I confess that I am here under false pretenses. I am not a quilter – never have been, never wanted to be one, never hope to be one. I am, however, a Quilt-Hunter. (Maybe I had better explain that term before the quilters come after me with their sharp needles.)
As a teacher, I learned to hunt down and capture elusive themes, symbols, and patterns in prose and poetry. As an academic critic, I write about those “captures” so that others can enjoy them. When I became involved with putting on a quilt show for Pearl S. Buck’s charities, I realized that many of the novels I had been reading for years contain quilts as symbols…and the hunt was on.
And what a successful hunt it has turned out to be. Quilt references seemed to explode into view when I sharpened my critical eye to spot them. They cowered behind the most illustrious names in romance writing and hid deep in the recesses of cozy mysteries but we – my companion-editors in the quest – sought them out and brought them to the light of day so that quilter-readers could enjoy them
The result is our book – Writers Who Quilt – Quilters Who Write – recently published and available on Amazon. Even as we finished that book, I kept discovering how authors use quilts as symbols and literary devices…and so, the never-ending quilt hunt goes on.
Stay tuned for the Blog of the Quilt-Hunter as she tracks down this elusive quarry in all sorts of written material.
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