by Lisa Congdon
I also became a part of this online group of women runners. These are people who would do anything for me. They’re from all over the world. We’d all do anything for each other. They’re not like a lot of online women’s groups that tend to get catty. When my husband passed away last year, they took up a collection and made a contribution in his memory, plus sent me a $50 gift card for Portland Running Company, and most of these people I’ve never met face-to-face.
Lisa: What’s the most positive or joyful part of doing this for you? What keeps you getting out there?
Fay: It’s almost a walking meditation for me. I’m out there and I’m paying attention to what I’m seeing, I’m paying attention to what I’m hearing. I find myself sometimes going, Okay, I can hear a bird over here, okay, there’s traffic noise, I can hear the planes at the airport, oh I can hear a train, so the wind must be coming from that direction, otherwise I can’t hear it from here. I can hear people talking; I can hear animals. And as I’m walking, I’m paying attention to what people have done with their yards and what flowers are in bloom and what’s going on around me. And it’s inspired me, in a way, just to see what’s going on.
Lisa: To what extent do you think your age has anything to do with this passion of yours? Do you think it happened at the right time in your life, or that it could’ve happened at any time? If you’d discovered it in your 20s or 30s, do think you might have also pursued it then?
Fay: I think it has most definitely been easier to pursue long-distance walking at my age than it would’ve been when I was younger, because I am mostly retired, and I have the time. Walking long distances, even if you are fast, takes a lot of time. I look at some of these people that I know are in their 30s that are training for marathons, and they’ve got little kids, and they’re working a full-time job and I wonder how they manage.
Lisa: What advice would you give older women who are considering taking on a new challenge or exploring a new thing in life, but are maybe hesitant or fearful?
Fay: Just get out and do it! You can do anything you set your mind to, but take your time. You’re not going to be fast. You’re not going to say today, “Oh, I want to run a marathon or walk a marathon.” It’s going to take you a good six months to do it, maybe longer, depending on how much of a couch potato you’ve been. Take your time and enjoy it.
Also, get focused. Focus on what your goal is and figure out why it’s important to you. And once you’ve got that goal and you know why that goal is important to you, it just kind of happens.
was a copywriter-turned-publisher whose later-in-life career at the helm of Cosmopolitan magazine changed notions surrounding sexual and career independence for a generation of younger women. A portrait of longevity, Helen took her post at the age of 43 and remained dedicated to the magazine and its audience for nearly fifty years.
Born on February 18, 1922, in Green Forest, Arkansas, Helen had a young life wrought with challenges—she lost her father at a young age, her mother struggled with depression, and her sister was paralyzed by polio. At 17, she left home to attend Texas State College for Women for three years, followed by a year at Woodbury Business College in Burbank, California. She worked her way through seventeen different Los Angeles offices as a secretary, until 1948, when her employer at the advertising firm Foote, Cone & Belding recognized her writing skills and made her a copywriter. In the ten years that followed, Helen won three Frances Holmes Advertising Copywriters awards for her work.
In 1959, she married Hollywood producer David Brown. Around this time (and quite ironically), she began writing her first book about the pleasures and freedom of singlehood. When Sex and the Single Girl became a fast bestseller in 1962, Helen left the world of advertising behind. Instead of copywriting, she dedicated her time to working on her next book, Sex and the Office (published in 1964), as well as her nationally syndicated advice column “A Woman Alone.” Helen’s emphasis on the benefits and freedoms of unmarried life and the idea that women are, in fact, sexual beings garnered her attention and criticism, which led to the next phase of her career.
In 1965, at the age of 43, Helen was named editor in chief of the then-sinking Cosmopolitan magazine. With no formal editing experience, Helen drew from the ethos behind her own writings to transform Cosmopolitan into the sometimes controversial, overtly sex- and independence-focused young women’s magazine we know today. Her work was daring and groundbreaking, both in content and in design. Cosmo began and continued to outsell other women’s publications throughout the three decades of her leadership. Though her tenure as editor in chief ended in 1997, she continued her work for the magazine as editor of international editions until her death at the age of 90 in 2012.
is an artist most known for her evocative paper collages. Since deciding to pursue a career as an artist at the age of 42, Della has exhibited her art both in Europe and throughout the United States, and was featured in Betty-Carol Sellen and Cynthia J. Johanson’s Self Taught, Outsider, and Folk Art: A Guide to American Artists, Locations, and Resources, among other publications. Drawing inspiration from her own life experience, Della examines the complexities of modern African American women while exploring her own origin story and her mother’s mental illness. In addition to collage, she creates colorful pastels, drawings, dolls, and quilts. Not long ago, the Smithsonian Institution purchased three of her pieces. Della recently illustrated her first children’s book.
Lisa: I’d like to start with a question about a certain palm reading you had back in your 20s. What did the reading reveal? Has it proven to be true?
Della: This person read my palm and told me that my lifeline is very heavy at the end, and he said I’m gonna go out of this world with a bang. He said, “Everything comes to you later in life.”
Lisa: Wow. Did you have any idea at the time what that would mean for you?
Della: No, I didn’t, because to be honest with you, I didn’t take the person seriously. But I will tell you this, when I was 18 or 19, I used to be involved with this gallery called the Black Aesthetic, but I wasn’t an artist. I saw Dr. Margaret Burroughs, and she was in her 50s at the time, and I remember saying to myself, I’m going to be like her.
Lisa: So you kind of knew then?
Della: Yes and no. But when I saw her and heard about her, I thought she was really fantastic.
Lisa: You didn’t pursue art seriously until you were 42, and when you started, was it just something you knew you wanted to do? Is there a reason you didn’t pursue it earlier in life?
Della: The reason I didn’t pursue it earlier in life was that I didn’t think of it as a serious career. I planned on doing it as a hobby when I retired. At around the same time that I decided to pursue a career in art, I was making another career change—I was going to school to become a psychologist. If I hadn’t gotten into the arts, I’d have been a psychologist. And at the time, I was at Milwaukee Area Technical College and my advisor said that I needed some humanities classes. She suggested I take an art history class. And I said, “Fine, I know a little bit about art history.” I grew up with my parents having a lot of books, and I knew a little about art history.
We had to write a paper in the class. I knew everybody was going to write on Picasso, van Gogh, and those types of artists, and I wanted to write on an artist who was African American and who was also from Milwaukee. And so I decided to write on Evelyn Terry. And I remembered Evelyn Terry from the Gallery Toward the Black Aesthetic. So I called her up to do the interview. She remembered me and that I used to draw these weird Picasso-like women having babies, and she’s going, “You should be an artist.” And I thought, Yeah, right.
I then transferred to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. At the time, my major was sociology, I was getting a certificate in women’s studies, and my minor was African American studies. I took this class on African American religious studies with Dr. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, and at around the same time, Evelyn invited me to an exhibition, and everything in it was Haitian influ
enced, and I heard a voice tell me at that exhibition to go make art. So I told Evelyn I wanted to go make art. I know it sounds crazy.
Lisa: Often the things that cause us to make life changes happen in an instant.
Della: Yes. So I started to go make art, which I had never done before. I mean, I sold a piece at 13 years old, but I was never serious about it. I never thought of it as a career or took it seriously.
So I told Evelyn I’d go to her studio and within two weeks I did three pictures: two pastels and a monoprint. And I never made art like this before in my life, and they turned out! I was shocked that they actually turned out. So later, I shared a studio with Evelyn Terry and another artist. I would go in and work on Fridays. It was very therapeutic for me. And Evelyn would tell me, “This stuff ain’t therapeutic.” But it was therapeutic, because it happened at a bad time in my life when I was making this career change. I got injured on my job.
Lisa: What was your job before you went back to school?
Della: I was a clerk typist II in charge, and I did data entry and I also maintained the computers. I got injuries from typing too much, and my doctors told me to make a career change. That’s why I was going to be a psychologist.
And so Evelyn told me if I got fifty pieces of work, she’d get me a show. I got my first two shows by myself and people started seeing the work and wanting to buy the work, and that was never my intent. I was shocked. My first show I had was at this Café Mélange in Milwaukee, and the second was at the UWM Women’s Resource Center, but that’s basically how I got started.
Lisa: You’ve said that one of the reasons you didn’t pursue art earlier in life was that you felt like you didn’t really have anything to say when you were younger.
Della: I didn’t. And I think it’s important for artists to have something to say, and I didn’t. When I was younger, to be honest, I didn’t want to talk about myself. I didn’t have a particularly horrendous childhood, but my mother has schizophrenia and I was always afraid that somebody would discover that my mother was different. And I didn’t want to be different.
In middle school and high school, my brothers were all real smart in mathematics and science and I was always the underachiever, and it was kind of funny because even the white kids at school would say they hated my brothers because they knew all the answers and they got straight As. And I didn’t want to be different. I think a lot of girls go through this—they don’t want to be different. I didn’t want people not to like me. And a lot of girls are like that, and so they don’t reach their potential.
Lisa: You mentioned you started drawing, you did pastels, you made a monoprint, but now you’re known as a collage artist. How did that all start for you, the collage?
Della: Romare Bearden was one of my favorite artists, and I saw this artist named Beverly Nunes Ramsay, and she would do paper sculpture and she would make collages on paper, and I wanted to try that. And of course, too, I was always interested in repurposing materials. I would always, even as a child, see things differently—I’d see a magazine or paper or found objects and want to make something from them.
What was funny is that I was at this gallery, David Barnett, and I had to do some pieces for Northwest Mutual. I did some pastels, I did two collages for them. And the person who was going in between, she said that she didn’t think my collages were my strongest work. But the gallery sold both collages first thing. Then he gave me a solo show, and one of the collages she said wasn’t my strongest work—he had six offers!
So I guess the point is, from where I am now in my life, you can’t listen to other people, you can’t let other people define you, and you will always find a lot of people who will tell you what you should do.
Lisa: You refer to yourself as a storyteller. Tell us a little about the stories you tell with your collages and paintings—themes in your work, and where you draw your inspiration.
Della: I draw my inspiration from life. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer. And the stories I used to write when I was a kid were different from those of other kids. We had to write a story about Christmas. I wrote about Santa Claus having a nervous breakdown. I think I was about 13. We had an assignment in high school, it was about cowboys playing cards and one shot one, and everybody wrote that they were cheating, and I wrote about a sore loser, that’s why he shot him.
Later on, I took a course in creative writing, and we did a collaborative novel. And I didn’t want to write what everyone else wanted to write about. They wanted to do a story about a beautiful woman who was an actress; the guy was tall, dark, and handsome and he was a lawyer; and she wanted to find her adopted parents. My friend, who was also in her 30s at the time, we conspired to ruin the story. So her shock was that she was black, and to me that was no big shocker, but when I wrote, I wrote that actually she was born a man, her penis was actually cut off as a baby, and she was raised as a girl. She became this sex symbol, and this other actress found out and was going to blackmail her, and I wrote a masturbation scene that Evelyn Terry actually used in a video she did later.
But it was funny—some younger students got mad, but the instructor said, “Thank God!” She was bored to hell with the story until then. But I always did have an imagination. My mother used to tell me stories, but as I got older, I realized a lot of the stories she told were really part of her schizophrenic mind, and they weren’t necessarily true. And when I was a kid I used to make up movies in my head. Full movies—I had actual actors that I had playing the roles. I was also fascinated with Dr. Seuss and fairy tales, because a lot of fairy tales looked nice and sweet, and a lot of my work looks nice and sweet but it actually isn’t.
Lisa: Fairy tales are really dark, actually.
Della: Right, right, and really a lot of my work is dark.
Lisa: How do you think your voice is different today than it was twenty years ago when you first started? How have you grown and changed as an artist?
Della: I think experience, life experience, changes your voice. I don’t think when I was in my 20s I could have created the same stuff I am creating now. I noticed a lot of the stuff I created in my 40s was reflective of African religion; now in my 60s it’s more about my life experience, maybe something that happens in politics. I think growing older—or at least for me—you look at things differently. I know some people perceive me a different way than I actually am.
Lisa: So you think people may perceive you differently than you perceive yourself?
Della: Yes, with the exception of people who really know me, who talk with me and have conversations. But there are other people who perceive me as being distant, not caring. And I think part of it is because people have stereotypes of how they think women should act. They think women should be sacrificial lambs, and I’m not going to be a sacrificial lamb, because I want peace and cool.
I noticed that with a lot of women, particularly in my generation, when they get to be in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, people expect them to be caregivers, that you’re supposed to be this loving grandmother. A lot of the women I know, they have their own careers, a lot of them have their own businesses, but at the same time they’re taking care of family. And I think women get boxed in, like that’s supposed to be their prime duty, and you’re supposed to sacrifice yourself. And I don’t believe in that. I don’t think you have to sacrifice yourself.
Lisa: Is that something you’ve grow into, or have you always been like that?
Della: I’ve grown into that. Which I think is good; I think it’s really healthy. For me, it’s healthy; it helps keep me sane. Otherwise, I’d be totally insane.
Lisa: What advice would you give to older women who are considering pursuing a passion, trying something new, or changing their life in a significant way and are doubting themselves?
Della: I’d say first learn what you can about the field that you want to go into. Talk to other people who are successful in the field. Even when I was going to be a psychologist, I talked to other psychologists to fi
nd out what it was like. Find the people who are going to support you, and understand there are going to be people out there who are not going to support you.
Also, take the criticism that you need, discard the other criticism, and don’t let the criticism define you. Don’t let other people define you. You can define yourself. There’s always a reason for people to find that you can’t do things.
They say, “You’re too young, you’re too old.” You know, Grandma Moses started painting at 60, and I was reading about a couple of other artists who got their first museum show in their 80s and 90s.
I say, go ahead and do it. Life is not over until you have your last breath, and youth does not define you. A lot of the time people define women by their youth, their looks, and so forth—that doesn’t define you. Just do it. And believe, and find the people that support you. That’s what’s important. Find and build a support system.
was not able to live freely as a woman until late in her life. Emboldened with the freedom to be her true self, she went on to create some of the most memorable musical scores of late-twentieth-century television and was the first openly transgender woman to win an Emmy Award.
Angela Morley was born Walter Stott in 1924 in England. She had an early interest in big band music and mastered several instruments before leaving school at age 15 to play saxophone in a dance band. In the 1940s, she began to hone her skills as an arranger, working for BBC radio. She was primarily self-taught but worked steadily in radio, moving on to score films starting in the 1950s. Married and a father of two children, Angela had, nevertheless, endured a lifelong struggle with gender identity. It wasn’t until her second marriage in 1970 that she found the support to live her life as a woman. In 1972, at age 48, she had sex reassignment surgery and changed her name to Angela Morley.