Carrie Green — “I Found My Way”


PROCESS NOTE

I’ve been making stitched and collaged erasures with Margery Wilson’s book, The New Etiquette: The Modern Code of Social Behavior (Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1937), for some time now and decided to try erasing her book I Found My Way: An Autobiography (Lippincott, 1956) as well.

I couldn’t find a copy to purchase at a reasonable price, but thanks to interlibrary loan I was able to scan the pages that interested me. 

Once I had erased about 20 pages, I realized that they weren’t individual poems but a single poem. I edited and arranged them in the order you see here. 

I collaged the text onto illustrations from The New Etiquette, which I also altered with embroidery.


Carrie Green is the author of Studies of Familiar Birds: Poems (Able Muse Press, 2020). She earned her MFA at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Her poems have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily,
DIAGRAM, Still: The Journal, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly
, and elsewhere.