Book Description

"Clare Cooley's true-life story is a riveting and intensely textural journey of amazing adventure, profound creativity, and punishing endurance through unimaginable life events. Cooley is fueled by her amazing spirit, artistic exploration, and an outright will to thrive, not just survive, over a lifetime of extreme challenges. Although her story is harsh and disturbing at times, it is also filled with beauty, inspiration, and life lessons for all." Mark Eveslage—Emmy Award-Winning Cinematographer "Clare's stories are well-written, entertaining, yet bittersweet, and they contain universal themes that surely will resonate with readers. Cooley's tales reveal the dramatic story of a woman who overcame enormous obstacles through determination and creativity. The subject matter is timely and can help many. As a writer, Clare has her own unique and articulate voice. This book will help others confront their own demons." Claire Kirch—Publishing Industry Veteran "Incandescence is the transformative book for our times, taking us from a dark and hopeless state to an iridescent and wondrous awareness borne by loss and humility, infused by a profound connection to the natural world, and forged by love's indomitable spirit." Sumner Matteson—Author of Afield: Portraits of Wisconsin Naturalists, Empowering Leopold’s Legacy Sixteen-year-old Clare Cooley is standing on an overpass, thinking about jumping into the traffic below. At her young age, she has yet to kiss a boy, but she is pregnant after being raped and faces a choice—surrender to the darkness or rise above it. Clare Cooley’s powerful and provocative memoir chronicles her journey from growing up in a dangerously dysfunctional family to becoming a self-made successful prolific artist. No one in her chaotic family noticed when she stopped attending school regularly at seven years old, and she did not return until she was asked to teach in her twenties. Cooley’s evocative stories follow her saga hitchhiking with truckers, fasting alone for three days on a mountaintop, being one of the first females to work with the longshoremen on Lake Superior, innocently ending up in jail, nearly perishing at sea, and being deported from a country. Cooley fearlessly reflects on moments of great adversity and expanding epiphany, dealing with abuse, addiction, suicide, teen motherhood, misogyny, raising her damaged drug addicted sister’s children, and confronting her father about his violent crimes. Cooley writes eloquently and authentically about growing up a sensitive, free-spirited daughter of a brilliant but broken pedophile father and a gentle artist mother. Cooley charts her sojourn from her first home in a quonset hut in the Arizona desert, to bouncing around the country with her family, then leaving home at seventeen to travel the U.S. alone, sometimes living in a tent, a teepee, a car, and an abandoned building. Cooley reflects on the power of facing painful truths, expressing them, and healing. A deeply vulnerable narrative that explores transcendence through artistic expression, Incandescence is dark and luminous, personal, and universal. Cooley chronicles the dark times in her life and how her focus on creativity helped her transform it into art. Cooley developed an arts curriculum that she taught to all grade levels, including universities and institutions and created a career as a creativity coach, sharing what she learned about the capability of expression to transform adversity into advantage through art. Cooley’s authentic voice shines through with heart and whimsy in her insightful illuminations of decades of prolific creativity, inner exploration, and meditations on what makes people happy. As evidence of her rise above darkness, Cooley’s masterful art offers moments of serenity between chapters.