My project in Introduction to Personal Storytelling course

'Who am I?'

My grandmother was a classical pianist and teacher. A well traveled woman who once lived in Europe and the Middle East, as did my mother. She loved music, art, and literature. Fancy hats, large dogs, and a garden full of pansies is how I remember her. I spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s house; she often took care of me during the spring and summer months when the most important, formative years of my childhood took place. She lived in a green city, full of parks, wild open fields, and meandering rivers. The monarch butterflies, the caterpillars, the lady bugs, and the smell of the boreal swamps still linger in my imagination. In her basement she kept many book shelves, full of books, and a grand piano. The floor was a sheer laminate that I would use to slide myself from one book shelf to another. Soon I was playing with the figurines that stood along the edges of the shelves; next to the leather bound, gold embossed books rising higher and higher like erected obelisks. I launched the figurines to gather at colourful spines and set them out on a migration while my grandmother’s piano thundered through the house in epic synchronicity. I can still see little statues from Israel, staring out over the piano in pride and heroic stillness, satisfied they had made such a long journey to my grandmother’s basement.

There was one particular book that I can never seem to forget; its thin spine and musky pages hid between large treasuries, directly beneath the sun dipped window. The title has disappeared from my memory, but bleary images remain and evolve into inspiration. It was a picture book. One that I was not allowed to handle without the accompaniment of my grandmother, or my mother. In my imagination it was treated like a uniquely treasured object, meant for adults to guard over. I recall this magical book veiled in lush greens and disguised in a fabled valley of pumpkins. Vines swarmed together and painted a small pumpkin house. A slim, leggy character traversed the botanical pages, and nomadic forests matured into thick, shadowy hollows. These memories of discovering worlds, playing, of feelings that I belonged, have followed me through my life. Even today I grow dozens of pumpkins each year in a large garden where hop vines slither up the windows of my tiny farmhouse. My home has become a place to guard over my creative endeavors, my treasured magical objects.

In nature, with music, and through books is where I feel I most belong. It is a connection from my formative years that has supported me through the turbulence of navigating a complicated world with complicated pressures. And so, I choose to express myself through the powers of storytelling, by way of drawing and painting picture books, taking photographs of nature, writing poetry, and conjuring up the biota of my dreams.

'What am I Here For?'

I serve my creative process like a garden, a secret universe that grows wider and wider each year. I have learned to patiently observe from my garden, how to connect with the soul’s condition, how to call upon a range of allegories, and find different ways of thinking, seeing, and living.

My great grandmother Ivy had her own secret garden. I recall not believing I would ever see the secret garden, but my mother assured me we would. She always wanted to show me garden’s, she always wants to see me happy in nature. Many moons ago, we followed a gravel path along the border of great grandmother Ivy’s farm land, here in Alberta. I can still hear the rocks crunching and turning, kicked up from under my shoes. I have big feet. My mother and I came to a thick wall of bushes, a mix of willow, poplar sprouts, and arctic roses snapping back on our bare skin, as we eagerly followed what would have seemed like a fox trail. We entered into the opening of a small garden and I still remember the feeling of disappointment. Yes it was a secret, and yes it was a garden, but it was sparsely laid out, and many plants had run their course for the season. It was nothing like the illustrations I had seen in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Even to this day I find myself trying to fill in this moment in the garden, pursuing the complex diversity I had imagined.

Painting and drawing feels like a life between worlds, like seeds waiting through the long winter to sprout. Layer upon layer of creative cultivation, this is like a garden. Stories inside stories’ is where I find myself, in a world of my own, reveling in the secrets of my past by unveiling personal mysteries. It is in my disposition to be observant, like an owl, or a cat. Through observation and exploration I seek to ignite thoughtfulness, and to lift nature into a place of cherished joy.I wish to belong to the world of picture books, a place where the imagined can become realized.

Phoebe Katherine Hunter