I’m Whitney Otto, a writer born and raised in Pasdena, CA, though I’ve lived many years now in Portland, OR. Still more Californian than Oregonian.

My box is called, “My Life as A Liar,” a title I’ve used in the past as a kind of play on my work as a novelist. Inside there are a couple of references to my work—which is usually about art and women—torn pages from my autobiography, Art For the Ladylike; a couple of vintage photos. The window and torn screen at the rear are a reference to one of my favorite Joseph Cornell pieces, a box called Toward The Blue Peninsula, which is a representation of confinement and the longing for freedom.

My mother was Italian/Sicilian/AMerican, born in an apartment in Harlem in 1926, raised in The Bronx, eventually moving to California where she met and married my father. SHe never fit in with the other post-war moms; she was glamorous, vivacious, exciting, loved people, was aspirational. She started working in advertising in her late teens, and continued in this career in Los Angeles, after she married my father.

I have a photo of her with the other moms, sitting around a kiddie pool, they in their camp shirts and capris, my mom with her red lips, black eyeliner, gold hoop earrings, fitted sun dress and pumps. Always dressed to the nines.