For years I had the privilege of having monthly conversations with incredible people creating work (visual, literary, dance, music) that expands and deepens this world we live in. Everyone approaches their work differently, some with that intention, others not. It makes no difference. The arts allow us to have a shot at that deepening, that expansion, no matter what.
My intention going into any interview is to ask questions that are interesting, to help facilitate an experience that enables people to explore comfortably and fully, to create a piece that allows the reader to really understand something about each one of them and what they create, and to have one rocking good time myself.
When I interviewed Ashley Bryan, it was the first time I had ever gone out to one of the islands, crossed open water in a small boat. It was summer, he greeted me at the dock, and we spent the entire day together in his house of many treasures, walking the roadways of Little Cranberry Island, watching the sun angle over the harbor, eating, and talking. There was a lot of talking. The nature of the interviews we developed for Mark Wellman and Tori Britton’s Bangor Metro included a certain word count, images of their works, a photo of them (always taken by the extraordinary Leslie Bowman), and I had free rein to ask/do/choose whomever I wanted to write about. Obviously I had way more material than I could ever use, and so it was about crafting/using what best communicated who they were and what they made, the energy of their time, the value of this place that shapes us all. Although many of the makers I presented in this venue were not native-born, many were and all represented the deep attachment one makes to this mid to northern section of Maine.
A rare and wondrous bird, Ashley absolutely got that color makes no difference. He saw people as people, Little Cranberry (Islesford) as his community, its children as family. He first came to this small island off the coast of Maine in 1946 (current summer population 200 and year-round 60 or so) and moved full-time to his house there when he retired from Dartmouth 35 years ago.
He was integral to my life and living from that time on. I count myself as extraordinarily fortunate that that has been true of more than a handful of the makers I’ve interviewed. On a personal note, when Henry and I became a couple, I knew that we could make this work despite the fact that he was in New Orleans (then Boulder and Denver and New York City) and I was in Maine because of Ashley.
SINGING A NEW STORY
CHILDREN’S BOOK ICON ASHLEY BRYAN IS STILL CREATING NEW WORKS AND MAKING NEW FRIENDS ON LITTLE CRANBERRY ISLAND.
(NOTE: This was published in 2005, and so at the time of Ashley’s passing he’d lived on the island for 75 years, 35 of that full time, and was 98.)
Ashley Bryan has been writing and illustrating award-winning children’s books on Little Cranberry Island for decades. The way the sun angles over the working harbor, the breadth of the trees, the scent of earth and flowers and snow, both the community and the solitude of this small Maine island, all feed the bold colors and rhythmic language of his books, most of which are based on African tales and African-American spirituals.
In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) sent artists out to teach in communities across the country, including the Bronx where Bryan lived. This supplemented a life already overflowing with creativity—a mother who sang all day, a father who played saxophone, guitar, and banjo, the energies of five siblings and three cousins, all in an apartment filled with the songs of the dozens of birds his father collected.
In 1946, Bryan was a 23-year-old World War II army veteran and a graduate of Cooper Union Art School and Columbia University (where he redid his entire undergraduate degree, this time in philosophy to try to understand his war experiences). On a scholarship to study at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture that summer, Bryan accompanied his classmates on a trip to Mt. Desert Island and discovered the Cranberry Isles. He has lived on Little Cranberry for almost 60 years, year-round for the last 17 in a home filled with whimsy and movement, hand-carved toys from Thailand and Maine, Russia, and Zambia, with airplanes hanging from the ceiling, thousands of books, and a perennially open door.
At age 81, Ashley Bryan is many things—teacher, artist, author, storyteller, poet, puppet maker, performer, historian, folklorist, activist, brother, friend, son, neighbor—but, more than anything, he is a man whose very nature defies labels.
We all leave our imprint on the world. How do you see your imprint?
If anything I do taps the creative spirit in another, that’s my greatest joy.
I sense movement and rhythm on every page of your books. Has your work always been that way?
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing or painting. But in 1950 I studied in Europe. I was at the first Prades Festival when Pablo Casals broke his silence after the war and resumed playing his cello in public. That’s when I gained a sense of the rhythm of my hands. I painted all day every day to the musicians practicing, to their performing. I made very swift drawings. I found through the rhythms how to put a composition—a visual composition—together.
You and your work seem to embody celebration. Do you see the possibility of celebration in everything?
It depends, of course, on what your experience is. For the oppressed, celebration must be of another form. I feel a spirit of thanks. I know it’s possible for me because I’ve been privileged. I have clothes, food, and shelter. But the majority of people do not have that.
Why do you live here? What makes Little Cranberry home?
There’s a special feeling to this island. There’s something else here. How to describe it or explain it, I don’t know, but I’ve often thought that if anthropologists or sociologists stayed here, paid attention, they’d figure out what makes the character of this community so extraordinary.
[In the time I am here, the phone rings four times. Bryan answers each time. He has no answering machine, or cell phone, or computer. He has five visitors come to the door—only one knocks—including regulars returning from their winter in Atlanta, Georgia, and a Bar Harbor resident whose children participated in last year’s Seacoast Mission performances with Bryan. She has brought him a present. Every call and every visitor are clearly unanticipated and each is greeted as if Bryan couldn’t imagine his day being complete without that interaction.]
OK, now, how do you get anything done? Do you block off time for your work?
Oh, no. Some people work that way, but not me. I have my ways. I require little sleep. I am able to put down what I am working on—a puppet, a sea glass project, a painting, it doesn’t matter—and pick it up. The rhythm of people flowing through my life informs my work, helps create it. I also work out of a sense of isolation and loneliness. Things are not always simple. And yet, they are. This is home and people are always welcome in my home.
What are you working on now?
Ah, look at these. [He pulls out the collages he is working on for his new book, a book of three spirituals. He turns the pages and reads, actually sings, through every vibrant illustration of cut paper: “When the children play in peace…He’s got the whole world in his hands.”]
I think of Ashley Bryan as an “unlabelable” person. Is that important to you?
I believe it’s important to everyone. People label each other. “She’s this, he’s that.” We limit each other that way. If you are doing something creative and constructive, don’t ever let anything or anyone make you give that up.
FOR INFO on awards and more, visit the Ashley Bryan Center HERE and on Islesford.
