This week I stumbled on some old photos of the first exhibit I ever curated on Harlan Hubbard. While I wouldn’t necessarily choose for anyone to read that exhibit text again in full (oh my, was it mediocre, as most of our early writing tends to be, no?), in it there were glimmers of the themes I would be exploring 14 years later in Driftwood: The Life of Harlan Hubbard:

“A steward, but never a servant,” I wrote, “Harlan lived like the river itself: always changing and evolving, slowly and respectfully carving his impression through the Kentucky hills.”

For comparison, in the Prologue of my upcoming book Driftwood, I write:

“There, outdoors, in his personal wilderness–following the example of so many other American artists, writers, and thinkers before him–Harlan worked and waited, allowing the river of time to shape him, to carry him, to deposit him where he belonged.”

Different style, similar theme: it took a long time for Harlan Hubbard to become Harlan Hubbard.

Like Harlan’s own maturation as an artist and thinker, my Driftwood project has evolved over years of steady, trusting hard work. When I think about what the 14 years of near-constant thought on this project meant, a word that comes to mind is PATIENCE. But another word that demands saying is BOUNTY.

Many of the facts, stories, asides, images, artifacts, and observations I have gathered over all these years related to Harlan and Anna Hubbard will make it into the final published manuscript of Driftwood. Of course, many will not. In the coming months, I hope to share some of the research bounty with you here, in this blog.

In the meantime, enjoy some more photographs (enjoy the poor cell phone image quality of the late 2010s!) of wee Jessica speaking with her hands at the 2011 Kentuckiana Sublime gallery talk. If any of you have seen me talk recently, you will know that not much has changed.