Description
“Incandescence: Rising Above Darkness, Memoir & Art” (Paperback: $24.99, ISBN: 978-1737076209) is 318 pages and features 52 Stories & 68 Full Color Art Images “A Journey of Turning Hardship to Happiness”.
Sixteen-year-old Clare Cooley is standing on an overpass, thinking about jumping into the traffic below.
She has yet to kiss a boy, but she is pregnant after being raped
and faces a choice-surrender to the darkness or rise above it.
DULUTH, Minn.—Follow Clare Cooley as she RISES beyond a dangerously dysfunctional family, above the darkness that threatened to swallow her, and into a successful, self-made artist in her memoir, Incandescence: Rising Above Darkness,
Memoir & Art.
Dark and luminous, personal and universal, Cooley’s deeply vulnerable narrative explores transcendence through artistic expression and reflects on the power of facing painful truths, expressing them, and healing. She shares her inspiring journey, and the lessons she learned along the way, through a series of 52 evocative essays in which she fearlessly reflects on moments of great adversity and expanding epiphany, from dealing with abuse, addiction, suicide, teen motherhood, and misogyny, to raising her damaged drug-addicted sister’s children and confronting her father about his violent crimes.
She writes eloquently and authentically about growing up a sensitive, free-spirited daughter of a brilliant but broken pedophile father and a gentle artist mother, charting her sojourn from her first home in a quonset hut in the Arizona desert to leaving home at seventeen to travel the U.S. alone, and to sometimes living in a tent, a teepee, a car, and an abandoned building.
The artist chronicles dark times in her life and how her focus on creativity helped her transform adversity into art, dark into light—, from hitchhiking with truckers to fasting on a mountain top, from growing up without a formal education to developing art curriculum and teaching in universities, institutions, and every grade level of the public schools, and from nearly perishing at sea to becoming a creativity coach.
For additional inspiration, essays are separated by 68 beautiful, full-color images from Cooley’s “A Journey of Turning Hardship to Happiness” collection of artwork. Together with her art, Cooley’s authentic voice shines throughout Incandescence with heart and whimsy in insightful illuminations of decades of prolific creativity, inner exploration, and meditations on what makes people happy.
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