Thank you, Gail.
I don't have either one of those administrative positions
you just mentioned, I'm happy to say.
But I'm still an associate professor.
Update your website.
My website is very old, yes.
I'm happy to introduce this presentation
tonight by Alison Deming and Lucinda Bliss, Bandage
and Rope.
And no, this wasn't planned.
But it's just a convenient and appropriate coincidence.
When Gail first asked me to make this introduction,
I tried to remember the first time I met Alison.
I'm pretty sure someone sent me to meet her in the early
'90s in connection with a symposium called Lighting Up -
Women in Creative Process.
Remember that?
I think it was 1992 or something.
And someone said you've got to meet Alison Deming.
And I remember sitting with Alison
in a room in the old Poetry Center bungalow on Cherry
Street, and we were surrounded by books from floor
to ceiling, thousands of books.
And I remember a very warm initial connection between us.
And I'm thinking now that maybe we
were talking about the relationship between motherhood
and our work as creative people.
Years later, my friend and colleague, Barbara Penn,
gave me Alison and Lucinda's book, Anatomy of Desire -
The Mother/ Daughter Sessions for a Christmas present.
And now here I am, introducing a further development
in this potent mother-daughter creative collaboration.
Lucinda Bliss is professor of Liberal Studies
at Union Institute and University,
where she teaches studio art and visual culture,
and serves as chair of the art department.
And you do have those administrative--
Her work has been exhibited widely,
including at the University of New England,
the Boston Center for the Arts, the Center for Maine
Contemporary Art, the Tucson Museum of Art,
and Dinnerware Gallery.
Her work is currently installed in the Poetry Center
and will be there until November 13.
Through a wide range of works, Lucinda
is working with and working out the relationship
between the urgency of the environmental crisis
and the possibilities of representation.
Working with playful, delicate images of the natural world,
she's exploring and questioning their potential
to increase our awareness of what we're doing and not doing
about the non-human world.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is a poet, essayist and professor
of Creative Writing here at the university, as most of you
know very well.
She is the author of seven books,
including Science and Other Poems
and Writing the Sacred into the Real.
She'll be reading tonight from her newest book, a collection
of poems entitled Rope.
Alison has received many awards for her writing,
including the Walt Whitman Award, the Pushcart Prize,
two NEA fellowships, a Fine Arts Work Center
fellowship, and the Wallace Stegner fellowship.
A few months ago when Alison opened this lecture series,
Oh Earth, Wait for Me, she said something--
much more eloquently than I'm going to say it.
I couldn't find the exact words, but she said something
like, "We need to care for the natural world
so we can go to it to comfort us."
When I first saw Lucinda's drawings and paintings
of the vulnerable wildlife, I saw
that idea explored and manifested
through gesture, sign, association, and relationship.
In Alison and Lucinda's long-standing creative
interactions, we get a glimpse into the rich and complicated
relationships between mothers and daughters, writers
and visual artists, words and images, humans and the rest
of the world.
So join me in welcoming Alison and Lucinda.
[APPLAUSE]