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Background & Education
"Genius is
childhood recaptured at will." (Baudelaire)
Hometown:
Cincinnati, Ohio (Mt. Carmel/Eastgate area)
High School:
Glen Este (Clermont County), class of 1988
College:
Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), class of 1992
Degree:
B.A. in Religion and English Literature
Religious Inclinations
"Great
God! I'd rather be a Pagan...." (William
Wordsworth)
The religion with
which I identify most closely is Neo-Paganism.
In expanded terms, I'm a Greco-eclectic
polyagnostic panentheist rational/ecstatic chthonic Pagan &
aspiring maenad. (What?) I'm pretty
much a Unitarian as well.
Deity-forms of
particular importance to me include Demeter,
Persephone, Dionysos,
Ariadne, Gaia, Hecate, the Green
Man, John Barleycorn, Aphrodite,
and St. Francis.
Some of my
personal sacred places:
Wisteria
- a 620-acre festival site & Nature retreat, located in SE Ohio
near Athens. I'm a co-owner, with several other families &
individuals, of this beautiful land.
Great
Serpent Mound - a prehistoric earthwork located
approximately an hour from my home.
Greece - In the
spring of 1996 I visited Athens, Iraklion and Knossos in Crete,
Santorini, and Delphi. There are no words for how much I loved it. I
pray that I can go back someday.
About The Boy
"He's kind
of arty...but okay." (from
sex
lies & videotape)
I live in
Cincinnati (East Walnut Hills) with my dear love Matthew and our two
cats, Friendly and Raja. Matthew is a Buddheo-Catholic Druid
and a perpetual student of Religionswissenschaft and psychology. We
were handfasted on September
30th, 2000.
How to describe
Matthew in a few words? -- gentle, brilliant, god-haunted,
absent-minded, compassionate, droll, earnest, and very shy with
occasional flashes of interesting flamboyance. A character from
literature he resembles is Larry in Somerset Maugham's novel The
Razor's Edge, though I'm glad to say he's far more human
and warm.
A film character
he resembles is Graham (James Spader) in sex
lies & videotape. They don't look alike, and they're
not alike in, ah, certain voyeuristic proclivities -- but they're
similar in personality, with that vague questing drifting thing, not
to mention the soft-spoken charm...intelligent, perceptive,
sweet-tempered but moody, with a strange mix of candor and reserve.
Literature, Art,
Music, Films
Five Beloved
Books, age 10:
The
Last Unicorn
(Peter S. Beagle)
Julie
of the Wolves
(Jean Craighead George)
The
Secret Garden
(Francis Hodgson Burnett)
Watership
Down
(Richard Adams)
Anne
of Avonlea
(L.M. Montgomery)
Five Beloved
Books, age 15:
The
Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
To
Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
Prince
Ombra
(Roderick MacLeish)
Gone
With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
The
Haunting of Hill House
(Shirley Jackson)
Five Beloved
Books, age 20:
Tess
of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
Catmagic
(Whitley Strieber)
Fire
From Heaven
(Mary Renault)
Reinventing
Eve (Kim Chernin)
The
Color Purple (Alice Walker)
Five Beloved
Books, age 25:
The
King Must Die
(Mary Renault)
Harvest
Home (Thomas Tryon)
Lake
Wobegon Days (Garrison Keillor)
Origins
of the Sacred
(Dudley Young)
The
Greek Myths (Robert Graves)
Five Beloved
Books, age 30:
Pagan
Grace
(Ginette Paris)
The
Bloody Chamber (Angela Carter)
Zorba
the Greek (Nikos Kazantzakis)
The
Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton)
J.W.
Waterhouse (Anthony Hobson)
Favorite Painters:
Herbert
James Draper, William Adolphe Bouguereau,
John
William Waterhouse, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, Edward
Robert Hughes, Hon. John Collier,
John
William Godward,
Sir
Lawrence Alma-Tadema,
Evelyn de Morgan, Edouard
Bisson, Sulamith Wulfing
Works of art on
the walls of my home:
Love
Among the Ruins (Sir Edward Burne-Jones)
Autumn
1910 (John William Godward)
The
Shrine (John William Waterhouse)
The
Love Potion (Evelyn De Morgan)
Dreaming
At The Windowsill (August Siegert)
Dolce
Far Niente (John William Godward)
L'Autumne
(Henri Lafosse)
Falling Leaf (Sulamith
Wulfing)
Woman of the Sidhe (Helena
Nelson-Reed)
Favorite Music:
Steeleye
Span,
Owain Phyfe, Crosby
Stills Nash & Young,
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Donovan,
Cat Stevens, Fleetwood Mac, Stevie
Nicks (early), Duran Duran, Vivaldi, Handel, Grieg, G. Gershwin, Dead
Can Dance,
Portishead, Alanis Morissette
Favorite Films
of All Time (listed in release date order):
Gone
With the Wind, West Side Story, Brother
Sun Sister Moon, The Wicker Man,
Picnic at Hanging Rock, The
Shining, Dragonslayer,
Amadeus, The
Company of Wolves, Ferris
Bueller's Day Off, Bull
Durham, sex lies & videotape, Benny
& Joon, Interview With the Vampire,
Gladiator,
The
Fellowship of the Ring, Mulholland
Drive, Donnie
Darko
Self-description
from my Amazon.com profile:
"I'm Tess as
she should have been: untouched by an Angel, free of a smart Alec --
and richly, consciously Pagan, no chaste club-walking with maimed
willow wands, but the Maypole dance itself, strong, salty, rosy;
life. Call me a contemporary Countess Olenska living in blissful sin
with Larry from The Razor's Edge...a neo-Ariadne, rescued on
labyrinthine levels, drinking Naxian wine in personalized starlight. "
Where I've Been,
Where I'm Going
Overseas places visited:
Greece, Austria, Germany, Caribbean
Farthest north visited:
tip of James Bay, Ontario, Canada (Moosonee)
Farthest east:
the island of Santorini (Fira) in the Aegean Sea (Greece)
Farthest south:
St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands
Farthest west:
Houston, TX (thanks Gretchyn!)
Places I'd
especially like to see:
New Orleans, Bali,
Macedonia, England, California, Russia, Roumania, Spain
Send Me Pretty Stuff
I love to get
beautiful cards in the mail from perfect strangers, and will respond
in kind.
Tess Avelland
c/o Midnight Muse
28 W. 4th Street
Cincinnati, OH 45202
Future Perfect
"Start by
doing what's necessary; then do what's possible;
and suddenly
you are doing the impossible."
(St.
Francis of Assisi)
Five dreams to
fulfill in next five years:
1) Re-open a
retail shop
2) Build a little
cottage on Wisteria land
3) Publish book(s)
4) Travel again,
particularly to Greece
5) Be well, or as
well as I can be [I am better! Here's why,
in my opinion.]
Photo Gallery
"The true
mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."
(Oscar Wilde)
I hope to have it
up sometime, with many pictures of my extraordinary friends and
family. In the meantime, you can look at my handfasting page. |
