This is some serious pressure for a rambling scribbler to tell the story of an accomplished writer. So, in simple words with sincere depiction, I am just going to tell you how I feel about Libby Callaway, curator of imogene + willie’s Our Voice. Part of our family. Our dear friend.
Libby is simply the most beautiful woman I might have ever known.
When I think how best to describe her to you… I think of layers.
Layers of haute style, no doubt, are what she is known for. But, those intricate layers of goodness are what she is all about.
She was once dubbed by a media columnist in New York City “the anti-Anna Wintour, fashion’s queen of nice”.
That’s so right.
I like to sit in restaurant booths with Libby and talk out lofty aspirations. We both sit with our elbows on the table and hands on our chins and talk for hours. When I get home after a booth chat, I usually have an email from Libby short after, where she has already manifested the dreams we just conjured in the booth… the path typed out so eloquently in front of my eyes.
Never have I known someone who’s own life path led her on a slight wild goose chase, in order to just simply and clearly and finally come home.
During our most recent booth chat at our neighborhood joint, Burger Up, Libby shared her story with me.
Pick up below, all post-growing up in Cleveland, Tennessee, going off to college, and then tearing up the roads all over the South, going to see rock bands and in search of cute boys to kiss…
Love,
Carrie
In 1994, I decided I would go to grad school.
I wanted a masters degree in journalism. I was living at home in Cleveland, working for my hometown paper, but I’d never wanted to live anywhere else but New York City. So I applied to schools there – well, one school: I didn’t apply to Columbia, because what they do is not my M.O. I never wanted to be a hard news reporter.
A brand new program started at NYU the year that I applied called Cultural Reporting & Criticism. I got a Xerox copy about it from the school in the mail. It was for people who wanted to write about art and culture instead of news. This program was made for me.
It was few days after the day NYU had said applicants would be contacted about admission, and I hadn’t yet heard them yet. So I called and spoke with Ellen Willis, who was the head of the CRC program. I had never spoken to her before, but when I told her my name, she knew who I was. She said, “Yeah, you’re in the program. And I think we also want to give you some money.” What?! I ended up being her graduate assistant, which meant I worked for her in exchange for a stipend and a full scholarship for a year.
A book just came out about Ellen – a collection of her essays about rock music calledOut of the Vinyl Deeps. She was a big deal: the first major female rock critic there was – she’s considered the godmother of female rock critics – and the first rock critic at the New Yorker, period. She was there from 1968 until the mid-70s. By the early ‘80s, she had become so disillusioned with music that she basically stopped writing about it. She moved on to concentrate on writing about politics and feminism and psychoanalysis.
By the time I was working with her, she didn’t really even want to talk about music. We would want to talk to her about her time with Janis Joplin. “Tell us about Iggy Pop.” She would never get really into it, which was kind of disappointing for someone who aspired to be a rock critic. But I idolized her. And it was through her that I really started to explore my interest in writing about music. Fashion, too. I have always been fascinated by the place where the two intersect and in the CRC I got to delve into that.
After I graduated from NYU, I was unemployed for about seven months. New York City is the worst place to be unemployed, let me tell you. Too much free time led me to drink too much. And I was already drinking a lot.
I really started drinking heavily when I moved to New York. I always drank, but never alone. I remember buying the first six-pack that I drank by myself. I did it listening to Frank Sinatra on vinyl, looking out my window at the city. I could see the Empire State Building from my window and it was lit up in blue, because it was Frank’s birthday, in honor of his eyes. I remember feeling very lonely and scared, even though I was thrilled to be in New York City and felt very welcomed and at home there. I made lots of friends, easily. But my circumstances were intimidating.
When I first got to town, I was intimidated by the intelligence of the people I meeting through my job with Ellen. It was nerve wracking just going out to dinner with Ellen and her partner Stanley, who’s a major Marxist scholar. I mean, these people were so freaking smart and I was just this 25-year-old girl from East Tennessee! That feeling continued, even when I graduated and moved on from NYU. I was still terribly overwhelmed by everyone around me.
By the time I was unemployed, I was drinking a lot, every day. Every afternoon I would go out and get a 40 oz of Budweiser, sit on the roof of my apartment building on the Lower East Side, and just listen to music and drink beer before my roommates could get home. I’d hide that bottle and then drink more with them, acting like it was my first drink. If they weren’t drinking that night, I’d go down to the corner pub and sit there alone, smoking cigarettes and drinking more beer.
And then I got the job at thePost - an assistant’s position. I was so cocky: I thought I was above it. I had been the lifestyle editor of my hometown’s local newspaper, for God’s sake! I was so wrong.
I worked the paper’s now-defunct Women’s Page. I took the job because I had to. But generally, I hate the idea of a women’s page. Newspapers should be great equalizers, as far as I’m concerned: everyone who reads one gets the same news, no matter their sex, race, income, or geography. A “women’s page” is essentially a ghettoization of information. In terms of newspapers, specifically, I think it’s insulting to assume that women and men need different information or need to have it delivered to them in different ways.
News ghetto or not, it was a good job, and it got me to thePost. When I got there, they needed fashion coverage. They hadn’t had a fashion editor in years – Elsa Klensch had been on in the ‘70s, so the position had existed. But when I got there, it was all freelanced out. I kept my nose down, just did my job and ran copy for my editor and did busy work. But I would pitch stories whenever I had time. By that time, my friends and I had started sneaking into fashion shows. The first show I ever snuck into was Betsy Johnson’s, in 1995 – the year she paid homage to Patti Smith. Totally fitting.
So, I started as an assistant but within two years I was a fulltime writer. And a few years later, they made me fashion editor. ThePost was on fire back then; everyone read us. I should probably write a book at some point about working there. It was there at the twilight of old school tabloid journalism. I have so many great stories.
The paper was so good to me. They just were lovely, but it didn’t make me happy. I was doing all these wonderful, fancy things with all these wonderful, fancy people, but it didn’t add up to happiness. The problem was that I didn’t know how to make myself happy. My life there never fed me. Plus, I knew I was drinking too much.
When I was living in New York, I’d come down to Nashville at least once a year to visit. It always made me happy. I actually tried to move here a couple of times in the late ‘90s, but it was just never right.
The last couple of years that I was in New York, I got so busy with work that I was essentially on autopilot. I had all these great opportunities – I was doing fabulous things that I can’t believe I did when I talk about them now. Parties. Awards shows. Travel. They paper gave me great play and a lot of support. But it was hard, grueling work.
And then one Friday night after working late, I was just washing my face when everything changed. I lifted up from the sink, looked in the mirror and felt this metallic feeling in my chest – I don’t know how else to describe it. And I said, out loud, “Oh, my God. I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to be here. And I can leave tomorrow.” I was ready to go to Nashville.
Everything about that move fell right into place, making it very obvious to me that it was the right thing to do.
Three months after that night at the sink, I was gone. And then I was here. Wherever you go, there you are.
I was working for a newspaper here, and getting settled and I just kept thinking that things would get better. For a long time, they didn’t: they actually got worse. So, I made a real change: just over a year after moving to Nashville, I checked myself in to a treatment center in Arizona. I am an alcoholic – and one with depression and anxiety issues, at that.
I came back to Nashville after treatment and started a new life. The Nashville recovery community has been where I have gathered a lot of my strength over the past six years. My family has been enormously supportive, too – above and beyond – as have my friends, here and elsewhere. I kept hearing at treatment that when an addict/alcoholic got out, they had to change everyone in their lives, cut bad influences out of their world. I think it’s a huge testament to the character of my friends that I didn’t loose a single one. I think I was the bad influence, not them!
Before I went to treatment, I had had my heart broken. As a way to make me feel better, my mother helped me open a vintage booth at Gas Lamp Antique Mall. I’d been collecting for years on my travels, and had a lot so it was easy to start. I quit the paper and started looking for work as a wardrobe stylist. I worked as a freelance fashion writer; I had a monthly column in Glamour magazine for a while and a weekly one here in the City Paper back when it was a daily.
Traffic at the Gas Lamp was great, but I had moved to East Nashville and wanted to set up shop over there. So I brought that up while I was sharing at an AA meeting in the neighborhood. Afterward, someone told me that they knew of a music store called Fanny’s House of Music that was opening in Five Points that had extra space they wanted to fill. I went in and met P. and Leigh, the owners, and we clicked. The rest is history.
Diamond Star Halo Vintage, my vintage business, is named in honor of my favorite line from the T. Rex song “Bang A Gong,” in which singer Marc Bolan compares the woman he loves to a car, telling her she’s “got a hubcap diamond star halo.” It’s lovey-dovey ’70s acid-trip gibberish, but I always thought it was such a groovy tribute to have a dude say you’re solid like a car. So dreamy!
The past six years have been really good, but as recently as last summer, I was still piecemealing a living together. I have known that that there was something else that I needed to be doing, but I didn’t know what it was or where it was. I knew it was there, but I couldn’t find it – that is until the day two years ago, when three people called me and left me messages, saying, “You’ve got to go to this jean shop in a gas station on 12South!”
It took me forever to get over here – I think I was intimidated. But when I finally did come, it was like coming home. You walked up to me at the door and said, “We have been waiting to meet you.” And you hugged me.
(Sidenote: I went to see a psychic a few months after that. I’d never seen a psychic before, but it was a Halloween thing going on in my neighborhood. I walked in and before I could even sit down, the psychic said to me, “Who’s Carrie?” And I said, “Well, I have this friend Kerry in New York and I know a guy named Cary…” I didn’t think about you, Carrie Eddmenson. I just had met you once! When I admitted I knew a few Carries but didn’t know which ones this was, the psychic said, very bluntly, “Well, I don’t know who Carrie is either, but a Carrie is going to change your life.” Less than a week later, I had to call you about something and bang! It hit me: are you my Carrie? So I left you this longwinded message about what the psychic said, ending it with, “I hope you’re my Carrie!” You must have thought I was a freak!)
And then you and Matt and I had dinner and we talked and I realized even deeper, and on so many other levels that you are my Carrie. And I’m your Libby.
I love how we keep finding out all these ways we’re connected. A lot of that six degrees of separation stuff. It keeps happening. Just last week, I found a magazine that for some reason I’ve kept for years. I’ve edited so many others out of my stacks, but I kept this oneNew York Times Magazine with the cover story about your dad and your brother that ran ten years ago. I held on to that issue specifically for that story – all these years.
I will never forget the day last summer that we met for coffee at Crema. I don’t think that either of us had any pre-conceived notions for that date. We were just talking. I remember you asking me if I was happy doing what I was doing. And I said, “Oh my God! I feel like I’ve been waiting for somebody to ask me that question. No, I’m not.”
Then you asked me to write down what my dream job looked like.
I wrote it down and showed it to you.
And you said, “Do that”.
So I did.
-I + W
Libby is the 2011 co-chair of the nD Festival, a five-day fundraising event taking place this fall benefiting the Belcourt Theatre. nD celebrates the sweet spot where film, fashion and music come together in Nashville – something that’s right up Libby’s alley. The kick-off party for the event is this Friday, June 24, at our friend Mike Wolfe’s new store, Antique Archaeology. Get tickets at www.belcourt.org.
Diamond Star Halo Vintage is located inside Fanny’s House of Music, 1101 Holly Street at the corner of 11th Street, near Five Points in glorious East Nashville.
About our photographer: Jo McCaughey is a British-born photographer now residing in Nashville. “Photography takes me on many great adventures and it’s an on going gift to have the opportunity to witness, shoot and document the lives of so many amazing and inspirational people,” she says. Her commercial work has been published in many major publications and has been used as part of numerous promotional campaigns. You can check out her images at www.jomccaughey.com.
