The Sketchbook Project
Brooklyn Art Library
Imagine your sketchbook traveling more than you.
I liked the idea of a story of mine going mobile. An actual movement movement.
So, I purchased a sketchbook from the Brooklyn Art Library to participate in The Sketchbook Project. Once the library received it back, the 5 x 7” sketchbook was assigned a six-digit bar catalog code. This allowed the me, the writer to track where the book traveled on the Brooklyn Art Library Bookmobile and also, see how often the book was viewed. Read more here.
I filled my sketchbook not with art but with a creative nonfiction story about a holler in the hills. A pilgrimage of sorts taken with my extended family to visit extended extended family perched way out on our family tree. The story seemed to fit the theme “Because of …” because only by sheer luck or fate of happenstance, my then young grandparents left the area and saved their children and their children from life in the holler.
We kids hated going out to that holler. Hate is a strong word, but well-deserved as an actual outhouse was involved. This particular trip, we had some hope. My grandfather’s people had built a new house, a new house directly in front of the old house. Reason being, one never knows when someone in the family will need a place to call home.
In back of the old place not too far but not too close, stood the outhouse, its use current. Reason being, why connect the new plumbing in the new house when the outhouse works just fine and the well as well?
The faucets were drip dry. The outhouse a deal breaker.
So, I wrote the story as part of The Sketchbook Project, a story likely many found implausible. I had to honor the past. With so many of our elders now gone, we long ago kids are left to tell the old old story.
Fifty thousand sketchbooks were created over a span of seventeen years and thousands of miles, these books traveled. The Sketchbook Project and Brooklyn Art Library eventually did come to a close.
Many lost track of their sketchbook(s). Worse, the moving trailer transporting the entire Sketchbook Project from Brooklyn to St.Petersburg, Florida caught fire driving through Baltimore. No one was hurt and seventy per cent of the sketchbooks survived.
Seven thousand books were lost. Read more here about the arduous process of salvage and writer notification.
If your book survived, have no fear. I have the information to help anyone looking for these sweet treasures.
I found mine.
The Brooklyn Art Library gifted the surviving sketchbooks to several institutions to house and archive.
These sites listed below are hyperlinked to websites, yet I had better luck connecting on Instagram as all the receiving institutions have an IG account. Websites are listed on IG and may have specific catalog links to streamline the search for Sketchbook seekers.
Also keep in mind, where you think a sketchbook might be located is not necessarily so. I’m a Floridian who wrote a sketchbook set in southwest Virginia. One would think, search Stove Works for Select South East Sketchbooks.
Well, my sketchbook was called home to the Taube Museum of Art (Minot, North Dakota). I’ve come close to North Dakota, but have not yet visited. What a satisfied feeling to know a piece of my history is in residence.
All that aside, remember - the first place that makes sense might not.
“Visit Our Sketchbooks” here.
The Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures (Tucson, AZ) houses the Tiny Sketchbook Collection. IG: @theminitimemachine
Stove Works (Chattanooga, TN) houses Select South East Sketchbooks. IG: @stove_works
Taube Museum of Art* (Minot, North Dakota) home to all other sketchbooks.
IG: @taubemuseum
Wonder’neath Art Society (Halifax, NS, Canada) houses Canadian Artists Sketchbooks. IG:@wonderneath
The Taube Museum has continued The Sketchbook Project. Become Part of the Project here!
Now, it wouldn’t be polite to let readers leave without a bit about that outhouse.
Enjoy and good luck to the Sketchbook Seekers.
Intestinal Fortitude
The toilet is the unsung hero of indoor plumbing.
Yet society does little to champion its ceramic mystique, other than perhaps, to enshrine what my grandmother politely called the commode within a room of its own. Though so architecturally distinguished, Thomas Crapper’s contribution to waste removal sits mostly unappreciated within its private encasement, referenced by a variety of pet names descriptive of where to go when a person needs to go: the restroom, the loo, the lavatory, the powder room, the john, the throne or the predetermined meeting place to see a man about a horse. The favorite seat in the house has ways of making itself known by refusal to fill or flush or by overflowing its banks, causing people caught with their pants down to take immediate notice, wielding plungers at the unexpected inconvenience perpetrated by the typically convenient toilette.
Simply, the toilet is a standard fixture of the contemporary world, a steadfast expectation of a civilized people; but because of a ramshackle house nestled deep in a holler of the Appalachian Mountains, I learned early in life to never take the toilet for granted.
My family drove north from the east coast of Florida most summers to visit family who called the true South home. My aunt was immersed in genealogy the summer of ‘66, attempting to trace our paternal line to a direct descendant of the American Revolution. Personal computers and Macs existed only as sparks of genius in the then prepubescent minds of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, so a midcentury search on ancestry meant piling into the station wagon to drive back to the past, traveling through east Tennessee and southwest Virginia, to explore church cemeteries or meet up with distant family members to swap old stories.
Some of these people might well have been from another planet. As a space brat living the heydays of the Apollo manned space flights, the only commonality we shared was our lineage. After one of the more chatty kin offered up an explanation that a moon shot was hanging one’s naked rear end out a car window just for fun, I was sure of it.
The most country branch on the family tree was my grandfather’s sister, Marg. She lived with her husband and kids in what locals called a holler, a surprise clearing of land squeezed between mountains. The house had no indoor plumbing, no running water and no toilet, but did indeed boast an outhouse out back, facing the side of the mountain.
My cousins and I considered the lack of an inside facility a true deal breaker and thus begat the begging. Please, don’t make us go, please, we’ll do anything else, but don’t make us go there!
Our mothers--true nieces of Marg, with second generation hillbilly blood coursing through their veins--stood tall against our pleas and we quickly found ourselves on the losing end of the battle. We of the third generation had no other choice but to train for our venture into the backwoods much like astronaut John Glenn had prepared for his orbit of the earth. We limited our liquid and food intake, pacing the need to eliminate through timed endurance intervals, holding the urge as long as humanly possible as once on the road-unlike Glenn aboard Friendship 7-we lacked the ability to urinate inside a space suit whenever nature called.
Expecting psychological warfare on two fronts in attempt to thwart our focus, my cousins and I prepared to endure targeted parental torture the length of the trip. Joined in solidarity against offers of sweet tea and Kool-Aid, our mothers paid our no thank you no mind and poured their own drinks into Dixie cups, sipping and gabbing of visits to Marg’s holler and trips out to the infamous outhouse, laughing about how as kids they used the two-holer day or night, in any sort of weather.
We stood fast against the cookies offered from the front seat and with a have it your way, we’ll eat them ourselves, the adult discussion turned toward identifying what type of animals scratched about the privy while business was conducted inside, running like crazy into the house, too afraid to look back at what might have been sniffing around. Even these two had asked to call their parents to come and get them, only to learn the invention called the telephone had yet to reach the residence of Marg.
If such tales weren’t enough to quiver one’s bladder, the sisters’ recollection of tearing pages from the Sears Roebuck catalog for use as toilet tissue with my aunt holding up her lunch napkin with a we certainly could’ve used one of these back then, finally broke us. The best hope my cousins and I had the remainder of this journey to the world beyond our norm was to negotiate a good landing, meaning the request of two designated stops at premium service stations prior to arrival at the long dirt road that led to the very last place on earth that a girl like me, who lived where astronauts drove sports cars down Cocoa Beach in their off hours, wanted to visit.
The house was accessible only by foot, so we parked the car on the shoulder and air trafficked our way past honeybees hovering the active hives lining the way in. We couldn’t see too far ahead because of the thick underbrush and crawling kudzu. The birds called out, sentries to our arrival as we hoofed deeper into a forest that smelled like a lifting rain. The end of the road revealed a secluded weathered shack, drab with time and notoriety. Waving from the porch stood Marg, dressed in cutoff pants and a man’s tailored shirt, surrounded by kinfolk of all ages, welcoming and ready to catch-up over a dinner of fried chicken, corn on the cob and peach cobbler for dessert. Our conflicted inner constitutions were tricked into total submission. The only way to orbit around what would soon amount to a post-feast digestive anomaly would be to do what Southerners do best: eat and pray a lot.
Imagine our joy a couple summers later upon learning that Marg built a new house complete with indoor plumbing, running water and a full-throttled bathroom--tub, sink and the godsend of a contemporary toilet, all ordered from the infamous Sears Roebuck catalog.
We couldn’t get to the car fast enough. No begging, no gnashing of teeth, no need for subterfuge and strategic maneuvers, we were giddy, delighting in the memories of our shared avoidance of a what people sang about but most would never see, a real farmer in the dell! Two years older and much more mature, we questioned ourselves as to the severity of the outhouse, was it really so bad? The consensus proved a resounding yes! but that was the past where all things primitive die and go to rest. Hallelujah! Marg had joined the twentieth century.
We consumed Pop Tarts and guzzled Double Cola with abandon, waving away offered opportunities from our mothers to stop at a rest area. Leaping from the car, we frolicked past the hives, balling our fists and pretending to box the bees. We skipped down the path, oblivious to warnings to be careful, breaking out into the light to see our Marg rocking away on her new front porch. The house was a palace compared to her last place.
I pushed past the screen door and ran down the hallway, wanting to be the first to try out the new toilet. My mother somehow beat me there and stood at the sink, tapping her left hand beneath the faucet while turning the cold tap all the way on with her right.
No water. Not even a dribble. She examined the sparkling dry toilet bowl--a cake deodorizer bent to shape on the rim--and gave it a flush.
Nothing.
Houston, we have a problem.
My digestive system activated, I flew to the outhouse, loaded with fresh rolls of toilet tissue provided for use by company. We would later learn that Marg had decided against connecting the plumbing to the water supply. She explained, with the well and outhouse in such good repair (not to mention the brook running clear so close to the house) to do so would be plain wasteful in the sight of the Lord.
Trudging back, relieved and empty, yet dejected and beaten by my kinfolk, I noticed that the back of the house didn’t quite mesh with the front. At first glance, it appeared divided in half by a narrow alley running between two exterior walls. From where I stood, I could see straight out to the other end and up to the sky. I stepped inside, placed a hand on each wall, my arms outstretched like a cross and discovered a constructional breach in the space-time continuum.
Marg had built her new house directly in front of the old.
I ran to tell my cousins, trailing toilet paper stuck to the bottom of my shoe the entire way back.
***
Produced for The Sketchbook Project, Art House Co-op and the Brooklyn Art Library, Brooklyn, New York.
©2014 Sheree Shatsky*
*Edited for clarity from the original
Currently archived at the Taube Museum of Art, Minot, North Dakota.
TAUBE: Because of …
1891
Sheree Shatsky 261.1-10 TAUBE Because of …
What a cool idea the Sketchbook was! Your story is wonderful! So well told.
love!