Tina Barry is the author of Mall Flower, poems and short fiction. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best Small Fictions 2016, Drunken Boat, American Poetry Journal, Blue Fifth Review , and Exposure, an Anthology of Micro-fiction. She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prize and several Best of the Net awards. Tina is a teaching artist at The Poetry Barn, and a writing tutor at SUNY Ulster. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Long Island University, Brooklyn. Find her here. ---------
In order to preserve the artistic arrangement of the writing, this piece has been created with Print2Flash Flashpaper.
“Water,” “Fortuneteller,” and “The Art Dealer’s Girl Friend” are part of an ongoing series with the working title Virginia. Virginia Haggard McNeil met the artist Marc Chagall shortly after his wife’s sudden death. Haggard McNeil was 28. Chagall was 58. Haggard McNeil, an art student and the daughter of a British diplomat, had fallen on hard times.
The stories, prose poems and hybrids, loosely based on recollections by Haggard McNeil, focus on the couple’s time in High Falls, New York, where they lived from 1946-1948. The home they shared and studio where Chagall painted is still there, a five-minute-walk from my house.