What a shame for a work of historical fiction to be written in an imagined, imitation voice of Georgia O'Keeffe, when her real, riveting voice can be read by dipping into My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz 1915-1933, an enormous and masterful volume, edited by Sarah Greenough and published by Yale University Press. Yet that is what Dawn Tripp had done in her new novel titled Georgia.
O'Keeffe's own letters are full of plainspoken words and phrases--at times erotic, always evocative about nature, and sometimes rich with esoteric thoughts, like these from her first summer in New Mexico: "I have never had a more beautiful walk--the mountains and the scrubby cedar were so rich and warm colored they seemed to come right up to me and touch my skin...I seem to be hunting for something of myself out there--something in myself that will give me a symbol for all this--a symbol for the sense of life I get out here."
O'Keeffe's own letters are full of plainspoken words and phrases--at times erotic, always evocative about nature, and sometimes rich with esoteric thoughts, like these from her first summer in New Mexico: "I have never had a more beautiful walk--the mountains and the scrubby cedar were so rich and warm colored they seemed to come right up to me and touch my skin...I seem to be hunting for something of myself out there--something in myself that will give me a symbol for all this--a symbol for the sense of life I get out here."