12:35 p.m. Peninsula College Little Theater, also via Zoom

Several decades ago, Alice Derry and Fred Sharpe began a project to write text for drawings of native plants he had inked over many years.  They hardly knew each other when they began, and although they both tried to make the partnership work, they eventually realized that both their life styles and their goals for writing were too far apart to continue.  More years passed.  Having already done so much writing and in the intervening time, having learned a lot more about native plants, Alice approached Fred when she retired from teaching and asked if she could use the plates to do her own writing.  He was free of course to find another writer to use the plates his way.  He said yes.

The result so far are three booklets which focus on native plants on the Olympic Peninsula, where Derry hikes and learns.  The booklets are entitled “Plants and Art” and although they never want to desert science, the emphasis is on how the drawings have inspired Derry’s imagination.  Certainly, that could never have happened if the drawings themselves had not been highly imaginative.  Issues of social justice accompany much of Derry’s thinking, and those issues crept into the booklets as well.  Members of Native Nations have lived on this land since it was land, and their knowledge of flora was and is thorough, especially in the use of plants for food and medicine.  Derry hopes to correct the sometime assumption that this knowledge was only part of the past. Tribal foods and pharmacopeias are alive and well today.

These booklets are Derry’s first foray into serious essay writing.