Deconstructing 'Grace:' How Mary Jo Cartledgehayes turned her book into post card mail art

COURTESY PHOTOS Postcards created by Mary Jo Cartledgehayes from her book "Grace: A Memoir."

MARY JO CARTLEDGEHAYES SPENT YEARS carefully choosing just the right words in just the right sequence while writing her book, "Grace: A Memoir."

As a writer, words are precious to her, and she has a reputation for weaving them together in unexpected ways.

Now she's taking apart the book

she so lovingly constructed, literally ripping out pages, tearing out sentences and paragraphs.

A year ago, she decided to take her published book and make mail art from it, creating one postcard a day. She determined she'd try to sent a postcard to anyone who asked, who sent her a postcard with their name and address.

Initially, the idea was easier to conceive than undertake; actually cutting up her own book, she discovered, was difficult.

She started a blog called It's Only a Book, which tracks her progress. (www. itsonlyabook.blogspot.com)

"God only knows what happened," she says, looking back a year ago to the beginning of her project. The blog, she says, "begins with dithering, because I'm thinking, 'I'm going to do this,' but not quite able to take my book apart.

CARTLEDGEHAYES

"On the blog I'm going, 'I'm going to do this today. OK, I didn't do this today.' 'Well, yes, I'm going to do this, but today is not the day.' And the next day's or next week's post is, 'I've got two copies of the book, because I'm definitely going to do it today!'"

On her blog, she wrote: "When am I going to start this project? The moment I convince myself it's only a book and not my entire life that I'm ripping to shreds."

One day she sat down with her book, about to cut it up, when her partner, whom she refers to as her compadre, walked into the room.

"Your're not really going to rip that book up, are you?" he asked.

"No!" she said, and the project was delayed yet again.

Finally, on Aug 25, she found the courage to do it, and posted her first piece, "It's About a Revolution." Since then, she's worked in spurts, posting postcards every day for weeks, then taking time off, then returning to the project.

For those horrified that she's ripping up a book (two copies, actually, so she can use both the odd- and even-numbered pages) she wrote: "Yes, it's only a book. No, this isn't sacrilege; rather, it's an exploration, an experiment in ritual, and an adventure."

The birth of a book

"Grace: A Memoir" is the story of how God unexpectedly called her to the ministry. She was middle-aged, twice divorced, and the mother of two children. Plus, as she points out, she didn't think God was calling her because she was the one who always got the punch lines to dirty jokes. The memoir relays her experience at seminary, including her professors' and fellow students' blatant sexism, pastoring her first church with its joys and infighting and politics.

Ten years ago, Ms. Cartledgehayes wrote the first draft of the essay that eventually grew into her book. The book sold in January 2000, and her husband Fred died of multiple myeloma a few months later, in April.

"It was 200 pages, and the publisher wanted 300 pages in October 2000," Ms. Cartledgehayes recalls. "But death being what it is, we did not wind up with the final version of the manuscript until spring of 2002."

COURTESY PHOTO One of the many postcards created by author Mary Jo Cartledgehayes from her book "Grace: A Memoir."

The book came out the following spring, in 2003. "Grace: A Memoir," was well-received by critics and readers. It received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and positive reviews in Kirkus Review and O, the Oprah Magazine. Some compared her to Anne Lamott and Kathleen Norris.

But then a number of events seemed to conspire against its success. USA Today was slated to run a review, but then the Iraq War began, and the review never ran. Her sister died unexpectedly.

And because the book was published two years later than originally scheduled, everyone involved with the initial contract and everyone who had worked on it, were no longer at the publisher.

"So my book was kind of orphaned," Ms. Cartledgehayes says. "It was that sort of thing. As is true with many, many, many books, a lot of forces were at work all at the same time. And sometimes that works to a person's benefit, to a book's benefit, and sometimes it doesn't. And mine was a case where it didn't."

Her memoir went out of print in 2005. Ms. Cartledgehayes bought "a few hundred copies or so," and stored them in a second bedroom.

She went through a period of grieving the deaths of her husband and her sister. She moved to a different state. She left the ministry.

For the longest time, "I just felt I was slogging around," she says.

Change came, slowly. She met another man and fell in love. They adopted a yellow Lab named Koko. She started writing poetry again.

One day, she visited a quilt shop. It wasn't the type of store she'd frequent; she hated quilts. But her mother needed some Halloween fabric. Ms. Cartledgehayes was astonished by the selection of fabric in the store.

"I had no idea there were so many darling fabrics in the universe," she says. "So I got Mother's Halloween fabric, and then I got some cute pieces for myself, and then I kept getting little pieces for myself. And then suddenly, I had so many pieces that by the end of the year, 2007, I knew I had to either make something or stop buying them."

Learning to work small

And that's how the woman who hated quilts started making them. After making a queen-sized quilt for her compadre, she wanted to start working small. So she started making postcard mail art, working in 4-by-6-inch rectangles.

Part of it, she says, was a response to how publishing companies are now owned by five or six major conglomerates.

"The mail art idea is about rejecting corporate control of art," she says, "that art belongs to human beings, not to whoever happens to have the most cash."

Mail art is also about non-judging, she says. You don't have to be professionally trained in order to do mail art.

Certain artists will put out a call for mail art, stating a theme, such as diaries, or fish, or green cat.

"Historic tradition is, the mail art is always exhibited and every piece is always exhibited. The person receiving them doesn't judge them and say, "Oh this is a really good one that this one is crappy.' They're all respected as art as that person is doing it today. That's the rejection of the gallery idea of: we will determine what constitutes art."

And mail artists send each other mail art.

"When I started… I wanted to have that sense of, 'I'm just tossing this out there, I'm tossing this out into the world.' So I would put 'mail art' into Google and wander around some sites and find an address and mail something to somebody. Which is not unusual. It's what a lot of people do."

It adds to the sense of adventure, she says, because you never know what you're going to receive in the mail each day.

On her blog, she posts all the mail art she receives, as well as the postcards she sends out. She's created over 150 postcards from "Grace" and the variety of styles astounds her.

"Isn't that interesting?" she says. "Because I've always worked with words. Isn't it interesting the immense variation that you can do with art, which is something that artists already know. But my doing it in this daily way, over time, it's really been experimental and freeing, because I'm putting fewer demands on it than I do with writing. Because you know, this is art. This really is curiosity but it's also play."

When Ms. Cartedgehayes gave sermons as a pastor, she'd start at one spot and wind up somewhere totally unexpected. She'd talk about all kinds of things that seemed unrelated, and show how they connected. She'd doing the same with her postcards now, using collage to bring disparate things together. Only now she's working with images and composition and color and textures and yes, words.

She's torn out pages and used chunks of text for design or background. She did a series in which she chopped up a calendar and incorporated that, using words or sentences or phrases from the book. She's used beads and feathers and fabric. She did a series in which she used American and foreign stamps.

"That just evolved," she says, "because it was a way of adding brightness and taking us to something larger than ourselves as well, getting outside of this tiny world we live in. Which is another aspect of mail art, the international aspect."

Ms. Cartledgehayes has sent postcards to people all over the world, and people from 42 different countries have visited her Web site.

A major tactile component

"This was an experiment in playing with an artistry in which words change dimensions, and sometimes are more important and sometimes are more subsidiary," she says. "And it's tactile. And after being engaged with words for so long, doing something that has such a major tactile component was wonderful.

"And then a couple months ago, I suddenly started noticing again that parts of this book are just beautiful. I have a distance from it, that I could look at these pieces and think: 'Oh, this is just beautiful!' And I feel that really differently than I did when I was in the middle of writing the book, and Fred dying, and Fred dead, and publication, and being on the road and doing things. Just a pure appreciation for it. And I just go, 'Oh my God, I caught that.' 'Oh my word, I nailed that one!' And 'Oh yeah, I remember thinking that.'

"Because it's been more than 10 years since the book project began. If you happen on the book now and you read it, you think the person who wrote it is the person I am now. And I'm not. There are those two different people. There's that person who wrote the book, and there's me. That was always true, but the 10 years is a really significant distance, because Fred died and I left the ministry, and on and on and on."

Will there be a follow-up memoir?

Readers are asking for one, but publishers aren't, she says, explaining that they're more interested in "celebrity packages." So she's "playing with art" because she doesn't know what else to do. Though, she admits, "it would be pretty charming" if her postcards became a book.

Each postcard is complete in itself, she says.

"It truly is deconstructing. Whereas in the book, I took all of these incidents and welded them together into this 300-word whole, now I truly am deconstructing it and creating the visual, contextural, complete universes, where they are complete in themselves."

One copy of "Grace: A Memoir" has maybe 15 pages left in it that are attatched.

"It's basically the book cover and a couple pages," she says. "And every time I look at it, I think, 'Oh my God. It just looks pitiful.' It does. It looks pitiful, it looks wan, it looks as if it's perishing, as if it's starving to death, or has been starved to death.

"I do have an emotional or physical response to it. I'm shocked when I look at it. On the other hand, I think, 'This is so cool! I've actually done a whole book's worth of these. And look at this range, look at what I'm creating here.'

"I look at this book that was whole, and now is sort of not. Which is symbolic of my life, that was whole up to 2000, and then was not. So there is that aspect of change, transformation, transition, that's been another element of this process."

It's been a long journey, but she's happy, she says. She's created a whole new life for herself.

"In the same way I've created this whole amazing 140 plus postcards. Who knew? Who knew I could do that many pieces?" she asks.

"Who knew there was that much art inside me?"

want a postcard

>> Send your name and address on a postcard to: Boo @ It's Only a Book 1029 Mallard Creek Road Louisville, KY 40207