It is with great sadness that the TLQ group announces, belatedly, the death last winter of longtime participant Elizabeth Anne Mitchell, on 15 December 2022.
Present and past TLQ contributors and followers will remember that Elizabeth Anne was an academic librarian with a background in medieval studies, a deep love of medieval manuscripts and their archives, and a special interest in medieval women writers. She had a series of blogs for creative writing and other projects. She loved words and their history, explored photography and various forms of fiction, and enjoyed handcrafts. In September 2022, she expressed enthusiasm about the idea of a mini-NaNoWriMo for TLQ members who wanted to do something creative but didn’t feel able to commit to the fullscale NaNoWriMo goals.
She joined the TLQ group as soon as it formed. In 2018, she listed her accomplishments since the group began, an impressive list by any standard, and the more so because most of these achievements took place while she dealt with challenges such as ill health, moving house, and a family member’s surgery. She took part in every session, until she dropped out in fall 2022 after receiving an unsettling diagnosis.
Elizabeth Anne was unfailingly kind, gracious, and encouraging to other group members even when she herself was frustrated with her day job and with bureaucratic obstacles to finishing her dissertation. Illness and surgeries rarely held her back for long, though physical therapy and medical appointments regularly turned up in her list of weekly goals. She persevered with finding time for the important and non-urgent even when awash in the urgent (important or not). Her goals always testified to the effort to find work-life balance, including tasks like “take puppy to vet” as well as “write better transitions.” She often had useful advice based on her own coping-with-ADHD strategies, which proved helpful for neuro-typical and neuro-atypical readers alike. She also offered excellent suggestions for library research and student assignments, based on her extensive experience.
At
TLQ, Elizabeth Anne is probably best known for her coinage of the motto “float like mist,” dating back to February 2016, when she was one of the group’s hosts. With
her encouragement, many of us adopted the phrase as our mantra in times of
stress, and it is often repeated in weekly posts here.
She will continue to float in our hearts.
Oh, EAM. She will always float like mist. I am so grateful for her and for all of you who have been such a kind, supportive community. I've been thinking about joining the second session, even though I am already late, but will be back to do a proper introduction tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteThank you, DEH, for this beautiful tribute. We'll miss her.
ReplyDeleteDame Eleanor has said it so well, but her post sent me back to earlier posts in this series. I've been a fairly regular participant since 2014, and Elizabeth Anne Mitchell was such a vital participant, part of what made it so kind and supportive. As a historian of the early modern world, I valued her love of rare books, manuscripts and the medieval; her delight in doing work at the Morgan library was infectious. Her good humor as she dealt with things that got in the way of her doing the work she loved was remarkable. I am so grateful I/we had her in our world, even a virtual one. May she ever float like mist.
ReplyDeleteThank you Dame Eleanor for doing the research and finding the words, both things Elizabeth Anne Mitchell would have appreciated. I valued her love of words and wordcrafting, and her grace in navigating the many frustrations of life and of academe - she exemplified how to float like mist without losing your own personality and passion, and we were and are very lucky to have had her as part of our little community here.
ReplyDeleteThis is a lovely tribute. Thank you for the link to her blogs. I love the mantra 'float like mist'.
ReplyDeleteWe will all miss Elizabeth Anne Mitchell, she was a genuinely kind and compassionate, and also very funny and interesting and had a lovely way of looking at the world. I enjoyed her writing very much for many years, and it was so lovely to meet her at our one virtual meet-up we did during peak Covid! She was definitely someone that we would have all wanted to have as a local-go-out-for-tea kind of friend I think!
ReplyDeleteAlong with "float like mist" I remember "move like water" which she coined to convey how to keep about moving around obstacles in a gentle but effective way...
Thank you DEH for finding the words and writing a beautiful tribute.