Still Life

On April 4, 2022, John Crutchfield’s personal essay “Still Life: Toward a Remembrance of Elliott Paul Orr” appeared in the online journal berfrois.

Exactly twenty years earlier, on April 4, 2022, Elliott Paul Orr – a brilliant young sculptor and close personal friend from Governor’s School West 1987 – took his own life. For many years thereafter, John worked on what was imagined as a tribute to his friend, a book-length collage of poems, photographs, diary entries, letters, philosophical explorations, and research materials on suicide, as well as interviews with Elliott’s surviving family and friends, and effluvia from his daily life. Somehow these materials dispersed themselves into various other forms: a collection of poems (Yearbook, still unpublished), a dance performance (“Seven Glimpses”), and two full-length plays (The Labyrinth and Solstice).

For the 20th Anniversary of Elliott’s death, however, John assembled a series of prose fragments into an essay intended to gesture toward the book that has not yet been written, and may never be.

To read the full essay, click here.