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In the Days When Wishing Still Helped: Sadie and the Flowers of Florida

Lisa  Olson

2003
Rives lightweight, inkjet imagery
letterpress, inkjet printing
8 1/4 x 6 1/4 x 1 /2 in
52 pages
edition of 18

For children of my generation, the fairy tale served as a subconscious social edict: a little girl was good or she was bad, good brought rewards, bad brought downfall. There was little room for curiousity, passion or choice in this simple world navigated by fate.// In the Days When Wishing Still Helped is the story of my grandfather's sister, Sadie Jones, who was born in Eastern Kentucky in 1901. I know little about her actual life but own photographs taken in her youth which show a happy and elegantly dressed woman seeming misplaced in a variety of rural settings. I once met an elderly woman who had known Sadie as a child; she remembered only that "there was something different about that girl." When I contacted a cousin who researched family history, I learned a few cold facts: Sadie had married five times and died of syphilis. I began to invent Sadie's story as one of defiance and aspiration. She was, after all, born into a changing world. I could imagine a woman of intelligence and curiosity wanting more that the old rural existence. I created my imagined biography with texts written both in Sadie's voice and in my own wondering voice bound within a framework of fairy tale dogma.

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