Words & Photography
My Gaia
7 Points Press (Florence, Alabama, 2025)
Poems by Jeanie Thompson & Photography by Wayne Sides
This book harkens back to the first collaboration that Wayne and Jeanie did, called “Litany for a Vanishing Landscape,” which featured poems and photos related to the strip of HWY 82 from Tuscaloosa to Montgomery. The first edition was privately printed and not available but was Jeanie’s first collaboration with a graphic artist and part of her role as a poet and documentarian of Alabama.
About Wayne Sides
Graphic artist, performing arts director
A native of Calhoun County, Alabama, Wayne has received a bachelor’s degree in visual and performing arts from the University of Alabama New College in Tuscaloosa and earned a master’s degree in photo image making/art from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He worked as a lecturer and artist in residence with Southwest State University of Marshall, MN, the New York Federation for the Arts. His work has been displayed nationally and internationally in galleries that include the OK Harris Gallery, Soho, NYC; A Palazzo Panichi Museum in Pietra Santa, Italy; and Birmingham Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, AL
His photographs are published in several books such as Side Show, Litany of a Vanishing Landscape, White Knights, Silence and the Hammer, Human Traces, Gather Up Our Voices, and Interpreter. His work has also been used as cover art for The Ballad of Little River by Paul Hemphill, Goodbye to the Buttermilk Sky by Julia Oliver, and three collections of poetry by Jeanie Thompson: How to Enter the River, Witness, White for Harvest, and New and Selected Poems.
Snowy Egrets Flying Before a Storm
In the stillness just ahead of the storm
I saw snowy egrets lifting above a field.
Their bodies rose, a chorus
catching the current of the mightier air.
Their flock twisted and whipped,
a delicate net of feather, wing, and bone
that broke as the storm flew into them –
I felt the fear hold me,
I flew with it.