No one seems content with my name, including my mother. I was born Jean Elaine Maloney; mother insists it is Elena, not Elaine! I was 12 when my father adopted me and I became a Treadway (gratefulness still abounds). In high school Jean became Jeanne in joyous celebration of that magnificent French part in my DNA.

 

Playfulness, affection, introspection, serendipity, aged ears, true love, spaciness, and plain old mistakes brought me a plethora of nicknames: Jeannie, of course, Little Miss Piss, Texas Jets, Michelle, Schatzie, Melissa, the trippy toe tapper of Tamarack, Jeano, Jetson, Jetsonian, Kat Kerouac, Lady of the Rocks, Queen of the Mesas, Onza Tredwit, even Jeeves Tradwat. Several loves call me La Francesa – my curious Spanish accent certainly cannot be from around here. I also have four spiritual names earned through blessings, quests, and ritual.

 

Myrtle, most beloved family heart, occasionally called me her raven child, usually when grumbling about a pile of desert detritus I hauled around, but PARFA officially named me Raven in 1969. A couple of decades later RavenJets spread wide ebony wings to hatch and nourish three little motley fledgling songbirds of art: Green Eyed Raven, Sena Queen, and Lola PinQ.

 

Green Eyed Raven’s sparkling jewel of an eye espies physical beauty for a painter of archetypes, alchemist sculptor of the lost and found, seeker of extravagant delights, lover of hinged boxes.

 

Lola PinQ emerged serendipitously from a writing class, a neighbor, her aunt, and a pink, functional, 1953, square Maytag wringer washing machine with raised chrome letters. Now iconic Ms. Lola is muse to this Divinely Cuddled Fool Errant, earth-observant essayist, poet-in-love, dizzying tome dancer that I am.

 

Sena Queen honors a spiritual line of female ancestors traced to a tiny island off the coast of Brittany first identified in 45 AD by Pomponius Mela (Sena was the last name of my first grandmother born in the US of A). This section wanders amongst inspiring web sites, fascinating animal group names, copious historic research, a bunch of stuff about Celts, my personal photographic love affair with an incomparable landscape, and some of the eloquence all that inspires.

 

As the long-ago nicknames acknowledged an aspect of my multitudinous self, so each online name—RavenJets, Lola PinQ, Green Eyed Raven, and Sena Queen—serves as a specific demiurgic room, so to speak, that allows me to participate in a swooping, swooning, delicious paean to the astonishingly pulchritudinous wonder of being alive.

 

So, we—the poet, the photographer, the sculptor, the painter, the thinker—are me. Welcome to my site.