CHAPTER 5 - I THINK THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED

It's September 1973. Barbara Hammer and Terry Anderson have parted ways, and are back at their respective schools: Barbara at San Francisco State University, Terry at the University of British Columbia. The vibrations of their Summer tryst – an uncertainty for the future – reverberate in letters to each other. 

In this chapter of New Friend, we follow the days, weeks, months, and years after the photographs, through the trials and tribulations of being a lesbian mother in the 1970s, waning interest in lesbian feminism, and the beauty and calamity in a relationship that unfolds over distance.

Listener discretion: This episode contains themes of addiction, illness and assisted dying.

New Friend is a five-part radio documentary exploring the story behind a series of photographs taken by the artist and experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer. The photographs were taken over one weekend in August 1973, on Hornby Island, Ja-Dai-Aich, in the Salish Sea.

Thank you to all of those who shared their stories, memories, and voices for the purposes of this project.

In this chapter, you heard the following voices (in order of appearance):

• Barbara Hammer
• Florrie Burke
• Derek Anderson
• Andrew Durbin
• Mark Street
• The rocks, plants, trees, wind, and water of Hornby Island Ja-Dai-Aich.
• Sounds from Vancouver, BC, San Francisco and Berkeley, California, all courtesy of Radio Aporee, Creative Commons. These recordings were made on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ​ (Tsleil-Waututh), and the Ohlone.
• Barbara Hammer and Terry Anderson, through their diary entries and written correspondence, are voiced by Martha Ross.
• In this chapter, you heard excerpts from Barbara Hammer’s films Dyketactics and Jane Brakhage (both 1974), Tender Fictions (1996), B-Roll from I Was I Am (1973), and previously unpublished footage from Marilyn Frasca and Barbara Hammer go Clamming in the Northwest / Barbara Mediates out loud on leaving and staying in the Pacific Northwest, 1988 March 4 (1988), part of the Barbara Hammer papers at The Beinecke Library of Rare Books. You also heard an excerpt from an Oral History with Barbara Hammer, recorded for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art by Svetlana Kitto (2018).

Credits:

• Hosted by Bitsy Knox.
• Production, research, script and sound design by Bitsy Knox.
• Mixing and mastering by Robert Steenkamer. 
• New Friend was originally aired on Cashmere Radio Berlin and 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio.
• Cover image courtesy of The Estate of Barbara Hammer.
• New Friend is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Thank you to:

• The Estate of Barbara Hammer
• Hornby Island Community Archives
• Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
• Cashmere Radio, Berlin
• 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio
• KOW, Berlin
• Company Gallery, New York City
• Florrie Burke
• Louky Keijsers Koning 
• Martha Ross
• Derek Anderson
• Rebecca Dunne
• Emma Walter
• Emily Harrison
• All beings, human and more-than-human, of Hornby Island, Ja-Dai-Aich, and its surrounding waters—where I am a part-time, uninvited guest on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral land of the K'omoks First Nation, the Eitsen, Pentlach, Sasitla and Sahtloot peoples.

Go here to learn more about the work of Barbara Hammer, including upcoming screenings and events.

Bitsy Knox is an artist, editor, radio producer and writer. She grew up on the unceded and ancestral territory of hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver, Canada. She is based in Berlin, Germany. Follow her on Instagram here.

For more information, and to support independent community radio, visit Cashmere Radio and 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

This chapter of New Friend contains themes of addiction, illness, and assisted dying. Listener discretion is advised.

SPEAKER_07 0:09

This is my comfort, my comfort. This is my mother, my mother. These are the children too happy not to have, to have, to have.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Chapter five. I think this is what happened.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

On trying not to become a lesbian mother, don't you know? I am consumed by you, and no form makes sense. You've blown me away. My skeleton, dry ribbed stem, my leafy one. You haunt my stomach. I eat chocolate to coat the wound, but you break through laughing and chanting and writing me poems calling back, come back. I try to hold back. I am afraid. What if it failed? Could I come back here then? I nearly didn't register for school today, nearly didn't. Everything's getting fuzzy.

SPEAKER_03 1:24

Barbara definitely never wanted children. That was not a dash dream or anything like that. No way ever. Um she talked to me about being in the late 60s when she was married to her husband. Um, they were living in a kind of communional arrangement, and I think there was some for some reason Barbara worked in the the daycare, but I remember she really disliked it. Um and I don't think, yeah, I don't think Barbara, I don't think she disliked children, but I don't think they they occupied no special place in her mythology, I'll put it that way. And whether that's external or internal. She just that did not seem to factor into her her thinking at all.

SPEAKER_02 2:15

Once I was with Joan as a as a about to be a senior in high school, and yeah, Joan kind of said, if it hadn't been for you, Terry would have been a major author, artist. Um you know, and I can't help but feel a little bit guilty about that as a high school kid when you're when somebody tells you that, but it also helped me understand her potential. Like Terry liked to have people around her who challenged her and who respected her intellectually, and so it it it makes total sense that this is how the relationship with Barbara panned out. That you know it was intense, they influenced each other tremendously but in the end, you know.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

It's mid-September. Things aren't going well. Barbara too is back at film school in San Francisco. She starts a new diary then. On the inside front cover, she tapes a picture of Catherine Cornell as Joan of Arc on the facing page. The location of the diary moves from Berkeley, the apartment that Maria Del Drago and Kate Millette had let Barbara stay in for a semester, to San Francisco, Oak Street, Dolores Street. In the first entry, on September 15th, Barbara jots down reshoot notes for X, and then ideas for new films. The Lesbian Family, with her and another woman getting it on while a third woman is washing dishes in the kitchen. Another idea simply reads Script a film for the country, then go live there. Meanwhile, in Vancouver.

SPEAKER_02 4:40

We began the school year in Vancouver. That's when she meets Barbara, and we live in Vancouver. Um is unable to fund the second semester and is. I mean, we are broke.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Terry sends Barbara a letter of exasperation. It's on the familiar yellow legal pad. Terry's quarreling with herself. The situation just isn't working. The course isn't what she wants. She can't afford to be a full-time student and take care of Derek and Valerie. She's considering switching programs. There's a job in Campbell River, just north of Hornby Island, that she's heard of. But no, it's too far. Too straight. Should she stay on course at UBC or take up Barbara's proposal for her to move back to California and live with Barbara's grandmother and start a film distribution company? Terry's being practical, methodical. She needs to be. There's no room for error here, for dallying or indecision. She approaches her relationship with Barbara with the same straightforward Terry practicality. She's focusing on the possibility of their future together. She has everything for them in sets of three or four, except for a set of dishes and glasses.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

On September 6th, you propose I come there, an agent of film distribution company. Live with your grandmother and the occasional presence of you. It makes me confused and frustrated and therefore briefly angry. I can't hold it all at once, not in the confused state I'm already in. We will find a way to be together, and it will be soon, but we can't even begin the groundwork tilling necessary for that. If you don't settle down, one of us has to got to be real. Be sensible. In any case, I'll be here to December. I would not think of moving the kids now. It would be hard to justify it later unless I had a job or the assurance that something like the film distribution would go. I found the idea exciting. Yes, I could do that. Yes, I'd like that. Maybe it would work. Then got off on expanding the possibilities to include musicians, poets, organizers, a clearinghouse for a matrix of networks, resources for the right brain renaissance. My PR, managerial bureaucratic skills could be used after all. So either be serious or drop it. Remember, I've got no cushion or anything to fall back on, and I don't like welfare. I don't doubt you, but I have to remember that's a possibility in making any decisions, or else you could do me in, or at least make it hard going indeed. It is now Wednesday night, and I'm still trying to find a way through this thing to be a decision. I have spent much time with myself, and I can't get it yet.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

It's October 4th. Barbara is having dinner with her sometime lover, Sarah. They talk about Terry, and Barbara mentions her father, Johnny Hammer, the emotions that she feels for both of them. The same sinking pressure.

SPEAKER_09 8:25

One time I hear him calling from his bed for a gun to blow his brains out. He says he has a migraine. Mother empties bottles of beer down the kitchen sink.

SPEAKER_11 8:38

She was angry at her father for many years, really angry at him. Um, and like me, she felt like she was the kid in charge. And you know, she had that scene of pouring the the liquor down the sink, I think, in Tender Fictions and talking about measuring what's in the bottle and stuff like that. And I used to do those things too. Um and she became protective of her mother and was really glad when they split up. But I think it had a big influence on her.

SPEAKER_00 9:15

And Terry, does Barbara see her father or does she see a version of herself that she could have been and never wanted to be, or still could be that day? Terry writes Barbara a long letter.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

Dear Madame, there are seven children in the sun porch painting, drinking Kool-Aid, eating crackers, and getting glue in their hair. The inside clothesline across the kitchen is full with her drying papers, rock music on the radio, moving their arms. Kids are fine when there's things for them to do and an adult in the background to handle some things, and when there's several rather than one or two. Yesterday three other children went with us to Lighthouse Park. I sat in the sun, mused, wrote, looked, napped while they climbed the bluffs and found their caves, came back to eat and were off again. There has been sun for four days. Yes, it is a beautiful place with the sun. And often I've known in the past four days that if you were here, you would not be unhappy with many of the things that are around. There's a new kind of gauge in my days. Would she like that? Would that annoy her? What would she do with that? How does she find what else she needs? I think this may be what has happened. I could not cut loose all at once. I needed to believe that I was getting on with whatever by going to school, and it was the only way I could get up here anyway. Kind of like an elaborate masquerade, which I could not, would not totally admit was just that. I was even sincere in pretending or trying to pull it off, and would have if there hadn't been so many things that were going so wrong. In the margins, there's a handwritten note. Between the decision and the new situation came you, and that has changed many things, it would seem. You always on the periphery whispering, no, don't. Now I am seeing this as a thing I did to throw me up against myself. The Jessica mind knowing what if, not how, or where yet. Money from wits, massage, cutting back lots, whatever I can drum up that won't lock me into eight hours per day. For two to three months I can do this here.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

Terry's two sides, the impulsive Jessica and the practical Terry may be battling, but concretely, Terry and her children are struggling financially. They can't quite pay the rent. They can barely afford groceries. Her pursuit of independence from middle-class married life is under threat. And her landlord is bearing down on her.

SPEAKER_02 12:42

Um, and calling her terrible names and her crying for Terry. Um that was a humiliating moment. Um, a series of moments, actually, it's happened more than once. And um and that and she was really upset that I had to witness it.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Terry's practicality swirls on the next page.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

I will come wherever you are or want to be under the following conditions. Number one, a six-month contract that if you move out, you'll either help me find someone else to pay rent or continue to pay it yourself. Number two, or find me a workable and healthy communal arrangement with women and children, or males too, I suppose if it's okay, one with some chance of lasting. I would pay $100 a month until I could find a way to make a working contribution, if you don't want to do it together with me immediately. Number three, or you can find me an apprenticeship in radio, TV, uh, printing, or an alternative school, community, collective teaching, and a school for the kids, a place to live in exchange, etc. No money is okay, but would want something with some witty feminists, not idologues, maybe a place to live in exchange for shitwork while learning. Number four, or if we knew enough yet, $2,000 towards buying a few acres or a house out close enough for your work, but far enough away for some different rhythms. If I got something, as in three, I could live in the city if it were not right in the midst of the disintegrative cutting edge. But city hideaways generally cost lots. By selling wet stuff I then wouldn't be able to put money in from the film, I could afford that inches of the end of the shape.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

A handwritten note on the last page mentions a recently published Village Voice article by the feminist writer Vivian Gornig. Vast internal changes must occur in women in which old responses, old habits, old emotional convictions are examined under a new light, the light of consciousness. A new kind of journey into the interior must be taken, one in which the terms of internal conflict are redefined. It is a journey of unimaginable pain and loneliness, this journey, a battle all the way, one in which the same inch of emotional ground must be fought for over and over, alone and without allies, the only soldier in the army of the struggling self. But on the other side lies freedom, self-possession.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Since you left, Gornack's article on female sensibility has been somewhere in piles of papers. Last night I found it. I have just reread it sitting in the cafeteria at UBC as I wait the processing of my withdrawal. It is crucial to me now. Thank you, Barbara Hammer, for you for our time for the intersections. Harry.

SPEAKER_02 16:54

My hunch is that she'd figured out that she couldn't afford to go back for the second semester. I don't I don't know when UBC's whether they're on semesters or trimesters or whatever, but the next quarter, the next term. Um you know, presumably that would have started sometime in January.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

In San Francisco, Barbara is having trouble sleeping. She hasn't slept for two or three nights, and it's two or three in the morning now. She started to take an anti-anxiety medication, Librium. But nobody thinks it's a very good idea. She sees Maria Del Drago, Kate Millette's girlfriend, regularly, and they discuss Kate Millette's health and mental state. Barbara's studying. She writes herself commands. Demoralize and ask a lesbian to dinner this week. Terry calls after 1 a.m.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Terry has a smile in her voice and an anger gurgles from the past. Telephone police. Me laughing down the rod on Librium. She tells me to stop taking Librium so I can sleep.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

Long distance phone calls were extremely expensive in the 1970s. Calls, if they were made at all, were usually kept brief. People sent letters or even voice recordings instead. But Terry and Barbara had been speaking into the night several nights in a row, having found a way around the fees. And then a letter arrives from Terry on October the 4th.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

Oh Christ, that was bad. There he was, a BC TAL detective and a cop beside him. Charge? Theft defrauding the company. To be booked, stay in jail overnight, enter plea tomorrow. Three months in jail. Deportation. So I, with my back to the wall, went into the vulnerable, weak female, mother of two children. Never before, never again. After 45 minutes of cooperating, they don't have your name, just Susan Hollidays, but do have the false credit card number. Of course, they have all the information on me and will probably try to charge me with that call bill to the private number. But don't know how they can prove it, except circumstantially, if it was to the same pay phone there. But rather than fight it, get a lawyer, etc., I'd probably admit it and pay the call. They both took me to my bank to get the money. Paid the call. $36.40. Ah. I am sitting in a restaurant, drinking a beer, feeling fortunate. They made me feel irresponsible about the chances I was taking with the children. I suppose they were reported to immigration. They have deported 78 since July on long-distance charges in Vancouver. So that ends that possibility of communicating. I got a grand scare. Considered trying to run, but wouldn't have made it. So glad now the way it worked out. Fire, theft, power winds, hallucinations, madness of despair, ecstasy, madness of fantasy, one thousand mile journeys, lifetimes of dreams and possibilities, of chances never taken before.

SPEAKER_02 21:11

I mean, part of the divorce with my father um was that he could have made her stay in California. Right. Uh that we were allowed to leave the state was that was just his generosity. Legally, he could have kept us in California. So if she had been arrested, he would have taken custody again. And you know, it wouldn't have just been the crisis of a small jail term or something, it would have meant she would have lost us.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Did Barbara realize what kind of risks Terry was taking for their relationship? With one thousand miles between them? Was Terry just becoming nearly symbolic? In her diary, Barbara jots down an idea for a novella about a woman with many sides, always trying to please the woman's movement. Barbara is tired of the women's movement. Is she tiring of Terry too? Barbara worries that she's out of touch with her sense of empathy and solidarity. Meanwhile, Barbara's met a new woman, Ray Lynn. On October the 16th, she writes in her diary that she's received something from Terry. Terry's Witch's Brew is fifteen pages of oscillating emotions, fears, anger, tenderness, rationalizations, bleeding. It's clear that Terry feels like she might be losing Barbara. She begins with a poem. An onanistic eulogy for one thousand miles. It's maybe the most ambitious of all of Terry's writing that I've seen, dipping and lumbering and swirling across the page.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

Keeping in touch Onanistic eulogy for a thousand miles Death's lens. The anemones tentacles begin to close around the hollow of my longing slowly. At first the empty space is rimmed flickers of promised synapse.

SPEAKER_05 25:05

The cave, a crater's mouth, whose rim begins to run down, crumble rush falling on itself.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

The black holes so dense not mind or light, or you can find the way a maelstrom sucking time. Collapse space dissolve the final break in waves across my memories.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

On another page, there's a thread. A last ditch effort, maybe. A poem of fierce or forced pride.

SPEAKER_01 26:46

Watch me not care, baby. Hey, better check what you're losing before you find it missing. Cuz I'm on my way out from under you. And I may take the plug with me when I go wryly smiling, cause it's either me or nowhere, baby. And you need me, and now it may be me or you. Without me, you'll be hopelessly lost, and without you, I'll have lost hope. So you'd better get me there, or you'd better get yourself here and check it out again, and you're going to sweat it hard for a couple of days with me at it, because otherwise, I'm getting out. Though still might see you at Christmas, just to get even. By then it will be cold.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

Had Barbara really said keep in touch, like two friends at the end of summer camp? As her letter progresses, Terry's fury and her threats to get even slowly soften. She works through poems, info, queries of the kind she described in her postcard upon landing in Vancouver two months prior. She is exhaling the idea of a continuation of their affair. Even as she breathes it in, she ends with a love bone. She writes it out by hand at first, but scratches it out and types it.

SPEAKER_01 28:36

This is a love bone. I can't write mushy letters. The words get in the way. On the tape I could hear you and see you trying there and filled my bath with salty juices, thinking you, thinking Sappho, thinking an uninhabited hornby on the equation. Past the log holding the sky over the sea, running with me until we found under that warm moon a place to lay the sheep's pelts we brought from the fire folding us as we anointed each other with oils touching so slowly, softly, each by beach, hand, arm, face, eyelid, ear, breast, bell, foot, knee, side, cheek, crease, hair. One by each, pulse gently until we found the ache to be filled in the moon's light down to the beach, lying with touch now, as soft as night wind warm on your shining skins. In rhythm with the waves, laps my wise fingers. Find you sea drape seaweed on your brake, with licks to lap you long enough to make you ache. To take the starfish arm into the cave of your need, the fish tails wriggling on your mound, swimming in the passageway until almost before you break to take the smooth carved driftwood taunting pan, who stands strands, throbbing at the forest's edge, to see our women's loving, caring nothing, then as with slow, slow strokes I like you over the crests of the cries into the still moon water flood tide ebb hole hold It's Halloween.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

The love bone languishes. Barbara's mind is elsewhere now. The intensity of her time with Terry and all that pain and emotion is increasingly far away. She's got Ray Lynn, school, Kate Millette's worsening mental health, and film at the forefront of her mind. Terry watches the rain as she writes Barbara the postcard. Her and her kids visited Bowen Island, the postcard trinket from the ferry terminal or shoot bay. Terry's thinking about Christmas. She's trepidatious to discuss it. Her language seems nervous. So she reverts to an idyllic childhood scene. Maybe something like a memory portal.

SPEAKER_01 31:53

The carved pumpkins smell as they always have. Fireworks are used here tonight. Wishing you well, holding. Should we discuss Christmas or not? I'll call some night next week.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

Barbara has been in Napa Valley filming dike tactics, performing rituals with a group of a dozen friends.

SPEAKER_08 32:27

We went to the country about, I don't know, 13 friends of mine to witches land in Napa Valley, and we performed these rituals in nature that I directed. I had sink sound. Alex Zink Sound camera.

SPEAKER_11 34:02

I think it was part of her exploration of who she was in that moment in history. Um in trying to find her place. So I don't I just think it was part of her whole um things sort of way back after her marriage ended, and trying to figure out who she was, and then who she was as an artist, and who she was as a free spirit, and all of those things, and then really kind of um cleaning house, getting rid of things that really were not her, instead of trying to maybe do things that were expected of her, um, or that other women were doing, and um just kind of paring herself down to her essence is the way that I understood it. Her editing of it was like another way to pair down to the essence.

SPEAKER_00 35:18

A moment in which she releases herself from the rituals that had bound her old life to her new one, the rituals that she carried with her from her home with clay to Hornby Island and then to Napa Valley. And now she realizes that she can just it wasn't a ritual. It was a touch that excited her. The next time Terry writes again, she and her kids are uh her sister's house in Seattle.

SPEAKER_01 35:58

Lodier followed into phase three. No more heaviness. Hope the filming went well. Barbara as a director, a good image. I wasn't clear if you were filming rituals of a coven or if you and others were elaborating your own but using their land. Hope to have an easy vacation with you sometime. Songs children, songs past, songs future, just a parentheses, a loving respite. Terry.

SPEAKER_00 36:38

Is Terry leaving behind the wild id of her Jessica Summer? There's a distance in her words, but a distance that comes with a sense of resolution, maybe. In a postcript of the letter, she writes.

SPEAKER_01 37:02

Love does it, work moves it together. You can do it, sister. Hammer, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

And then, undated on a separate page, handwritten, Terry describes a glimmer of hope, an exit, and a shot at stability.

SPEAKER_01 37:21

I think it's coming. A position, part or full time at Mills College. I think I've got what they should want. Be interviewed during Christmas, or maybe before. Spend Christmas with you, find a place for myself, children, and if you want for as long as you want. If done, we could drive to Mexico for a few days and pick up Derek and Valerie in San Diego on return. See, it's all going to come around. All systems go. Energy crisis resolved by meshing circumstances. Phone call last night, job announcement from Mills today, and everything I've done points to it. Doors that needed to be closed, closed, and those that need to be opened, opening. And then and then we will be and see.

SPEAKER_00 39:07

On December 22nd, Terry arrives in San Francisco. Of her arrival, Barbara writes this previously unpublished page from My Life is Henry Miller.

SPEAKER_01 39:24

I turned away from the Western Airlines desk, noting the late arrival of her plane, to see her walking toward me in her orange blouse vest and brown slacks, my favorite of her outfits. Only a look of hello in her eyes. No more. I was sorry. I had more. Did I show it? Did I let her know? It was six months since our head over heel affair and the pain that followed our separation. I did expect more of a hello. That was the first wound. More to follow.

SPEAKER_00 40:08

In her diary of that day, Barbara writes of tension spilling over.

SPEAKER_01 40:15

In the car, the argument continues. She is saying, I am judgmental, overly critical. I am getting very angry, feel near end of being pushed. I stop car, tell her to walk back to my apartment that I'm I'm not taking her to grandma's. Previously, in the car, she had said, now watch this, and then became a cute little girl pleading with me to go. Now she cajoles, says, We can't hurt grandma. I feel myself hating her. As soon as I start driving, she begins again. She is going on about me, how insensitive, etc. I hit her knee, pull her ear, she, and now tough. I am upset with myself for losing physical control.

SPEAKER_00 41:09

Barbara's been seeing Raylin since October. The relationship is evolving fast. While Terry visits, Raylyn tells Barbara that she loves her. Barbara feels that she wants to be free from the relationship with Terry.

SPEAKER_01 41:30

When I look at her, I don't love her. I don't love her ways, her say's. She is making a reservation to fly away. So let it be. She is right in asking, what is it? Why have I cut off? I feel to tell her would be to open her to critique. Terry asks me if I'd rather she'd stay and Maria's. I say yes. She packs, saying, Lesbians are something else. Then we are something else. I ask her to take the Christmas present I got her. We hold hands, she says, all sarcasm aside, I hope something good happens for you. And if I find I've made the wrong decision to let her know, I say, that's awfully good of her. She says, I can't help it.

SPEAKER_00 42:29

I still believe. Then on December 23rd, Barbara writes in her diary.

SPEAKER_01 42:38

She is hurt. She is hurt by love. Her tight face, my own, eyes melted, lapis lazuli on the floor, eyes red-rimmed, craters, the unlimited blue depth, smoke hazed, filtered, her anger spent already too much on me.

SPEAKER_00 43:03

Barbara rereads Terry's letters.

SPEAKER_01 43:06

Hey, hey, Terry. Of course I try with the Iron Mails too, I suppose, if it's okay. Yes, that's Terry, I thought, shuffling the pages. She is both sides of her own life. In the bookstore, I give her belongings and money for half a phone call. She I don't want your money. Me, it's only fair, saves me from sending you a check. She takes it leaves. I feel sick to my stomach. Empty. The first I have felt since her nonchalance incommunicato at the airport. I wonder about calling her, then think no, nothing to do, say since I've but felt hurt.

SPEAKER_00 44:00

Terry's gone back to Seattle to be with her kids and her sister for Christmas.

SPEAKER_02 44:06

There's Terry doing this id superego thing, right? I mean, she's got to be present Christmas morning for her kids. Right? I mean, that's just and so maybe the the all the relationship with you know Barbara had this impulsiveness about it, perhaps, and this intensity. But Leanne's, you know, Matt and I are gonna come first. And yeah, I I can't imagine her not being there Christmas morning. But I think there's you know she's torn as well. I mean, I yeah, she she shows up, but um you know it must have been hard too. Like here's this this whole other world that she could have been a part of.

SPEAKER_00 44:52

Barbara spends Christmas Eve alone.

SPEAKER_01 44:56

I opened the Christmas present she brought Tiger Bomb from Singapore for aching muscle aches. How did she know? The hot glow on the back of my neck was the pleasure on the day before Christmas. Tiger bomb from a tiger, tiger heat from Terry Heat, and Kirall Tiger Heat, Tiger Beat. Well will we ever relax to be friends? Do you see? I am a slow developer. Months in the fluid left nothing but a want, a real want to be your close friend, perhaps, someday again your lover. But nothing like before. No bingos, no eurekas, no holy rolling.

SPEAKER_00 45:48

On Christmas Day, she drops Terry a plea.

SPEAKER_01 45:55

Goddess Terry, can you hear where I am? Do you sense my confusion? How I blocked at being able to love you because it has been so long, because I've never learned to love two at once, and I didn't know what it was is. Terry, I love you in some new way I haven't yet defined. Terry, I have been feeling sick without you. My neck has stored corded energy. Terry, will you sometime give me a second chance? I didn't want to love you because I didn't know how to reconcile my love with Ray Lynn. Neither did I know, though I feared, the demands you might make of me, demands of being another significant adult to your children. This I can see, and let me say that I am afraid. I am afraid of becoming responsibility for you and care of your children. And Terry, would you love me even so? Terry, I am torn apart. I want you now. Is there any way we can make life easier for ourselves by living closer? I want to call you now, and I can't. You might be interested in the anxiety attacks I've been having since you left. The first came Sunday night when I tried to reach you at Maria's, and then later left message upon message for them to page you at the airport. Now I tried Dwight's listing in San Diego, but find there are four Andersons and none in San Diego. Still, I don't reach you.

SPEAKER_00 47:49

It's January 1974. Barbara is on her way to Colorado to film Jane Brackage, the wife and frequent muse of the filmmaker Stan Brackage for her MA thesis project.

SPEAKER_07 48:06

In January of 1974, I took a trip to Romansville, Hollywood, to meet in film, Jane Black.

SPEAKER_12 48:16

Is this a mountain? And the Greek thing is my mountain is not named. So I've been considering Mount Jane.

SPEAKER_08 48:31

Love it. I love it.

SPEAKER_04 48:34

I don't know if I see it in the footage necessarily, but in the correspondence, I see um, you know, a real openness to evolution, you know, and to and to to to change. She talks about psychotherapy. She talks about um you know moving, she talks about leaving, she talks about transitions. And um, you know, I just think, you know, projecting or looking backwards or trying to connect the dots in one's life. I see someone who who um she walked out of her marriage and her house with the clothes on her back. I mean, she just walked out the door and got on her motorcycle and left.

SPEAKER_00 49:19

A year before she died, Barbara asked Mark Street, who you just heard from, to make a companion film to Jane Brackage, asking him to work with Barbara and Jane's 12-year-long correspondence. Mark's film revisits various locations of Barbara's letters and quotes one of them. Dear Jane, I am working on a multi-level version of the film of hopefully what will become my psychosynthesis, bringing it all together. The artist, the critic, the child, the baby, the so many ideas. Impossible to do all. Three months later, on March the 26th, 1974, Barbara drafts Terry a letter.

SPEAKER_01 51:20

Dear Terry, this is one letter written at a time when I usually discard whatever comes out the next day, but I thought I'd feel better writing you. Yearn for your intellectual companionship. Never have found another of those, even here in the heartland, they say, of thought and climate. Jane Brackage progresses slowly. Is not the documentary wonder it could have been. Bores me too. Now after months of her language, I will make my own film again. Will you, dear one of the past, the wonderful Hornby Island fantasy canoe trip, come to lie with me on the rug and watch fantastic images?

SPEAKER_00 52:09

On May 19th, they speak on the phone, this time as friends.

SPEAKER_01 52:14

In her diary, Barbara writes that she wants to not live in fantasy, but in feeling, to know that we are both taking care of ourselves, and that it could be wonderful to care for each other, to know that, and to know too, that were it necessary to be separated at various moments and various times, separated by spatial, timed, all distance there is, except for mine's eye, that has begun to be said, I say, I want from you.

SPEAKER_00 52:58

It's the fall of nineteen seventy four. A year and a half has passed since they first met, and Terry writes Barbara a letter, this time from Pullman, Washington.

SPEAKER_01 53:15

Address change Northeast nine six zero Monroe Pullman nine nine one six three. Barbara, since last Saturday I've been meaning to write you to let you know I was still. Before that I intended to, but since I'd missed the chance to write you in Mexico, I didn't know where you were when. What about your autobiographical novel? I thought as I listened to it that for my sequence you could transcribe a part of the tape. You're lying in bed, listening to cars before sleep, reflective, playing with words, stream of consciousness about your intentions regarding film, the way you want to order your life, country places, city lands, purring, playing with yourself. It's a nice peace. I've been in Pullman for six months now, from spring through this fine but closing fall. Much of significance happened over the summer. Beside me asleep is a woman, Pam. We began not long after I arrived. We found a fine large old house and moved in with a friend of both named Jeannie. Three women, two children, a dog, a fish, a cat. I've thought of the Vancouver time this fall and on good memories, but my what a mess.

SPEAKER_00 54:59

Their lives just move on like a curve in the road. Many more women after Barbara would have a profound influence on Terry's life, her work, and her children.

SPEAKER_02 55:15

There were women that moved in and out of Terry's life all the time. I mean, we we had a house, I call them the army of mothers. I mean, it's just this this endless array of women who were trying to help me grow up and always giving me advice, right? And um and I I remember Barbara being one of these women. I mean, that's that's you know, she's she's just not I know I met her more than once.

SPEAKER_00 55:42

Between 1973 and 1975, Barbara made twelve films, a kind of extended Anna's miraculous, which Terry surely had a hand in fomenting. But Terry was one of many of Barbara's lovers who would have a profound influence on her work. There was Corky Wick, T Corinne, Gloria Churchman, Poe Asher, Terry Sangraaff, and of course, Flori Burke. All of these women would feed Barbara's films with their friendship, their love, their curiosity.

SPEAKER_01 56:23

You've you've always been a um a gal that would that would catch another gal's eye.

SPEAKER_03 56:31

It just didn't deep it didn't get deep into it because you almost felt like Barbara's relationships, even if they were meaningful, they were passing. You know, it wasn't what she had with Florey.

SPEAKER_11 56:43

We were both at the West Coast Women's Music Festival, which is in no uh Yosemite. We didn't know each other, we were both there with other people. Everyone was nude almost, and there was this wonderful kind of creek river with huge big boulders, and uh the woman I was with and I were up on top of these boulders, and all of a sudden Barbara and this other woman get out of the water and they're down below. And all of them knew each other, except Barbara and I did not know each other, and I thought, wow, she's something, but I was mortified because I'm standing up there stark naked, and she's down below looking up, and I thought, ay, ay, is this any way to meet someone? Well, apparently it was. Barbara was uh teaching uh at Evergreen during those years, so we saw each other occasionally at uh events, um and then in 1988 she left Evergreen and moved back to the Bay Area, and we happened to run into each other uh at a restaurant on her first day back. She literally had her car parked outside full of stuff. And she said, I have a film play opening at the Castro. And uh I said, Oh, that's great, and maybe I'll go. And then she went on, and at the table behind me, I overhear her having this huge um reconnection with someone who had been uh a partner of hers in years past, and she invites this woman to go to the film with her, and I think, whoo, okay. Um, so I went to the film anyway, and then we started having long uh phone conversations, and um both of us thought, well, this is interesting if you can talk to someone and have a decent conversation that goes on and on, this is worth pursuing. And I had been told that Barbara had a big reputation of love them and leave them, and people would say to me, Oh, don't go out with Barbara Hammer, she'll dump you in a couple months. And I said, Well, I'm a big girl, I can handle it. So, our first date, we went to a Japanese restaurant in Berkeley, and we had planned to go see a film afterwards. We never got to the film, we were just still talking and closing down the restaurant, and I told her that I heard that she was good for a fling, and that's what I needed right then in my life. And she said, I'm so hurt. She said, I'm not like that anymore. I've I've decided to change and not do that.

SPEAKER_00 59:57

Around the same time in 1988, she makes friends with a lesbian couple, the artist Marilyn Frasca and the filmmaker Sally Kloninger, who was also teaching at Evergreen. One day, in March of that year, Marilyn and Barbara go out clamming one of Barbara's favorite activities, and they film themselves. Barbara has just turned down a full-time position at Evergreen. The scene ends, and all of a sudden, we find Barbara alone on a pebble beach, pondering what kind of life she could have had in the Pacific Northwest.

SPEAKER_10 1:01:18

I wish there were ways to make everything possible. I wish there were ways to tell you how much I love you. I wish there were ways to tell you how much I love me. I wish there were ways.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:36

After that, Barbara moves with Flori to New York City, and from then on her work becomes more overtly political. She leaves behind the dreamy, erotic corporealism of her 1970s films and moves into documentary work, seeking to comment not just on queer life, on her life, but also on housing insecurity, disease, aging, and human life and struggle in other countries South Africa, Korea, Palestine, and Ukraine.

SPEAKER_10 1:02:14

Thank you. Thank you. It's so great to be here and to laugh and then get very somber at that last film and realize nothing's changed, and to see that evolution of just that early sexual joy, and then meeting a woman who works professionally with uh as a human rights activist with disadvantaged people, and my whole life changes. And suddenly I want the uh that personal love to be on the street, take responsibility for our middle class life, and somehow get that damn circle to change.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:01

Terry, too, dedicated the rest of her life to advocacy.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:07

Ian Pullman, she worked with the Continuing Education Division and did an led a number of programs there that were pretty revolutionary. By the time she gets to Portland, she's begun to move into a different kind of field from education. She worked with uh an agency that was funded through United Way called Information Referral. And what they did was um people with problems would come and um would telephone them and get get help, and they would help them find the resources. You know, you can't pay your electric bill, and it's winter in Portland, or um, you know, I I don't know where to get health care. You know, that you know, the all all of the problems from homelessness on that any kind of people have the problems people have. Um, and so it was a referral service that she pioneered. And as out of that, she moves more and more increasingly into uh homeless work, but she doesn't do it with an agency, she does it, she ends up doing it um with city and county government, and she becomes very attached to a uh woman named Gretchen Kofori. She's Gretchen Kofori's number one aide. And Gretchen Kofori was a pretty major uh political figure in Portland um for at least 20 years. She fought really hard. Um but by the time she's you know in her forties, fifties, sixties, she's working more within systems and within structures as opposed to fighting the fight that she was in the sixties and seventies from the outside. She hated almost every boss she ever had. She all thought they were terrible, incompetent, unimaginative. And so she's always struggling with with these institutions as well. So um I I I I hope that that helps provide bookends to to the Terry that you know in 1973. She's also pointing to a lot of failures, and um, I think one of them is she was never able to create the artistic work that she wanted to. I mean, she never really um it just never quite happened. But she did she did evoke Oregon's um right to die. Um that's how she died. She she had cancer and um you know she she evoked Oregon's law.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:18

An illness that she would live with for 13 years during those years returned to disease advocacy with the help of Lori Burke.

SPEAKER_11 1:06:29

One of the state senators in New York. Uh they've tried for nine years to pass the Medical Aid in Dying Act. And um, I got Barbara involved in it. And um this year still, he came to our apartment, and it was just a couple weeks before Barbara died. They'd wanted to do a press conference, and and I said, No, that's not happening. And so then uh they said, Well, could he come? And I said, just a minute, you know, and I asked Barbara and she said, Yeah. So he came to our apartment and young gay man, wonderful senator, and they talked. And he still every year writes in his newsletter at the press conference, says, I the most impactful thing that's happened to me is sitting with Barbara Hammer, one of my constituents, who was close to dying, and having her talk to me about why passing this bill is so important. And you know, they still haven't, but um, you know, she just she left her mark in so many places on so many people. Um it's quite amazing.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:48

The thing that became the central part of the last bit of her life, which was her cancer. I think one thing she was so interested in doing was making sure, trying to find a way to make what is essentially a very lonely process of frankly dying and externalizing that in a way that was um, I don't know what the word would be, almost optimistic or something that could be shared. I think she wanted to show that dying and death, aging, these were communal activities, and that you didn't have to do anything alone, and that people could participate in it. I felt like a participant in Barbara's death and in her disease. I wasn't suffering it, but I was brought into it and I was made aware of it. And I think she particularly thought knowledge of things, intimacy was a way for that to work. But nevertheless, she was always going to be pulled back into the singularity of that experience. Only one person dies that death. Um, and I think that's probably true for her throughout her life in other ways.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:51

You know, free spirit. Um, love of um I don't know, um love of possibility. She was dreamy and practical, and that you know, she was always forever going in between.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:15

Perhaps it's time to return to the beginning. And the first question that I posed to you, what happens when we look beyond the rectangular peripheries of a photograph? This past summer on Hornby Island, I was reading Clarice Lespector's final and unfinished novel, Breath of Life at the Beach. And on page 62, I feel like I came closer to the answer. Suddenly an odd feeling. I find myself odd as though a movie camera were filming my steps and suddenly stopped, leaving me immobile in the middle of a gesture, caught in the act. Me? Am I the one who I is? But this mad senselessness, part of me is mechanical and automatic, neuro-vegetative, the balance between not wanting and wanting, of not being able and being able, all of it sliding along in the routine of mechanism. The camera singled out the instant. And so it is that I automatically left myself in order to capture myself, dazed by my own enigma, right there before me, which is unprecedented and terrifying because it's extremely true. Profoundly naked life merged into my identity. And this encounter between life and identity forms a minuscule, unbreakable, and radiant, indivisible diamond. A single atom, and all of me feels my body go numb as when you stay in the same position for a long time and your leg suddenly falls asleep. I am too nostalgic. I seem to have lost something. Who knows where or when. The instant, a weekend, in August 1973, on an island. The voices of Barbara Hammer and Terry Anderson, via their diary entries and letters, are voiced by Martha Ross. In this episode, you heard excerpts from Barbara Hammer's 1974 films, Dyke Tactics, and Jane Brackett, and her 1996 film, Tender Fictions, as well as B-roll from her 1973 film, I Was I Am and previously unpublished footage from Marilyn Frasca and Barbara Hammer Go Claming in the Northwest. Barbara Meditates Out Loud on leaving and staying in the Pacific Northwest, March 4, 1988. You also heard excerpts from An Oral History with Barbara Hammer, recorded for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art by Svitlana Keto in 2018, and field recordings from Radio of Corey. Thank you to all of those who contributed their voices to this chapter. Flori Burke, Derek Anderson, Andrew Durbin, and Mark Street. And to the water, rocks, wind, sky, plants, and all living and non-living beings of Hornby Island, Jadaiich, I extend gratitude and respectfully acknowledge that these recordings were made on the unceded, traditional and ancestral land of the Comox First Nation. Recordings were also made on the unceded traditional and ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Slewitude, and Squamish nations, and the Olone, all of the Pacific coast of North America, Turtle Island.