James Tiptree, Jr. Award 2007 Art
"Up, Over Rocky Ground,"_ named necklace created by jeweler Elise Matthesen specifically for The Carhullan Army. Here are the artist's notes for this piece:

Dear Ms. Hall,
I had the honor and the happy task of making the artwork that comes to you as part of the prize for your book. In making the piece, I was guided and inspired by various passages from and aspects of the book, and it seems a good thing to tell you about them. I hope that knowing where I got some of the design elements will increase whatever pleasure the piece may bring you.
The piece does not really have a formal name, but I came to think of it as "Up, Over Rocky Ground." The combination of sterling silver and gold (filled) wire is a reference to all the machinery, whether dead and rusting or new and stockpiled, at the beginning of the book. It's also a framework, a web-work, connecting the separate bits of stone and glass (if it is glass, but we'll get to that later) in rather a make-do but sturdy fashion, much as anyone in a little farm town will patch up things that need to be patched, and go on. To me, it echoed the way Jackie put together her army out of the women who came her way, using whatever was there, and getting the most she could out of it. (I come from a little farm town in Wisconsin, and the term for patching things together was always "it's held together with spit and baling wire."_ This is, I hope, more sturdy than that, but you see what effect I was aiming for, I hope.)

The different beads, of course, made me think of the women of the book: different shapes, not just physically but mentally, psychologically, but all fitting together somehow. Some of the stones have greens and browns and grays in them, which looked to me like the colors of the terrain and what grows there up on the moor. I didn't put much of the tawny veldt of October in there, but there is the green vegetation of the lowlands that she left behind, and some of the colors of stone and mud she found as she climbed. Many of the beads, though, have blues in them, either as their main hue or dancing across them in fitful flashes, as happens with the faceted round grey-green beads that are labradorite. It's a trick of the crystal structure, that bit of blue that dances there, and it made me think of a paler reflection of the blue from Jackie Nixon's eyes, and the way her thoughts and purposes found reflection in the women of Carhullan.
Central, of course, is the blue stone on a twist of wire, looped at the ends. It's a piece of lapis lazuli, and the bits of golden pyrite in it harmonized with the gold wire, and the bits of white, which looked to me like clouds, spoke to the silver. While I expect it's quite different from the stone you envisioned in the book, the stone that Megan gives Sister, it seemed to me to bring interesting opposites together, and I liked the stubborn angularity of the cut, and the way it refused to be easily fitted into some sort of comforting symmetry. I toyed with the idea of braiding a lace for it and threading it through the necklace-crown, but decided that the stone and its looped wires would be better attached to the armature like the rest of the beads, a bit of history testifying to something that had happened, back before the bit wound up where it is now.
