Dreaming in clay on the coast of Mississippi

the long version

"Almost a century ago, a New Orleans society woman vowed that her three sons would become artists. Turning her back on bourgeois life and abetted by her skeptical husband - a grain merchant - she bought twenty-eight acres of woodland on the Mississippi Sound. Beside a sleepy bayou, in the shade of towering pines and magnolias, she opened an art colony, one of the first of its kind in the South.". "Intimate diaries, letters, and poems lead the reader into a stormy, passionate, sometimes heart-breaking past. Meticulously researched and compassionately written, Dreaming in Clay gathers one family's eternal legacy of wisdom and beauty: the healing power of art, the consolations of writing and of memory, and the spiritual treasures given to us - if we care to receive them - by the natural world."--BOOK JACKET.