User:Ladybelle Fiske

I exist. My real name is Isabella Fiske McFarlin and I live at Quarry Hill Creative Center.

I am the daughter of Irving Fiske, writer, speaker, co-creator of Quarry Hill Creative Center and "anti-guru", and of Barbara Hall Fiske Calhoun, painter and cartoonist, also a co-creator of Quarry Hill Creative Center. I was born on August 12, 1950, am a writer and occasional artist, and do what I can to continue the creation of this mountainous artist's center and alternative lifestyle (the oldest in VT)for free-thinkers in Rochester, VT.

In NYC in the 1960s, when my parents had a Gallery (Gallery Gwen), I met many of the best of the underground cartoonists such as R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman (whose girlfriend I was for several years), Trina Robbins, Kim Deitch, Spain, Jay Lynch and others. Later on, they and I and friends at Quarry Hill created rubber stamps of their designs through the Top Drawer Rubber Stamp Company in [[Hancock, VT.] I never attended public school. The first time I attended a formal school was when I went to Vermont College starting in 2000 or so. I earned a degree there in Creative Writing and Children's Psychology. I had also gone to several writer's retreats, including the (1997) UVM Summer Writer's Program where I studied with Bill Roorbach, then to Bread Loaf Writer's Retreat twice, once, I believe, in 1999 and once in about 2003. The 2nd time was on a scholarship partially provided by the VT Arts Council of Vermont. I won a Full Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in 1999 and studied there in 1999=2000 with Terry Tempest Williams (whom I also worked with the 2nd time at Bread Loaf). The first time I studied with Scott Russell Sanders, among others.

One of the finest teachers I have ever had, though, was my father,Irving Fiske. He was a proponent of Aristotelian plot and form, and I learned much from him as a child and as an adult.

--Ladybelle Fiske (talk) 19:49, 16 November 2014 (UTC)