Price, Alice Lindsay 1927-

views updated

PRICE, Alice Lindsay 1927-

PERSONAL: Born October 21, 1927, in Augusta, GA; daughter of William Lloyd (in business) and Orlana Jerome (a homemaker; maiden name, Gould) Price. Education: Attended Kansas City Art Institute, 1945-46, 1950-51; Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College (now State University), B.A., 1949; University of Tulsa, M.A., 1970. Politics: "Environmental."

ADDRESSES: Home—3113 South Florence Ave., Tulsa, OK 74105. E-mail—blkpoodle2@aol.com.

CAREER: Writer and artist. Neighborhood Center, Monterey, CA, director and recreation planner, 1954-60; City of Tulsa, OK, recreation planner and program director, 1962-69; Hall and Hall School, Tulsa, OK, literature and creative writing instructor, 1970-86; Oklahoma Arts Council, artist in residence, 1986—; arts education consultant, 1998—. Board of directors, AICAD, Washington, Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, PA; board of directors, secretary of executive committee, National Association of Schools of Art and Design; vice-president and member of board of directors, Swan Lake Waterfowl Society. Has also held numerous one-person exhibitions in galleries and universities throughout the United States and in Jamaica.

MEMBER: International Wild Waterfowl Society, National Council of Art Administrators, Trumpeter Swan Society, Authors Guild, Poets and Writers, Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (England), Whooping Crane Conservation Association, College Arts Association, American Higher Education, Society for College and University Planning.

AWARDS, HONORS: Feldman Award in Literature, Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa, 1993, for Swans of the World in Nature, History, Myth, and Art; Church of the Artist Award, Diocese of Seattle, for a poem; Pegasus Award, Oklahoma Writers, for a poetry chapbook.

WRITINGS:

Faces of the Waterworld (poetry chapbook), HCE Publications (Tulsa, OK), 1977.

Our Dismembered Shadow (poems), Ena Press (Bourdonné, France), 1980.

Swans of the World in Nature, History, Myth, and Art, Council Oak Books (Tulsa, OK), 1994.

Cranes: The Noblest Flyers in Natural History andCultural Lore, La Alameda Press (Albuquerque, NM), 2001.

Contributor of articles to Nimrod, Rhine, Commonweal, and Phoenix. Also edited John Brooks Walton's One Hundred Historic Tulsa Homes, HCE Publications (Tulsa, OK), 2000, and One Hundred More Historic Tulsa Homes, HCE Publications (Tulsa, OK), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: Alice Lindsay Price, poet, artist, photographer, and nature writer, has held numerous individual and combined exhibitions of her works, not only all over the nation but also in Jamaica. Of her love of nature, she once told CA: "A duck suddenly took flight and soared right past my twelve-year-old eyes. To witness it was an event that transformed me and moved me out of time. The duck, a mallard, was and still is so commonplace a sight that, to those who look at waterfowl, sighting it would be an ordinary event in ordinary time. It was that snap of pinion feathers, however, that blurred flash of green and brown flying before my eyes which kindled the desire to record what I saw and fired me to write.

"At first I wrote mainly poetry. Some years later another event, the witnessing of wild swans in the wilderness, enabled me to find a particular metaphor for which I had long searched. I began to think of a work that would not only embrace a kind of natural history in prose, but would also include, from my side of the border between science and art, that timeless zone of poetry and myth where understanding between humans and animals has long met. The result was my first book in prose, Swans of the World in Nature, History, Myth, and Art.

"Along the way I found writers, mostly poets, but also some essayists such as Henry David Thoreau, Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, and Annie Dillard, who imparted their own vision of a landscape alive with rocks, plants, and animals. Poets of the past, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, bequeathed their writing landscape. Contemporary poets, such as William Stafford writing of touching a dead deer on a dark road, taught me something of poetry's shadowy domain.

"From the act of writing and from other writers I have learned the mysterious connections of words on a page. It is, however, to the instructive voices of prairie and woodland, where wild swans nest and marsh reeds grow in watery silence, that I have tried to listen and to hear the lessons of the wild."

In Cranes: The Noblest Flyers in Natural History and Cultural Lore, her second book of prose, Price draws on a huge variety of sources to recount the story of a large collaborative project between scientists and lay people to save whooping cranes from extinction and save and protect their breeding grounds. David Scofield Wilson, reviewing the book for H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences online, commented: "Price's book is also a cornucopia of intriguing bits and pieces on cranes: excerpts from poems and prose, woodcuts, engravings, petroglyphs, and half-tone photographs of birds, landscapes, sculpture, pottery, tapestries, and even Canadian and U.S. conservation stamps." He called the book a "treasure trove" that collects ancient images and modern anecdotes in the telling of the whooping crane story. Phoebe Ing wrote in her review of Cranes for Bloomsbury Review that the book's primary purpose is not as a field guide but as a "glorification of existence....The greatest value of this well-researched, fact-filled book is, however, its sensitivity of style, the touch of a talented author well-suited to her subject."