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Stirling Davenport's Studio
Category:
Memoir
Publisher: Independently Published
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 387
Copyright: 12/21/2025
ISBN-13: 9798275277159
Price: $4.50 (eBook)
This memoir reveals the journey of an unwed mother of a biracial son, from the divided city of St. Louis in 1971, to Boston, Connecticut, New York, and eventually Tibet. True love brings tragedy, loss and struggle, while following a mystical path and exploring what it means to be an artist and mother.
When passionate young Susan meets Leon, she falls hard. An older, charismatic artist, he's unlike anyone she's ever known. One unplanned pregnancy later, and she's the single parent of an interracial son in the deeply divided society of 1970s St. Louis.
Fleeing to Boston to join Leon, she falls into a head-spinning world of drugs and art, where he is at the center, and her own identity is slipping away. Two near-death experiences challenge her sanity and survival.
Susan's story is a map through the territory of mystic experience and everyday life. Her struggle to define herself as a creative woman will take her across the world and into the true meaning of love.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
Fallen Leaves
I woke up in the hospital, a tube attached to my hand. Through the haze of morphine, I asked myself, why am I not dead?
Instead of a green-walled Catholic hospital, I envisioned a castle around me, a huge Medieval keep, with a blazing fireplace and trestle tables. And I – a wounded hero – on a bed of sheepskin.
Ah, morphine. I must have spent a few days rolling in and out of a blessed fog, not needing to know where I was, and more so – who I was.
The day they took me off the drug, I was scared. When I closed my eyes, there were no colors. No images. No kaleidoscopes, even when I pressed my fingers to my eyeballs. I had never known a black-and-white world.
I was now in a spare private room. I saw a tray table on a swivel arm, visitor chairs, and a bathroom. One window looked out to the parking lot, and a lone oak tree. It was October in Boston, and the tree was starting to shed its leaves.
Slowly, I sat up in bed, in a white cotton hospital gown printed with blue sprigs of flowers.
I touched the cast on my left arm where my elbow had broken. I pulled up my gown to see a line of stitches on my midriff where I’d been told my torn liver had been repaired. The skin was puckered and red, the incision sore.
Slowly I slid off the bed and hobbled to the bathroom, needing to look in the mirror.
Surely my face was the same, the beauty on which I depended. Like morphine. The more you looked at me, the deeper I pulled you in with my compassionate eyes and sweet smile.
I gasped when I saw my swollen face, no longer symmetrical. One high cheekbone, one deep brown eye still the same. The other side was that of a stranger, the drooping eyelid with its stitches, the slightly lowered cheekbone that had been broken.
My mouth was worse. I’d broken my jaw and lost six front teeth. Now there was a hard, black silence where they had been. No sexy gap between the two front ones. I saw a small, healing cut on my lower lip. A scar left by stitches on my chin.
Ruined at the age of twenty-six. I grabbed onto the sink to keep my balance.
This is how Leon had seen me in the ICU. Could he still love me looking like this?
Why did I do it? Why am I alive? The questions batted at me like moths against a screen door, blocked from the light. Did I flunk a cosmic test? A shroud of failure settled around my shoulders. Answers were hidden in the mud of guilt filling my belly.
I’d taken the two-story leap to land on the sidewalk in a puddle of blood and bone. The doctors assumed it was a suicide gone wrong. Maybe some of Leon’s friends. Probably my parents, too.
The truth was, I hadn’t been trying to die.
I spoke to my reflection in the mirror. “Who are you?”
A tear squeezed out as I spoke without those six front teeth.
“A mystic.”
Really? Was a failed mystic still a mystic?
Either way, it was a lonely path indeed. With or without LSD. It was 1973 and hallucinogens were a common part of life in Boston – at least, my life. How could I explain my leap of faith? Especially to myself.
I went back and crawled into bed, suddenly exhausted. Everything was harder with my arm in a cast.
Lying in a cocoon of failure, I closed my eyes and begged my spirit guides to return my visions.
When the nurse came in to brush my hair, she said, “Your parents are coming to visit you soon.”
I cringed. They would be driving from Connecticut.
“Won’t that be nice?” she asked.
I wanted to say, No. Tell them not to come. But I heaved a big sigh and nodded.
They would see my broken body and the remnants of my injured psyche. They could add nothing to the mountain of shame I already felt.
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