Honey Blacklock
Honey Blacklock grew up amongst the hardwoods of west-central Wisconsin, outside of River Falls. As a child, she learned to name all the trees and wildflowers surrounding her home, and loved to escape with a book to the top of her favorite climbing tree. Her family moved into town when she was eleven. Though she never lost her appreciation for the natural world, she lost the intimate connection she’d had as a youngster, when running naked through summer rains and sliding through silken mud puddles. As a teenager, she turned to intellectual pursuits. Honey graduated near the top of her high school class and decided to leave the Midwest to attend Smith College, a prestigious, women’s college in Northamtpon, Massachusetts. She majored in women’s studies and did focused coursework in government and French literature while at Smith.
When her mother and stepfather moved to the Duluth area in 1994, Honey began to fall in love with the Lake Superior region and again felt a deep, emotional connection to the natural world. She returned to Duluth after she graduated from college in 1995, but didn’t plan to remain in the region for long. Her expectations changed when she met Craig Blacklock in the summer of 1996 and began to collaborate with him on the project that has become A Voice Within — The Lake Superior Nudes.
As she grew to love kayaking on the largest lake in the world, she realized that the opportunity to paddle on the lake was endangered by residential and commercial development. She joined the board of directors of The Lake Superior Water Trail Association of Minnesota in 1997, and was association president from 1998-2000. This organizations works with private individuals and commercial, municipal, and state organizations to established sites where kayakers can get off the water to rest or camp along the lakeshore, without trespassing.
Honey knew that writing could be a means for her to remain involved in the many areas of life she’s always found fascinating — feminism and other social issues, politics, the environment, and the arts. In 1998, she began working toward an MFA in Writing at Hamline University in St. Paul, MN.
Honey and Craig married in 1999. Their honeymoon trips were spent kayaking on Lake Superior and making more images for A Voice Within. They continued working in remote areas until Honey became pregnant. Their daughter was born in June 2001. Honey temporarily paused graduate school to focus on raising Charis for the first few years of her life. In 2002, she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, after recovering from troubling vision problems. She remains hopeful that medication will continue to slow progression of the disease until a cure is found. She plans to kayak with and model for Craig for many years.
Honey and Craig’s collaborative project A Voice Within was published in June 2004. For it she wrote a long, personal essay, in which she describes how she decided to model nude on the shores of her beloved lake and what it was like to be stilled in those magnificent settings. Hers is an emotional and intimate voice that fleshes out the life of the woman we see on the page in two dimensions and in black and white.