Tracy Hamon took a trip to the Reid-Thompson Public Library on Feb. 20 to share her poetry with Humboldt readers.
She read from two of her books of poetry, including (Interruptions) in Glass and Red Curls, as well as her current collection of poetry that has yet to be published.
This wide range of writing worked to show her evolution as an author, says Hamon, from showing how she was writing from one book to another and then how she is writing for her fourth book.
Hamon’s writing in her first and second collections are more personal, while her third book was her Master’s thesis about the life of Austrian artist Egon Schiele and his mistress/model Valerie Neuzil.
While there is not a lot of history available on Neuzil, Hamon wanted to explore her life and her relationship with Schiele, who first hired her as a model before taking her for a mistress.
“I kept thinking that she had to have some creative element to her. From what I’ve been reading, she was only 14 when they started their relationship.”
Hamon wanted to explore how Neuzil felt about her relationship, because how would a 14-year-old in the end of the 19th century feels about a relationship with an eccentric and wild painter, amused Hamon.
“Would she have loved him, did she love him? Because there was so little written about her, it just sparked my imagination. I just kept asking all these questions.”
Both Neuzil and Schiele, including his wife and unborn child, would die in 1917 from the Spanish Flu, Neuzil while she was a nurse at a hospital.
Just like Hamon, Neuzil also had red curly hair, which Hamon also saw as a way to connect with Neuzil.
Hair is the subject of Hamon’s next collection of poetry since she was a barber before following her passion she had for writing.
After dropping out of journalism, Hamon’s family was worried that she would become a wild child, she says. When her aunt’s friend got her into hairstyling, Hamon says she did not mind doing it but the dream of writing was still with her.
“I came to writing fast and hard in my 30s because then boom, I’m going to still do it and I did. I just didn’t do the genre that I thought I was going to do.”
While Hamon’s curly red hair gets into everything, both literally and figuratively, obsession with hair is everywhere, she says, with appearance being an obsession with the majority of people.
Hair throughout biblical stories has caused problems for many women, including Delilah, Joan of Arc, and other characters with questionable reputations.
Inspired by wood cut poetry of powerful biblical women, Hamon wanted to write her own interpretations of their stories, as well as other hair inspired stories, including one where she is barbering at St. Peter’s Abbey.
