“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The photograph of me, taken and dated by my father [Robert Sr.], has been kept in one of the Butts family albums for 53 years. In it the time is June 1, 1921. I’m almost 2 years old. I have curly light-colored hair. I wear a one-piece suit, long white stockings, and black shoes. I stand in the side yard of the house my parents rented in Mansfield, a small college town in northeastern Pennsylvania. Perhaps a dozen chicks cluster in the grass at my feet while I stare down at them, quite entranced. In blurred focus behind me an unknown teen-age girl sits on a swing that’s suspended from a tree limb, and an empty wicker stroller-type carriage [mine?] stands beside her. Parked in a driveway in back of her is a four-door touring car with a fabric top. I might add that Mansfield is only 35 miles below Elmira, N.Y., where Jane and I live now.

In a very simplified summary from Rich Bed: Jane was the only child of Marie Burdo and Delmer Roberts. She was 2 years old when her parents were divorced in 1931. With her daughter, the young Marie then returned to her own parents, and the home that the family had rented for a number of years: half of a double dwelling in a poor neighborhood in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Marie began experiencing the early stages of rheumatoid arthritis, but worked as much as possible.

6. It took more than a little while for Jane’s mystical nature to show itself in prose. Two years after we married, she published her first work of fiction, a short story about reincarnation called “The Red Wagon”: It appeared in the December, 1956, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [© 1956 by Fantasy House, Inc., New York, N.Y.]. She was 27 years old, and most pleased with the beginning of her professional career. Within the next several years she sold a number of additional stories to the same magazine, as well as two short novels, and also published poetry and a little fiction in other markets.

I remember being a little surprised at her subject matter for “The Red Wagon” — for it’s not contradictory to write here that even though she was so interested in reincarnation as a theory, we seldom talked about it. “The Red Wagon” is included in the collection Ladies of Fantasy/Two Centuries of Sinister Stories by The Gentle Sex, © 1975 by Manley and Lewis, and published by Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., New York, N.Y., 10016.

10. I gave up my commitment to commercial art in 1953, when I was 34 years old. My intuitive desire to do so had been growing slowly for several years. The act of separation finally became conscious and deliberate when I moved to a small community near Saratoga Springs, N.Y. (where Jane lived), to temporarily help an artist-writer friend produce a syndicated “comic” strip. This was the last commercial work I was to do for some time; I finally understood that I was simply more interested in painting pictures than in doing anything else. Since I believe that each of us creates our own reality in the most precise terms, it can hardly be a coincidence that at this time of decision my friend introduced Jane and me — for she was just as devoted to writing as I was to painting.