Celebrating Mary Jane

Yesterday was my writing mentor's memorial service. My story with Mary Jane Dickerson is also the story of how I came to write about my parents.

Two Houses. Two Painters. Two Parents. is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson. Sign up here:

[DEEP BREATH]

What an honor it is to join you in celebrating the life of Mary Jane Dickerson. 

Mary Jane mentored me across two degrees and thirty-five years. I’m speaking to represent many, I imagine, of Mary Jane’s students and mentees.

I know she graced you with so much love, insight, and understanding. I know my story with her is distinguished only by its particulars. 

I wrote about the morning Roxanne called to say we would not be getting together because Mary Jane had died the night before, and I described coming to terms with Death squirreling her off, tired of waiting her turn, as I used to wait by Mary Jane’s door in the Old Mill at UVM. 

Mary Jane took so much time with everyone.

And I milked it.

I had a terrible moment during my junior year abroad. In Edinburgh, I was cramming in all these classes to fulfill random lit requirements. How would I return to finish out college feeling like my education had amounted to anything that mattered to me? 

Back in Vermont, I approached Mary Jane about writing and studying memoir, then still called autobiography. (In Scotland, I had read Lord Byron by day, but Maya Angelou by night.)

The work I did with her was life-changing. 

Together, we read memoirs and emerging scholarship, and I drafted fifty pages of criticism and fifty pages about growing up between my parents' houses and painting studios. At the time, I had no idea how cutting-edge she was to be on top of that emerging genre. 

Later, when I felt pangs of regret for attending UVM in the 80s, I remembered all she’d nurtured in me. Like many, I arrived on the shores of college, shipwrecked from life with—in my case—overwhelming artist parents. Mary Jane did not just care for students seeking their bearings or who did not in some way fit in; she identified with them. She saw value in sharing her vulnerability, which mixed with resilience and brilliance. In later years, she shared poems with me, telling me, “Your opinion matters.” 

I felt real.

It wasn’t easy for me to come out as a lesbian as an undergraduate. In the 80s, there were maybe two out faculty members on the whole UVM campus. Mary Jane advised my master's thesis in lesbian autobiography, adored my partner, attended Kim’s and my commitment ceremony in 1998, and held our baby boy in our house in 2003. Eventually, we lost touch with each other as parenting and other things swept me away. 

But when my parents passed, I picked up my memoir where I’d left off. My mother had died with a harrowing form of dementia. In 2021, I washed up at Mary Jane’s house with a manuscript to share. 

Her beautiful back patio yesterday.

Now I was writing very truthfully about my parents. Thirty years had passed, but Mary Jane knew all the players. She still had my college honors project on her desk. She kept each one she’d advised there, she told me. That’s how important we, her students, were to her. 

My parents were dead, but I had back my academic mother. 

She’d advised Alexander Nemerov, too, she explained as she pressed his recent biography of the painter Helen Frankenthaler into my hands. And she held my hand on that first visit and told me that she loved me. 

We met routinely, though with long interruptions because of her failing health. Until she died, she always told me she was getting better. 

Our last visit together was last month. I was sharing my anguish about trying to write honestly about my father and his large painting, Jupiter and Antiope, and she asked for an update on my efforts to get an agent. And I was telling her what a miserable era this is for publishing when, after a beat, wearing that oxygen tubing, she smiled and said, simply, “I am so proud of you.”

I’ve never felt so seen in my life. It didn’t matter if I ever got published. It’s a moment that I write about now to make it last. To share with you how she knew just what to say and when. To burn it into my psyche to continue carrying me forward.

To milk it. 

Mary Jane Dickerson holding our son Atticus in 2003 (left). Mary Jane holding our rings and getting ready to speak at our commitment ceremony in 1998 (right).