by Stuart Mitchner

The most effective art therapy book I know is the Audubon Guide to Wild Flowers. My son must have been eight when he began looking through it, fascinated by the bright images, especially the more exotic flowers. The Audubon became his book of choice at bedtime. It wasn’t long before he wanted to make up his own guide. We found a large bound book of blank pages, gave him crayons and marking pens, and he spent many happy hours following the Audubon model. First he drew his idea of the flower, gave it a name, and then a description like the ones he knew. These were all his own inventions. Not only was it more satisfying, and more do-able, for him to make up the flowers, rather than trying to copy the real thing, his small motor disability gave him no choice. Simply trying to copy the image would have led to frustration, as happened in school where most kids could at least draw some identifiable semblance of an assigned object. In this case, neccessity truly was the mother of invention, for once he gave up the obligation to replicate the image, he was free to dive into the riot of color he’d discovered in the Audubon guide. An insensitive teacher would have made him feel at fault or inferior for not being able to keep up with his peers. Fortunately, he had one or two teachers who lived up to the Greek definition of therapy: therapeía “to be attentive” — and not judgmental. more

 Award-winning fiction writer Kirstin Valdez Quade will join the Lewis Center for the Art’s Program in Creative Writing faculty at Princeton University in September 2016. She has been appointed Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and will be teaching undergraduate workshops in fiction.

Following the debut of her short story collection Night at the Fiestas, Quade was awarded the “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation in 2014, a recognition of writers who “challenge, innovate, and energize the writing world.” She is also the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the 2013 Narrative Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Narrative, Guernica, The Southern Review, The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation.

Jeffrey Eugenides, the faculty member who chaired the search committee that selected Quade, noted, “Each of the ten stories in Night at the Fiestas seeks to depict, in Elizabeth Bowen’s phrase, ‘life with the lid on it and what happens when the lid comes off.’ Calm, dignified, and well-composed, these stories exhibit a surface tranquility that lures the reader in, much like the desert landscapes that serve as their background, only to twist and strike, spewing poisons, like a rattlesnake beneath a rock.” more