Hanna’s short first book of essays, Bedsores and Bliss, has been very well received. Unfortunately it has been a bit difficult to distribute outside the US. The eBook helped. And now, at last…

The audiobook edition of Bedsores and Bliss is now available. We love this production—beautifully performed by famed South African actor Erica Wessels, with theme music some of you will recognize: “Most Beautiful Sky,” written by Jennifer Levenhagen, arranged by Annie Zylstra, and performed by Lisa Littlebird.

Curious what it’s like? Here is an excerpt from the audiobook.

Folks who’ve seen Hanna’s art have been asking how they can get prints. Also, Hanna’s writing contains many memorable short passages, suitable for clipping out and holding onto. So these seemed like a natural: folding cards, blank inside, with a painting from Hanna on the front and words from Hanna on the back. Fifteen gorgeous “greeting cards.”

Well, they look like greeting cards. But they don’t say “happy birthday” or “get well.” They carry invitations, blessings, provocations, fresh ways of seeing ourselves and the world. The art is great. The words make everything deeper, or higher or wider, or all three.

Some examples

How to order?
You can order Hanna’s cards and books online: okaythen.net/shop, or click the button below. If you click on any card, you’ll see there’s a way to see both the art and the writing on the back in more details.

For folks outside the US, I am sorry that shipping costs are so ridiculously high. I can’t find a better way to get books and cards to you, but I promise I’ll keep looking.

One more thing. The shop is brand new. Please let me know about quirks and difficulties.

Throughout her involvement with Careforce, Maranie Staab has been documenting life at The Oasis (Hanna’s house) and beyond. She makes photographs, and pairs them with Hanna’s words so that each amplifies the other.

• You can see Maranie’s Careforce captures on her Instagram feed, or on Facebook. And she has a newsletter, and we repost on Hanna’s Facebook page as well. (Though I’ve had a hard time integrating Instagram into the Okay Then site–working on it!–this will always be the go-to place for things Hanna.)

• This work will be featured in the inaugural issue of Working Assumptions Magazine this Fall. A fitting place for it—Working Assumptions describes itself as “a publisher of visual stories that provide insight into the labor and complexities of the give-and-take of family and caregiving in America.”

• The work is on the wall at a gallery here in Pittsburgh. Maranie combined Hanna’s words with her photographs, as one of the four artists featured in Tender Tuirse, an exhibition of four artists’ work all related to the theme of Care. It’s at the Community College of Allegheny County, in partnership with their Nursing Program.

Want to see the exhibition? Here, I’ll give you a tour….

Words are the life of our love

So there we are, fellow sailors on these seas. Creating, together, “in the furnace of this world.” What else?

This week I had lovely correspondence with James Heaney, one of Hanna’s Irish writing mentors. The drift of the conversation led me to bring up the poet Gregory Orr. He’s still on my mind, so I’ll bring him up to you now.

Orr writes into this notion that there is a thing called “The Book,” which is a giant invisible anthology that contains all the songs and poems ever written. He says, “They’re there to sustain us. Their purpose is to praise The Beloved and resurrect The Beloved.” And in “Beloved” he has another hard-working abstraction—a placeholder for all the people, all the beings and places with which we have a loving relationship. “This is my religion,” he says. “We live in this mystery of love and death and being a body in time. And we live in the mystery of language and what it can do.” Some of his poems are invitations, exhortations for us to add to the book.

I often think of Orr when I think of Hanna in her wheelchair, unable to move, dependent on others, using an inefficient interface to a machine that tracks her gaze, all so she can add to “The Book That Is The Body of The Beloved.” And I am visited again by gratitude and inspiration.

Here is one of Orr’s invitations to add to The Book.

This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.
No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.

No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.
No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.

That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.

. . . . .
Peace, peace.
Marc