Spirits Come Home: The Civil War (Redux) Images of Willie Anne Wright

Second Manassas: Women and Parasols
© 2011 WILLIE ANNE WRIGHT

The ghosts of the Civil War are always present in the South — stand in the shade of the stone rifleman in any southern square, and they crowd up close, hoping you'll wonder their names.

Native Virginian and VCU alumna, Willie Anne Wright, does more than that: she catches them on film. For 13 years, armed with pinhole cameras of her own design, Wright followed Civil War re-enactors to many of the most famous battlefields from Manassas to Gettysburg. The result, Civil War Redux , has been on the march both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. In 2011, selections from the series were shown in group shows at the George Eastman House in Rochester and the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk. Solo show venues were the Morris Museum in Augusta, Georgia and the VMFA in Richmond, which will travel the show statewide through 2013.

Seeing Guido Reni at the Alte Pinakothek

...reminds me that I've met someone who knows his paintings like the back of her hand...

I'm working on a new slew of stories for Endeavors, the online creativity and research magazine of Texas Christian University. I've decided to make myself an honorary step-child of the place, seeing as it's been a "bountiful mother" to me for about as many years as it takes to get a PhD. I wonder if I need to tell somebody.

I'm talking about wealth, here. The kind you can't count, fold, shine up or slink around in. I've thought it many times over the years, as I've had the chance to interview people who discover, enthuse and enjoin, transform, spark and heal: to be able to write their stories is to have the best job in the world.

I remembered that yet again this week, listening to the soft west Texas accent of Dwayne Simpson, who has spent forty years trying to un-knit the chain-mail of drug addiction. And to the world's most patient engineer, Tristan Tayag, who had to explain to me at least three times how his machine (the one that may one day help cure diabetes) tumbles, tumbles, tumbles cells so that they never land, or break apart, or die.

It has been a lucky education. I don't mind if they never let me graduate. As long as I can keep coming to school.