Welcome to the blog tour for Leeana Tankersley‘s lovely and wonderful book Found Art: Discovering Beauty in Foreign Places. Leeana is one of our Wives of Faith blog contributors, and I’m thrilled to review her book here at Wives of Faith!
Found Art is a memoir of the year author Leeana Tankersley lived in the Middle East with her Navy SEAL husband during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As her story unfolds, Leeana finds her life and her soul have been changed forever.
Pattie’s Thoughts:
Found Art is an amazing, deceptively small book—for inside its textured painted cover is a world: the world of a journey inside a woman’s soul. Leeana Tankersley tells about the first year of her marriage to her Navy SEAL husband, while they lived in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. The book shows several journeys: the journey she makes during the year in Bahrain, and the journey the following year back in California.
The overlying theme of “found art” is presented artistically in the eight items in her life collage. Representations of themes in her life, Leeana writes about the items themselves, as well as what they represent to her. In doing so, she shares her heart in an open and honest way, and she also invites her readers to do the same. There are even prompts at the back of the book for personal journaling or group discussion.
From the standpoint of being a military wife, I appreciated Leeana’s journey. I have not yet been called into a foreign country as a military spouse, so reading about her journey, her spiritual awakening moments, called to my heart in a very special way. Also, the “stones of remembrance” she talks about has always been something that stood out to me in Scripture as well.
All in all, this book came to me at exactly the right time. It was a little “late” because it arrived in my mailbox towards the end of the blog tour timeline, but it was precisely the right time for me, Pattie, to read. I’ve made no secret to my friends, in the past year, about my great reluctance to turn 40 this past November. I felt like I was at some sort of turning point in my life, even though we’ve been in the same place nearly four years and I’m comfortable here in the way one is comfortable being in a place for that long. The eternal twin questions of who am I and what am I doing bombard me as I continue to pray for God to show me what His design is for my life. Where that “sweet spot” is for me.
Found Art arrived just after we listed our home for sale (a new venture) and prepared for a weekend trip to Winnipeg, Manitoba, to see the Royal Winnipeg Ballet dance Swan Lake. Granted, Canada is not Bahrain; yet any travel, even if it’s only a couple hundred miles north into another country, is still a journey. As I read the book a chapter or two at a time during this weekend, I found myself looking for things, noticing things, like the melting ice sculpture in the courtyard. Or the people in the street with various funky clothing or piercings. The taste of the French toast at Pancake House. Driving through fog. The overall beauty of the ballet. The joy on my daughters’ faces as they experienced the live ballet accompanied by the Winnipeg Symphony. Even my Tim Horton’s doughnut and coffee. All of these sensory experiences served to make a collage of our weekend.
My desire is to make the most of our opportunities as a military family. As the Air Force moves us onward and southward in the coming months, I will carry Found Art with me, its own work of art that spurs me and prods me to allow God to make my own life into art.
Somehow I ended up with an extra copy of the book; occasionally this happens with Zondervan. I’d like to offer it to one of our Wives of Faith readers as a giveaway. And this time, I’m going to make you work a little! (Kind of like our blog carnival at Christmas and the one coming up in May.)
To enter the giveaway, you need to write a response to this prompt:
In Leeana’s book she writes about little pieces of “found art” that grew in significance to her. Write about something that you have found at some time in your life that has become significant to you.
Write about it on your blog and leave the link in the comments. If you don’t blog, leave your response in the comments here. I will close the comments on Tuesday morning, March 23, and choose a winner by 10 a.m.
Looking forward to reading your responses!
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When I was student teaching, one of the teachers told me about her daughter going off to college. She was a widow and only had one child. She was so concerned about her. She prayed for her daughters protection daily. Her daughter(as a young girl) had always said when she found a quarter that it was her angel watching over her. It had become a joke and yet sentimental over the years. One day my friend was going through some things in her daughters room and found a whole bag of quarters! She loved it and felt comforted by a bag of quarters some how. I thought it was a cute story. When my husband was deployed (this was about 10 years after I had heard that story), I was really down in the dumps. I told God that I felt all alone. As I cleaned house with tears streaming down my face, I found a whole bad of quarters in my husbands closet! I had to stop and laugh! It did make me feel comforted in a strange way. I still keep a quarter out of that bag I found in my coat pocket.
Thanks again for the great review, Pattie. I so appreciate it. And I love that quarters story from Christie. In the book, I wrote about the "handwritten note from Kuwait" that Steve wrote to me the weekend the war started. I still have the note and look at it from time to time. It is certainly a piece of art to me, filled with all the raw emotion of that life-changing weekend. One of these days, I'll frame it and preserve it for our kids.