I have four books in print, which you will find in the sidebar, the latest of which is Lives Illuminated, a collection of essays that combines my passions of traveling, reading, and creative nonfiction. Locale by locale and personality by personality, I bring the historical figures I have chosen as my subjects to life. Famed soprano Giudita Pasta and composer Vincenzo Bellini collaborate on the shores of Lake Como; Colette is illuminated in the story of her life in the Palais Royal and her death in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris; Horace Walpole creates his marvelous mansion Strawberry Hill House near London; Marie Louise of Austria’s wealth as an empress is found in a quaint museum in Parma; the silent visages of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lurk in their former home in Montgomery, Alabama; and other historical movers-and-shakers take center stage.
Lives Illuminated
Lives Illuminated is a collection of essays that combines Saxon Henry’s passions of traveling, reading, and creative nonfiction. As an intentional traveler, she visits places in order to feel into the past and plumb the lives of the historical figures who have lived in the locales. She has explored Giuditta Pasta’s world on Lake Como; taken in Horace Walpole’s Gothic visions at Strawberry Hill near London; followed Johann Wolfgang von Goethe through his hometown of Frankfurt; grown curious about Marie Louise of Austria in Parma and Consuelo Vanderbilt in Newport; plumbed Edith Wharton’s heartbreak in New Haven; marveled at the life Djuna Barnes chose to lead during her last four decades in New York City; trekked through the Jazz Age with the Fitzgeralds by way of their last residence as a family in Montgomery; and learned a great deal about a nature-loving Colette, a brazen Natalie Clifford Barney, and a wise King Charles V in Paris. Each of these stories reveals aspects of the lives being illuminated that show each character in a surprising light. It is also available on Amazon.
The Modern Salonnière
In my previous book before Lives Illuminated, titled The Modern Salonnière, I plumb the depths of dozens of historical figures, these few among them: I stroll through Paris while imagining the era when the Emperor Julian the Apostate ruled Lutetia, parts of which still stand at the Thermes de Cluny; I walk London’s streets in search of the fin-de-siècle haunts where the Decadents were determined to turn convention on its ear; I trek to Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where Edna St-Vincent Millay summered with her avant-garde chums; and I follow Peggy Guggenheim to Venice, Jim Morrison to Paris, Denys Finch-Hatton to Africa, Ottoline Morrell to Oxford, and Henry James to a string of Italian towns in Tuscany.
I am currently posting essays with similar themes on The Modern Salonnière, my publication on Substack, and am working on new adventures, though the people who are alive in them are different. I am blessed to be able to spend my life immersed in writing. Buy it here in her designated shop of Bookshop.org.
Collaborations: A Houston Penthouse
This beautifully illustrated large-format monograph reveals how multi-disciplinary architectural firm 212box has crafted a luxurious and bespoke penthouse suite in Houston, Texas. The principals on the project collaborated with more than 50 talented artisans and craftspeople — from sculptors to cabinet makers to painters and ceramicists, among many others — to create beautifully designed interiors, including furniture, materials, and art objects. The project illustrates how artisanal elements curated during a collaboration between the firm and the homeowner patrons inherently coalesced into nuanced interiors. Set atop of the stunning Arabella building, overlooking the magnificent Houston skyline, this elegant penthouse includes exquisite materiality, detailing, and craftsmanship, from special sliding doors, a uniquely positioned curiosity cabinet, and stunning objets d’art that are tailored to each room, which all together create wonderful stories that connect the residents with an eye for their own collections, their vision and ambiance for each space, and the energy within their home. Along with presenting the building containing the penthouse and the residence itself, renowned writer and journalist Saxon Henry exquisitely introduces readers to each maker as a character in a story. Each space elicits its own experience. Buy the book here in my designated shop of Bookshop.org. You can see my post on the book here on the blog.
Anywhere But Here
To publish a book of poems has been a dream softly burning within Saxon Henry for several decades, one that Anywhere But Here realizes. Many of these poems took root during studies under Tom Absher at Vermont College and the late William Packard at NYU, both of whom served as examples of lives lived in authentic inward exploration. This book is a result of their encouragement toward that way of living, which offers both difficulty and solace in equal measure. Buy it here in my designated shop of Bookshop.org.
Stranded on the Road to Promise
On the windswept prairie of the Great Plains and in the Alaskan Bush, one woman struggles to understand why an honest account of history was never told. As she moves amongst the Sioux and the Athapaskans as a construction missionary for the Episcopal Church, her questions deepen when the pain of these tribes’ pasts tap into hers. The question as to whether Western Religions have relevancy for Native Americans lead her on a chaotic journey to her own spirituality. It is not scripture that helped her maintain equilibrium but the literary works of remarkable writers, both Native American and non-Native American. The path to her growth resulted in Stranded on the Road to Promise. Buy it here in my designated shop of Bookshop.org.
