Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Bookmark/ A Freewheelin' Time

This week's bookmark was chosen for a sad reason—the passing of its author Suze Rotolo. Susan, as those of us in the book arts community knew her, was a book artist. We were in several exhibits together and met some years ago at the Center for Book Arts in New York. Although I knew her only briefly, I felt an artistic kinship. When I read her book, I was filled with admiration for her as a person and a creative woman. Here's a previous blog post I wrote when the book came out:

Susan Rotolo is a book artist who was Bob Dylan's girlfriend in the early 60s when she was know as Suze Rotolo. She has written a warm and generous memoir about those days called A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. While it is very much about a time and place and a certain group of people, there is much that speaks to the journey of growing up and understanding one's place in the world as a woman, an artist, and a human being. She concludes the book by saying "The creative spirit finds a way."


Susan's Book work

NY Times obituary

Guardian obituary (I think this is most complete)

Rolling Stone remembrance (by a friend and more a sense of her as a person)

Her own voice on Fresh Air with Terry Gross

1 comment:

Brett said...

I became fascinated about the Greenwich Village at that time. She did a wonderful job describing ground zero of the folk scene. I went on and read The Mayor of McDougall Street, by Dave Van Ronk.

She did a powerful thing of becoming a successful artist in her own right, getting out from under Dylan's shadow. A warm and bright light has been extinguished. I was saddened to hear of her passing.