Just as she showed instinctive skill with the plants, pruning, pinching, disbudding, grafting, feeding or not, she went at the pages with a sure hand and eye, attacking flabby transitions, misplaced prepositions, and the bevy of exclamation points she considered in a class with women who squeal, "You don't say!" "Imagine that!" In Chapter 4, she gouged out "eyes like lustrous pansies" that had been "glinting sapphire" six pages earlier, and substituted "sapphire" throughout because at least it was preferable to "lustrous pansies."

When she had finished ridding a manuscript of all these blights, she often felt the virtuous satisfaction of a gardener who's spent the day weeding and squashing bugs. But there were times, especially with bad novels, when it was hard to keep from putting on rubber gloves and ripping out whole hunks of a book like poison ivy, and in Chapter 5 she found a section that made her fingers itch. The lovers were talking baby talk in bed, making up playful nicknames for their intimate parts. If they had beaten each other with pink and blue ribbons, she couldn't have been more revolted.

-- Open the Door (1966)

While I was thus polluting the blank pads of paper intended for Art, the art teacher in grade school continued to have hopes for me, in the dogged belief that, being my mother's child, I just couldn't be that bad. Once a week, on Wednesdays, she came to the Fourteenth Street School, and we had a whirl at Art. While the other children were drawing houses with doors and chimneys and neat spirals of smoke coming out, the most I could manage was a lean-to. No smoke, no symmetry. I was equally wobbly on Halloween pumpkins, spring flowers tastefully arranged in a vase (which the teacher called a vawhse) and Christmas trees with a star on top. Stars, with all those points, drove me crazy. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, I was the only child in class who became an artist's model.

The exotic role came to me at the age of eleven, when the Saturday morning art class ran out of subjects. The class had been organized by Mr. Ward, a small, gray-haired man who looked as though he'd break if you bent him in the middle. He had lived abroad for many years, but now he'd come back to Franklin, to squeeze out his last years, like dried up paint from a nearly empty tube, in doing portraits of citizens whose forbears had struck oil. On the side, he'd started the art class for twelve ladies, including Mother and Mrs. Ramspeck, all of whom paid two dollars a week for the privilege of studying under Mr. Ward.

They must have been terribly hard up for models, to choose me, and I must admit they tried my pretty sister first, but she squirmed too much. I had always had a talent for sitting static as a corpse, but it had been considered a rather unfortunate, negative talent until the art class got ahold of me.

-- from We Shook the Family Tree (1941)