I was running errands at some point around the holidays when I happened to tune in to a radio segment about tarantulas. This is not a subject I’ve ever had any interest in, and I would normally have changed the station at once, but the topic wasn’t immediately clear to me. A woman was describing a furry creature with delicate, pink-tipped feet. I tried to guess the animal, factoring in her obvious admiration. I was hindered by the detail of her holding it in her palm. When one of the hosts of the show expressed his disbelief that a tarantula could be charming, I actually recoiled. My hand, which had been hovering near the radio buttons, yanked back as if a huge spider might suddenly appear there. Who was this lunatic? In short order, I learned that the woman speaking was naturalist and author Sy Montgomery, who has been described by The Boston Globe as, “Part Indiana Jones and part Emily Dickinson.”

Don’t get me wrong – I’m no slouch when it comes to loving animals. During my childhood summers, I would prowl the adjacent properties of my grandmother and aunt in rural New Hampshire, which hosted a menagerie of ponies, goats, cats and various breeds of dogs. Wildlife wandered through the profusion of flowers and the acres of trees that graced that happy place. The aunt encouraged my fascination with horses by gifting me books like Marguerite Henry’s Born to Trot and My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara, which I followed with others, from Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty to James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small. My grandmother provided art supplies with which I would depict the pony I planned to have one day. An array of pets over the years included a turtle, fish, hermit crab and dog, but I never did get that pony.

I learned that the aforementioned spider was one of the baker’s dozen of characters featured in Sy Montgomery’s latest book: How to be a Good Creature: a Memoir in Thirteen Animals. The collection includes a sampling of Montgomery’s signature adventures with the strange inhabitants of exotic locales, including her first such journey. She recounts that experience in Australia tracking a trio of emus, where she slips into a level of engagement reminiscent of Jane Goodall with her chimps; she shuns the role of observer in favor of participant in order to more fully know her subjects, noting their different personalities and behaviors. However she doesn’t write solely about exotic creatures. She also shares stories about the animals she has rescued, from a runt piglet to several dogs. She begins with her childhood Scottish Terrier, Molly, and ends with a half blind Border Collie named Thurber. Montgomery writes with unapologetic passion and isn’t afraid to show the fierce kind of love she has for animals. She credits all of the animals in her life with being her teachers, which is an outlook that I share.

As an adult, I’ve had the privilege of caring for three retired racing greyhounds. The first one my husband and I adopted was a sleek brindle we named Abby. She was beautiful, smart, and a social butterfly around people, but she could’ve taken or left other dogs. Her “roo” (the howling noise favored by this generally quiet breed) was deep and beautiful, and could perhaps have been dubbed into a movie as the distant cry of a wolf. Having the good fortune to be entrusted with this special dog made both of us feel like we’d won some sort of cosmic lottery. Three months after she came to us, I received unrelated, terrible news: my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Over the next two-and-a-half years while she fought for her life, Abby was by my side as I navigated moments of pain, despair, and (false) hope. When my mother died, it was Abby who consoled me. Perched on the couch next to me with her chin slung over my leg, she did something no person could do: bear witness to a torrent of tears without feeling the need to smother it with words. The gratitude I felt for this gift was immeasurable. It was also short-lived. Five months later, Abby was also diagnosed with untreatable cancer. This time there was no silent witness to my pain. It was the moment when I realized how much I had relied on my friend. I was bereft. Then slowly, with time, I was able to find a new narrative in these events. Abby arrived before the darkest time in my life, and she stayed by my side throughout it. All I have to do is imagine that time without her presence to feel lucky all over again.

I had expected to read the memoir of an animal lover. What I actually found when I read this book was much more than the title promised. While it does recount events from Sy Montgomery’s life through a series of vignettes about different animals she has known, her own story is interwoven with those of the animals so deftly that in movie parlance she would be just one of an ensemble cast. She lives her message. I couldn’t stop reading this book, which is a testament to Montgomery’s way with words (who knew reading about octopi could be so compelling?) She also has a way of writing about connecting with wild creatures that makes it seem not that odd an event.

Sy Montgomery is the author of dozens of books for both children and adults. Those who are hungry for more can check out The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood or The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness. If you’re looking to branch out, Montgomery’s recommendations include: My Life with the Chimpanzees by Jane Goodall, Gorillas in the Mist by Diane Fossey and Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf.

Kirstie David is the Literacy/Outreach Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Look for her article in the February 14, 2019 issue of the Norwood Transcript.

One day, while I was at home working on a painting, I decided to try to learn through osmosis and put a documentary on. I usually listen to music or have the TV on while I paint or draw, and I don’t really pay close attention since I am focused on my work. But instead of absent-mindedly trying to figure out who the real murderer was on some British mystery, I thought, maybe I could learn something! I always mean to watch more documentaries or read more about the topics I am interested in, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day. So I picked a topic, female artists, and selected a documentary on someone I’d never heard of.

The documentary was “Le Fabuleux Destin de Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun” (Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: The Queen’s Painter). Truthfully, 18th Century court painting is really not an interest of mine. I’m more of a contemporary art kind of gal. But I do try to broaden my horizons and thought I could sit through an hour and a half of the documentary to learn about something I might not otherwise learn.

After a few minutes, I started to get really into my work and wasn’t paying much attention until I heard something about a school. A school for female artists in 18th century France.

Huh? Surely that was wrong; women were not permitted to study at an art school at that time, right? In my art history classes, we heard how there were very few famous female artists in our textbooks due to a combination of backward societal ideas (women were not thought to be intelligent enough), laws (women were not permitted to study at universities or as apprentices), and familial obligations (who else would have those babies and keep the house?) Sure, there are exceptions to every rule, and those exceptions were usually wealthy and had a father or family member who was an artist to learn from. But that lead to what I thought was maybe a handful of female artists every hundred years or so, right?

What was this documentary talking about?

I went back to this part to hear exactly what the historian had said. Yes, this woman was a famous, professional portrait artist, the personal artist to Marie Antoinette, and among other things, had started a school of art for young women.

Amazing! Why had I not heard of her? Shouldn’t she be in every art history book as the first woman to start an art school for women?

I immediately stopped what I was doing and Googled this. Who was this lady? What school? Why did I not know about it?

I discovered something amazing and infuriating: she was not alone. There have been many female artists throughout history who started schools, usually within their own homes, to teach art to their sisters, family members, or other female members of their community. Women may not have been permitted to attend schools with men, but that didn’t stop them from starting their own.

So then, if there were many female artists, why do we not hear more about them?

Women were not allowed to be in art schools, and they were not allowed to join professional organizations. Take, for instance, the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture that decreed in 1770 they would allow no more than 4 women members at any time. This was for the lifetime of an artist! Institutions like these controlled what got put into galleries and what people were able to view. If the art was not available for view, it was not talked about, written about, and was essentially lost to history. Another well-documented problem was that art dealers and collectors routinely changed the name of an artist from the unknown female artist, to either a male family member or a male artist, to maximize prestige and perceived value. Women that did prosper also had the problem of changed names due to marriage, making it difficult to properly assign multiple works to the same person, showing an evolution of an artist’s life’s work.

This lead me to the question, who was the first female artist? I knew that was an impossible question but I wanted to run with it. Google led me to an article from 2013 in National Geographic called “Were the First Artists Mostly Women?” This article cited a study that claimed that of the artist hand stencils analyzed from various cave walls across the globe (thought to be the “signatures” of the wall painters), 75% were women! Another article stated that the women of Mithila, India have been famous for painting domestic scenes on the walls of their homes to mark important life events since the 14th century.

In the book, Women Artists by Nancy Heller, she talks about how the historians of ancient Greece spoke of female artists, and how in some work that has survived antiquity, artists depict women working alongside men in artistic pursuits. There are records of women in ancient Egypt, women working during the Renaissance, and across almost every time period there are records for.

So if they there are records, why are they not in our canonical texts? Thanks to better education for women and more demands for inclusion in all areas of society, we are finally rediscovering the art and stories of so many women long forgotten.

For more on this topic:

Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader

Broad Strokes, by Bridget Quinn

50 Women Artists You Should Know, by Christiane Weidemann

The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art

Nicole Guerra-Coon is the Assistant Children’s Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Look for her article in the February 7, 2019 issue of the Norwood Transcript.

When I saw the writing on the crate, I remember getting this rush of excitement. It was an old wooden crate on the floor of my mother-in-law’s cottage in New Hampshire, which was being used as a container for all sorts of miscellaneous newspapers and magazines that had been collected by myself and the family during our many summer visits to the cottage over the years. The sturdy but aged wooden crate was clearly an antique, but to me it had always just been a fixture of the cottage; something that was always there, but never actually warranted a closer look or any further inspection. It was just, to me, an old box with some old papers in it.

It’s funny how a little education can change your perspective.

This time, what DID catch my attention was the logo on the side of the box, which in black cursive read “Haffenreffer & Co. Boston, MA.” I was beside myself. Having been on the Samuel Adams Brewery tour, well, more times than I care to admit, I recognized that Haffenreffer was the defunct beer company whose old location in Jamaica Plain is the current home of the Boston Beer Company (makers of Samuel Adams and Angry Orchard). Haffenreffer closed in 1965, so I asked my mother-in-law how she acquired the crate. She told me that my wife’s great grandfather, an Irish Immigrant, worked at the then bustling brewery, and the family had kept one of the crates he used to “bring home the beer” as a souvenir.

New England actually has a very deep and interesting history with beer. In her book Crafty Bastards: Beer in New England from the Mayflower to Modern Day, author/historian Lauren Clark delves into the history of beer brewing in New England. I was lucky enough to meet Lauren Clark and listen to her speak at the Weymouth Public Library five years ago (she has also given the same lecture on her book for the Morrill Memorial Library), and both her book and her lecture were fantastic. In Crafty Bastards, you might be surprised to learn that one of the reasons that the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts was because they ran out of beer on the ship! As she researches in her book, the Pilgrims brought beer on their voyage, which they drank in place of water. Beer has a low PH level (4-5) so it does not harbor pathogenic bacteria, and beer also supplied them with extra calories for their long journey to the New World. Another excellent read is Drinking Boston: A History of the City and its Spirits, by Stephanie Schorow. Though not an exclusively beer-based book, Schorow discusses the history of distilling and brewing in Boston. WBUR interviewed Schorow  (in Boston’s historic J.J. Foley’s Irish Pub, no less) in 2013 about her book, and it is well worth a listen!

For a more recent example of how New England beer has influenced America, and if you want to pick up some solid business tips, be sure to check out Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two, by Samuel Adams founder Jim Koch. Koch gives an intimate firsthand account of what it was like to start the now iconic brand. He chronicles his own family history with brewing, how he got inspired to start his own business, and the difficulties of running up against beer juggernauts like Anheuser-Busch and Miller/Coors. Today it seems like everywhere you look, there is a new craft brewery popping up, but when Koch was getting started, the craft beer craze had not yet taken off, so he was one of the first to really challenge the established beer companies of the time. His book is filled with great insights into how to run a business, and also gives a great history lesson on the founding of a local favorite. I recommend it to aspiring entrepreneurs and beer lovers alike.

Speaking of the craft beer craze, you might be ready to explore some of New England’s most recent upstarts and trailblazers, and there are a lot of them. Lucky for you, we at the Morrill Library can get you started on your journey! Your first stop, of course, should be Norwood’s own Castle Island Brewing Co. which has some fantastic brews and is well worth a visit. However, when you are ready to branch out further, be sure to get the book Beer Lover’s New England, by Norman Miller, which gives a comprehensive guide to some of the best breweries and bars in all of New England, and even gives some suggestions for pub crawls. Norman Miller also wrote Boston Beer: A History of Brewing in the Hub which you can get right now though our Hoopla app, and gives a good introduction into the history of breweries in Boston (Haffenreffer included).

You might not initially think to go to the library to learn more about beer, but beer is so much more than just a drink, isn’t it? Like that old wooden crate, something that seems commonplace can, in fact, have a long history and deep history, and you might not even realize it. I think part of the fun of drinking beer (other than the obvious) is learning about that history and how it shaped the craft beer revolution that we see today. So grab a pint and a good book from our library, and learn more about that history. Bottoms up, New England.

Brian DeFelice is the Information Technology Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Look for his article in the January 31, 2019 issue of the Norwood Transcript.

In some ways Ansel Adams confirmed that my husband and I were a match made in heaven. No, I did not know the famous photographer personally. No, he did not arrange my first date with my husband through a Sierra Club app. However, his photography played a role in sealing our fate.

You see the first time I ventured to my future husband Vincent’s condo in Brighton for a homemade dinner I noticed a few things. First, we owned the same rice cooker. This was amazing in itself because I had acquired mine from a family friend who had taught at the university with my father. The professor was heading back to his home in Hong Kong, so he kindly dropped off the rice cooker for us to use. Believe me when I say at that time I don’t think there was anyone else in my hometown of Farmington, Connecticut who owned a rice cooker, nevermind this particular model. To find out Vincent owned the exact same one was nothing short of miraculous.

But I digress. The other thing I noticed was Vincent’s décor. His place was completely modern compared to the antique New England look that was familiar to me. It was like seeing an IKEA showroom before I knew about IKEA. And there, on his living room wall above his keyboard, stood two framed Ansel Adams prints: Moon and Half Dome and Old Faithful Geyser. While I owned a coffee table-sized book entitled Ansel Adams In Color, edited by Harry M. Callahan, the full-sized prints on his wall had a completely different effect. I was transported to another time and place.

In this way Ansel Adams brought us together. I looked at Vincent with new appreciation and through the lens of this great photographer. After all, my future husband was not like anyone I had dated before. As a Chinese-American who grew up in San Francisco, he was surrounded by a world much like the one Adams experienced. These beautiful portraits of nature were in his back yard, so to speak, and they were directly opposite from the tight, curving New England roads that I knew and loved.

Still, I could feel the West calling to me, as so many others have when they fall into the world of Ansel Adams. I wanted to see these wild and lonely places. This is truly the beauty of his work. As Robert Frost’s words call to a place deep in our souls, so do Ansel Adams’ landscapes. When we observe them, we long for the quiet, the simple, and the majestic.

As Robert Turnage wrote in a piece for the Ansel Adams Gallery, “Wilderness has always been for Adams ‘a mystique: a valid, intangible, non-materialistic experience.’ Through his photographs he has touched countless people with a sense of that mystique and a realization of the importance of preserving the last remaining wilderness lands.”

Like many famous people, Adams did not have an easy start to life. As the children’s book, Antsy Ansel: Ansel Adams, a Life in Nature, by Cindy Jenson-Elliott (Illustrated by Christy Hale) reveals, Adams was an antsy child. He couldn’t sit still in school long enough to learn, and so his parents allowed him to be home-schooled and learn outside from nature. “’Why don’t you go outside?’ suggested his father. So Ansel did, whenever he could.” The day that his parents gave him a camera changed his life and our world, too. There was no looking back.

Not surprisingly, when I noticed that the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) was having a special exhibit entitled Ansel Adams in Our Time, I had to go. The exhibit is in the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery from now until February 24^th. Some of Adams’ most famous photographs are displayed, including Moonrise Over Hernandez, New Mexico; Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, and the one I discovered on my husband’s wall so many years ago, Moon over Half Dome. The exhibit also includes work by Adam’s predecessors, such as Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and Timothy O’Sullivan. Likewise, there is work by those who have followed in Adams’ footsteps and who have made statements of their own. These pieces are displayed side by side with the Master’s. This way the visitor can discover the work of photographers who might be new to them and, like Adams predicted, see the impact of the human race on our natural environment.

In particular I loved connecting with Laura McPhee Midsummer and her photograph entitled Lupine and Fireweed. As the plaque states, “Working with a large-format camera, Laura McPhee records the impact of human activity on the land—especially in Idaho, a state she loves and visits regularly.” And then there was Will Wilson. As a Native American photographer, he offered a unique perspective on the same land that moved Adams.

Whether you are introduced to new work or whether you reminisce about photography that you’ve loved for years, please go visit. It brought me back to the first time I saw Ansel Adams’ work hanging on my husband’s wall. Now they hang on OUR wall. Besides owning the same rice cooker, which seemed like a sign that we were meant to be, we had Ansel who worked his way into our lives and sealed our fate. Not a bad introduction. I guess I owe him a big thank you.

Other items you may want to check out, related to Ansel Adams and his cohorts:

Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film, Written and directed by Ric Burns

Ansel Adams: The Early Years, by Karen E. Quinn and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr MFA

Ansel Adams: The Spirit of Wild Places, by Eric Peter Nash

The American Wilderness: Ansel Adams, edited by Andrea G. Stillman

The Camera, by Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams: Letters and Images (1916-1984), edited by Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman

Nancy Ling is the Outreach Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Look for her article in the January 24, 2019 edition of the Norwood Transcript.