Chester County writer celebrates life of painter Horace Pippin

When she was 8 or 9, in the 1960s, Jen Bryant learned to type by copying obituary material on the desk of her father, a Flemington, N.J., undertaker.

In 2004, having already published more than a dozen books, she happened on a painting at the Brandywine River Museum by Horace Pippin, the late African American artist from West Chester.

Bookend events. From her first childhood taste of writing to her latest children's book, A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin, published by Alfred A. Knopf in January.

"Even as a kid, reading these seemingly ordinary lives" in material that her father would phone to the local newspaper, Bryant said, she realized that even "gas station attendants had much bigger and more interesting lives" than passersby might have thought.

The encounter with Pippin's work happened while Bryant was teaching writing at West Chester University.

"I'd been rambling on one day about Andrew Wyeth," she said. Realizing she was talking to "35 blank faces," she packed them off to discover Wyeth's work at the museum.

But, walking the galleries, she was the one who was startled, and it was by a Pippin painting, Saying Prayers.

On Sunday, Bryant will be at the museum in Chadds Ford for an 11 a.m. event in which museum volunteers will read from her Pippin work, and to deliver a talk at 1 p.m. about researching and writing it.

At home in Glenmoore on Wednesday, Bryant, 52, said that although Pippin's works were usually somber, "he always has a small amount of red in his paintings."

In 2004, she was struck by the simplicity of Saying Prayers, a scene of two children kneeling before a seated woman.

Pippin (1888-1946) "was a self-taught artist, born and died in West Chester," she said, "and that struck my interest."

The book germinated for years. "I am very distractable," she said. "But I try to use that rather than let that be a hindrance."

The result has been 11 books for children and young adults, all in print since 2004, and about a dozen written earlier but now out of print.

She alternates between what she calls "picture books," between 32 and 40 pages - Melissa Sweet of Rockport, Maine, illustrated the Pippin work - and "novels generally for middle to high school readers, anywhere from 200 to 300 pages."

She is married to Neil Bryant, vice president of sales training for a medical imaging firm.

Their only child, Leigh, 24, a doctoral candidate in sport and performance psychology at West Virgina University, was the spark for her writing.

"When our daughter was born," she said, "I was not teaching for the first time in the years since I graduated." She earned a bachelor's degree in French and German at Gettysburg College in 1982.

Visiting the public library in Exton to find books to read to their daughter, she found among them "a real lack of female role models in several professions."

The result was her series of nonfiction career books for children, published by a small press, all now out of print.

Although she returned to teaching, at West Chester University from 1999 to 2005, her focus has been on writing verse and children's works.

Sometimes combined.

If you've ever heard a child repeat a rhyme over and over, you might consider that telling stories in verse is a door into a child's love of the rhythm of language.

"Writing in poems," she said, "smashed together my two passions - poetry and biography, historical writing."

Annie Dillard is another influence.

On the edge of a couch where she was sitting Wednesday was Dillard's 2007 novel The Maytrees, which Bryant was reading.

A mentor, Bryant said, ever since Dillard's 1989 work, The Writing Life.