Savannah author Susan Earl revisits a 1970s artist community in novel, 'We Part to Meet Again'

Local author Susan Earl has written two captivating novels about Savannah — "In The Dark" and "Harrington’s Way" — as well an award-winning non-fiction book with co-author Tom Kohler called "Waddie Welcome and the Beloved Community."

For her latest novel, "We Part to Meet Again" (2022 A&L Press), Earl stepped out of Savannah to revisit the formative period in her life when she attended the Cummington Community of the Arts in Massachusetts in the early seventies.

Earl had heard about the artist community from a friend and decided to try it out. Earl fell in love with the place and spent four summers between 1971 and 1975 practicing photography.

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“It was just this beautiful place,” said Earl. “It had been a school in the twenties, founded by a woman named Katherine Frazier. It was Cummington School of the Arts, and then it became Community of the Arts. It also had a beautiful letter press there that produced these handmade books. Mostly poetry.”

Cummington was a haven for writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, and photographers. Luminaries such Willem de Kooning, Diane Arbus, and Marrianne Moore had even attended over the years.

“It was funky,” recalled Earl. “A lot of people slept in this big wooden barn that had no insulation, so you could hear everything. And there were these little out buildings. One had been a chicken coop, an ice house, and they were all over this 150 acre property. And there were children. If you apply to Yaddo or McDowell they don’t allow children. It’s all very serious. And this was serious, but there were a bunch of kids around too, so families were there, where the wife might be an artist or the husband might be a writer. It was so much fun.”

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Earl drew upon her experiences to create the story of Josie Miller, a photographer from New York City (Earl is originally from the Bronx), who is inspired by the freewheeling, creative sixties to attend Cummington Community “where she encounters the heady world of Monarch butterflies, chanterelle mushrooms, and mescaline.”

There Josie falls in love with sculptor Sean Callahan and gets pregnant. A tragic event involving Sean’s ex-girlfriend interferes with Josie and Sean’s chances of getting married and a frustrating love triangle ensues.

Earl is coy about how much of the character of Josie is based on autobiographical experience.

“Some of it is and some of it isn’t, let’s just put it that way,” said Earl with a laugh. “I got to have fun and have my main character do some things that I probably wouldn’t have done. So that was fun.”

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Cummington Community for the Arts was sold in 1992, and most of the people Earl had met at the retreat have passed away, but she was able to keep in touch a few of her friends. One of her surviving friends had built the strange structure that Earl lived in one summer.

“The last summer I was there I lived in a geodesic dome that looked like a little house Frodo Baggins would have lived in,” said Earl. “When I went back there years ago, I was pretty much done with the book, but I wanted to make sure I hadn’t goofed up. It was sold in the nineties, so it’s in private hands now. I got in touch with somebody that lives there and she said she would be happy to show me around. We were walking around and she said there’s this thing down there they call the pavilion. She didn’t know what it was. So we walked down there, and of course it was 50 years later and trees had grown all around it, but I went, ‘That’s the dome! I lived in that.’.”

Of course the dome, with its triangular windows and tiny sleeping loft, makes an appearance in Earl’s novel.

“I took pictures and sent them to Marjorie who built the dome and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but it’s still standing,'” said Earl.

Another location that features in Earl’s novel is the infamous Belchertown State School for the Feeble-Minded which was shut down in 1992 because of its notorious reputation for poor conditions and the inhumane treatment of developmentally challenged children. The decrepit and abandoned Belchertown building still stands and now resembles a setting from a horror movie.

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“I wanted to talk about that, because places like Belchertown shouldn’t exist,” said Earl. “And the families of people who were incarcerated there, it took them years to get that place shut down.”

Earl visited Cummington in 2018 to see how much the area had changed since the seventies and was surprised to find some of the businesses she used to frequent, like the bookstore, diner, and laundromat, still remain.

“There was a store down the hill from the property called Woody’s,” said Earl. “Of course it’s no longer there, but now there’s a restaurant and grocery store called the Old Creamery Co-op...They’ve been selling my book there and they sold out!”

Earl’s photography days are mostly behind her. Her last big photography project was taking photos of Savannah’s disappearing hand painted signs for her and Kohler’s book. And Earl never adapted to the shift from film to digital. At the same time, Earl’s daughter Emily, has become an accomplished photographer and artist in her own right, so Earl wanted to step aside.

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“Then I retired from my job [at Georgia Infirmary] and I thought, ‘Well, what am I going to do?” said Earl. “I don’t want to do photography because I don’t have a darkroom. I was sad about that, but I thought I could write about photography. It was wonderful because when I was writing the book I was back in it. I was thinking about the paper I used to use, and the film I used to use, and all of that.”

Earl’s experience as an artist, and her eye for detail, has led to a highly descriptive writing style that readers are immediately drawn to.

“It’s funny because some of the women in my writing group tell there is too much detail, but it just so happens that people read the books and say they love the detail and they love the descriptions,” said Earl. “The first two books I wrote are about Savannah, so people say they used to live here and it’s wonderful because all the detail is familiar to them.”

For those readers that ask Earl why she didn’t write about Savannah again, Earl replies, “It’s about art, it’s about an artist. It’s about what you have to do and how you think about art.”

Susan Earl’s "We Part to Meet Again" is available at The Book Lady, Sulfur Studios, Amazon, and if you happen to be in Cummington, Mass., at Old Creamery Co-op.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: We Part to Meet Again by Susan Earl: Interview with Savannah author