A Sense of Beauty

By MARGO HAMMOND

The first piece of furniture I ever bought — I was 12 — was a Mission bench. I paid $5 for it, all of my savings at the time. It is made of oak with a red leather seat and a simple design of vertical slats. It still is one of my most prized possessions.

The Mission style is closely associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement, a movement that began in Britain and quickly spread to Europe and America. The movement inspired the Craftsman line of furniture promoted by Gustav Stickley and the Prairie School architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.
. . .

The Craftsman magazine, founded by Gustav Stickley, promoted the aesthetics of the American Arts and Crafts movement.

. . .
Like Mission aficionados, the Arts and Crafts folk emphasized simple design and natural materials. Stickley’s pieces were handcrafted and my bench was mass produced, but both were rebelling against the ornate Victorian furniture that prevailed at the time (and which filled my childhood home in Wisconsin where both Stickley and Wright had strong ties).

So when I heard — in 2015 — that Tarpon Springs businessman Rodolfo “Rudy” Ciccarello was building a museum at 355 4th St. N. in St. Petersburg to house his American Arts and Crafts collection, I was thrilled. 

I pictured a small, modest furniture museum filled with dark oak bookcases, tables, chairs and clocks.
. . .

The exterior of the Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. Image @ MAACM Photo @ Joe Brennan

. . .
Now, six years later, I realize my mistake. Ciccarello’s Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement (MAACM), which finally opened to the public last month, can hardly be called a furniture museum — and it certainly will never be described as small and modest. Although there is a whole floor devoted to exquisite hand-crafted furniture — everything from linen presses to pianos — the five-story, 137,000 square foot museum (40,000 devoted to gallery space) offers a lot more than cupboards.
. . . . .

Rodolfo “Rudy” Ciccarello, pictured here, began his American Arts and Craft collection with the purchase at a Boston auction of a Gustav Stickley’s bookcase

. . .
“I became interested in American A&C in the late 1990s,” Ciccarello told the Journal of Antiques & Collectibles in 2016. Ciccarello had grown up around antiques in his family home in Rome, Italy. “The A&C style at once resonated with me and I soon purchased my first Gustav Stickley bookcase at an auction in Boston, Massachusetts. From that auction my passion grew as did the collection. What began as furniture from the movement evolved into all the varied art forms so that now every genre is represented in the collection from pottery to photography to lighting and beyond.”

Indeed. At the MAACM you can peer into a completely reassembled tiled bathroom — the Iris Bathroom, originally installed in an Ohio mansion in 1914. You can walk into a recreation of a wood-paneled Arts and Crafts bedroom, complete a with bed, dressing table and chests of drawers from Stickley’s Craftsman Workshop – plus a dazzling Tiffany lamp encircled with peacock eyes.

There are tiles from a Newport, Rhode Island boathouse and a staircase designed by Louis Sullivan from the Chicago Stock Exchange.
. . .

On display in MAACM’s Architects Gallery – furnishings from a Prairie Home built in the early 20th century in Minnesota and Louis Sullivan’s staircase from the Chicago Stock Exchange

. . .
Two temporary exhibits are on view.  Seventy-five examples of work — from printed books and ephemera to furniture, electric lighting, metalwork and stained glass — by the Roycroft Enterprise, a reformist community of crafters founded in 1895 by Ebert Hubbard.  And a photography display called Lenses Embracing the Beautiful that features photographs taken between the 1890s and the 1940s, including Edward Steichen’s portrait of Auguste Rodin in a pose reminiscent of his famous sculpture The Thinker. 

There’s a gift shop where every object is something I want to take home and a cafe with signature cocktails.   

That gift shop and cafe were eerily empty when I got my first glimpse of the museum last June, thanks to my friend Carolyn Nygren who, as a member, was invited to come with a guest for a sneak preview. On a Monday afternoon last June, we entered the museum’s soaring Grand Atrium where a large group of mostly older, mostly masked folk, awaited their tour.
. . .

The objects and the structure that houses them at MAACM — like The Medusa Lamp, designed by Elizabeth Eaton Burton, shown here juxtaposed with museum’s iconic staircase — both reflect the aesthetics of the American Arts and Crafts movement. . . simple design, natural materials, utility of purpose and nature motifs

. . .
Whisked into elevators (too few for the eager crowd, many of whom opted to take the stairs), we were treated to a whirlwind walk-through of the museum’s four floors of displays — although not all the galleries were ready yet. A museum curator reviewed for us the history of the Arts and Crafts movement and explained the evolution of the collection from Ciccarello’s purchase of that Stickley bookcase to his establishment in 2004 of the nonprofit Two Red Roses Foundation which has fleshed out the museum’s holdings to over 2,000 objects.

As my eyes took in the dozens and dozens of pieces set on raised platforms or behind glass cases, I found myself looking more and more not at the objects but at the building that houses them. The ultra-modern museum structure, designed by Alfonso Architects, a Tampa-based firm led by Cuban-American architect Alberto Alfonso with apparently considerable input from Ciccarello, is itself a work of art.
. . .

The museum’s ovoid looks like a piece of pottery. Image @ MAACM Photo: @ Joe Brennan

. . .
The white bulge on the exterior of the building — called an ovoid — looks like a piece of pottery. Inside, the thick-coated white spiral staircase resembles the whorls of a rose in designs by Arts and Crafts pioneer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. And the multi-color stained-glass skylight echoes Frank Lloyd Wright.

From the use of wood on the floor and walls to the natural light flooding into the galleries (some of them with curved walls, thanks to that ovoid), everywhere you turned, there was a nod to the aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts movement.

. . .

MAACM’s spiral staircase is a nod to the roses in designs by Arts and Crafts pioneer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Image @ MAACM Photo: @ Joe Brennan

. . .

Helen Huntley enumerated the four principles of that aesthetics on my second visit to the museum last month – simplicity of design, honesty of materials, utility of purpose and the incorporation of nature motifs. A colleague from my days at the St. Petersburg Times, Helen, who is a docent at MAACM, had offered to guide me and my friends through the museum, now opened to the public.
. . .

Helen Huntley, a MAACM docent, begins her tour of the museum in front of a modern recreation by Motawi Tileworks of a circa 1910 stained glass window (also on display) illustrating the William Morris poem that inspired the name of the Two Red Roses Foundation

. . .
She began our tour in front of two images of a woman looking up at a Moon and two roses – a small, backlit, stained glass window, made around 1910 – and a larger modern recreation of that window in tile made in 2015 by Motawi Tileworks. The original window, illustrating a 1858 poem entitled “Two Red Roses Across the Moon” by British Arts and Crafts pioneer William Morris, was found in a private home in St. Petersburg. The window and the poem were the inspirations behind Ciccarello’s naming his nonprofit foundation Two Red Roses, Helen explained.
. . .

A typical Craftsman bedroom on display at MAACM

. . .
She also answered a question that she said she knew was on a lot of our minds – How did Ciccarello make all his money? Answer, pharmaceuticals. Beginning with a $15,000 investment, Ciccarello, once a consultant pharmacist at the Jack Eckerd Corporation, grew his company, Florida Infusion Services, into the second largest national specialty pharmaceutical distributor in the U.S.

For our tour — each docent fashions their own — Helen told us that she would be concentrating on only a few of the more than 800 objects currently on display at the museum, so that we could take a deep dive into each one of them.
. . .

The Rookwood Ship Mural hangs in the Grand Atrium at MAACM

. . .
First stop – The Rookwood Pottery Ship Mural. Made up of 600 tiles depicting ships in a calm harbor, the mural was designed in 1914, but had never been assembled and installed. In fact, the tiles ended up being separated into two lots. Ciccarello bought one in 2004 and the second lot in 2012. Reuniting and restoring the tiles turned into an eight-year-long project.

How had I missed this massive work hanging over the admissions desk in the museum’s Grand Atrium on my first visit? I never looked up, I guess. Now we were looking down into that atrium at the mural from the second floor.
. . .

On the second floor of MAACM, Mary Corbett views the Rookwood Ship Mural, composed of more than 600 tiles, which spans more than 50 feet span across the wall of the museum’s Grand Atrium below

. . .
The mural is about 50 feet long, smaller than the original mural which was designed to be 70 feet long. During restoration some sections had to be left out because too many tiles were missing or damaged. One set of tiles was left out because it showed only half of a ship and could not be incorporated seamlessly into the final work. 

Helen steered us to that section hanging on a wall just around the corner from where we had been viewing the larger piece. She invited us to examine the tiles up close, pointing to the sign next to them – “Please Touch.” (How often do you see that in a museum?)  So we did, running our hands over the raised piping depicting the ship’s rigging and other textures. The tile decorators created those ridges by squeezing colors from a tube like a cake decorator, Helen said.
. . .

Invited by a sign that reads “Please Touch,” Carolyn Nygren takes a close-up look at a section of MAACM’s Rookwood Ship Mural available for hands-on examination

. . .
Next, she directed us to the Architects Gallery, also on the second floor, instructing us to look thoroughly at a tall Prairie School floor clock, asking us what we saw. “It’s made of oak,” one in our party observed, “and it appears to have been stained.” Yes, Helen pointed out, in keeping with the Arts and Crafts “honesty of materials,” it would never have been painted. “See, you can still see the wood’s grain,” she said. 

She noted the clock’s trapezoid form and urged us to find that form repeated in the table and chairs set in front of it, also made of oak. All of the pieces were originally designed to complement a Prairie House built in the early 20th century in Minnesota, but the owners eventually got tired of the design and redecorated. Luckily they stored the pieces in a barn on the property where they remained untouched until they were auctioned off in the 1980s and later bought by Ciccarello.
. . .

A Tiffany lamp decorated with the eyes of peacocks on display in the bedroom installation at MAACM

. . .
On the third floor we visited the Lighting Gallery, filled with a dazzling array of lamps, chandeliers and lanterns made of glass, copper, wood and ceramics. Electricity was just being introduced to homes in the early 20th century. 

In that gallery we focused on three lamps designed by Elizabeth Eaton Burton (a fourth is on display on the second floor next to the Two Red Roses signage). One, called the Medusa lamp, was encircled with abalone shells and supported by a copper base. Did Burton choose the name because it looked like a jellyfish which often are called Medusas after the mythological Greek figure? Or perhaps the name was inspired by the tangle of cords under the lamp’s shell, resembling the snakes in Medusa’s head. Helen left it to us to speculate.
. . .

The three-handled mug called a tyg designed by Roberta Beverly Kennon is more brightly glazed than her other pieces in MAACM’s display of Newcombe Pottery

. . .
In the Ceramics Gallery on the fourth floor, we stopped to admire another Arts and Crafts object designed by a woman – a large mug with three handles, called a tyg, displayed among other examples of Newcombe pottery. This tyg, designed by Roberta Beverly Kennon, was more brightly glazed than Kennon’s other pieces in the vitrine. It featured three motifs of a rising sun.
. . .

Mary Corbett stops and admires pieces of Newcombe pottery on a tour of MAACM led by docent Helen Huntley, also pictured here

. . .
Helen had us “try out” the mug by pantomiming how we would pass it along to each other at a beer hall. Newcombe pottery was produced in a women’s college (now part of Tulane University) in New Orleans. Men did the throwing while women decorated the pieces (and placed their initials on them, in this case the notorious RBK).
. . .

The reassembled Iris Bathroom, originally built for a home in a suburb of Cleveland, now on display at MAACM

. . .
Before moving on to the final piece Helen had chosen for us, we all took a peek at the 2,000 green tiles in the Iris Bathroom decorated with water lilies and irises and the 19 floor tiles depicting sailing ships salvaged from Arthur Curtiss James’ Rhode Island boathouse (both supplied by the Grueby Faience and Tile Company of Boston).
. . .

The tiles from the floor of Arthur Curtiss James’ Rhode Island boathouse, supplied by the Grueby Faience and Tile Company of Boston, depict the owner’s own yacht, The Aloha, surrounded by 18 sailing ships from maritime history

. . .
Our final stop on the tour was on the fifth floor to view the pianos on display there. The most impressive was a piano built at Stickley’s Craftsman workshop in Eastwood, New York and assumed to be designed by architect Harvey Ellis. Ellis, who worked at the Craftsman workshop for only seven months before his death in 1904, had a big influence on Stickley furniture, introducing decorative touches, like the inlay work that flanks either side of this piano’s front.
. . .

A piano built at the Stickley’s Craftsman Workshop in Eastwood, New York, attributed to architect Harvey Ellis known for his decorative touches like the inlays that flank the cabinet’s front

. . .
Finally, we all headed to MAACM’s cafe for a cup of coffee. Unlike my first visit, it was filled with visitors, including Ciccarello himself who was deep in conversation at the table next to ours. Ciccarello lives in Tarpon Springs, but Helen told us that she often spots the hands-on entrepreneur at the museum. “I once saw him behind the counter in the cafe teaching someone how to work the coffee machine,” Helen laughed.

When I returned home, I found this quote by Gustav Stickley on the Internet. . . 

“When a man’s home is born out of his heart and developed through his labor and perfected through his sense of beauty, it is the very cornerstone of life.” 

Substitute the word “home” with “museum” and the quote perfectly describes Rudy Ciccarello and his collection.

*****

To my blog subscribers who don't live in St. Petersburg: I hope you get to see this unique museum soon. This article originally appeared in Arts Coast Journal. 

. . .

 

Giving Thanks to the Chefs in My Life

    

Thanksgiving, the ultimate food holiday, takes a lot of effort to pull it off. For years my husband and I were lucky to celebrate it with two chefs: Tom Valeo, a childhood friend of mine, and Karen Pryslopski, a Florida friend whom I introduced to Tom. They weren't professional chefs, mind you, but the meals they made were better than any restaurant meal I ever had. 

This year will be our first Thanksgiving without them both. In February Karen died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage after an apparent fall (Tom died of cancer in 2015).  Tom used to say, "Don't be a slave to the calendar."  This year we are following his advice. 

This year we are skipping Thanksgiving. Well, opting out of preparing the traditional Thanksgiving feast, that is. Thursday we are taking it easy. No heavy cooking. 

To be clear, cooking has never been my forte. My grandmother, my mother and all three of my sisters were/are great cooks. I never inherited the gene. For as long as I can remember I have relied on the kindness of cooking friends and family to make my Thanksgiving dinners memorable. For the Thanksgivings with Tom and Karen, my husband would contribute mashed sweet potatoes, Tom would make what he called pumpkin pie shooters (served in miniature foil pans) and Karen, who was the best cook of us all, would whip up a slew of sides dishes. Me? I "cooked" a pre-cooked Publix turkey.  

"You will never love to cook," my friend Nancy Paradis, another friend of mine who was a fantastic cook, once told me with her characteristic frankness, "but I'll teach you how to do a few meals and that's all you'll need." We started with a shrimp dish. Just cook the shrimp until you hear them sizzle, she instructed. When she saw the panicked look on my face, she laughed: "You don't know what sizzle means, do you?" I didn't. After that shaky first lesson, Nancy compiled a folder of easy recipes for me that she entitled "Margo's Kitchen Adventures." Nancy died in 2008. Every time I make Greek Pasta and Shrimp Salad, I think of her. 

Last August when Sheila Cowley, my editor at Arts Coast Journal, asked if I would be interested in doing a story on a cooking class at a museum in Dunedin, the irony wasn't lost on me, but I immediately said yes. Who better to write about a cooking class than someone with a history of cooking phobia?  I called up my friend Anthea and invited her to come with me. I owed her. She recently had given me the recipe for the meal she had cooked for my birthday party: Chicken Poppyseed (affectionately referred to as Chicken Shit in her family), a dish made with sour cream, cream of chicken soup, Ritz crackers, butter and, of course, chicken and poppyseeds. So easy to make even I could do it.

The museum cooking class was a smashing success (see the account below which originally appeared in Arts Coast Journal in September) -- even though I will never be able to duplicate the complicated meal we created that night. On the other hand, I have made Anthea's Chicken Shit several times with great success. 

Thanksgiving may be a cooking holiday but, it's not only about food. Even though I'm passing on the turkey this year, I will be offering up a special thanks to all those, living and dead, who have cooked for me in my life and/or shared easy recipes. 

Art for Eating's Sake: Cooking Class in Dunedin

At the Dunedin Fine Art Center, some masterpieces are not on the walls. They are on the table. The kitchen table, that is. 

For the past three years, DFAC has been offering dozens of cooking classes with such mouth-watering titles as Paris Summer Bistro, Taste of Thailand and Flavors of Sicily in its state-of-the-art kitchen classroom. Students create chef d’oeuvres — and then get to devour them. 

As Marcella Hazan, the Italian-born cookbook writer who died in Longboat Key at age 89 in 2013 once said, “Cooking is an art, but you eat it too.”

Chef Craig Tinling poses in the Dunedin Fine Arts Center teaching kitchen while Arts Coast writer Margo Hammond in DFAC’s blue apron takes her place at one of the five cooking stations. (Photo by Anthea Penrose)

 

Anthea Penrose brought her own apron for the DFLAC cooking class. Given to her by her grandchildren, it’s labeled Guggy (their nickname for her). (Photo by sous chef Alina Berja)

In August, I attended a class called New Orleans French Quarter and although I will never be mistaken for a culinary artiste, I made a meal fit for a king (or queen) —  with the help of cooking instructor Chef Craig Tinling who earned his culinary degree in his hometown of Winnipeg in Canada. In registering for the course (cost $65 per person), I was required to sign up with at least one other person with whom I would feel comfortable working in close quarters. My friend Anthea Penrose (who has been in my COVID bubble since the beginning of the pandemic) agreed to become my cooking accomplice.

She and I arrived at DFAC 10 minutes before the 6:30 p.m. class, as instructed. After we had our temperatures checked at the front door, we were directed to the second floor. There, in a 1,400-square-foot teaching kitchen, Tinling and his assistant Alina Berje greeted us with aprons and two glasses for the BYO wine we had been encouraged to bring along (Anthea chose a Pinot Noir, I contributed a light Cab). Tinling then led us to a stainless-steel cooking station. The class was full – 10 students were paired two by two at the kitchen’s five stations. While Anthea and I were first timers, Linda Shutt Atkins and David Atkins of Dunedin, occupying the station next to us, admitted they were confirmed recidivists.

Each station was equipped with a cooktop with two burners  and a large countertop workspace laden with the ingredients, already cut and measured out, that we would be using for our cooking lesson – cups of oil, flour and spices. Bowls of crushed tomatoes, chicken broth, slices of Andouille sausage and bite-size chicken pieces. Onions, celery and green peppers (dubbed the “Holy Trinity of Cajun cooking”) along with garlic and fresh okra.

Some of the ingredients — already chopped and measured — set out for the New Orleans French Quarter cooking class at DFAC (Photo by Anthea Penrose)

 As we broke open our wine, Chef Craig, who also gives cooking classes at Casa di Mazzaro’s in St. Petersburg, outlined the meal we were about to create – Chicken and Andouille Sausage Gumbo over Red Beans and Rice. A butter lettuce salad tossed with crusty lardons and a home-made vinaigrette and topped with a poached egg. And, for dessert, beignets, those puffed pastries smothered in confectioner’s sugar that I have been dreaming about ever since I first encountered them at the Cafe du Monde in downtown New Orleans.

But first, Alina brought us hot French bread and seasoned butter to enjoy with our wine. “I make it different every time,” says Tinling when someone asked him for the butter recipe. This time he mixed a pound of “salted, pricey” butter with lemon juice, zest, cayenne, Dijon mustard, honey and black pepper.

Stirring the Chicken and Andouille Sausage Gumbo (Photo by Anthea Penrose)

 We started by making the roux for the gumbo, mixing flour and oil in a heated pan. Tinling urged us to keep the heat up, stirring the sauce until it was the color of milk chocolate. “Like this color,” he explains, pointing to the room’s brown-paneled walls. When we eventually added the prepared gumbo ingredients, he told us to keep on stirring the gumbo as we tackled the rest of the meal.

For the rice and beans dish, Chef Craig taught us how to chop celery without cutting our fingers off – hold down the stalk by curling your hand into a bear claw, making sure you tuck in your fingernails. With the other hand, grip the chef’s knife with your middle, ring and pinkie fingers, pinching the blade near the handle with your thumb and index finger. Then cut the celery with a gentle rocking motion. He also suggested first sautéing the trinity of vegetables and then adding the garlic to prevent the cloves from burning.

Red Beans and Rice ready to serve (Photo by Anthea Penrose)

 As we grilled the lardons (which I learned are cubes of salt-cured pork) until they were crisp and mixed the ingredients for the vinaigrette, the chef taught us the best way to poach an egg – break an egg into a small dish. Slide the egg into a saucepan of simmering water and distilled vinegar, pushing the egg white around the yolk with a slotted spoon forming an oval shape. Let the egg cook for 2-4 minutes depending on desired firmness and then transfer the poached egg to a bowl of warm water. When ready to serve, lift the egg from the water with a slotted spoon, draining off any excess water.

Butter Lettuce Salad tossed with home-made vinaigrette and crusty lardons and topped with a poached egg (Photo by Anthea Penrose)

 For the beignets, Alina brought us a ball of prepared dough which we rolled out to a quarter of an inch thick and cut into squares. Then we were invited to drop our squares into a vat of oil heated to 350 degrees F on a stove in the back of the room. When the batter puffed up and was golden brown, we transferred the pastries with a slotted spoon to one of the paper bags filled with powdered sugar lined up on an adjoining table.

Confession – in the spirit of the infamous bumper sticker “Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first,” I convinced Anthea to join me in immediately gobbling up more than one of the piping hot beignets, now covered in powdered sugar, before they cooled off. I knew they would never taste as good as at that moment.

Cutting the rolled dough for the beignets (Photo by Anthea Penrose)

 Before the pandemic, the DFAC class would have ended with a group dinner around a common table. Instead, we stuck to CDC guidelines for indoor dining and returned to our stations to savor the results of our labors with our cooking partners. We poured the gumbo over the rice and beans, plated the tossed salad and finished off a few more beignets.    

As we left, Alina handed out printed recipes so we could try all these dishes at home. Would we? Alas, a team of assistants to do the shopping, chopping and measuring beforehand and cleaning up afterwards was not included.

Students at the five cooking stations listen attentively to Chef Craig in the DFAC teaching kitchen (Photo by Anthea Penrose)

 

 

In Person or Virtual Book Talks? Which Do You Prefer? I'm Rooting for Both

Last summer  I attended three book talks by Cynthia Barnett, author of The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans. Last week I was able to see her again online when she teamed up with the ever-witty Craig Pittman (The State You're In: Florida Men, Florida Woman and Other Wildlife) to talk about their new books as part of the Times Festival of Reading. 

I have always loved author talks. But the pandemic has provided me with an unsettling number of occasions to attend them. I know a lot of people can't wait to get into a room with a lot of other people and are not fans of Zoom. I get that. But my secret addiction is listening to authors yak about books in the comfort of my home.

Last fall alone I dropped in on Patricia Engel (It's Not Love, It's Only Paris) in a series called Writing Brilliant Essays; Rebecca Solnit and Maxine Hong Kingston at meetings of the California Book Club; Michael Posner on Leonard Cohen at the Toronto Book Festival; Ta-Nehesi Coates (Between the World and Me), Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings), Nikole Hannah Jones (1619 Project), Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together) and Adam Serwer (Cruelty Is the Point: Essays on Trump's America) at a Banned Books Week event sponsored by Random House; 

Wole Soyinka (Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth) at the New York Public Library; Eric Larsen talking about No One Goes Alone, his new audio-only ghost story, courtesy of AARP; Jeff Klinkenberg (Son of Real Florida) and Janisse Ray (Wild Spectacle) lamenting the loss of habitat in a conversation offered by Tombolo Books; Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should See Someone) with Nedra Tawwab Glover (Set Boundaries, Find Peace) exchanging views on therapy; Lauren Groff (Matrix) at the Times Festival of Reading; and an interview of Gary Shteyngart (Our Country Friends) by the actor Fred Savage, offered by Book Soup.

Sometimes I wanted to "meet" the author because I already had read and admired their books. Others lured me in because I wanted to see if they would convince me to add their titles to my long "to read" list after I heard them speak. 

Cynthia Barnett holds the record though. Who knew shells could be so interesting? The first time I heard Barnett speak was at an in-person talk, entitled “Marveling at Nature,” held July 11 at Tampa Bay Watch in Tierra Verde. 

The view from the balcony on the second floor of Tampa Bay Watch in Tierra Verde where “Marveling at Nature,” a book talk featuring Cynthia Barnett and her new book, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans, took place.

The next time I heard her talk was online on July 19, Books & Books in South Florida sponsored an online talk called “Listening to Sea Shells”  featuring WLRN environmental reporter Jenny Staletovitch interviewing Barnett.

Then the next day Tombolo Books of St. Petersburg offered “Sound of the Sea: Seashells, the Gulf and the Writing Life” online and I couldn't resist tuning in again. This time Floridan historian Jack E. Davis, the author of The Gulf, took on the role of interviewer. 

At the in-person event there was a slide presentation (including Botticelli’s Birth of Venus with the goddess on a giant scallop shell), a fabulous view of Tampa Bay, wine for sale by St. Pete’s  Book+Bottle bookstore and — finally after more than a year of lockdown — a roomful of people talking face-to-face.

WLRN environmental reporter Jenny Staletovitch blowing the conch shell trumpet at “Listening to Sea Shells,” Books & Books; online book talk promoting Barnett’s new book.

At the virtual meet-ups, there were people in squares talking to each other, no wine, no water views and no slides. There was, however, the chance to catch a glimpse of Barnett’s bookcases in her Gainesville home (where she lives with her husband and their two teenagers), an impromptu one-woman conch concert by Staletovitch (following a request in the chat by a friend who knew she had a conch shell trumpet in her Miami study) and a brief barking commentary provided by Davis’ dog in his residence just outside Gainesville.

Staletovitch and Barnett are both environmental journalists. Barnett teaches environmental journalism at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communication, but for 25 years she was a newspaper and magazine reporter, more than half that time as senior writer for Florida Trend magazine in St. Petersburg.

Davis, who teaches environmental history and sustainability studies at the University of Florida, and Barnett, are both book authors. Davis’ book, The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018.  Barnett has written three books about water-related issues. The Sound of the Sea completes, as Barnett likes to put it, her “hydroponic order.”

Of course, the online sessions couldn’t hope to compete with the setting of Barnett’s in-person Tampa Bay event. What better place to hear a talk about the need to save our oceans than at Tampa Bay Watch? The striking blue and white building that houses the nonprofit organization, dedicated to protection and restoration of our local estuary, sits on Pinellas Bayway South in Tierra Verde, providing spectacular views of the Bay.

The talk was held in the building’s second-floor Bay View Community Center. At the back is a balcony that overlooks a dock and a wide water view stretching to the horizon. I stepped out to peer down on the sparkling waters of the Bay, grateful that I didn’t see any dead fish or get a whiff of any of the red tide bloom that had been stinking up the Bay that week.

Two women enjoy the water view from the balcony on the second floor of Tampa Bay Watch in Tierra Verde before listening to Cynthia Barnett’s talk.

Behind me the room was filling up with people, most of them lined up to buy a copy of Barnett’s book and a glass of wine sold by Terra Dunham of Book+Bottle, a St. Petersburg bookstore that stocks both. Dunham was returning $2 back to Tampa Bay Watch for each book sold.

When I stepped back into the room, Peter Clark, founder and president of Tampa Bay Watch, was giving a shout out to writers in the room, including Gary Mormino, a Florida historian who has several books under his belt. Steve Seibert, former executive director of Florida Humanities and one of the event's sponsors, then introduced Cynthia Barnett as an international author with Florida roots (she’s a fifth generation Floridian). She is, he said, quoting the Boston Globe, “part journalist, part mom, part historian, part optimist.”

Barnett told lots of engaging stories about shells. How her daughter became obsessive about collecting them when she was five, a practice that dates back to the Neanderthals. How cowrie shells, the first global currency, were used during the African slave trade (an estimated one-third of enslaved people were paid for with the tiny white shells). She talked about the origins of the Shell Oil Company and the pioneering work being done by a number of largely unsung female marine scientists.

At the end of the talk she fielded questions and answers from the audience about red tide and the ethics of collecting sea shells (she’s in favor, but only in moderation), often yielding the floor to Steve Geiger, a research scientist from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who specializes in mollusks.

Cynthia Barnett holding up her well-marked book The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans as she searches for a passage to read at “Listening to Sea Shells,” Books & Books’ online book talk.

I learned a lot about seashells from her at the in-person talk, but I learned even more during her one-on-one conversations online. I learned, for example, that not all mollusks are seashells. Snails in our gardens are mollusks. Mollusks are the second largest group of animals in the world behind insects. They are all over land as well as the sea. But in The Sound of the Sea, Barnett writes exclusively about marine mollusks. That is, shells.

In the book Barnett concentrates on 12 iconic marine mollusks, choosing among the more than 50,000 species identified by scientists. She chose these particular seashells — including the cowrie shell, the bay scallop and the conch shell — because they allowed her to tell both a story of human history and the impact of climate change.

Jack E. Davis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Gulf, interviewing Cynthia Barnett at “Sound of the Sea: Seashells, the Gulf and the Writing Life,” an online book talk sponsored by Tombolo Books

It was Davis who asked Barnett to define mollusks. He also challenged her to sum up her book in two sentences. She did it for him in one. “This book is about listening – about listening to nature, about listening to unheard voices, and listening to what the Earth is telling us about climate change and how we treat each other.”

The in-person talk was like sitting in a classroom listening to a lively and interesting teacher. The online sessions, on the other hand, were more intimate, quirky affairs that felt more like sitting in a living room eavesdropping on a conversation between good friends.

Both Staletovitch and Davis are writers themselves, so they naturally talked with Barnett at length about her writing process, something missing from the in-person presentation. Barnett humorously described to both of them the many false starts she had with this project, including an attempt to start the book with a story about marble and Michelangelo (marble being an all-natural stone that was formed by limestone which itself was originally formed by seashells). Eventually she was forced to abandon that ponderous opening and ended up simply starting the book by telling the personal story about her daughter collecting seashells instead, imagining that the first seashell collector was also a little five-year-old girl.

Cynthia Barnett at “Sound of the Sea: Seashells, the Gulf and the Writing Life,” an online book talk sponsored by Tombolo Books

“Seashells are a home and they are a metaphor for our home, the Earth and what’s happening to our home,” she told Davis to whom she admitted that “this was my hardest book to write. It took six years to finish.”

Since her book’s launch on July 6 at Third House Books in Gainesville, Barnett has given an insane number of talks, both in-person appearances and virtual, including the latest with Craig Pittman at the Time Festival of Reading. According to her website she has seven more coming up -- all in person.

So which is better? An in-person book talk or a virtual one? Which one is the more pleasant and informative experience?

Personally I welcome the return of in-person books talks, but I confess I'm still hoping authors continue to include online sessions as part of their book tours.

Maybe I’m hoping for another conch concert.

A version of this article was originally posted on July 27, 2021, in Arts Coast Journal, the online journal for Creative Pinellas.