the whole Marie

Barbara Maloutas

An extended bio from the author

 

I was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the eldest daughter in a line of eldest daughters. My mother’s mother was born of Quaker stock on her mother’s side, a secret she kept from her family until she one day told me. As a very young child I named her Bobo and it stuck for the rest of her life. A long Irish Catholic tradition on my father’s side included his mother’s firm belief that donkeys do at times kneel in prayer. This strong Catholic upbringing eventually led to six years as a member of a progressive religious community that ran hospitals, clinics and medical training centers around the world. With no talent in the field of medicine, I worked in the community’s art department, and did well enough that they sent me off to Philadelphia College of Art for a BFA in Graphic Design. After six years, including John XXIII’s progressive Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, I left the community and moved with my parents to Europe. There I completed my BFA degree, and followed up with work on an MFA at the Algemeine Gewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland with designer Armin Hoffman and typographer Wolfgang Weingart.

In 1970 I met my husband, Paul, in Brussels—two years later we were married in Switzerland. Walking from my mother-in-law’s family house to the local Catholic Church, letters from the Bishop of Philadelphia laid on the altar affirmed I was no longer a nun. We spent time over the next three years in Switzerland and Greece. Paul worked in hotels and I worked in a small map-making Verlag where we spoke English, French, Swiss-German, German and Italian, every day, all at once. After returning to the United States, for many years I helped Paul run a wholesale travel company—the main destination was Greece. Our two children now grown have traveled both as children and young adults to Greece and Europe many times.

In 1988, I began teaching design and typography at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and in 1996, became Assistant Chair in the Communication Arts department. I started writing during the years I was studying graphic design in Basel. As a freelance designer I have combined writing with design in many projects for my favorite clients. In 1994, I began writing poetry and hand-making small edition artist’s books. As an applicant for the Otis MFA in Creative Writing I wrote a large portfolio of cinquains (5 lines of 2, 4, 6, 8, 2 syllables) during summer vacations in Athens, in a village on the Peloponnesus and on the island of Hydra. I graduated in 2003 and my Otis MFA thesis, In a Combination of Practices, won the New Issues Poetry Prize for first books in 2003. The same year Diagram/New Michigan Press published a chapbook, Practices; both included diagrams accompanying prose poems.

Greece’s ethos continues to hold on to me. It is complex and contradictory. I should be a yaya there by this time in my life, but I am not there and I still think of myself as a passionate observer. After all, I know o kyrie Petro, o kyrie Yanni kai kyria Eleftheria. I want the writing that results from this intimacy to not describe a thing in particular, but instead to engage a lively, shifting, indeterminate, variously voiced and Gertrude Steinian “continuous present.”