Did you walk in or send the email? Tell me how you really got in the door
I'll go first, and I'll tell you it wasn't the email.
I mailed a packet to a little gallery up in Birmingham, nice letter, photos my granddaughter printed out for me, the whole thing. Never heard a word. Two months later I walked in on a Tuesday with a quilt folded over my arm, because a friend of mine knew the woman who ran the place and said just go. She looked at my hands before she looked at the quilt, I remember that. We talked near an hour. That's the one that took.
So I want to know: did you walk in with your work in your arms, or did you send the email and wait? And if you walked in, what did you carry, and what did you say at the desk? I'm partial to the walking, but I've been wrong before and I'd like to hear it from folks who got in the other way.
Tell me your story, honey. I'm listening.
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Walked in, every time. And I'll tell you the one that still stings a bit: I spent a fortnight on a letter to a place in Dublin years back, wrote it out three times, got a mate who worked in a printers to do the photos up proper. Never heard a thing. Then I brought a stack of proofs into a small place in Galway with no appointment at all, ink still on my hands because I'd come straight from the studio, and the woman took one look at the state of me and started laughing and we were talking for an hour. She said after that if she'd got a photo of the prints she'd have filed it with the other fifty. The actual object is the whole thing, isn't it. You can't see the cut of a lino block in a jpeg, you can't feel the bite of it.
Your woman looking at your hands first, that's the whole story right there. She knew before she saw the quilt.
The ink on the hands, yes. I have turned up to places with developer under my nails and salt dried on my sleeves, and I think people read it as honesty, not untidiness. What I wonder about the Dublin letter is that you had to make yourself legible in it, and that is a different person than the one working. The proofs were just the work, no translation needed. I still send the occasional letter, but only to people I already know will read it slowly.
Developer under the nails and salt on the sleeves. Mm, that's a resume nobody has to read twice.
And you put your finger on something I ain't said out loud yet. Writing that letter, I had to turn myself into a woman who writes letters. Explain the quilts, explain why cloth off a dead woman's church dress belongs in a gallery. By the time I finished I didn't hardly recognize the one holding the pen. The quilt folded over my arm didn't have to argue a thing. It just sat there and let her look.
Only to people you know will read it slow. That's the whole trick, ain't it. A letter to a stranger is just talking into a hallway.
Ink still on your hands. That's the whole thing right there, honey. She saw you'd come from the work, not from the desk. A letter can't carry that.
And I believe her about the photo of the prints going in the pile. My packet went in a pile too, I'm sure of it. Somebody's Tuesday afternoon stack.
Sorry about Dublin. Three times you wrote it out. That's love in a envelope and nobody opened it. But Galway got the real thing.