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Unbounded Bea
My favourite drawing by Bea Lotz is of a lone mourning dove perched at the end of a long, thin branch. Observant and a wee bit vain, the bird calls out for attention. She can wait all day.
Next month we say goodbye to Bea’s art and poems in The Times. Her much-loved contribution is the longest lingering feature of this newspaper. It is the lone surviving remnant of the Times before our acquisition of the paper in 2004.
Bea and Dieter lived in Wellington then. Both artists in the truest and most struggling of ways—they had managed to raise their children into magnificent adulthood by then. They had been gifted with time. They were, at last, free to pursue their creativity and imagination— wherever it took them. Without the strictures of deadline, commercial dictates or even the need for a payday.
Dieter, though a graphic designer by training and trade, returned to the sensual reward he found working with wood. From his shop behind their Wellington home, he hewed intricate and slightly oversized candlesticks and obelisks. He was inspired by the natural inclination of the wood grain, the aroma as it took shape and the dimensional possibilities that arose when you lifted pen from paper.
Bea was compelled to project emotion. Trained as an actor—though with an outrageous Jersey accent that continues to colour her speech to this day—Bea had learned how to conjure a feeling from deep inside her and hurl it across a vast hall—so that everyone felt it.
Lacking both a suitable stage or the desire to leave her settled—at last—home, she found a vehicle through verse and drawings to project her vast well of observed moments. Doodled at first as remembrances of her children growing up, a few scraps of paper soon became a bundle.
She packaged a few and brought them to the editor of the newspaper in Wellington. Gord Dancey saw that her work would have broad appeal for his readers and agreed to pay a small honorarium if she could produce a drawing and accompanying verse each week. She agreed. That was 20 years ago. She has done so ever since.
Bea describes her creations as old-fashioned and out-of-step with contemporary verse. That is, for many readers, part of her enduring appeal. She was not bounded by rules of grammar or punctuation. An exasperated proofreader once complained that Bea used (misused) exclamation marks the way a child deploys every crayon in a box when one would do!!!
An intensely visual person she experimented with staggered indents, random capitalization and an abundance of ellipses…(hardly ever the standard three dots) scattered through the verse. The look—the first impression—mattered much more than the correct use of the literary nuts and bolts.
She had a great deal of difficulty staying inside a box. It was the cause of our fiercest disagreements. When we took over the Times in 2004 and Bea agreed to continue contributing her verse and drawings, my only stipulation was that her work be confined to specific space. Bea hated that idea. Under Dancey, her verse had been allowed to flow without structure or form meandering aimlessly down a column of type. Some weeks the verse was four lines long, another week it would be 25 lines. Man, did she resist the idea of a fixed space. It didn’t help that Dancey was more flexible with font size, leading and kerning—more willing to stuff ten pounds of pudding into a five-pound bag.
I see now I was naïve. But I stuck to my guns. We went through dozens of iterations of the frame that now defines Bea’s weekly contribution. There were times I expect both of us thought we weren’t going to get past this.
I explained that in the newspaper business, every writer, advertiser, columnist and contributor must learn to live in a defined space—that some variability could be accommodated, but only so much. I might as well have been trying to explain that the world is flat— that the oceans flow to the edges and fall off into the abyss.
Bea fought instinctively and fiercely against limits to what she considered creative freedom. The notion that an idea, a feeling or a memory could be confined by the arbitrary dictate of this small newspaper editor struck her as patently and objectively false. She had grown up and lived her life at a time when many people understood freedom in a fundamental and visceral way. She did not take it lightly. She fought bitterly against the notion of her ideas, her creativity and imagination being put in a box.
But we did get past it. We both made compromises along the way. We both got older.
Dieter passed away three years ago in August. By then, they had moved to a bungalow in Belleville— closer to services and health care. One morning he just didn’t wake up.
Bea moved back to Toronto—closer to her children. She has done her best to keep up with life in Wellington. She continues to receive The Times delivered to her home. Occasionally she will stop by for a surprise visit. Not so much lately. Things are different. Unfamiliar. Her mind’s eye reflections of Wellington are barely recognizable now.
Yet, I want to think she remains quietly observant from her perch way out on the end of the branch. Thank you, Bea.
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