Outstanding Authors: Tennessee Williams

These days I am feeling more confident about my letterpress printing skills. It’s exciting! I started learning about letterpress while I was working on the Cast and Recast Exhibit and learning about St. Louis’ vital role in the 1800’s as a producer of artistic lead type for newspapers and fine books. Over the years, I have learned letterpress while working on an artist’s book project with my good friend Macy Chadwick, and since then I have been incrementally adding more letterpress into the design program at UMSL.

I have also been geeking out in my free time attending letterpress conferences, which are not held in beige ballrooms in downtown hotels, but instead are raucous parties in semi-heated barn-like letterpress studios, which feature a thrilling amount of grime, and printmakers in work dungarees trading stories and techniques. In short, it’s heaven.

This summer I decided that it was time to make something serious on the letterpress. I learned a lot of letterpress from Marie Oberkirsh of Central Print a St. Louis non-profit promoting letterpress printing. When I saw that this year’s Famous Authors Print Exchange was dedicated to Tennessee Williams, I joined the print exchange, agreeing to produce an edition of 30 prints in two weeks.

I saw Tennessee William’s play The Glass Menagerie in my teens, and I remember loving it deeply. I went to church in a beautiful old Art Nouveau structure up the street from the Glass Menagerie apartments, where Tennessee Williams wrote the play, which immortalizes Williams’ sister, Rose. It’s a sad story, but many St. Louis stories are sad stories. We are a city with troubling history and adverse times. We are a city in love with the blues.

This summer I watched the play again, the 1973 version with (gasp) Katherine Hepburn at her finest, and an extremely young and plucky Sam Waterson as Tom Wingfield. In the opening moments, I realized why I was so taken with this play. It’s these quotes that arrest me:

"The play is a memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music"

“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion"

I created my poster about the glass menagerie, where the actors are trapped in amber, living in a memory. It’s my first time doing a half-silkscreened, half letterpressed final piece. I really enjoyed making this poster. I set lots of type to find the one that worked best.

This is the third print exchange Central Print has done. The Outstanding Authors: Tennessee Williams Print exchange has been on exhibit since this summer, where it showed at the Tennessee Williams Festival in August, and at the St. Lous Mercantile Library in the fall. It is currently up at Schlafly Library until January 31st, 2026.