Bare feet keep you safe is a sensuous uncanny journey twisting back and forth... blue boat drifting on the water, the river in flood, the churning water through the factory turbines; Bluebeard's locked rooms, ... these symbolic images will stay with you. In Bare feet keep you safe the central characters are the girl and the river, though her best friend and her lovers accompany her at times on the journey, and the river is lost and found again. Fairytale, fantasy, memoire, journal, poem; Bare feet keep you safe is about the internal isolation of growing up a woman, (Simone de Beauvoir: 'you are not born a woman, you become one'), and the work of an artist and poet to become La femme intégrale (Nicole Brossard). The book explores childhood in the 50's; teenager, young lesbian and then wife in the 60's, becoming a feminist and a lesbian in the 70's, and a lesbian mother in the 80's. Bare feet keep you safe evokes the grass in the park, and the river bed weeds, where the child walks with barefoot freedom. This is a rich tale for the present, for the third wave of feminism, opening out the struggle women have been through to knit their many selves together and reach the present... With her, the reader becomes she, her, you and I. A book to meander in, savour words and thoughts. If you have enjoyed Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, or Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, this will be a book for you. 'trust me water and light trust me touch and sensation know it is exactly this..
About the Author: Caroline Halliday was born in 1947 in Brixton, London, and lived in Mauritius for two years when she was 5. Most of her childhood was spent in South London by the River Wandle. She has travelled to China, America, Australia, and many European countries. Supported by the lesbian-feminist writing community in London she began writing and publishing poetry in the late 70's. Some Truth, Some Change was published in 1983 by Onlywomen Press, the first poetry book by a single lesbian author that they published. Since then she has had many articles, poems and stories in anthologies: 'One Foot on the Mountain', 'In Other Words', 'In and Out of Time'; and magazines: Sinister Wisdom, Common Lives Lesbian Lives, Just Seventeen, and Baby Magazine among them. As well as writing, she has worked in Community Development, with diversity issues in primary schools and Community Care, and as a freelance Training Consultant. In '74, with a group of feminists, she initiated Lewisham Women's Aid, the second women's aid refuge in the UK; and Deptford Womens Centre. London has been Caroline's centre for most of her life. In 2000 she lived in Brighton for two years but decided she really was a Londoner through and through, and lives in Hackney again. 'Bare feet keep you safe' was written in the late 80's as The River and edited in 2000/1. It was part of a series of explorations of 'book form.' Aged 50, she began a short course in Art using visual images instead of words and went on to complete a BA in 2006, and an MA in Fine Art in 2012. Text was always important in her work. She uses mixed media and installation often deconstructing everyday objects to reveal their patriarchal and heteronormative dimensions. She has had work in many group shows, a solo show in Hackney, and she also curates and organizes group shows, including two Feminist Art shows (2011, I-SHO, and 2013, FANS OF FEMINISM). FANS OF FEMINISM 2014 is in planning. Her work is inspired by the writing of Nicole Brossard, a French-Canadian, a lesbian-feminist writer. 'The personal is political' was a key phrase in 70's feminism, now being used by younger feminists. This, and the implications of getting older, mean 'Bare feet keep you safe' has come to the right time to be published.