A single cello was the magnetizing force for versatile San Rafael artists Diane Frank and Erik Ievins.
Theirs is a story perfect for telling on Valentine’s Day.
The two cellists, who will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary this year, met on an October country dance weekend more than 15 years ago in Aptos. Separately, they walked into an almost empty room, where they found a lone cello and each other.
As Ievins started playing Bach, the spell was cast. They have been together ever since.
Today, Frank, an award-winning poet, writer and teacher, and Ievins play with the Golden Gate Symphony, a community orchestra of professional musicians and amateurs. Ievins has the standing of professional and Frank, who studies under cellist Jill Rachuy Brindel of the San Francisco Symphony, is a “serious amateur.”
The couple also will be celebrating the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony this year, with Golden Gate Symphony performances of the beloved piece in the Bay Area in May and in Switzerland in June.
Their gifts don’t stop with music. Ievins is an electrical engineer and woodworker.
“He has a magical ability to figure things out. He has an artist’s soul and the precision of an engineer’s training,” says Frank.
While Frank maintains, “There are things that music can express that nothing else can,” she says, “I have a larger gift with poetry.”
A teacher of poetry, fiction and memoir workshops at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute programs at San Francisco State and Dominican universities, Frank has authored eight books of poems, two novels and a photo memoir of her 400-mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas.
Her acclaimed first novel, 2003’s “Blackberries in the Dream House,” tells of the forbidden love between a geisha and a Buddhist monk.
When she wrote it, she was still single waiting for the soulmate she eventually found in Ievins. “I had so much love inside me and needed a way to express it,” she says.
However, finding love did not quench her creativity. Far from it.
Her collection “While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems” won the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Poetry.
The work came about as she was in an audience listening to Elgar’s “Enigma Variations” (aka “Variations on an Original Theme”).
She says, “While it was playing, I kept seeing things and having memories. I wrote them in the dark and started working on the poem at home.”
She does that. Writing in the dark while music is playing, she is keeping notebook publishers in the black.
She is still working on a manuscript (in which a mermaid is the narrator) she began 10 years ago and hopes to complete by the end of the year.
Frank likes to mix fantasy with what is loosely termed reality. Even her quasi-memoir, “Yoga of the Impossible,” does not entirely stick to the facts and data.
“I am the only one who knows what really happened and what I made up. I require the freedom to make things up,” she insists.
One of the five editors who head Blue Light Press, a Bay Area publisher of poetry and fiction, Frank has edited award-winning poetry anthologies including “Fog and Light: San Francisco through the Eyes of Poets Who Live Here,” “Pandemic Puzzle Poems” and “River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the 21st Century.”
Blue Light Press editors select the poems they want to publish at a yearly potluck get-together. When the comestibles are consumed, they attack their mound of submitted manuscripts.
For Frank, it’s not just love. It’s also appetite—gusto for sensation.