38924,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3230,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-awards","category-literary-arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Letters.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-04 14:22:50","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38923"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98496,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38923\/revisions\/98496"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}