Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Sidewalk Blogging and Elisabeth Chant

I'm on my way home from two days of research on a biography of a painter, a book project that I began in the fall, and have just gotten back to after a bout of novel revisions.

On the road the last two and a half hours, I pulled over to check e-mail and chat on my laptop in a little town I knew had a wireless network on its one downtown street.

This feels like a nice break, sitting in the cool on a park bench between an insurance agency and an ice cream shop. I've been living in 1922 for the past two days, the winter my subject arrived in my hometown of Wilmington, NC. My 57 year-old heroine (my age, too, as it happens) was walking on Jan. 12, 1922, from the train station in Wilmington to the "prestigious Hotel Orton." I was trying to find out what she saw on those few blocks. Not easy!

Now I'm back to technology. And so I'll take an Internet approach to this work:

DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY KNOWLEDGE OF A PAINTER NAMED ELISABETH CHANT? IF SO, PLEASE GET IN TOUCH.