Cathy Hamill & Shaku Bhaya

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Shakuntla L. Bhaya met her partner Cathy Hamill in 1982. “They said it wouldn’t last,” jokes Shaku Bhaya. Shaku and Cathy were certainly in different places in life when they met – Cathy was a single mom, raising two boys with no child support and doing shift work at the Getty oil refinery. Shaku was a University of Delaware student. And they didn’t exactly rush into things either; although they were a couple from the start, it would be twelve years before they finally began living together. But they are still together today.

Shaku is involved in many civic activities and she is also an attorney. Cathy is the co-chair of the most active advocacy group in the state of Delaware for abused and neglected children. Cathy is one of three or four people without whom Delaware would likely not have made the significant changes it made in the late 1990s to its child protection system.

Cathy and Shaku also helped raise a son together – Josh, Cathy’s nephew, who came to live with them under difficult circumstances when he was six years old. They adopted him when he was twelve.

Source: mattdenn.blogs.delaware.gov/2011/03/

Further Readings:

Dear Tiny Heart: The Letters of Jane Heap and Florence Reynolds by Holly A. Baggett
Series: The Cutting Edge, Lesbian Life and Literature Series
Paperback: 216 pages
Publisher: NYU Press (November 1, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 081479856X
ISBN-13: 978-0814798560
Amazon: Dear Tiny Heart: The Letters of Jane Heap and Florence Reynolds
Amazon Kindle: Dear Tiny Heart: The Letters of Jane Heap and Florence Reynolds

Writer, artist, Manhattan gallery owner, and co-editor of the Little Review, Jane Heap was one of the most dynamic figures of the international avant garde, creating a life that defined the "modernist experience" as a syncretic one. Deliberately seeking a low profile throughout her life, Heap has frustrated many scholars interested in her personal life and the extraordinarily vital period in which she lived. Through her correspondence, Heap here reveals her intimate self as well as her more public, creative relationships with some of the legends of modern art, literature, and spirituality. Focusing primarily on the voluminous letters written by Heap to Florence Reynolds, the correspondence included in this volume spans the years from 1908-1949, incorporating additional illuminating letters to Reynolds from other significant figures in Heap's life.

Heap's letters reveal the radical transformation of a dreamy, young Midwestern woman into a forceful, sophisticated arbiter of international modernism and provide rare insight into the struggle for lesbian identity and community during the inter-war period. They detail her eventual abandonment of art in the search for the transcendent in the seductive and esoteric mysticism of George Gurdjieff. Holly Baggett's accompanying essay further highlights the boldness of Jane Heap's aesthetics and life.