Following her divorce, Kiesa Kay completed a book, Princess Gilanee, for her best friend who had passed away. Kiesa truly believed that if her friend had had time and solitude, then she could have finished the book herself. Knowing that, Kiesa established Oleander Cottage, near Toulouse, France, as a writers’ retreat. Why France? Kiesa admits to a long fascination with the country and in particular, with a lady called Camille Claudel…..
I’ve always had a really strong fascination with France. I tried to learn French when I was little but with little success. More recently, I attended a French language learning institute on the French Riviera because I wanted to be able to read Camille’s letters in the original. I spent a month just learning the language and now I can read it fairly well. It’s still difficult for me to speak and much more difficult to comprehend.
Camille is a sculptor – her work is magnificent. There’s a whole room devoted to her in the Rodin Museum. Rodin was her paramour for 15 years but she really didn’t like him much. At first she didn’t want to date him and she went away to England. He chased her all over and finally she acquiesced. There are all these letters where he’s totally wooing her and one or two where she’s giving him the time of day. She wanted to be his student. She wanted to know his art. She wanted the talent shared and he wanted to make her his play thing and it didn’t work for them.
What entranced me about her story was how beautiful her work was – La Valse (The Waltz) is one of her pieces and it’s absolutely magnificent.
Then there’s L’age Mur (The Age of Maturity). I think that’s what actually did it for me. It’s this girl and she’s reaching out in a pleading motion and the man is turning away his face and almost being pulled away by an angel – an older woman who looks sort of like an angel and the man is leaving the younger woman and moving towards death, moving towards something else.
I was going through my divorce and that seemed like a really poignant image to me. She has said that it doesn’t represent her break up with Rodin although he thought it did. She said it represented the three aspects of herself. It’s just a magnificent piece.
There’s also a piece called The Wave – it’s three young girls and they’re crouched down, about to leap and there’s a beautiful green onyx wave coming crashing over the top of them. Beautiful. It’s very small and just shows so much joy.
She was capable of extraordinary joy and yet her story is so sad. After her father’s death, her family had her institutionalized. She lived the last 30 years of her life in an institution although the psychiatrist who tested her said she was not mad. She didn’t belong there. So her story’s very tragic.
I’m working on a play about her life. It’s hard because I want to throw in too many details but you can’t tell somebody’s life in one hour. Right now, I have this kind of epic saga and I’m struggling with what to take out.
The Divorce Coach Says
I admire Kiesa’s spirit – she followed her life-long attraction to France, immersed herself there to learn the language, became fascinated with Camille Claudel and founded a writers’ retreat. What drove Kiesa to France however, was the pain of her divorce – the pain of being separated from her children and of losing the home she loved in Colorado. She went searching for a place that would feel like home to her soul. What she discovered was you don’t find it outside yourself….. Come back and visit again for the last segment in Kiesa’s story.
Kiesa’s not the only admirer of Camille’s work. You can read about another admirer at the Transpacific Sketch Project blog. Kiesa says she’s written many plays however only one of them has ever been performed publicly. That was Thunder is the Mountain’s Voice – a play about when lady traveler, Isabella Bird visited Estes Park, Coloraodo in 1872.
The writers’ retreat Kiesa established is called Oleander Cottage and you can find out more about it at this website.