Draft cover of the Hide Aways book 2023 with artwork by Juliette Losq

In the late summer 2020 year of seclusion, several women friends began to share memories of hideaways where they spent time as alone as children—spaces of play, thought, and dreams.  Sometimes secret, always private, they were anchored in imagination as a place each woman could mentally return to over time.

A book of artworks and writings grew and was sorted into thematic chapters rich in overlapping details echoing those private spaces.  What is clear throughout is that the sensation of feeling hidden and safe remains one of the deepest memories of childhood.

Some of the artists and writers describe the beginnings of an intimate relationship with nature that led to a lifetime of care for the environment.  Some found refuge in trees, held high in branches, perched and observant while happily unreachable.  Others craved a crawl space with hugging contours—or, where the call of outdoors wasn’t available or desirable, found a sanctuary in indoor alcoves:  in cupboards, shelves, and window seats, alone with their thoughts.

The writing and artworks in Hide Aways are expressive and sincere.  Similar to Talking To Women (1964), Nell Dunn’s interviews with women from all walks of life, the thoughts collected in Hide Aways are from many different countries, backgrounds and experience united by a moment in time.  Some of the contributors are chaired professors, others live in rural isolation; some had never written before, others are published authors.  The works shared are not what Hilary Mantel, quoting Sir Walter Scott, once identified as the male :  “Big Bow-wow strain”  but instead, have: ”… the exquisite touch… the truth of the description and the sentiment.” The most vivid memories of childhood involve our sharpest senses looking out while feeling safe and invisible within.  They endure as a deep well:  a psychic refuge for observation and reflection, care for oneself, for things, creatures, nature, the future.  

Contributors to Hide Aways

Prof. Susan L. Aberth is the Edith C. Blum Chair in Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College in upstate New York. Her academic work focuses on women and esoteric visual arts and she has written extensively on Leonora Carrington, Agnes Pelton, and Surrealism in Latin America.

Kelsi Anderson is an ecological artist, designer, and earth tender. Her mission is to cultivate healthy, reciprocal relationships between people, the earth, and the building of community. She weaves together creative art, regenerative design, and nature connection practices to create healing, imaginative, and collaborative community-based public artworks.   www.wildearthart.co 

Catherine Armsden co-founded Butler Armsden Architects in San Francisco in1985. She left the firm to pursue writing her novel, Dream House, which was published by Bonhomie Press in 2015. Her second book, An Alert, Well-Hydrated Artist in No Acute Distress, will be published in summer, 2023.

Lisa Haderlie Baker grew up in Monterey, California, the daughter of a British war bride and a professor of marine biology, both of whom instilled in her a passion for art, travel, and natural history. Her childhood included not only adventures in tree houses, but also extensive travels with her parents to many distant places all around the world. She loves her daughters, her pug, nature and the world’s creatures, painting at her easel, beautiful old things, thick books, good conversation, and a nice cup of tea.  lisahaderliebaker.com

Raquel Baker teaches literature and creative writing courses at California State University Channel Islands. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College in Oakland, California, and is deeply committed to art-based community making. In her work, she is currently grappling with how to create stories of blackness that can address and heal state and other violences.

Judith Belzer is a painter based in Berkeley, California.  Her work explores the human engagement with the natural world, often looking to the man-made landscape in order to consider this dynamic and sometimes uncomfortable relationship.  Belzer shows her work regularly in both galleries and public institutions, is a 2014 Guggenheim fellow and currently teaches painting at Harvard University.

Ramsay Bell Breslin is a California poet, art writer, former small press publisher (Kelsey Street Press) and academic editor. Her autobiographical essay about California sculptor Stephen De Staebler is forthcoming in a book of essays from Oxford University Press, entitled Examining Lives: Self-reflections in Psychobiography. As part of her ongoing photography practice she takes daily walks in the Berkeley Hills and at Stinson Beach.

Ginger Bruner is a Las Vegas native, born in the heart of downtown at the long-gone Las Vegas Hospital and has done a lot of things for money, including music, photography, writing, juggling, clowning, and many years in public radio. Art is in her blood, and she is on a mission to make art-making part of everyone’s life. She is currently Associate Producer and Lead Photographer for Our Las Vegas, and bassist/tubist for the band Killian’s Angels.

Emily Buck is a junior at Smith College studying English. She is originally from Iowa City, IA and is passionate about racial justice, literature, and hanging out with her friends. 

Bette Burgoyne received her BFA from Seattle Cornish College of the Arts and her MFA at Mills College and has returned to Seattle where she lives and works drawing various phenomena using color paper and color pencils.  She has had solo exhibitions at New Langton Arts, Southern Exposure, Mincher/Wilcox, Headlands Center for the Arts in the Bay Area and at Vermillion Gallery, Scroll at Amo Art, Forest at LxWxH Gallery, and Ghost Gallery in Washington state and in group exhibitions in many places in the US.  She is the recipient of Veronica di Rosa Residency Award at Headlands Center for the Arts CA, Tread of Angels Fellowship at Djerassi Foundation CA, Watkins Award at New Langton Arts SF, and the Boudreaux Cadogan Scholarship at Mills College CA.  http://betteburgoyne.blogspot.com/

Sarah Cahill is a pianist who lives in Berkeley, California.  Her musical project The Future is Female encompasses seventy compositions by women around the globe, from the Baroque to the present day, which she has performed at The Barbican in London and across the U.S. in marathon concerts. She hosts a radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, every Sunday evening at KALW in San Francisco.

Lisa Caronna has varied careers first as professional Landscape Architect and then in public service as both Parks and Waterfront Director and Deputy City Manager for the City of Berkeley. She is currently on numerous committees and boards that strive to improve life for all of us. 

Sarah Cook, a Canadian who lives in Dundee, Scotland, is a curator of contemporary art and a professor in a department of information studies at the University of Glasgow, where she works on understanding how art made in collaboration with science, technology or engineering, might change our perception and lived experience of the world around us. In 2019 she co-curated the exhibition 24/7 for Somerset House in London, showcasing art reflecting on our programmed inability to switch off from the non-stop world and how we might together reset the clock-time of our lives.

Dede Cummings is a poet, writer, book designer and publisher. Her second poetry collection, The Meeting Place, was published in spring 2020, by Salmon Poetry. Her memoir entitled “Spin Cycle” is a work in progress, a collection of linked stories with a narrative arc. Dede lives in Vermont where she writes, designs books, and runs Green Writers Press.

Liz Cunningham is the author of the award-winning book Ocean Country, with a forward by Carl Safina. She writes about ocean conservation and the practices and traits we need to be effective agents of change —among others courage, creative imagination, and the ability to work together to find solutions. More information about her work can be found at: http://www.lizcunningham.net.

Lauren Davies is a visual artist based in Cleveland, OH. Her mixed media work in photo-based textiles and sculpture explore the ways in which history continues to reside in architecture and the landscape. Much of her work specifically focuses on incarceration and the economic histories that continue to impact lives in the Rust Belt and the Deep South. 

Bridget Draxler is Associate Director of Writing, Speaking, and Academic Support in the Center for Advising and Academic Support and an adjunct assistant professor in the Writing program at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. Originally trained in eighteenth-century British literature, Bridget’s current teaching and research focus on public humanities, writing centers, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Lisa Dungan is a social justice and environmental activist and chef. She loved playing pick-up basketball in the before times and now spends too much time sitting in the stream. Proud to be known as “LD-The Human” among her dog friends.

Andrea Feeser is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism at Clemson University. She writes about places and their entangled communities in her 2006Waikiki: A History of Forgetting and Remembering with Gaye Chan; 2012 The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dye and Pigments, 1400 – 1800  with Maureen Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin; 2013 Red, White, and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of Colonial South Carolina Life; and 2021 Jimmie Durham, Europe, and the Art of Relations. She counts flowers among her beloved friends.

Judith Foosaner is a mixed-media artist who incorporates elements of collage and free-hand sketches into her large-scale acrylic works on canvas–dramatic, gestural black and white works where linear elements suggest letters from some unknown alphabet.  Foosaner has received many awards including the Yaddo Fellowship and the Fellowship for Artist in Residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Sweet Briar. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the United States, and her work can be found in collections throughout the country.

Laurie Gonzales grew up on a small farm in Northern Colorado in the 1960s that was like heaven.  She was able to explore and pretend all day. Now on her small farm outside of a tiny town in Southern Colorado she is enjoying showing her grandchildren the magic of pretending in the willows.

Joan Grant is a third-generation San Franciscan now living in Berkeley, California.  Though the pandemic continues to curtail in-person activities, her ongoing work as an actor who portrays ‘standardized patients’ fulfills a need for members of the medical profession as she provides honest reactions to difficult conversations thus enhancing those vital interactions for others. She also records poetry for Voetica.com and occasionally narrates audiobooks. 

Lauren Haldeman is the author of Instead of Dying (winner of the 2017 Colorado Prize for Poetry), Calenday, and The Eccentricity is Zero. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, The Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Fence and others. A graphic novelist and poet, she’s received an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award and visiting artist fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and University of Cape Town, South Africa. You can find her online at http://laurenhaldeman.com.

Cindy Hanks was born and raised in Southern California and recently retired from a career as Deputy Director of Academic Computing and Multimedia Services at Long Beach City College. She is a product of the California State College system where she earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Theatre and Education Technology. She is currently building her dream home in Southern Utah and lives with the loves of her life:  a thirty-nine year old Amazon parrot named Gumby and her two Labrador Retrievers, Zorro and Beetlejuice. 

Laura Hartwick is an artist/writer, and a dog/horse trainer. She spends most of her hours working/frolicking with dogs/horses in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Terry Helbush was born and raised in San Jose and has lived in Berkeley for more than 50 years. She was an immigration attorney for 35 years and was married for 30 years to Dale Miller, a guitarist. She continues to live in her Mediterranean house on a narrow pathway with her dog KozB and two cats, Joanie and Jamal. In the last 3 years, she and KozB have walked all the streets in Berkeley, Emeryville, Kensington, Albany and El Cerrito and some of Oakland and Richmond.

Laura Houha is a writer, actor, and filmmaker who studied Film and English at the University of Iowa. She has appeared on a billboard in Times Square, lived in a haunted mansion, and is an award winning road rallyist and navigator. She currently lives in New York with her partner, her cat, and a mountain of books that she is slowly but surely climbing.

Nina Jürgens is a scholar, freelance editor, indexer and translator from the Southwest of Germany. The currents of the Pacific Ocean have brought her to Honolulu, where she currently lives.  She is fascinated by literary objects and their capacity to shape belonging and works at the intersections of literary material cultures and Australian literature. In her free time, she trawls real estate websites for houses with deep window seats and alcoves.

Karen Kevorkian’s poetry collections are Quivira, Lizard Dream, and White Stucco Black Wing. Her poems and book reviews are featured in many journals including New American Writing, Four Way Review, Volt, Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Since 2002 she’s taught poetry and fiction writing at the University of Virginia and at UCLA. http://karenkevorkian.com

H. Constance King has loved stories since Babar and Pooh as a child, leading to a continuing career in design and publishing. Curiosity in all things has taken her from college to coal mine country, to the study of healing arts and culture, design at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and an always and ever-increasing love of nature.

Sarah La Bauve grew up in the backwoods of rural Arkansas but has been happily ensconced in the intellectually stimulating Boston metro-area community since 2009.  For her day job, she helps facilitate economic research at Harvard University, and her main creative pursuit is cake decorating. This is her first published work.

Holly Lane is a California artist who integrates painting and frame, hand carving elaborate wooden frames that formally and contextually expand on the intimate paintings within. Following earning an MFA at San Jose State University, Lane has exhibited widely in museums and galleries, with 21 solo exhibitions and more than 90 group exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in Stamford, Connecticut. Among others, Lane’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, ARTnews, Art & Antiques and PBS’s online art magazine, art21.  hollylaneart.com 

Edyta Lehmann is a mother,  linguist,  essayist and runner.  She holds a PhD in Celtic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University and has published on a variety of topics concerning Irish literature and mythology. Native of Poland,  she now lives and teaches in Bolzano,  Italy. 

Jessica Liebman is a native New Yorker, born and raised.The city’s past and ever-changing present play a large part in her imagination and photography.  Her work depicts private interior spaces blended with the exterior life of the city in which the real and imaginary co-exist.  www.jessicaliebman.com

Juliette Losq is a contemporary British artist known for her large-scale ink and watercolor drawings of immersive landscapes, often punctuated by urban remains or antique furniture. She is the recipient of several awards for her art, including the John Ruskin Prize (2019) and the Jerwood Drawing Prize (2005) and her work is part of the permanent collection at the Saatchi Gallery and the Women’s Art Collection.  Losq is  a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, a Royal West of England Academician and a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors.

Tracy McBride is a mom, partner, worker bee, trusted advisor, and always circling back to what stories are told by vintage clothing, quilts, kitchen and garden ware, heritage plants, rustic tools and oddities.

Edie Meidav has been calledan “American original”, and is the author of Kingdom of the Young (Sarabande) and the novels Lola California (FSG) and Crawl Space  (FSG), among other works. Called an editorial pick by the New York Times and elsewhere, her work has received recognition from these sites: Lannan, Whiting, Bard Fiction Prize, MacDowell, Bellagio and others. She is on the permanent faculty of the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers. 

Amy Mikelson is a photographer and fiber artist who lives in Iowa with her menagerie of farm animals and dogs; all pets, big and small. She was challenged to black and white photography which produced this photo. She likes to believe that just through the thicket there be magic and fairies.

Susan Moffat is Creative Director of Future Histories Lab at UC Berkeley. She is the founder of Love the Bulb, an organization dedicated to protecting the guerrilla art and wild nature of the San Francisco Bay shoreline landfill known as the Albany Bulb. albanybulb.org, futurehistories.berkeley.edu.

Allison Morehead is a scholar and curator based at Queen’s University, Canada, on Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee territories. Morehead has published widely on modern art in relation to gender, the psy-sciences, and the medicalization of modern life and is currently curating an exhibition that juxtaposes the works of Edvard Munch with material cultures of medicine. 

Stacy Murison is writer and educator. Her work has appeared in Assay, Atticus Review, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, Hobart, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, River Teeth, The Hong Kong Review, and The Rumpus among others.

Joan Nelson lives and works in upstate New York. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Museum of Art; the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Kelsey Nicholson is an artist and arts advocate from the California Bay Area. Constructed dummies of the natural world are central to the work in both theory and practice. kelseynicholson.com

Julia Oldham is an artist living and working in Eugene, OR and New York City, and she received her MFA from the University of Chicago. Using a range of media, from animation to graphic storytelling, she explores the complex relationships between nature and technology, humans and animals, and science and creativity. When she is not making art, she can be found hiking in the Cascades, volunteering with shelter dogs and reading horror novels.

Janet Passehl is a visual artist and writer. Her work is exhibited and collected in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Her writing has appeared in poetry journals and artist’s catalogs and been presented as audio installations in the context of art exhibitions. janetpassehl.com

Jaanika Peerna is an Estonian-born visual and performance artist living and working in New York since 1998, working in drawing, installation, and performance, dealing with the theme of transitions in light, air, water and other natural phenomena. Peerna has exhibited her work and performed extensively in New York, Europe as well as in Australia.  Her work is in numerous private collections and is part of the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris.  #GlacierElegy / www.jaanikapeerna.net 

Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer who researches the living matters of the unified multi-dimensional being that animates the critical zone of our planet.  She is both an objectivist and a vitalist. Along with Brian Holmes, she is the co-founder of Watershed Art and Ecology, an experimental cultural space in Chicago.

Frances Phillips is the author of three small press books of poetry from Hanging Loose Press and Kelsey Street Press. She also has published book reviews, interviews, and essays,  and served for two years as poetry review editor for the former Hungry Mind Review. Recently retired, she worked for many years in philanthropy, for arts nonprofits, and as a writing instructor at San Francisco State University.

Yulia Pinkusevich is an artist and educator born in Kharkov, Ukraine. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Stanford University and Bachelors of Fine Arts from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts. Yulia’s art is in the public collection of the DeYoung Museum, Stanford University, Facebook HQ, Google HQ and the City of Albuquerque amongst others. Her work is represented by Marlborough Gallery in New York.

Sri Ponnnada is a product manager based in Brooklyn, NY.  She is passionate about building inclusive communities and wants to create meaningful change using technology.

Maria Porges has pursued dual practices as both writer and artist since the late 1980’s. Her criticism has been published widely in print and online art magazines, and she has authored essays for more than120 exhibition catalogues as well as multiple book contributions. She is currently working on a book about mending as an art form across multiple platforms.wordsaboutart.com

D. L. Pughe is a writer and artist in Berkeley, CA.  Her interests in art, philosophy and history have led to museum work and research projects around the world, with publications in various journals and books.  She is honored to have so many talented and caring friends with whom she shares laughter, memories and ideas.

Kathryn Reasoner is a semi-retired arts administrator who has dedicated her professional life to advancing the role of artists in society, as an advocate, educator, and leader of arts organizations locally and abroad. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she has deep family roots in Northern California, and is happiest perched at elevations on the Mendocino coast or in the Sierras.

Sarah Robinson is an architect based in the Langhe region of Italy. She was the founding president of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture board of trustees and is an Adjunct Professor at Aalborg University in Denmark. She writes about the ways that design shapes human perception and well-being, applying multi-disciplinary research to a more than human practice of architecture, her latest book is Architecture is a Verb, Routledge, 2021.

Katie Roche is an artist living in Iowa City, Iowa, who also leads the Iowa City Public Library Friends Foundation advocating for public libraries and intellectual freedom. When not swimming Katie plays with the Folk Americana band Awful Purdies and the 1920s jazz project Dandelion Stompers. Katie is currently working on a collection of essays called “Letters to the Future Blind”; a personal reflection on living with the growing effects of a chronic illness, while also contemplating the qualities of information derived from ocular input.  awfulpurdies.com, dandelionstompers.com

Judy Rohrer is a theorist with research interests in a number of interdisciplinary fields: feminist studies, queer studies, settler colonial studies, indigenous studies, critical racetheory, critical ethnic studies, and disability studies. She grew up in Hawai’i and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. http://judyrohrer.mystrikingly.com

Anne-Catrin Schultz writes about historic and contemporary tectonics in architecture, exploring narratives that unite the past with the present and beyond. She is interested in exploring the web of connections between culture, technology, politics and building through teaching and research. Anne-Catrin is the author of several books, including Carlo Scarpa–Layers and Space, Time and Material–The Mechanics of Layering in Architecture and Real and Fake in Architecture–Close to the Original, Far from Authenticity?.

Ellen Sebastian Chang is a storied figure in the performing arts, as a director and arts educator whose career spans 45 years. She lives on the West Coast between California and Washington. 

Maw Shein Win’s full-length poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn). Previous poetry collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, California. mawsheinwin.com

Thet Shein Win is an artist, writer, teacher, and cultural anthropologist. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her partner, Mick, their kids, Tika and Laurence, and their dog, Lupin. Thet offers Lahpet Thoke Writing Circles for BIPOC communities via www.thetsheinwin.com.

Annette Louise Solakoglu is a Swedish-German photographer based in New York’s Hudson Valley. Annette lectured film at Vassar College and works in the fields of documentary and environmental portraiture. She graduated from Berlin University of the Arts, Germany, and holds a MFA from Boston University. www.blickpictures.com.

Sandra Strange currently resides in Deep River, Ontario, where she enjoys a blessed life with her three loves, Darleen, Stella and Zion. In between travels to faraway mountain ranges, she reads, paddles, skis, and walks herself into a state of wellness.  Mountains are her passion, and will always be her refuge.

Sarah Sutton is a painter based in the Rochester, NY area. In her work landscape is a verb and never a frozen moment; bodies and their stories are not separate from depictions of a place but embedded within it. She has had numerous residencies including most recently at Yaddo and has exhibited widely with an upcoming solo exhibition titled ‘Sticky Mirror’ and HUB/Robeson Galleries at Penn State University. www.sarahsutton.net

Isabelle Tabacot grew up in southern France and lived in Italy before emigrating to the United States. She teaches history and makes her home in the Sacramento Valley.

Olivia Ting is a visual artist, designer, photographer, video projectionist, pianist and jack-of-all-trades of other things, hopefully master of some.  In her most recent project “Into Beethoven’s Sound Box,” inspired by Beethoven’s vow to continue his art despite impending deafness, she investigates hearing sound not only through one’s body but through objects that become extensions of the body.  Today, with a cochlear implant embedded in her skull, she has embraced imperfect hearing, and becoming a cyborg musician.  olivetinge.com beethovensbox.cargo.site

Clarissa Upchurch is a British artist and printmaker who has taught etching for many years. With her husband, the poet George Szirtes, they ran Starwheel Press together and recently collaborated on a book of poetry and monoprints:  Thirty Clouds, 2019.  Her work has been exhibited widely both abroad and in the UK mainly in the Boundary Gallery, London.

Vanessa Vobis loves to feed her curiosity at the intersections of disciplines. These convergences often trace back to art, nature, and education. Vanessa is currently learning about university fundraising and the legal landscape in the U.S. through the lens of Stanford Law School.  She currently resides in Silicon Valley with her husband, son, and their fur child.

Erin Wiersma was born in New Jersey and resides in Manhattan, Kansas.  She holds a MFA from the University of Connecticut and BA from Messiah College. Wiersma is an Associate Professor at Kansas State University and is represented by Robischon Gallery in Denver, CO and Galerie Fenna Wehlau in Munich Germany.  www.erinwiersma.com

Isabelle Wilhelm is a large format landscape photographer navigating her way through Northern California landscapes. Her work is deeply inspired by her childhood and growing up in the Bay Area. She grew up camping in the Santa Cruz mountains and this location specifically is what led her to photography. Her work navigates human connections and emotions to nature that are reflected in forests.

Jennifer Wong was born and raised in Hong Kong. She has a creative writing PhD at Oxford Brookes University. Wong is the author of several poetry collections including 回家 Letters Home (Nine Arches Press 2020), which was the PBS Spring 2020 Wild Card Choice. She teaches at Poetry School, London.

Mikaela Wynne is an Architect in the District of Columbia with a Master’s of Architecture from Kansas State University. She is interested in philosophies of design, especially the neurological and phenomenological perspectives on architectural experience. For her, writing is a way of emphasizing the human dimension of the spaces and places of the world. 

Angela Fang Zirbes is an artist based in New York City and Iowa. Her paintings retrace her experiences reconnecting with her culture through exploring themes of consciousness, the fine line between dreams and memories, and symbolism through ambiguous characters.  angelafzirbes.com

Jan Zwicky is the author of over twenty books of poetry and prose including Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, The Long Walk, and Wisdom & Metaphor.  She grew up in Alberta in Treaty 6 territory, and currently lives on the west coast of Canada.