"But What About The Children?" Published, February 2019

Mid-February 2019 I Finally Published with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)

But What About the Children? 

Diversity is Life: A Memoir

by Shirley A. Blair Keller

You may purchase this book on Amazon in Paperback or Kindle

Trying to stop my mother from marrying a black man, my grandfather asked Mother, “If you do not care about yourself, what about the children?” It didn’t stop the marriage. I lived with the question a lifetime and decided to write an answer to my grandfather. 

Struggles were a plenty with parents who were social activists, in a time of segregation, anti-immigration, and religious bigotry prevalent in the majority culture of the land. 

Families come in many forms: blood, by marriage, by adoptions, adding siblings that are birth, steps, halves, and relationships-of-the-heart. Secrets and lies are a part of the tapestry. Figures like Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker, heroes in the movement for equality and justice, are living characters in my story. I also was a volunteer, then lived and worked in Synanon, a rehabilitation community. Controversial and troubling, and yet, relationships developed that lasted a lifetime.  

To tell you a little more about me: 

Writing journals led me to doing art late in life. I was widowed, children grown, living in small circumstances and able to cover basic expenses, but, no cash for entertainment. I bought a cheap pen with black ink, a composition book, and began a process of writing morning pages. I was so entertained that I rushed home each night after work, ate a quick dinner, asleep as soon as possible, to wake at 4 am to write before work. This became my lovely life.

One night I had a dream of seeing a quilt on a wall of a museum. When I went up close, I saw it was not made of cloth, but more like collages of photos and art, each patch in white wood frames and were illustrations of the stories I had been writing. In stead of cloth stitching the quilting was done in ink. The next day I began to make what I call Ink Quilts. The Ink Quilts are in the book, in black and white, along with some family photos.

  

Ceramic mask making emerged from a friendship with Marn Reich, an acqaintence from Synanon. I raised kids in the Synanon School. She worked in the law office. We had little in common. We both ended up in Three Rivers living 2 minutes from one another. I pledged to go 3x’s when she invited me to join her to attend a weekly ceramic workshop. That was over ten years ago. I am in love with mask making and still excited with each new lump of clay that leads me to the next mask.

Over time I explored many art forms: photography, clay-mono-printing, black ink drawings. The art form I have fallen in love with is exploring dot art, mixed with recycling old things and turning them into art pieces. One of the favorite canvases are hubcaps found in the streets.