Form and Function
How Lydia Mead 鈥22 and Professor Barbara Tetenbaum built a book from a 鈥渓ong poem in prose.鈥
“Show your work,” instructors of all stripes have appealed to students of math since the advent of the pencil. This is certainly what Lydia Mead ’22 and Professor Barbara Tetenbaum [studio art] did with their approach to bookmaking.
In their postgraduation collaboration, Lydia (a creative writing major) and Tetenbaum (a letterpress/printmaking instructor) combined talents to turn Lydia’s thesis, [some sentences & phrases I wrote once], into a delicate work of book art that gladly reveals its underpinnings.
Professor Peter Rock [creative writing] who advised the thesis says, “I keep this little book on my writing desk to pick up and read a sentence when I’m feeling discouraged.”
“This project moves beyond a mere housing of words to something that honors the experience of the reader: how they first encounter the book, the weight of it in their hands, the layout and design of the text and the shift in materials at key moments in the text,” Tetenbaum says.
Working with Rock, Lydia penned a collection of prose poems about dreams of the beach, conversations with a lover, and memories of another. Over a summer spent working on a farm, the narrative swirls with introspective thoughts on the act of self-expression—writing as well as speaking.
“To my mind, writing can even out the reality or intensity between waking experiences and dreams,” Lydia says. As a writer, she seeks to create dreams that feel “just as ‘real,’ or just as expressive, or just as affecting, as waking experiences within the world of the writing.”
In the midst of her collaboration with Rock, Lydia began to understand that this thesis was a “long poem in prose,” conceiving of the sentence or phrase as a unit, and the page break as a line break—which informed how the physical book was designed, printed, and hand bound by Tetenbaum.
Tetenbaum hand stitched the six sections onto cloth-textured paper “tapes” and wove the tape ends into the book’s white wrapper, a pebbly cover that contrasts with the slick sheen of divider pages. The dove-gray tapes suggest the lacings of a corset, or, thinking of the book’s content, an echo of Lydia’s writing that likens dreams to “strips of silk.”
“The final format came from a completely personal, unscientific response to what felt good in the hand,” Tetenbaum says. “I decided to let Lydia be a part of these decisions as it is her voice that needs to be heard the most clearly through these essential elements.”
Without a hard spine, the book flops open, beckoning the reader into its folds. A hidden invocation of “for you” appears on the underside of the introductory tag. It is an invitation to enter an emotional landscape that fulfills Lydia’s belief that “waking experiences and dreams contextualize and reciprocally accumulate meaning [and] interact meaningfully with each other.”
Tags: Alumni, Books, Film, Music