Image credit: Margaret Kilgallen
Art21 just released a previously unseen segment of an interview with the late Margaret Kilgallen (1967-2001), recorded in 2000. In it, Kilgallen talks about her heroines, saying:

I like to paint images of women who I find inspiring, and I don’t like to choose people that everybody knows. I like to choose people that just do small things and yet somehow hit me in my heart.

Among the women she favors is Australian swimmer Fanny Durack (pictured center, below). After initially being refused permission to compete in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, Durack became the first Australian woman to win an Olympic gold medal in a swimming event when the New South Wales Ladies Swimming Association allowed her and friend Mina Wylie (who took silver) to go provided they bore their own expenses.
Watch the video and read more about Kilgallen’s heroines on the Art21 blog.

One story ends and another begins:

From the last page in Wild by Cheryl Strayed:

To believe that I didn’t need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything.

From the first page in Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton:

Water is elemental, it’s what we’re made of, what we can’t live within or without. Trying to define what swimming means to me is like looking at a shell sitting in a few feet of clear, still water. There it is, in sharp focus, but once I reach for it, breaking the surface, the ripples refract the shell. It becomes five shells, twenty-five shells, some smaller, some larger, and I blindly feel for what I saw perfectly before trying to grasp it.