CHAPTERS: Kelsey Rose Williams
CHAPTERS: Kelsey Rose Williams
Every (life) chapter has at least one memorable moment, sentence, or story.
Every (life) chapter has at least one memorable moment, sentence, or story. What are yours? In Chapters, I ask creative people to reflect on the stories of their lives and respond to any of the below prompts (however they wish).
In today’s installment,
—a freelance writer/historian and the Eames Office's archivist—shares literature favorites, (slow) design stories, and a cherished commuting ritual.— Rachel
Kelsey’s Chapters
I. Slow Story
A narrative is built between a home and its inhabitant(s) at a layered, gradual pace. In my eyes, many of the most memorable homes are often the ones whose owners spent decades personalizing various elements. First, it was the motivated cleaning of the baseboards, the removal—or addition—of textured wallpaper, and the initial move-in of furnishings. Then, time marched on slowly, as did the accumulation of spirit. Rugs were unrolled, photographs and artwork hung, bookshelves and closets filled, and objects (found, purchased, or gifted) were collected and arranged. How comforting to feel the ease of a space that’s been long-lived in.
Some wondrous examples of slow, home-building stories are:
Textile designer Pauline Caulfield and her home/art studio/courtyard in London that she’s occupied for 48 years. I love her stories of using the house for her textile printing, raising children, and creating artistic corners with her ex-husband (also an artist).
Charles and Ray Eames spent decades (Charles for 29 years and Ray for 39) living in their self-built home in Pacific Palisades, California. In the early days, the boxy, steel-framed home’s interior was as minimalistic as its structure. Slowly, an abundance of artwork, books, rugs, and collected items from all over the planet populated nearly every square inch of their residence and studio.
Salvador and Gala Dalí’s home in Port Lligat, Spain, functioned as their life and artistic base from 1930 until 1982. I’m sure it is easy to imagine the surrealist method of decor as the couple expanded the property from a single hut to a seafront mini-campus.
II. Inside Story
There were two answers given by Olga Tokarczuk during her interview, The Art of Fiction No. 258, in the Spring 2023 issue of The Paris Review that struck me with force.
Q: “Do you choose your novels or do they choose you?”
A: “Generally, they start with an idée fixe that I’m not able to shake. It breeds the beginnings of a story, delicate themes and subplots. It inspired me to do some reading. Slowly, a character appears—not a full-fledged literary one, but I am able to discern their edges, to figure out who they are and what they want. I start to identify with this person. Then, crucially, the character starts to speak. At first, I can’t tell what they’re talking about, but I keep listening.
I think we carry many such emergent stories inside us. As a child, I once watched my mother prepare a chicken carcass before cooking it for dinner. Bear with me—this is a little macabre. Back in the day, nobody cleaned bothered meat for you—you just got this headless, feathered creature at the store. When my mother cut open this chicken—it was a young hen—I saw eggs germinating inside it. We’re used to the way an egg looks when it’s ready to be laid, but that same egg goes through many intermediate stages. It’s tiny at first, and then a yolk appears, enveloped in a thin transparent membrane. You begin to discern a tiny embryo developing inside it, and the shell gradually hardens and becomes opaque. These eggs in progress were nested alongside one another, illustrating their own genesis. They shocked me—the egg is not a ready-made thing but a whole process of creation. Is that how we form our personalities, I’ve wondered. Besides the one we ‘lay’ and display to the world, do we also carry in us some that are still developing? And when we write, do we somehow give birth to these embryos?”
Q: “Do people sometimes speak through you in your novels?”
A: “Let me tell you a story. Some time after we moved into this house, we learned that it was built by a German couple, Mr. and Mrs. Franz. They’d had to flee and abandon the property after the Second World War. Turn around—there’s a picture of them on the mantelpiece. How did I come to own this photograph? When I was writing House of Day, House of Night, my homage to the house and to the basin, I came up with the character of Marta, an old woman who walked around in a threadbare knitted cardigan—she became my principal narrator, a spirit of the valley who pulled all the plot sirens. Some years later, the Franzes’ grandchildren approached me at a book event in Germany. We became friends and they came up to visit me, bearing family photos. When I saw one of the pictures—a portrait of their grandmother, an older woman in a stretched-out sweater just like that one I had described, down to the buttonholes—I got chills. I asked them who it was, and they answered, “Marta.” Since then, I’ve assumed these people are still here.
III. Winter Story
The postmodern novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italian author Italo Calvino will alter the way one views narrative writing. It begins with the narrator walking into a bookstore with the goal of reading a new book, also titled If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. After one chapter of reading, the narrator realizes a mistake in the printing of the book. In an attempt to find the rest of the manuscript, the story unfolds exponentially into many different stories through alternate realities. As a reader, you are unsure if you’ll ever receive closure for people, conversations, situations, and dreams that were left ajar without resolution. Even the title is a fragmented, unfinished thought. Brilliant!
IV. Bedtime Story
Modern architects RM Schindler and Richard Neutra had many things in common. They were both born and architecturally trained in Vienna, and they moved to the United States in the 1910s with the goal of practicing architecture. They worked for Frank Lloyd Wright and soon found themselves in California. Besides their births and childhoods, these events were no coincidence. Schinder and Neutra were friends, architecture partners, and an inspiration to each other. Schindler built the Kings Road House in West Hollywood, CA, in late 1921/early 1922 and invited Neutra and his wife Dione to live in the second half of the two-winged residence. They shared the unconventional home (the bedrooms were “sleeping baskets” on the roof) from 1925 until 1930.
Their combined and individual stories are long and undeniably fascinating. Because of some rivalry, rumored jealousy, and accidental “stealing” of clients, Schindler and Neutra stopped talking. After suffering from a heart attack in 1953, Neutra was wheeled into a hospital room for recovery. He looked up—according to Neutra’s son—and said, “It’s you.” Serendipitously in another bed next to his was RM Schindler, who was fighting a grueling cancer. “The two former friends, now aging and ill, lay side by side in the Cedars of Lebanon hospital room,” wrote Mitch Glazer for Vanity Fair. “Their families reported hearing German and laughter rolling out from behind the closed door.”
V. Short Story
I naturally find myself gravitating toward stories with art or design historical ties. A 1958 poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, referenced the 1931 Marc Chagall painting, Equestrienne. This one receives bonus points because I adore its slightly hectic spirit.
VI. Color Story
During my time spent living in Los Angeles, I commuted four hours per day from my east-side apartment to my dream job at the Eames House. Traffic was molasses, so I devised a mechanism for keeping my mind occupied while my hands gripped the steering wheel and my feet repeatedly tapped on the brakes. I decided that each day, my goal was to spot six yellow Volkswagen Beetles. Vintage, 2000s-era, scrappy, shiny, convertible, missing a door—whatever. If it was a yellow bug, I mentally tallied the number. When the count reached six for the day, the following 24 hours were deemed, by me, an international Day of Luck.
Upon sharing the idea with some Angeleno friends, we created a superstitious society of the yellow bugs, sharing hurriedly snapped photos while at stop lights. You’d be surprised how many Days of Luck Volkswagen blessed us with.
VII. Long Story
My all-time favorite book is Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel, which chronicles the lives of abstract painters Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler. By the end of the tome’s 944 pages, you’ll feel that you met, loved, and lost five crucial women in your life. Gabriel does such a fantastic job writing biographies in a way that allows you to tangibly experience Lee Krasner’s headstrong nature, grasp the privileged condition that Helen Frankenthaler began her life with (and her struggle that came with assuming the new role of “starving artist”), and feel enchanted by Elaine de Kooning’s gregariousness.
If you’ve ever read Tolstoy’s War and Peace, you’ll find Ninth Street Women familiar. It’s a winding story with a ton of characters, overflowing with the best and worst of emotions. But instead of focusing on Russian aristocracy, this one is focused purely on the height of modern abstract painting in New York City.
VIII. Love Story
I make the effort to read The Orange Girl by Jostein Gaarder one or two times per year. It’s roughly 150 pages long and serves as a periodic refresh for my spirit. The story is about a young man, Jan Olav, who spots an equally youthful woman on a tram. Her arms are filled to the brim with a brown sack of oranges. While imagining his life with this stranger—a daydream in which they are two squirrels enthusiastically leaping through tree branches together—he knocks the oranges out of her arms and sends her emotionally rushing out of the transportation. He spends the following months in search of her, and the story turns deeply celestial.
I shared the story with my now-fiancé before we began dating when he innocently asked me for a book recommendation. We like to say that I became his orange girl, and, as his name is Jean-baptiste, he became my J(e)an Olav.
Thank you, Kelsey!
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