Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O'Keeffe

by Jennifer Sinor

Georgia O'Keeffe mistrusted words. She claimed color as her language. Nevertheless, in the course of her long life, the great American painter wrote thousands of letters--more than two thousand survive between her and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, alone. Jennifer Sinor's Letters Like the Day honors O'Keeffe, her modernist landscapes, and, crucially, the value of letter writing. In the painter's correspondence, we find an intimacy with words that is all her own. Taking her letters as a touchstone, Sinor experiments with the limits of language using the same aesthetic that drove O'Keeffe's art. Through magnification, cropping, and juxtaposition--hallmarks of modernism--Sinor explores the larger truths at the center of O'Keeffe's how we see, capture, and create. Letters Like the Day pursues the highest function of art--to take one's medium to the edge and then push beyond.

Genres: Essays

168 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2017

About the author

Jennifer Sinor is the author of Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O'Keeffe, a collection of essays inspired by the letters of the American modernist Georgia O'Keeffe and Ordinary Trauma, a memoir of her military childhood told through linked flash nonfiction. She teaches creative writing at Utah State University where she is a professor of English. She is also the author of The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray's Diary, a book about the diary of her great, great, great aunt, a woman who homesteaded the Dakotas in the late nineteenth century. All of her books work to reveal the extraordinary possibilities that arise in the most ordinary moments of our lives.

Born into a military family, Jennifer has lived all over the United States. While she considers Hawaii her first home, she has come to love northern Utah, where the mountains remind her of the ocean in the way they crest all around her.

Jennifer graduated from the University of Nebraska, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Michigan. She is married to the poet Michael Sowder, and they have two boys as well as a passel of animals.

Reviews

[Sandrine · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely marvelous rendition of life coming to life out of letters. I utterly enjoyed getting to know Mrs O'Keefe and glimpses of the author's life. It was a very pleasant read, one that made me want to take many more looks at Georgia O'Keefe's work (although I saw some in Chicago and in Santa Fe) and more of the Mrs Sinor.

[Laurie Lisle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jennifer Sinor gives us a heartfelt meditation on the extraordinary letter of Georgia O'Keeffe. "While the letters are the subject, writing is the center," Sinor explains about her book. An academic, her style is experimental, personal, meditative as she attempts to do with words what the artist did with paint: express herself emotionally. The author writes about her experiences in New Mexico, Hawaii, and India and compares them with O'Keeffe's. It's not an easy task since the painter who disdained words actually used them in a way that was powerful in her gorgeous handwriting.

[R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful exploration of O’Keeffe’s life, art, and letters, and how each offers insights into her life, especially how O’Keeffe used colors in her paintings to expressing something profound without using words. Also loved how Sinor’s life intersected with O’Keeffe’s, and the discussion of the two views that nothing exists outside of language vs. everything that matters happens outside of language. Does language create the boundaries that fence an experience in and allow us to talk about it, or is language the road that leads beyond the details of the experience and into understanding?

[Braeden Udy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful meditation of Georgia O’Keeffe’s life through her letters mixed with memoir. Highly recommend!

[Cara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just beautiful! Art inspiring art.

[Elisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this personal exploration of O'Keeffe's letters. Nine essays trace, more or less chronologically, major turning points in OK's life, twining them with personal reminiscences of the author. Interestingly original approaches-- one chapter is a series of fantasy letters to O'Keeffe. The author's Hawaiian background sheds new light on OK's sense of space and landscape. Last chapter on travels in India opened a facet of OK that few have explored. Bottom line: I enjoyed reading it, and got several genuine insights.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reviewed by me in 15-Bytes Cracking the Nut of O’Keeffe’s Genius: Jennifer Sinor’s Letters Like the Day

[Michael David Sowder · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. A collection of personal essays inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe's letters offers us a marvelous adventure. Like other works by Sinor--the memoir, "Ordinary Trauma," for example--the heart of the matter for Sinor is always the heart. As she meditates on the "literary" work of O'Keeffe, Sinor delves into memoir-writing that begins with her extensive knowledge about both O'Keeffe and Modernism and ends in rich and rewarding personal narratives and meditations that explore the meaning of art and the attempt to articulate the unsayable.

[Close · Rating 5 out of 5]

Letters Like the Day is a lovely, imaginative book that gives readers the chance to see O'Keefe in a whole new way. Jennifer Sinor's sparkling prose, playful structures, and deeply human research make this book a truly remarkable read.

[Story Circle Book Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sinor begins her book—a memoir of her study of Georgia O'Keeffe's lifetime of letters—with a letter to her readers. Her nine essays, she says, are arranged as an interconnecting series, taking as their subject the letters of a pioneering figure of American modernism, "who turned trees upside down and painted ladders to the moon." But while O'Keeffe's letters are the subject of her insightful book, writing—and language itself—is its central focus. And, of course, its medium, but in a way that is as profoundly and ambitiously self-conscious as the subject of her work. In her nine "experimental" essays, Sinor says, she attempts "to push words on the page as O'Keeffe pushed paint on her canvas ... to replicate what it means, for me as a writer, to really look" as the artist herself really looked, past the reality of the form to the connection between the artist and her subject, the distance the heart must cross.

The first essay, "Letters Like the Day," is about the letters O'Keeffe wrote to her husband, Alfred Stieglitz: letters written in her strong italic script, punctuated with dashes and white spaces, "those wild lines coursing like so many waves against the shores of her margins." It is also about Sinor's own correspondence, as a vital record of lived experience, and the importance of letters as "vehicles for vaulting time and space, carrying the 'I' to the 'you'" and binding the "I" to the "I" through the moments and years of life's radical changes. And it is about Sinor's connection to O'Keeffe's letters: they "took up residence inside my body," she writes, "and refused to leave." For the letters are the verbal embodiment of O'Keeffe's visual imagination. They do in words what the artist does in paint: they require us to venture out from what is in the frame and dare to see it while at the same time we see ourselves seeing.

Sinor's essays are as varied as O'Keeffe's body of work. "Hole in the Sky" introduces the artist as a character in Sinor's life and suggests their parallel journey in surreal peripatetic leaps across white spaces on the page, requiring the reader to leap with them. "A Walk into the Night" creates a realistic context for the beginnings of the O'Keeffe-Stieglitz correspondence, framing them in their temporal and physical settings. "More Feeling than Brain" is Sinor's fragmented story, illuminated with briefly juxtaposed passages from O'Keeffe's letters.

"Cleaving, 1929" is a collection of Sinor's letters to O'Keeffe on the occasion of the artist's "threshold moment," her arrival in New Mexico, finding both the desert and the beginnings of her independence from her husband. Both had taken a lover: O'Keeffe the desert, Stieglitz Dorothy Norman. The next essay interleaves Sinor's own similar "threshold moments" with O'Keeffe's painful discoveries, her affair (if that's what it was) with Jean Toomer, the difficult learnings of the opening heart. The last three essays take both Sinor and O'Keeffe on journeys of the heart, to distant places that reveal to us how imperfect language is and how we must struggle—both to speak and to hear—when we use it.

Abstract art never suffers from these limitations; it has the power to convey and create consciousness itself in an expansively wordless, timeless, limitless gesture. For O'Keeffe, her paintings are a way "to express myself—things I feel and want to say—haven't words for." Her letters are a way to tell her story to another while at the same time refusing "the tidy lines of story." Perhaps this is why it is so much more satisfying to read O'Keeffe's letters than to read her autobiographical writing, which reduces the nonlinear experience of her artistic vision to the compact, time-bound linearity of story.

Letters Like the Day resists tidy linearity. Both critical study and memoir, the book employs O'Keeffe's letters as a medium to convey Sinor's story, interleaved, juxtaposed, reflected in, and enclosed by O'Keeffe's story. This is a remarkable book, revealing at once the meaning of a passionate life lived through paintings, and a different life, lived through the powerful art of words—both bridging the distance the heart must cross.

by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women