by Deborah Stein

The Sea

Deborah Stein | Nov 2023 | Issue 29

November 9, 2023: I was trying to pull together things from a life at sea in the desert, but I’d been jotting and feeling things with only bits and a few bobs rising to the surface. I’m trying to take better care of myself and was immersed in folktales and buying too many books and hoping all of it would settle in somehow so I could come out with some artwork about it and I hoped also for some words—a bit of something, somehow. I was reading Daniel Weissbort’s collection called The Poetry of Survival and also Renee Gladman, and maybe these would also rise to the surface.

I finally began to paint a story based on Gianni Rodari’s tale about The Fisherman from Cefalú who finds a tiny sea creature and the sea creature begs the fisherman not to throw them back. The sardine-sized creature promises they’ll make the fisherman rich if the fisherman would feed and care for them. So the fisherman reluctantly takes the tiny sea creature home and packs them in with his other twelve children. The tiny sardine-sized creature eats and gets strong and goes on to make the fisherman rich…so rich that he forgets about the magical little sea creature and all the magical little sea creature did for him. And when the sea creature suggests the now wealthy fisherman might do something good for the world, the now wealthy fisherman is just annoyed. He shuts the little creature in a clam shell and throws him back to the sea.

“I think it’s too real somehow,” I write to Amy. I say, “I feel like it equates with something happening in the world and not sure anyone wants a story that will break their hearts. It is an old forever tale that goes something like this.” Amy stood by this version of the tale, which I wasn’t sure was going the way I wanted.

She wrote, “Deb, are we not all magical chubby sardines thrown back into the sea, and also the ones who do the throwing?”

I made this picture soon after, which ended up becoming a story of stories like this one, kept by the sea, imagining the sea itself, who inks each version of its stories on its body and in every drop of its water.

Deborah Stein is a picture, story maker, artist, and writer who lives between New York City and a small mountain town in Northern New Mexico with her husband and their little dog Pablo.

She shows at LDBA’s Gallery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe. In January 2023, she was a fiction fellow working with Sabrina Orah Mark at the Under The Volcano residency in Tepoztlan, Mexico and in May 2023 was in residency writing and painting at The Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown. Her piece Ways of Dreaming My Way Home was chosen to accompany Chaya Babu’s writing in the Spring 2023 edition of the Literary Journal Rowayat.

She is working on writing and making art and books for adults and children that express variable ways of seeing the world and our parts in it. She loves projects that challenge her imagination and skills.

When she’s not drawing or painting she’s writing except for when she is teaching workshops on and off-line. She loves to read, look at art, hide in bookshops, poke in gardens, hike up hills and walk along rivers. She loves roads trips, movies, and well-made documentaries. She likes to cook and laugh and draw in the car and to be with folks and animals she loves.