Beware of telling Pamela Hastings what you would go out and do, if you just had the nerve.
“Do it!” she’s likely to say, after listening carefully to your idea.
Five years ago, Hastings took her own leap. At 58, she was divorced and living in Saugerties, N.Y., with a well-paying job and a relationship that was, in a word, “OK.”
But “I realized I was angry a lot of the time,” she recalled.
Hastings was pouring energy into a relationship that wasn’t giving it back. An artist since she was a girl, she wanted to instead put her energy into making new kinds of art. Meantime, she tended to blame her partner for her unhappiness.
So, at last, “I decided to make a move,” all the way to the opposite corner of the country, to the Olympic Peninsula. Hastings had relatives in the Seattle area, and when she learned about Port Angeles — a town about the size of Saugerties — she liked the looks of the place. Via the Internet, she landed both a job at Olympic Medical Center Home Health and a house to rent.
An occupational therapist by profession, Hastings is also a dollmaker — and one who takes extreme pleasure in teaching other women how to make their own wild creatures out of sticks and scraps. In workshops online and physical, she shows how assembling a doll, or a quilt, or anything you want, is a way to tell your story, and fiercely.
Today Hastings’ life is filled with art, friends, visits from family and her job as an occupational therapist for people with shoulder, arm and hand injuries.
She is the author of three books, including the self-published Dollmaking As a Transformative Process, and this fall’s Hot Flash! A Celebration, a collection of 50 personal essays by women she knows around the world, thanks to workshops, mutual friends and Facebook.
How does making a doll transform? It all has to do with personal symbols — and sticks.
You can make a doll representing yourself, or someone in your life, or a fear, a hope or a healing process. It’s like painting, only it’s three-dimensional and can be less intimidating.
In workshops, “I have people use forms as simple as possible: a bundle of sticks, or a very basic fabric shape, so they don’t get bogged down in creation but can let their subconscious come through,” Hastings said.
“People throughout history have used icons to represent what they wanted or what they were afraid of,” she added. “We haven’t changed all that much in our minds and feelings from our ancestors.”
Hastings’ latest book has a fiery-looking doll on its pink cover. But Hot Flash! isn’t only about that much-discussed sign of menopause.
It’s a trove of women’s true stories — illustrated with their artwork — about love, struggle, loss and rejuvenation. It turns out that “hot flash” can also mean a burst of creativity, and a flash of courage to try something new.
Carol Feierabend is one of many who embraced her hot flash: a desire for a big change after her marriage had ended. In May 2001 she sold her business and said goodbye to Vermont, where she had lived for 28 years, and accepted a job teaching English in Taiwan.
“Perhaps the biggest spur to my leaving was my demented fascination with watching for my husband’s car at the home of his new ‘friend,’ a house that I passed daily on my drive to work,” Feierabend writes. “That may not be the best reason to embark on an adventure in a foreign country, but initially it was my strongest motive.
“Even at the age of 61, I thought it was within my grasp . . . to build a new life for myself in a foreign country.”
She did just that, stumbling and plunging ahead despite fear and lack of Mandarin Chinese vocabulary. Feierabend stayed five years, teaching, eating the strange foods, making friends and learning the language.
“Almost every moment,” she writes, “I was as wide awake and alive as I have ever felt.”
The book also looks full into the face of suffering, in essays such as the one by Anna Wiancko Chasman of Joyce. In a piece titled
“The Phoenix and the Fire,” Chasman writes of her daughter Erica, who died of cancer at 16.
Enduring this, for Chasman, was akin to walking through scorching flames, to being transformed like kiln-fired clay.
On the day Erica died, and as Chasman held her daughter one last time, a lark landed on the sunlit window ledge of her room. The bird sang, and kept singing for nearly 20 minutes.
“A truth resonated inside me: This was Erica, singing of rebirth and eternity,” her mother writes.
Chasman, now an art therapist, lives in a house she and her husband, Paul, built on Freshwater Bay; it has a studio where she works with clay and teaches classes.
Other essayists include Kathy Dexter of Port Townsend, who writes: “Art has always been a big thing to me. The folks that I lived around always encouraged me to try new things and felt that ‘everything is art’ and ‘we are all artists. It is not a thing learned in school, it is a thing inside of us all.'” To Dexter, “hot flash” means “another page turning in this book of my life, another adventure . . . and this I embrace.”
Gloria Skovronsky of Sequim is here, too, reflecting on how she realized her dream of becoming an artist: “by sheer strength of will, by ignoring family opinions and by never giving up.”
A former museum curator and university administrator, she met Hastings a few years ago in a dollmaking workshop.
“She was so inventive and prepared; she brought us piles of beautiful paper, skeins of thread, broken branches to use as arms and legs. I was enthralled,” Skovronsky recalled.
These days Hastings is reveling in her multifaceted life. She’s an occupational therapist at McGovern Therapy Specialists in Port Angeles; she’s creating a 9 ½-foot-tall doll named “Woman’s Work” in her living room, among other projects. And Hot Flash! is selling, well, like hotcakes.
The beauty of this book, to Hastings, is that it reveals the everyday heroism of women. She has been heartened by the stories of grace under fire, and humor under pressure. Women, Hastings said, “should be proud and happy as much as possible.”
She knows, of course, that this is easier said than done.
“There is so much horrible stuff happening in the world,” she said. “It’s good to reach out and connect.”
