Stephanie Cowell

I am back from a very quick two day trip to Glen Ellyn where I talked about CLAUDE & CAMILLE at a booksigning/lunch at the charming Bistro Monet. What better place? The walls were filled with reproductions of Claude's work. It was one of the loveliest book events of my writing life. Go to Glen Ellyn and the Bistro Monet!

I had three hours to spend in the Chicago Art Institute where I was rather stunned to walk into a room of Impressionist paintings which I knew so well from reproduction. Reproductions are nothing like originals! I can't express what treasures I saw but I will mention the visceral reality of Monet's Gare St. Lazare with its smoking train engine, how intense it was...and the blue dress of the older girl in Renoir's Two Sisters. Especially moving to me was Frederic Bazille's self-portrait: critical, hidden, intense. A man looking into his own soul. He paints himself older than he is (he was about 25) but does not seem as old as in the reproductions of the paintings. He was a beautiful young man who could also look like a haughty member of an old family; it is amazing how different he appears in various paintings.

But on a very personal level, it was a return to something I had left with some unhappiness when I was 19. At that time I lived in Chicago with my mother: by night I sang Elizabethan songs in a coffee house and wrote short stories, one which would win a great prize in Seventeen magazine. By day I worked in a newspaper office as a sort of clerk. I had left my friends in NYC and never quite adjusted. Now I make friends quickly...it was odd to look back on the young girl I had been. I had no idea then that many years later I would return to the Chicago area as an author of my fifth published book. It made me want to ruminate on the very complex journey through years of life and sons and love and music and writing but ruminations are short as present life is so rich and pulls me away from them.