Libraries Homea lovely memorial
a beautiful day, the same sad building we’ve used three times in the last eleven months, standing-room only. the organizing committee (charlotte hutt, chair) did an outstanding job.
if the speakers will send me their eulogies, i’ll post them here.
September 25th, 2006 at 7:51 am
I know a simple “thank you” will do. I am humbled for the opportunity to serve Tee, as countless others have, with gratitude towards others. We have open hearts; we came together and showed our strengths and love for Tee and for each other. To single out any ONE of us is to acknowledge ALL of us.
When Tee’s estate is settled, and when the University of Oregon’s Special Collections and University of Archives’ huge task is completed, the world will have a magnificent legacy of one of its most prolific, gifted, generous women.
Please also communicate your messages, experiences, tributes and efforts to Linda Long, Manuscripts Librarian, at (541) 346-1906, or llong@uoregon.edu. Surely, a flood of correspondence to Linda will gain her the additional stature and emphasis to
move this project along.
The processing of Tee’s huge body of work, including her art, photography, literature and personal history will require many hours, so many, we can’t even project a completion date at this time. But it WILL be there, for all of us to enjoy. The sooner we assist with the funding, the faster the job will be done.
I am not just the money counter; I care about this project and will continue to donate my time and efforts to see it through.
For the confidence Tee placed in me, and the many wonderful people who have embraced me, I am truly grateful.
May our grief over Tee’s passing soon be displaced with our warmest thoughts and memories of all that Tee meant to us.
So THERE! The woman who wants to stay in the background but was forced to stand before a large crowd to accept an acknowledgement now says, “Backatcha!” We all gave what we could to make Tee’s life easier. We are continuing to work to assure her legacy.
Love and peace to you all!
Jeanne Simington
September 26th, 2006 at 6:50 am
The first I knew of Tee Corinne was a photograph: Once in the mid-seventies, at Mother Kali’s I was searching for a new journal called Sinister Wisdom
. . .when I pulled out Tee’s cover of the women making love, one tenderly cradling the other as she comes; in solarization their darkest, most secret places seem lit with fire.
I felt such a “shock of recognition”: such a sudden, powerful remembering of what it had been for, all the sacrifice, all the hardness of “being a lesbian”,
starting over in a whole new culture. What it had all been for, something which my whole society conspired to make me forget was possible, something that had happened with a woman:
a kind of opening, a kind of learning, a kind of bonding, a kind of birthing that had changed my life forever. It seemed to jar the very floorboards of the bookstore as the world slipped back into place.
I took the picture home, and as I learn so many did, put it on my altar.
A few months later I wrote a story which was to be published in a book of lesbian erotica Nellie Kaufer was creating, called A WOMAN’S TOUCH. For artwork for the book, I suggested, maybe even Tee Corinne would not be beyond possibility. And so she proved, contributing another iconic cover, and other photos.
So it was very exciting to me to actually meet her, when she came to Grants Pass to do a slide show at the Grange. Potluck beforehand
…Ticklish, this fan and idol stuff. How do you tell someone her work has meant so much to you?
That you love her art? In the end I just blurted it out. Tee paused to breathe and let herself take it in, and graciously said, “Thank you.” And shortly wanted to know something about me and my art.
So I began as her fan, and also got to be her friend. I was interested to know a famous person: what I quickly learned is that they work very hard, that they’d often rather do art than anything else. It was great to have a friend who understood that urge and encouraged it in me.
Soon after she moved here in 1981 she joined our fledgeling Writers’ Group, and turned herself into a writer; in the end she wrote and published a novel, and two books of erotic stories. She edited several books of erotic short stories and poetry, and wrote and self-published countless small books of poems, and drawings. She also encouraged all of us to publish, to make books, to get our work out of our heads onto paper and out of desk drawers into journals, newspapers, archives.
I for one appreciated how she helped to keep Writers’ Group – Writers’ Group, insisting on the rules, willing to ruffle feathers if that’s what it took to make sure we stayed focused on the writing, and that we end at four sharp (We are all busy women!) She even made up new guidelines – don’t try to rewrite each other’s stuff, was one. Always ask, “Where can this be published?”
In the ’80s I watched her assemble YANTRAS OF WOMANLOVE, which she rightly called a book about the spirituality of sex. It’s a book of erotic photographs, where images of women making love are solarized, fragmented, kaleidoscoped, mirrored, repeated; shapes your subconscious may recognize before your mind understands. It’s a sort of Sistine Chapel of lesbian sexuality.
I saw Tee through her three great loves here, relationships which each in their time gave her happiness, comfort, and inspiration.
I saw her into becoming a teacher at Rogue Community College, opening up whole new areas of friendship and mentorship as she led classes in drawing and painting, in writing memoir.
There were times during those 25 years when I didn’t even like her all that well.
But always I so honored her art and her accomplishments (and she mine, I should say) and our increasingly long knowing of each other’s lives, that our friendship held.
One of the things I liked best about Tee was her sense of memory, of history. For in addition to all the creative things she did, she was a researcher, a historian, and educator in these fields.. She was fascinated by the expatriate lesbians who gathered in Paris in the early 1900s, made sure we all knew of Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, and their friends. She sought out news of lesbian artists and writers from all over, historical and contemporary, wrote articles for journals and encyclopedias, put the information on line, gave presentations at conferences. She also researched and meditated on her own family history, writing poems, creating her powerful art show, “Family”. And she documented the lesbian community she found here with books like LITTLE HOUSES ON WOMEN’S LAND.
Once, Tee wrote a piece called “Remembering as a Way of Life”. She wrote of the pioneer lesbian writers of the generation before ours who had recently died, or who were still with us, Jeanette Foster, Valerie Taylor, Anita Cornwell, Sarah Aldrich, June Arnold, Sonny Wainwright. She asked, about one and all, “Who is going to write her biography, keep her books in print, gather our memories of her life and work?” …. “And where can we have city parks named after openly lesbian women? Formal gardens framing statues of our foremothers, of our cultural heras? Where are the cast bronze plaques announcing the houses we’ve lived and died in, the public monuments and cemetery markers, the written guides with quaint encapsulated histories, noting where we are buried, what we did, how long we lived?”
Well, Tee, some of this vision is coming true: planted at the school where you taught there will be a tree with a bronze plaque in your honor.
And many other kinds of living memorials around the country.
I hope someone writes your biography.
You have made it very easy.
Thanks for coming to live among us. Thanks for the original, thoughtful, exploratory, turned-on way you lived, and died.
Every day I notice gifts from you, understandings, or ways of thinking I learned from you. I almost don’t miss you much, it feels you are with me every day. I love you always.