Sallie Bingham

  • Events
  • Blog
    • Doris Duke
    • Best of 2024
    • My Favorites
    • Full Archives
    • Writing
    • Women
    • Philanthropy
    • My Family
    • Politics
    • Kentucky
    • New Mexico
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Theater
    • Religion
  • Books & Plays
    • Doris Duke
    • Fiction
    • Nonfiction
    • Plays
    • Poetry
    • Anthologies
  • Writing
    • Short Stories
    • Poems
    • Plays
    • Translations
  • Resources
    • Audio
    • Video
    • Print
    • Biography
  • About
    • Contact
 
You are here: Home / Women / Dead Girls

Dead Girls

November 10th, 2019 by Sallie Bingham in Women 7 Comments

317views {views}

Painting by Anne Cooper Dobbins, Victorian Sofa

Anne Cooper Dobbins · Victorian Sofa ( James A. Michener Art Museum: https://bucksco.michenerartmuseum.org/)

Of course they were not girls, these three long gone friends of mine; they all made it to early middle age, and two of them even achieved a fair amount of recognition. That they are all forgotten now, except by their families and friends, is not surprising; except for so-called celebrities, or criminals, we are all forgotten within few years of our deaths.

I’m interested to explore the degree to which they were able to fulfill their primary goals. All three wrote and painted not as a hobby or a way to make a living—impossible, in most cases—but as a vocation, begun early and continued, with passion, until the end of life. Two were married to men, but none had children, which I think is significant, although in the case of my high school friend, Anne Cooper Dobbins, it may not have been a choice. She was severely injured as a teenager in a car wreck—the first friend I visited in the hospital, unprepared as I was at sixteen to deal with such pain and crippling.

Later, when she found a devoted husband, she moved with him to Bucks County, a rural landscape—still—with the cows she loved to paint. But cows were the least of it; she painted everything, including the elevator hall in my first New York apartment, which she livened up with floor to ceiling green and blue stripes. Fortunately it was a small hall. She also painted a portrait of me, at that time in the early sixties, that expresses perhaps too eloquently my frustration with my first attempt to publish to find acceptance as a writer.

This was long before women artists and writers were taken seriously. My agent at the time found a use for me as a babysitter for her child, and the only chance I had to meet Joan Didion—it was to supervise our children in a Central Park playground—somehow I missed her and so never told her how deeply I admired her writing.

Except for so-called celebrities, or criminals, we are all forgotten within few years of our deaths.

Neither Ann Cooper nor I—I’m following the ancient Southern tradition of including her middle name, often the mother’s maiden name—knew how disabling, professionally, it would be to flee New York. But flee we did. To become a “local” writer, or a “local” painter, inevitable for the millions of writers and artists who live outside that impossible city, is to become minor by definition. And neither Anne Cooper, nor I, aimed to be minor.

Yet she was able to appreciate the audience, and the reputation she gained in Bucks County, and said of her paintings, “I like to leave the door open so the viewer can ask questions.”

She was fortunate to find a well-rooted colony of artists in Bucks County, and her work was shown there. She had the right credentials—a Fulbright Fellowship, a residency at the MacDowell Colony, where I also spent time—and it may well be that she achieved with her painting a great deal of satisfaction. My favorite is her large painting of an enormous baby, sitting on the lap of a woman dressed in red. The red dominates the canvas, but only the woman’s hands are shown, holding the baby.

Ann Cooper, a painter I knew in New York in the 1980’s, led a more difficult life. Affording a loft studio in the increasingly gentrified Chelsea neighborhood strained her to the limit, yet she couldn’t imagine her life as an artist anywhere else. A man who loved her and offered to help her financially was somehow never good enough, and she was determined to make it on her own. Her paintings, which seem to have vanished, are hard to describe. She found a place in a downtown cooperative gallery but it was never what she wanted. Ambition tormented her, along with other demons. And she did not have the professional credentials that helped my other Ann, and that also helped my third dead girl, Aleda Shirley.

Aleda Shirley, photo by Nancy Jacobs

Aleda, a southern writer, never aimed to live in Manhattan. She was rooted in Kentucky, where she grew up, and where her family lived. She also had the bursting confidence, always shadowed, that was becoming more possible for a woman writer—she burned like a flame, even when she was already stricken with the disease that would kill her. And she was a poet, in itself a high vocation, and a difficult one, since readers have been taught for a long time now that they don’t read poetry. I think there may be a buried group that nevertheless does appreciate the extraordinary use of words that sometimes makes poems transcendent.

Aleda achieved more worldly success as a poet than my other dead girls achieved as painters. Her first book, Chinese Architecture, was published by the University of Georgia Press and won The Poetry Society First Book Award in 1987. Her second book, Long Distance, gained a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly in 1996 and admiring reviews. Meanwhile she taught, traveled, excited her friends with her energy, and came to rest finally in Jackson, Mississippi, with many friends and a literary life there. But her third book, Dark Familiar, published in 1996, a few years before her death, seemed to vanish into oblivion.

Aleda was enormously talented, which in the end is all that matters.

“Right As Rain,” her poem from Long Distance, gives me that prickle in the back of the neck that means true poetry:

“It’s the thirteenth of February, a Friday, the birthday
Of a man I haven’t seen in years, the first man
I loved… I don’t think of it as loss
Except when I think of it. He’s living, I heard,
In a leafy suburb north of here. There’s a suitcase somewhere,
In the back of a closet, perhaps, with clothes
I wore then, photographs, ticket stubs from the track.

Exhausted, those clothes—the slips and blouses—are thin
As silk from repeated washings, the steam iron.
They smell of him: rain, bay rum, low tide…
This is the rain of the past.

Reading Aleda’s poem, after many years, convinces me that she achieved what she was put on earth to do, and I feel the same way about Anne Cooper’s Red Dress and Baby. As for my other Ann, the outcome is less certain. New York chews up and spits out those of us who are determined to make it there.

How blessed I am to have these three dead girls, first as close friends, then as living memories. They showed, not the way, but a way.

Share
Tweet
Share
Buffer4
4 Shares

In Women 20 Favorites of 2019 Anne Cooper Dobbins

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

Comments

  1. Dawn says

    November 10th, 2019 at 11:01 am

    Sallie how timely that you posted three dead girls
    I often feel the same way about Enid Yandel.
    She was the first female Sculptor inducted excepted into the national sculpture society in the late 1800s.
    But she is not forgotten the path she cleared for women through her efforts as a suffragette, writer, humanitarian activist through her art contributed greatly towards the liberties gained for all women.
    The year 2020 is to be the year of the women.
    To punctuate this event I am working on securing support for a life size bronze sculpture of Enid Yandell to represent women as women in their own right..
    I very much would like to speak with you about this project and what it will represent for the women of Louisville Kentucky and all women.
    Fiercely yours, Dawn

    Reply
    • Sallie Bingham says

      November 11th, 2019 at 1:02 pm

      Dawn,

      Thank you for the comment and for mentioning Enid Yandell. As you may know, I wrote about her earlier this spring in Sometimes It Takes a While, prior to the anniversary events of this summer.

      Sallie

      Reply
  2. Rebecca Henderson says

    November 10th, 2019 at 10:50 pm

    I love you

    Thank you Sallie,
    Rebecca

    Reply
  3. Patrick Moore says

    November 11th, 2019 at 8:07 am

    Thanks for sharing Sallie – your inspiration is our inspiration!

    Reply
  4. Geneva Parris says

    November 11th, 2019 at 9:58 am

    I took the moment – a pause in my morning – to click, open, read. Thank for your reflections on women who left too early but linger in the heart, mind, and art accomplished.

    We all recall our own special women who left to soon for our hearts and minds no matter their age. Their influence lingers.

    Thanks, Sallie.
    Geneva

    Reply
  5. Susan Munroe says

    November 26th, 2019 at 5:04 pm

    If you have a big, nurturing family, the kind that live together generationally 3+, you will be legendary as founder, matriarch, multi-nana of small flocks.
    Big flocks? Too expensive.
    Or, if you’ve become famous or infamous, a memory may become legendary.
    The caring will keep the life alive. But we are busy and don’t have time.

    Reply
  6. Dennis Shaffner says

    July 9th, 2023 at 6:01 pm

    A thread runs through us in these brief biographies. Cooper was my great grandmother’s maiden name which I bestowed on my third nephew last century in her honor. Leaving my stomping grounds of youth in Bucks Co PA to nest in Kentucky reversed the path of Ann Cooper whose paintings I admire, and archived in my favorite Doylestown museum where the Delaware Valley Pennsylvania School of painters fill the tall walls like Dr. Barnes’ broken will to rehang in Philadelphia…. No comment.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

 

You might also like

  • Painting of cows at dusk by Ann Cooper Dobbins
    Promise
    Twice in my life, I’ve had the rare privilege of encountering a young woman of promise. Only twice because promise is handed out randomly or according to a pattern I can’t discern....
  • Exquisite Aloneness
    Exquisite Aloneness
    There is an avidity, even an arrogance, and a superb energy I sometimes detect in those who live alone......
  • Maligned Because She Is Different
    Maligned Because She Is Different
    The public shaming of Hill is yet another example of the hypocrisy of our culture, which pretends to respect or even worship difference, but is deeply and actively hostile to it....
  • Photo of Anne-Marie McDermott
    Some Remarkable Women
    I give you several women who have been seen as remarkable; they stand for a multitude of others who through timing, luck or geography are never given the accolades they deserve....
 

Subscribe

 

Latest Comments

  • Martha White on The Fruits of the Past Five Years: “Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings: “And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing…” July 6th, 11:14 am
  • Nenita on The Fruits of the Past Five Years: “I like your writings, I can relate to you. If I had been persevering and seriously aware of my interests…” July 6th, 11:13 am
  • Sallie Bingham on Whose Eyes: “Thank you, James – you are correct!” June 29th, 11:19 am
  • Martha White on Feeding the Fish: “Blinkying Report:: Our neighborhood rabbits have been observed leaping into the air three or four feet off the ground. It…” June 29th, 8:10 am
  • Martha White on Whose Eyes: “Subtle. The “b” stays silent—subtle, even.” June 24th, 12:59 pm

Watch Sallie

Taken By The Shawnee

Taken By The Shawnee

July 6th, 2025
Sallie Bingham introduces and reads from her latest work, Taken by the Shawnee.
Visiting Linda Stein

Visiting Linda Stein

March 3rd, 2025
Back on October 28th, 2008, I visited artist Linda Stein's studio in New York City and tried on a few of her handmade suits of armor.

Listen To Sallie

Rebecca Reynolds & Salie Bingham at SOMOS

Rebecca Reynolds & Salie Bingham at SOMOS

November 8th, 2024
This event was recorded November 1, 2024 in Taos, NM at SOMOS Salon & Bookshop by KCEI Radio, Red River/Taos and broadcast on November 8, 2024.
Taken by the Shawnee Reading

Taken by the Shawnee Reading

September 1st, 2024
This reading took place at The Church of the Holy Faith in Santa Fe, New Mexico in August of 2024.

Upcoming Events

Jul 25
July 25th - July 27th

The 9th Annual Taos Writers Conference

SOMOS Salon & Bookshop
Taos MO
Sep 23
All day

How Daddy Lost His Ear – Garcia Street Books

Garcia Street Books
Santa Fe NM
Sep 30
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm MDT

How Daddy Lost His Ear – The Church of the Holy Faith

The Church of the Holy Faith
Santa Fe NM
View all of Sallie's events

Latest Tweets

salliebingham avatar Sallie Bingham @salliebingham ·
1 Jul 1940081262770708499

Years ago a man I was in love with persuaded me to have a large fish pond dug near my studio. I think it was his attempt to be part of my necessarily solitary life there; like other such attempts it failed—and now I'm left with the fish pond! https://buff.ly/fGgnN39 #Koi #KoiPond

Image for the Tweet beginning: Years ago a man I Twitter feed image.
salliebingham avatar Sallie Bingham @salliebingham ·
30 Jun 1939751124925390864

Our wisdom outlasts kingdoms and democracies and tyrannies. It is for all places all people and all times. Unfortunately our wisdom can be bought, suborned, which is what I see in all the pretty women around Mr. T. "Lady Wisdom": https://buff.ly/mKAYBnf #HagiaSophia #DonaldTrump

Image for the Tweet beginning: Our wisdom outlasts kingdoms and Twitter feed image.
Load More

Recent Press

Sallie Bingham's latest is a captivating account of ancestor's ordeal
Pasatiempo, The Santa Fe New Mexican

“I felt she was with me” during the process of writing the book, Bingham says. “I felt I wasn’t writing anything that would have seemed to her false or unreal.”

Copyright © 2025 Sallie Bingham. All Rights Reserved.

Press Materials   —   Contact Sallie

Privacy Policy

Menu
  • Events
  • Blog
    • Doris Duke
    • Best of 2024
    • My Favorites
    • Full Archives
    • Writing
    • Women
    • Philanthropy
    • My Family
    • Politics
    • Kentucky
    • New Mexico
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Theater
    • Religion
  • Books & Plays
    • Doris Duke
    • Fiction
    • Nonfiction
    • Plays
    • Poetry
    • Anthologies
  • Writing
    • Short Stories
    • Poems
    • Plays
    • Translations
  • Resources
    • Audio
    • Video
    • Print
    • Biography
  • About
    • Contact