Thinking of Anais Nin: Moira Collins

There was another beautiful young woman who had come to me in Green Bay in tears, Moira Griffin. She is here, clear-eyed, graceful.

The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume Seven 1966–1974, p.217

MoiraMoira Collins met Anaïs Nin on a train going to Indiana. The South Shore Line. After meeting her (through reading her diary on the train) she went to hear her at Northwestern University and later at University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she first spoke to Anaïs Nin personally. When she met Frances Steloff of the Gotham Book Mart in New York through her friend William Rossa Cole, Ms Steloff gave her a copy of a flyer to the Celebration weekend at Wainwright House in Rye New York. She attended the Magic Circles weekend. Besides meeting many life long Nin friends who introduced her to others in the inner Nin Circle like Sharon Spencer and Rochelle Holt, she began a correspondence with Ms. Nin. Through her friendship with Valerie Harms, she met Donna Ippolito, Ms. Nin’s editor at Swallow Press. She became friends with Donna (who had arranged the earlier overflow lecture she had attended at Northwestern) and it was this small circle of friends that began the site in 1996 with the blessing of Ms. Nin’s husband Rupert Pole and the added directives and permissions of Ms. Nin’s longtime literary agent Mr. Gunther Stuhlmann. Our goal was to provide a source of information about the Anaïs we knew and loved. The Anaïs that treasured her friendships and relationships, who was adept at celebrating “the changing rainbow of our living relationships”. The rainbow hasn’t yet found a pot of gold, except for the extraordinary help and friendship of Peter Fraterdeus who has hosted this site for free for almost five years. We would also like to thank XenoMedia who donated many pro bono hours (on top of their normal fee) to the site and captured the elegance of the Anaïs we all knew and loved. In a piece of synchronicity that can only happen in Magic Circles, two of the three members of the Xeno team that took on the initial project’s birthdays were April 25, the date of the Celebration weekend.

Moira hopes to write her memory of Anaïs using some of her letters from Anaïs to grace the pages of memories of her friends, Sharon Spencer, Judith Citrin, Adele Aldridge, Valerie Harms and Donna Ippolito . Her dear friend Sas Colby has a beautiful memory in Benjamin Franklin’s elegant Recollections of Anaïs Nin .