At a diminutive 4 feet 7 inches tall, Sandy Diamond looms large in the North Olympic Peninsula arts and literature world.
She is an accomplished painter and calligrapher, has published two books of her poetry, written five plays — four one-acts and one full-length — and fronts the band, Quasimodo and the Bellringers.
At 73, she is at peace with a life that has been less than peaceful.
Diamond is up-front about two elements that have shaped her both mentally and physically: a mental illness that has landed her in mental hospitals three times and a physical deformity that has left her with the self-penned nickname “the hunchback.”
“One way of looking at living with a hunchback is to say, ‘Oh, poor me,’ but I look at it as everyone knows me — and I’m special,” she said an impish grin.
Diamond was born with scoliosis — curvature of the spine — but it wasn’t discovered until she was 27, when she fell of a roof and broke her back.
“My mother was always telling me to sit up straight. She never told the other kids that,” she said.
After months in a body cast, her broken back healed, but as time went by the curvature grew, stooping her from a height of 5 feet 3 inches to her current stature.
She addresses her physicality — and people’s reactions to it — in her second book of poems, The Hunchback,
published in 2000 by Creative Arts Book Co., Berkeley, Calif.
Her poem, “The Hunchback in the Supermarket,” tells of the problems of reaching the top shelf:
Just my luck, it’s a law of merchandising:
if it has a bird on it, it goes on the top shelf.
I wait for someone to come to my aisle
Don’t think I don’t know everyone’s avoiding
Condiments because a hunchback’s lurking here.
Two teens fetch the bottle from the top shelf for her, but then whisper:
. . . A hunchback — is that supposed to be good luck or bad? Good luck, she whispers, but you have to touch the hump.
God knows I wish them luck.
In her first book of poems, Miss Coffin and Mrs. Blood: Poems of Art & Madness, published in 1994, also by Creative Arts Book Co., she describes her back, saying, “I curve like a swan, like pianos, like my mother’s arm around me.”
Diamond grew up in Gates Mills, Ohio, studied literature at Brandeis University and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Columbia University’s College of Painting and Sculpture as a painting fellow.
Her future looked bright, but like many artists and authors before her, Diamond was bipolar, swinging widely between mania and depression.
She describes her manic phases as “all acceleration and no brakes.”
At 22, she had her first manic breakdown and was institutionalized, an experience she confronts bravely in Miss Coffin and Mrs. Blood.
“It tells the story of the breakdown and the unreality of it — but it was all too real,” she said.
She was put on Thorazine and underwent shock therapy, then managed to return to school to complete her degree.
“When I was losing my mind and feeling like I was crazy, the college was so supportive,” she said.
In 1969, she moved to Berkeley, where she made a living painting, teaching calligraphy and selling her works in galleries and at art fairs.
When she was 35, she decided she wanted a child but was not mentally stable enough to be in a relationship.
Instead, she became a “deliberate single parent,” she said, giving birth to her son, Gabriel, in 1972.
As she writes in her poem, “The Sign of Libra”:
Three hours after the first contraction
the infant mariner sailed from the maternal sea
And lay slippery on my breast
Like a prize catch.
Diamond raised her son in Grand Ronde, Ore., and later paid for acting lessons for him with her calligraphy work.
He is now an actor and cinematographer.
It was after Gabriel left home to attend college that Diamond turned to writing and telling her personal story.
“It just started pouring out of me,” she said. “At last I had permission to say it all.”
In 1998, she received a writer’s residency at Centrum in Port Townsend and fell in love with the area.
She found creative inspiration there and also a new outlet for her poetry.
Former Centrum director Peter McCracken introduced her to author and blues harmonica player David George Gordon, and over dinner talk turned to forming a band with Diamond reading her poetry, beat style, while they played a bluesy background.
Thus was born Quasimodo and the Bellringers, with Gordon on harmonica, Bruce Cowan on guitar and Bruce Cannavaro on bass piano.
They have released two CDs and perform around the area, albeit infrequently of late.
On that first visit, she also noticed a cottage not far from Fort Worden State Park ,and even though it was not for sale, Cannavaro knew the owners and asked if they would be interested in selling.
A year later, she had sold her home in Oregon and moved into the little house, which had been remodeled by her friends in Port Townsend.
Cannavaro, a carpenter, installed a special raised platform in the kitchen so Diamond can reach the upper shelves.
“I call it my stage,” she said.
Diamond was in the news recently as the author of a full-length play staged during the Port Townsend Playwrights’ Festival in February.
“Blanche and Claude in Seclusion” draws parallels to Diamond’s life, with a manic Blanche and depressed Claude passing time in adjacent “cells” in a New York mental hospital in 1970.
“The play stands for all people who are tormented,” Diamond said.
The play was directed by Key City Public Theatre director Denise Winter, who praised Diamond’s playwriting skills.
“Sandy has a unique writing style. It’s both poetry and drama — anything she writes is fabulous,” she said.
Winter had worked with Diamond in presenting her one-act plays and encouraged her to write a full-length play for the annual festival.
“She is so amazingly imaginative,” Winter said. “She defines her own style.”
Winter said Diamond has raised the bar in playwriting in Port Townsend and has certainly influenced many other area writers.
Diamond is planning on submitting the play to theaters for development, where she would work with actors and directors to continue polishing it.
“That sounds like heaven to me,” she said.
Arthritis in her hands has stolen her ability to create the fanciful brush-stroke calligraphy that was once her bread and butter, but a room in her house holds a treasure trove of past works.
She is busy now getting the work organized to be on the Port Townsend Artists Tour in August, which will be a rare chance to see and purchase some of her work.
