I don't remember the first time I met Ela White. It was probably at one of the fundraisers for the Writers BarBQ, the magazine I ran in the late 80s and early 90s. I remember Ela sitting in the backyard at the house I lived in on Bryn Mawr Boulevard in Springfield. We had a cookout with readings to raise some cash to get the magazine going. My friend Ted Samsel had brought his cooker over. He had one of those rebuilt metal drums and was himself a master of the slow cooked meat.
Various people did some reading, Gael Carnes, and Martha Miller, I remember for sure. I believe Ela was somewhat involved with Martha at the time. She looked pretty butch that day. Later I found out she still lived with her crazy husband, John White, down on the Illinois River. They ran an operation that involved having a reproduction of a Mississippian native american village setup. You could go spend time in the village, living like the aborigines and hunting, cooking, and flintknapping like they did. John White was a well known anthropologist and Ela herself had done a lot of work, creating weavings based on the decorations of pot sherds from the time period. I know her work exists in numerous museusm.
Although her relationship with Martha ebbed, she did start attending the Friday night sessions on Bryn Mawr. Most of my adult life I had some sort of writers workshop going on. The last one, the Writers BarBQ, lasted from 1986 through 1999, when I finally called it quits on Springfield, after 27 years. Kimberly and myself moved to New Hampshire where we almost stayed. We ended up back in Illinois though, a year later, in Urbana where we are today.
Ela's work was very intense. She had spent many years researching the greek myths and their origins. And this led her into re-telling these stories, in what she considered their more primal forms. By the time I met Ela I was already pretty much a complete Goddess worshipper. I had my major Robert Graves going on (The Whtie Goddess) and I was really ready to move as far from bible culture literature as I could go. I recognize, of course, that xtian discourse, the stories and their interpretations, color everything in western society, for good and ill. The King James Bible is second only to Shakespeare for forming the basis of what we think of as literature.
In any case, Ela was working on a series of stories. The plots and characters were all familiar, Hera, Demeter, Artemis. The stories we all learned at Edith Hamilton's knee, in school. Ela had vast quantities of information that informed these stories in sometimes radically different ways. She gave us what she could defend as the "original" versions of these myths. Of course, as myths, they were probably oral tradition for a long time, so discerning what came first was a serious task.
Ultimately Ela had two books working in those days. One of them was the stories themselves. We encouraged this book the most, because we were mostly fiction writers and hearing these stories presented in a somewhat modern idiom with the new and different information that Ela had made them come alive and truly sparkle with that kind of energy that humans can have. The other book was the scholarship. And it was large and hunky and difficult to get a handle on. If you've ever tried to read the long version of the Golden Bough you know what I am talking about.
I think the most distressing part of my forays in "literature" in the 80s and 90s was the projects like this that were well written, thoroughly researched, and something new and different, that couldn't get a bit in the land of the publishers. Really. This story went on and on. These books were really important and were never published, despite Ela's scholarly chops and background. I assume that the real story in publishing, particularly academic publishing, is that you have to kiss a great deal of ass and smooch up to the people who control things. There is a lot of subjectivity in the arts, so they can always say well that was good but this was also good. So I published my friend's treatise on coffee tables over your re-telling in a feminist voice of the greek myths. It's a fucked up world. I know John Knoepfle spent years kissing Lawrence Lieberman's minor poet ass to get his book published at the University of Illinois. Ultimately it turned Knoepfle into such a sad egocentric loser. But his book was out there. Mind you he never got to be the "Illinois" poet. That was reserved for What's his face, at Bradley, Kevin the Stein man.
Well. Like my other Crone friend from the 70s/80s, Jane Morrel, there came a time in Ela's life where she began to have physical troubles. She had adult lieukemia, but survived it, but she also began to suffer from some form of dementia. I don't know if it was Alzheimers. But the fact was she didn't really remember who I was after a point. This mirrored what happened with Jane Morrel, who also lost her own memories. So, I haven't seen Ela in several years now. I hear about her occasionally from her daughter, Karli, who works at the labs for the Illinois State Museum.
But a couple of weeks ago, Claire Martin, another old friend from the writing group days, sent me the news that Ela had gone from the scene.
I have missed her for some years now. But now I will miss her in the rest of this lifetime that I live. But I will never forget her, nor what she brought to my life and my understanding of our time and our culture and mostly where we really came from. I know she is with the Lady now, and there is celebration and honor there. For the Lady is merciful, and She loves us. That is something Ela and I both knew right away when we first spoke. Be well, old friend. Give my love to Her.
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