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by Janée Baugher (Author)
An ekphrastic experiment in imaginative biography and personal detachment.
The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles presents an imaginative narrative of the painter's creative life, rife with both losses and pleasures. Janée J. Baugher employs the footnote form to write a book-length narrative of ekphrastic poetry in which the character of Andrew Wyeth chronicles his internal musings. The sixty-three Wyeth paintings that influenced these poems (dated 1938 through 2008) are the ones in which Baugher delighted in how the quotidian is made tender, like a white sheet drying outside on the line or sunflowers' shadows against a house. Studying the work of this particular artist was a decades-long meditative practice of deep looking, a method by which the author detaches from her ego. Wyeth's paintings, drawings, and watercolors became portals through which she could imagine worlds beyond her immediate awareness and in which she could explore linguistic possibilities.Author Biography
Janée J. Baugher is the author of the only craft book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction, as well as the full-length poetry collections, The Body's Physics and Coördinates of Yes. In 2008, she held a two-year post as a Humanities Washington Inquiring Minds Speaker, in which she lectured across Washington State on writers and visual artists of the Lost Generation. Her poetry has been adapted for the stage and set to music at the University of Cincinnati-Conservatory of Music, Contemporary Dance Theatre (Ohio), Interlochen Center for the Arts, Dance Now! Ensemble (Florida), Otterbein University, and the University of North Carolina-Pembroke. Educated at Boston University and Eastern Washington University, Baugher has been a featured poet at the Library of Congress and on Seattle Channel TV. Recently, she was a judge for the Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow Ekphrastic Poetry Film Prize (Fotogenia Festival, Mexico City). She's a longtime assistant editor at Boulevard magazine and lives in Seattle, where the Office of Arts & Culture awarded her a 2024-25 CityArtist grant.
