L-R: Lyn Hejinian, Emma Bee Bernstein, RS,
Susan Bee, Bruce Andrews & Susan Howe,
Tarascon, France, 1988
One of the many pleasures of being in Atlanta Saturday for the marriage of my nephew, Daniel Silliman, to Beth Jarvis was getting to see my half-sister Nancy meet my brother Cliff for the first time ever. Our father, Glenn Sherman Silliman, died in 1965 at the age of 38 from burns suffered in an on-the-job explosion, having had three marriages & leaving behind shards of family everywhere he went. Forty-four years later, we’re still putting the pieces back together.
My father’s nickname was Lucky, which may seem macabre in retrospect, but if he had not walked away from an airplane crash in The Dalles, Oregon in 1947, I would have been an only child. He was in the process of smuggling alcohol from Portland to a dry county in Southeastern Washington, so this wasn’t one of your skid-off-the-runway crashes either. The wings iced up and he ended up in a field staggering around with a broken back. Even in 1965, with third-degree burns over 80 percent of his body, he walked to the ambulance.
Going to & from Atlanta Saturday, I read the latest volume in Belladonna’s Elder Series, entitled simply Emma Bee Bernstein, containing work by the young photographer, who committed suicide while working at the Guggenheim in Venice last December at the age of 23. The volume consists of an introduction by Johanna Drucker, the original introduction written for this book by Emma herself, interviews done jointly by Emma with Nona Willis Aronowitz of the painter Susan Bee, Emma’s mother, and Marjorie Perloff, taken from their work for the forthcoming volume girlDRIVE, documenting a cross-country roadtrip talking with women about the nature of life, art, politics & especially feminism today. Susan Bee has contributed a wonderful essay on Emma & her work, as has Aronowitz. Perloff has an additional note, and there is one as well penned by four members of the Belladonna collective: Emily Beal, HR Hegnauer, Erica Kaufman & Rachel Levitsky. There are photographs by Emma, and of her, as well as collage work throughout by Susan Bee.
