About/Contact

Country Mouse turned City Mouse, waiting to move back again. Wife to an opposite personality: he is calm and steady and focused and works as a consultant in strategy and research for MLB, NCAA, NFL, ESPN, and major event marketing. I am a retired psychotherapist, after 35 years, and now happily ensconced at the Lincoln Park Zoo as a docent and zoo educator. I am a fiber artist and teacher, working predominantly in the area of felting. He is more rational, I am intuitive but also practical and we bring balance to each other. Mother of two nearly perfect children- a musician son and a mermaid daughter, both starter people in their own right, out discovering the world. The icing on the cake? two lovely step-daughters!  We live in Chicago but spend some months each year tucked into a bungalow in historic Old NorthEast St. Petersburg. There, I work at Boyd Hill Nature Preserve, in raptor rehabilitation and giving tram tours out and among the alligators. I spend inordinate amounts of time fondling wool and transforming it from fleece to felt.  I read and write, process wool and make felted creations, garden, dream and dawdle, weave, knit, cook. All pursuits are works in progress. I like catch and release fly fishing-I don’t catch much but I tie beautiful flies! I practice yoga, not very well. I struggle with inconsistency in focusing my energy and time and I procrastinate a bit much.

It seems as though the first 56 years were all about the foundation and structure and now I can begin on the aesthetics. For me these include becoming more environmentally aware, eating in a local and responsible fashion and creating a center of peace and calm within myself that just might spread far enough to influence a few others. I want to spend more time with an eye towards a macro look at the lives with whom we share this planet- creatures and plants. Perhaps I’ll take a photograph or two.

UPDATE 10/1/2010 Hello from Asheville! We left Chicago a while back and we’re now right where we want to be: most of the time perched on the side of a mountain just south of Asheville, NC and those really cold months? In St. Petersburg where I am teaching fiber arts at The Morean Arts Center. In North Carolina we share our territory with many birds and deer, 3 bears (a mother and two cubs this year) and we enjoy a big garden full of tomatoes. I spend more and more time working in the world of wool and fiber, primarily teaching and creating felt.

vbennett@umich.edu

vibennett@mac.com

On FaceBook: Vicki Bennett-Luker