University of New Mexico Press Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2010

Weekends with O’Keeffe
C. S. MERRILL
In 1973 Georgia O’Keeffe employed C. S. Merrill to catalog her library for her estate.
Merrill, a poet who was a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, was
twenty-six years old and O’Keeffe was eighty-five, almost blind, but still painting.
Over seven years, Merrill was called upon for secretarial assistance, cooking, and
personal care for the artist. Merrill’s journals reveal details of the daily life of a genius.
Merrill describes how O’Keeffe stretched the canvas for her twenty-six-foot cloud
painting and reports on O’Keeffe’s favorite classical music and preferred performers.
Merrill provided descriptions of nature when she and the artist went for walks; she read
to O’Keeffe from her favorite books and helped keep her space in meticulous order.
Throughout the book there are sketches of O’Keeffe’s studio and an account of once
assisting O’Keeffe at the easel. Jockeying for position among the helpers O’Keeffe relied
upon was part of daily life at Abiquiu, where territorial chows guarded the property.
Visitors came from far and wide, among them Eliot Porter and even Allen Ginsberg
accompanied by Peter Orlovsky. All this is revealed in Merrill’s straightforward and
deeply respectful notes. Reading her book is like spending a weekend with O’Keeffe in
the incomparable light and clear air of Northern New Mexico mountains and desert.
Available
5 1/2 x 8 1/2 • 248 pages
24 line drawings • jacketd cloth
978-0-8263-4928-6 • $24.95 ($29.95 Cdn)
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C. S. MERRILL
was born October 9, 1946, in Tulsa, Oklahoma where she climbed
trees, explored neighborhoods on her bicycle, and enjoyed free access to a neighbor’s huge
library of rare old books. Her neighbor had her reading Samuel Pepys’ Diary, Shakespeare,
Emerson, Whitman, biographies of artists, and other classics. Winters were spent going to
school in the city, and summers were on the family farm where she helped with the garden
and with farm animals. She played freely and imaginatively around a huge farm house. Merrill
wrote her first poem at age 12 to honor the memory of her grandmother. Family and
community encouraged more writing endeavors, and the young Merrill was invited to write
plays and poems for school and special events.
Her writing was further nurtured by a very strict and exacting college professor, Dr. Winston
Weathers, at the University of Tulsa where she graduated in 1971 majoring in philosophy.
During this period she read the published journal of Anais Nin. At the university she won
a haiku contest, and her poem was read under a blooming cherry tree for the evening news
one spring evening. That left an impression. Merrill ventured into New Mexico in 1971 with
a scholarship to study poetry at the Santa Fe Workshop of Contemporary Arts for a summer.
The next summer she was on the Island of Paros in Greece, living with a Greek family and
studying poetry and photography as an art at the Aegean School of Fine Arts.
In the fall of 1972 C.S. Merrill wrote a letter to Georgia O’Keeffe and received an answer welcoming her to visit Abiquiu.
In August, 1973, Miss O’Keeffe and Merrill met for an afternoon which turned into seven years of weekends (1973-1979)
when Merrill served as librarian, secretary, cook, nurse, and companion to the artist. During that time Merrill kept a personal
journal of the daily details of her life with the artist. Her writing was deeply influenced when she was asked to describe the
play of light in the colorful New Mexico high desert world for Miss O’Keeffe who was suffering blindness from macular
degeneration.
One day Miss O’Keeffe asked her if she considered herself a poet and Merrill answered “Yes.” Miss O’Keeffe asked if she
had published. “Not much,” she said. “Then you’re not a poet yet.” That simple exchange led Merrill to get busy with her
writing. From 1975-1998 she edited and published ten limited editions of The Southwest Women’s Poetry Exchange. In 1975
she was the coordinator for the Southwest Poets’ Conference in New Mexico and Arizona. Merrill received the Academy of
American Poets prize for poetry at the University of New Mexico in 1976. Summer, 1978, at Naropa Institute in Boulder,
Colorado Merrill worked as apprentice to Allen Ginsberg typing and re-typing his poetry and participating in roundtable
events with many visiting poets, young and old voices at the time. In 1979 she won a prize from the National Endowment for
the Arts which culminated in five performances of her play “Ever Since Yesterday Evening” at the Kimo Theatre in
Albuquerque, New Mexico. There were numerous publications of single poems and readings of her work in various venues.
After receiving a Masters degree in TESOL, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, Merrill taught in Qu Fu,
Shandong Province (Confucius’s birthplace) in the People’s Republic of China from 1981-1982. There she climbed Tai Shan
and ventured into the favorite writing places of Li Po and Tu Fu. As a single mother, she took her one-year-old son Issa along
on this life-changing adventure. Next she served as librarian in the village of Corrales, New Mexico, from 1983-1984. Merrill
has worked as a teacher and librarian in New Mexico, while she carefully worked on her manuscript about Miss O’Keeffe. This
effort resulted in a volume of poetry, O’Keeffe, Days in a Life, published in 1996 by La Alameda Press. Merrill had received a
$7,000 individual poet’s grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation in 1994 to support her work on this volume. In 1999 Merrill
was a guest poet at the Taos Poetry Circus where she read from this poetry along with other works. She has offered readings
of her poetry in Oshika-Mura, Japan, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Tulsa, Oklahoma, Dallas, Texas, and various places in
New Mexico. In 2010 the University of New Mexico Press published her 230-page volume Weekends with O’Keeffe, an
account in journal entries of seven years of work with Miss O’Keeffe from 1973-1979.
Currently, CS Merrill works as librarian at the Kewa Pueblo Elementary and Middle Schools as well as Cochiti Elementary
and Middle Schools in New Mexico. Trips to Europe, China, Japan, and Peru have further informed her poetry these days.