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Archive for the ‘Ilana Simons’ Category

Woolf on a plate and on a couch

Posted in art, art exhibits, books, events, Ilana Simons, tagged , , on Sunday 16 January 2011| 2 Comments »

Ilana Simons' Woolf painting as it appears on Flickr

Ilana Simons, sent out an invite to a Jan. 14 gallery opening in Chelsea featuring the work of 11 visual artists and her own stitching series, “Let Me Self Soothe Without Self-Harm.”

I live too far away to attend, but I’m wondering if any Blogging Woolf readers stopped by last Friday. The exhibit included Simons’ most recent painting of Woolf.

Simons has painted Woolf before. On paper plates, in fact. Two Woolf portraits are included in Simons’ collection of 50 portraits of authors on plates, which she created one summer using 99-cent tubs of acrylics.

A literature professor and the author of  A Life of One’s Own: A Guide to Better Living Through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf (2007), Simons also writes weekly for the Barnes and Noble Unabashedly Bookish blog.

Writing and art are not Simons’ only interests. She is a trained therapist and writes the Literary Mind blog for Psychology Today.  Simons mentions Woolf in some of her posts. “Painting Might Help You Find Flow” and “A Therapist Should be a Good Storyteller” are two I noticed.

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Virginia Woolf as storytelling therapist

Posted in Ilana Simons, Virginia Woolf, tagged , on Thursday 22 July 2010| 6 Comments »

A Life of One’s OwnA while back, Virginia Woolf was my therapist. At least I thought it was Woolf. But maybe it was really Ilana Simons.

My confusion came from the fact that I was immersed in the Woolfian therapy found in Simons’  A Life of One’s Own: A Guide to Better Living Through the Wit and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf.

Thanks to kind friends who know what I like, I had two copies. That meant I was able to sneak in a dose of therapy whether I was upstairs or down, reading in bed or ensconced in my favorite chair.

And I found myself applying the wise words contained within — whether they were Woolf’s own or Simons’ interpretation of them — to my daily life.

When I felt annoyed by my husband, I remembered Simons’ discussion of the wisdom of Mrs. Ramsay, for example.

Now Simons has an interesting post on the Psychology Today blog about the benefits storytelling has for therapy. As she puts it, both literature and psychology must “try to organize the mess of human emotion and motivation into a narrative” and both “[w]riters and therapists need to be good storytellers, because they have to build stories that organize emotion.”

In her piece, she credits several writers, including Woolf, for giving her “new images or narratives to live by.” In the case of Woolf, Simons says the author helped reframe her feminist thinking and stand her ground as a strong woman.

Perhaps it is this ability to help us think differently about some aspect of our daily lives that has helped Woolf earn her iconic status.

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