Deborah, born in 1956, grew up in a family in which her parents, naturalized Americans, are descended from four generations of Dutch painters. Her father’s career in the international grain business took Deborah and her family to live in foreign countries on three continents and in six different American states, instilling in her a wanderlust and quest for new experience. After graduating from high school in Rye, New York she entered Cornell University with an intended Agronomy major. After two years she left college, drawn away by her love of photography and art, and took to the road in search of imagery and a broader sense of the World. In her twenties she traveled extensively, alone, developing a creative process inspired by atmosphere and light and fueled by a zest for knowledge resulting in photography exhibitions and gallery representation, and then slowly evolving into pastels and oil paintings. She has been showing her work professionally and continuously since 1976.
In her paintings and pastels personal interests and every day life have served as subject matter and her imagery is a collection of domestic comforts, explorations of the natural world, and contemplations of emotion, intellect, beauty and ideas. Deborah’s photographs, pastels and oils can be found in many personal, corporate and University collections across the country, and she continues to license her images for calendars, cards, and book covers. Currently her original paintings are represented by White Bird Gallery in Cannon Beach, Oregon.
She and her filmmaker husband Carl Vandervoort live and work on the north Oregon Coast, with their cat Birdie. Past and current work can be seen on her website www.deborahdewit.com
Praise for When All Else Fails
“Ayers generously takes us along on her journey from violence and decay to a
hard-earned rebirth into nature, love, and art. In the end, we too are redeemed.”
—Alison Luterman, author of In the Time of the Great Fires
those blooms will soon fan out sadder than sky. Even on the high sunny days of August, my beloved, your birth month, the month you died, sorrow flutters amid the branches. I’ll not sever those blossoms that remind me of you until late fall, when faded and frail as pages of an old book of poems I’m afraid to open for fear their music will crumble to dust.
Cat mama, dog mama, sky-watcher, recovering coffee obsessive, former New Yorker Lana Hechtman Ayers writes in a room over the garage. Her work appears in such places as Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, The MacGuffin, and Verse Daily. Author of eight full-length poetry collections, the most recent are: When All Else Fails (May 2023) and Overtures (August 2023). In 2024, her ninth collection, The Autobiography of Rain, will be released by Fernwood Press.
Lana also delves into romantic time travel fiction and mystery. She leads generative writing workshops in the Amherst method, helps poets assemble their own collections, facilitates a Zoom Poetry Book Club, and manages three small poetry presses where she’s fostered over 100 books in the world. Lana spends entirely too many hours watching HGTV and solving cryptograms with her spouse in Newport, Oregon, a town famous for its barking sea lions.