Sept. 3, 2013 Poet, Editor Ralph Pennel

Ralph Pennel

Ralph Pennel received his BA in Creative Writing from Knox College and his MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University. Ralph's writing has appeared in Common Ground Review, Ropes, The Cape Rock, Apercus Quarterly, Open to Interpretation, Ibbetson Street, The Smoking Poet, Unbound Press, Right Hand Pointing, Monologues From the Road, and various other journals. He has also published reviews with Cervena Barva Press, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Rain Taxi Review of Books. His poetry collection, Any World Less Perfect for Dying In, will be published by Cervena Barva press in the fall of 2014. Ralph teaches literature at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, Massachusetts, and is the fiction editor for Midway Journal (www.midwayjournal.com), an online literary journal publishing out of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Novelist Elizabeth Graver Aug 13, 2013

Elizabeth Graver’s new novel is The End of the Point. She is the author of three other novels: Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her short story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories (1991, 2001); Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards (1994, 1996, 2001), The Pushcart Prize Anthology (2001), and Best American Essays (1998). Her story “The Mourning Door” received the Cohen Award from Ploughshares Magazine. The mother of two daughters, she teaches English and Creative Writing at Boston College.

Guest: Sheree Pollock: A Psychiatric Nurse with a Creative Flair. Aug 6. 5PM

Sheree Pollock

In my 30 plus years working at a major psychiatric hospital just outside of Boston, I have worked with countless patients and staff on both locked and unlocked settings. One of the most creative of these people is Sheree Pollock, a veteran psychiatric nurse. Pollock is a dramatic personality, and uses her knowledge of theater, literature, gardening and other creative passions to engage the patients on a more human level. The minute she walks through the door her presence is known, and she is not too shy to quote Bette Davis, or Joan Crawford--or belt out a few lyrics from a Judy Garland song to make her point. She is a natural storyteller and thespian--and makes what can often be a purely clinical experience into a richer milieu.  I had the pleasure of interviewing Pollock on my Somerville Community Access TV show Poet to Poet Writer to Writer.

"My goal is to engage every client in an authentic way. I learned long ago that we may not be able to change the clients lives but we can control what happens on a  daily basis while they are with us. So my goal is to improve their lives while they are in the hospital. That may be with Karaoke, Movies, Food, Gardening, Fashion or whatever their personal interests may be. The goal is to engage them. I am dramatic because it is engaging. They may love me or hate me but I hope to get them engaged in the present."

July 16 5PM Poet Dan Sklar author of new poetry collection Flying Cats (actually swooping)

Professor/Poet/Playwright Dan Sklar of Endicott College

    New poetry collection:  Flying Cats ( actually swooping) ( Ibbetson Street Press) by Dan Sklar


"Fans of European 19th century verse, thick with symbolism and multi-syllabic, will find little to love in Dan Sklar’s work. Sklar’s poetry could be characterized as American Primitive, clean and bracing as creek water. Like Whitman, Sklar celebrates the mystery and profundity of the everyday. This is “guy” poetry, muscularly chronicling the days and to-do list of the contemporary American male, helplessly and joyfully committed to the challenges of raising a houseful of boys, teaching sleepy-eyed college students, and handling the ignominies of manuscript rejection letters. Sklar’s poems tumble and sing with enormously universal appeal."

 --Lisa Beatman, Author of Manufacturing America

July 9th Poet/Legislator Denise Provost

Poet/State Rep.--Denise Provost

"I started writing – mainly, but not exclusively poetry – as a child. I got a full scholarship to Bennington College during my sophomore year of high school, based in large part on a manuscript of poetry. In my senior year, I decided to go to law school, after having decided that I was not suited for a graduate degree in English literature.

I graduated from Bennington in 1971, started law school in 1972, graduated from law school in 1982. I worked as a lawyer for the City of Newton, then was recruited by the City of Somerville, to work for reform mayor Eugene Brune. Working in local government gave me ideas about how government could become more transparent and responsive. In 1993, I ran for Ward Alderman in Ward 5, coming very close against a long-time incumbent.

The incumbent resigned a year and two weeks later, and the Board of Alderman appointed a replacement. I ran against the appointee in 1995, again coming close. After that second defeat, I figured my political career was over. Then, in 1999, the ward 5 incumbent did not run for re-election, and one of the at-large aldermen made the same decision. I ran for the latter seat, and won.

I served on the Board of Aldermen for almost seven years, running for state representative in a special election. I won that election in February, 2006, and have since represented Somerville’s 27^th Middlesex District.

As my children got older, I found I was writing more poetry again, and decided that I needed a teacher. I was accepted into Susan Donnelly’s poetry writing workshop in 2010. Since then, I’ve had poetry published in a number of print and on-line journals."

June 25 Poet, Writer, Professor J.D. Scrimgeour

J.D. Scrimgeour

 Scrimgeour teaches at Salem State University. He recently published the poetry collection Territories (Last Automat Press). He has published another book of poetry, The Last Miles, and two books of creative nonfiction, Spin Moves and Themes For English B: A Professor’s Education In and Out of Class. With musician Philip Swanson he formed the performance group, Confluence, and released a CD of poetry and music, Ogunquit & Other Works.

Poet Charles Coe author of " All Sins Forgiven" 6/4/2013 Poet to Poet 5PM

Charles Coe is the author of two collections of poems published by Leapfrog Press: “Picnic on the Moon” (1999) and “All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents” (2013). An accomplished jazz vocalist, Coe is known for his powerful readings and warm and compassionate voice. He is featured on numerous spoken word CDs, including “Get Ready for Boston,” a collection of stories and songs about Boston neighborhoods, and “One Side of the River,” an anthology of Cambridge and Somerville poets.


In “All Sins Forgiven,” Coe writes as a way to understand his own mother and father, and to connect readers with their own parents

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Marge Piercy describes the collection as “at once an extremely clear-sighted and unsentimental portrait of Coe’s mother and father, and a book written with great tenderness. It’s rare we can come to see our parents in themselves, and even rarer to see all their faults and yet express love and understanding, as these poems do.”
“My Mother Cut My Hair” begins: “As she stood behind me / dressed in motherhood’s ill-fitting robe / I wonder what messages she read / in the hair that settled around her feet / like snow from some private winter.”
Coe is a program officer for the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a long-time activist with the National Writers Union, a labor union of freelance writers. He lives in Boston.

May 21, 2013 Poet Philip E. Burnham, Jr

Philip E. Burnham, Jr

Philip E. Burnham, Jr. lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was born in Rochester, New York, and grew up in New England. He attended Groton School, the University of Edinburgh, and Harvard College. A former member of the United States Foreign Service, he served as American Vice Consul in Marseille, France, from 1962 through 1964. For the next 35 years he taught history in both public and private secondary schools and colleges in the Boston area. He holds a PhD in Medieval History from Tufts University. He has traveled extensively in Europe and spent two sabbatical years abroad, one at Cambridge University and another in Paris. He was married to Louise Hassel for 42 years and has three children and four grandchildren, all of whom live in California

Poet to Poet Writer to Writer May 14 Poet Tim Suermondt

   

 BIO

Tim Suermondt is the author of two full-length collections: TRYING TO HELP THE

ELEPHANT MAN DANCE ( The Backwaters Press, 2007 ) and JUST BEAUTIFUL from

New York Quarterly Books, 2010. He has published poems in Poetry, The Georgia Review,

Blackbird, Able Muse, Prairie Schooner, PANK, Bellevue Literary Review and Stand Magazine

(U.K.) and has poems forthcoming in Gargoyle, A Narrow Fellow and DMQ Review among others. After many years in Queens and Brooklyn, he has moved to Cambridge with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

Apirl 2, 2013-- 5PM-- Poet Sassan Tabatabai

Born in Tehran, Iran, Sassan Tabatabai has lived in the United States since 1980. As a poet and scholar of medieval Persian poetry, he is the author of Father of Persian Verse: Rudaki and His Poetry (Leiden University Press, 2010). He teaches humanities and Persian literature at Boston University and Boston College, and is Poetry Editor of the literary journal News from the Republic of Letters.

Most recently, Tabatabai is the author of Uzunburun, a collection of poetry and translations published in 2011 by Pen & Anvil Press --

March 26 2013 5PM Meikle Paschal

Meikle Paschal   author of the memoir  

The Black Buddhist 

The Black Buddhist by Meikle Paschal (Ibbetson Street Press) http://ibbetsonpress.com  $15

Review by Afaa Michael Weaver

In sentences that are as sincere as they are nostalgic, Meikle Paschal gives us a valuable portrait of the journey of his life from the poor neighborhoods of Boston to the comfort of a consciousness furnished by the loving kindness of his Buddhist principles, principles that save him from the bitterness and resentment that can occupy the mind of someone who has fought adversity for his entire life. An African American man gifted with unusual intelligence and a keen intuition, he is lifted also by a penchant for forgiveness. As a reader, I am especially endeared to his portraits of a Boston I could never have known, the old Boston of the mid twentieth century. Paschal seems remarkably adept at recognizing and seizing the chance in life, even when he was not aware of the fuller meanings of his actions at the time. He implies repeatedly that something saved him, and it is that hope he offers the reader, namely that if we would just believe there is a way, the way will reveal itself to us. He is not blind to the tragedies of life, as he notes the people who did not have or see the chance, people who fell victim to things we would rather not imagine, but he offers his own encounters with those chances. He explores the vicissitudes of upward mobility in stories that are insightful and inspiring. In admitting the perfection possible in life, he admits the imperfections, the double binds, the impasses, and he continues on with life, even as the apparent paradise proves itself over and over to be only that and not something ultimately real. Paschal lets us see only the journey is real.
To order:
http://tinyurl.com/cxgxdhh

March 12 Author Ira Wood

Ira Wood is an author, a teacher, a former publisher, and the host of a weekly radio program called The Lowdown on WOMR-FM, Cape Cod’s Community Radio Station, a Pacifica affiliate with studios in Provincetown, Massachusetts. You’re Married to HER? his new book of autobiographical essays was released in August, 2012.
Ira’s three novels are The Kitchen Man, Going Public, and Storm Tide, co-authored by Marge Piercy, with whom he has also written So You Want to Write, an award-winning book about the craft of writing fiction and memoirs which is based on their popular course. His short pieces have been published in ‘Ploughshares,’ ‘Tikkun,’ ‘Fifth Wednesday,’ ‘The St. Petersburg Review,’ and the ‘Utne Reader’ among many literary magazines. In 1996 he and Marge Piercy established the Leapfrog Press, an internationally distributed ‘boutique’ publishing company, which the Boston Globe called “the pulse of what’s hot in the publishing world.” Although they sold it in 2007 it has continued their mission of publishing cutting edge literature and has more than tripled in size.
Ira has been praised for his ability to work with writing students to overcome the inner censor, his darkly funny and wildly confessional readingss from his own work, and his lectures on everything from the publishing industry, to obsessional gardening to using the Tao Te Ching as guide to governing a small New England town. For over a decade he has taught regularly at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, the Rowe Conference Center, and more recently Kripalu.
While an editor at Leapfrog he specialized in the resurrection of near misses: books that had come close to being published by mainstream New York publishers but lacked certain elements, sometimes just big numbers for the author’s previous books, but that notwithstanding, a compelling beginning, a tighter plot, a selling title, or simply a great marketing campaign—as wll as the patience to keep a book in print until it found its audience. With a hand in the marketing of every one of Leapfrog’s books, his small press titles received national media attention, some becoming regional best sellers, BookSense and best-of-the-year picks.
For over 30 years Ira has made his home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, a small fishing village celebrated for its oysters, art galleries, and the colony of well known writers, architects, painters and intellectuals who have settled in this rugged outpost near the tip of Cape Cod. Indulging his interest in public affairs, he has spent over twenty years in town government, serving for twelve years as a selectman—one of a board of five women and men elected the principal administrative officers of the town.
Zazen meditation is an important practice for him as is organic gardening, which he indulges with far too much passion resulting in way too many tomatoes. In 2010 he began hosting a series of bi-monthly political debates on public radio which morphed into a weekly interview show called The Lowdown, which airs on WOMR/WFMR-FM (broadcasting the length of Cape Cod and the North and South shores of Boston). Interviewing authors, politicians, activists, and newsmakers, enables him to indulge a lifelong compulsion to pester people with questions. His essays and book reviews are often aired on the station’s Friday news magazine.
Ira’s writing tends to reflect his life experience. His first novel, The Kitchen Man, details the secret life of a gourmet waiter. His second, Going Public, is set in the early years of the burgeoning dot.com industry, while Storm Tide considers politics in a New England town. You’re Married to HER?, a collection of essays is a compendium of tales about sex, drugs, teaching, politics, publishing, and everything he did instead of writing.

 

Since 1982 he has been married to the poet/novelist Marge Piercy. They live on four hilly acres of land surrounded by pine and oak forest, midway between the Atlantic Ocean and Cape Cod Bay. They share their space with six cats (again, way too many).

Feb 26, 2013 5PM Poet Donna Johnson

Donna Johnson grew up in Tennessee, but now lives with her family outside of Boston. Her poems and reviews have been published in Birmingham Poetry Review, Blue Unicorn, Café Review, Green Mountains Review, Ibbetson Street, Marco Polo, Perihelion, Tulane Review, Two Rivers Review, and others. In 2010 she won Cutbank magazine’s annual poetry contest and was a finalist for the Patricia Dobler Award. In 2011 her full-length manuscript, Selvage, was chosen by Carnegie Mellon during its open reading period and will be published in February 2013. Ms. Johnson currently works in the educational software publishing field.

Feb 12, 2013 5PM Novelist Perry Glasser

Perry Glasser is the author of five books. In 2012, he was named a Fellow of the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Riverton Noir, a novel, was winner of the Gival Press Novel Award for 2011 (forthcoming in late 2012);
metamemoirs, a collection of creative nonfiction( Outpost 19, New York and SanFrancisco (forthcoming  in 2013);
Dangerous Places, a short story collection, received the 2008 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize from BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City,  recipient of the2009 National Best Books Award from USA Book News;
Singing on the Titanic (Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1987), recorded by the Library of Congress for the blind.
Suspicious Origins (St. Paul: New Rivers Press, 1985), the Winner of the Minnesota Voices Competition.
Other work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including two novellas featured in Next Stop Hollywood (St. Martin’s Press, 2007).

More than 50 short stories, memoirs, and essays in a variety of journals including Utne, Northwest Review, The Antioch Review, Confrontation, Salamander, The North American Review, Hanging Loose, Flint Hills Review, Passages North,  ACM, GSU Review, and Portland Review.
Freelance magazine journalism has appeared in such venues as The Chronicle of Higher Education, Poets & Writers, Phi Delta Kappan, and Dads;
Book reviews  and critical essays have been featured in The New York Times Book Review and The Chicago Tribune's Sunday Review of Books.

Jan 8, 2013 5PM Poet, novelist, teacher, publisher, Robin Stratton

Robin Stratton
 Robin Stratton has been a writing coach in the Boston area for almost 20 years. She is the author of The Revision Process, A Guide for Those Months or Years Between Your First Draft and Your Last, and two chapbooks, Dealing with Men and Interference from an Unwitting Species. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she's been published in Word Riot, 63 Channels, Antithesis Common, Poor Richards Almanac(k), Blink-Ink, Pig in a Poke, Chick Flicks, Up the Staircase, Shoots and Vines and many others. Her novel, On Air, (Blue Mustang Press, 2011) was a National  Indie Excellence Book Award finalist. A second novel, Of Zen and Men, is now available from Big Table Publishing Company. She’d love to have you visit her at robinstratton.com

    

       

                                                  

Dec 4, 2012 Judy Katz-Levine

Poet Judith Katz Levine

Judy Katz-Levine is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, "When The Arms Of Our Dreams Embrace" (Saru 1991) and "Ocarina" (Saru/Tarsier 2006). Her most recent chapbook is "When Performers Swim, The Dice Are Cast" (Ahadada 2009).  She is the recipient in 1988 of a Massachusetts Cultural Councel Grant and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Her poems have been published extensively in the USA, Japan, England, Turkey and distributed in Mexico and Canada as well. Over the years her poems have appeared in "The Sun", "Fence", "Istanbul Literary Review", "Muddy River Poetry Review", "Blue Unicorn", "The Plaza" (Japan), "Voices Israel" (Israel), "The Delinquent" (UK), "Mother Jones", and many other magazines.  She has been anthologized in "The Dreamlife of Johnny Baseball" and "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" -women writers on baseball.

Nov. 20, 2012 5PM: South Shore Poetry Czars: Jack Scully/ Rene Schwiesow

Jack Scully

Jack Scully-- was the co-founder with the late Mike Amado of two ongoing poetry venues in Plymouth, Massachusetts , Poetry: The Art of Words a monthly poetry series and The Poetry Showcase a yearly poetry reading held in conjunction with the Plymouth Guild for the Arts yearly juried art show.In 2012 Scully organized Visual Inverse a join effort between poets' and visual artists at the Plymouth Center for the Arts.  

Mike Amado published three books of poetry during his short time on this earth. Scully and poet Nancy Brady Cunningham have edited , his fourth book. Scully, who currently serves as the literary executor of Mike’s work has read Mike's poetry as a feature reader at Greater Brockton Poetry and Arts Society, Boston National Poetry Month Festival, Main Street Café, Poetry in the Village, Stone Soup Poetry, Poets Pathway, Poetry at O'Sheas' and Salem Literary Festival 2010. He also serves as the unofficial photographer of numerous poetry venues.

Rene Schwiesow is the co-host for the South Shore Poetry venue The Art of Words.  A Somerville Bagel Bard, her publishing credits include Muddy River Poetry Review, the Waterhouse Review, and Ibbetson Street Press.  Rene’s work has been aired on the Talking Information Network, a non-profit service for the visually impaired.  April, 2012, she was a guest on WGDH, Vermont, along with New York/Vermont poet Michael Palma.  In recent news, her work, “Shades,” has been chosen as Poem of the Week by the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and will appear beginning January 25, 2013.  Rene is a reviewer for Boston Area Small Press, writes a column for the arts in The Old Colony Memorial newspaper, Plymouth, MA, and is currently working on a third poetry manuscript slated for a 2014 publication date by Cervena Barva Press.

Nov 16, 2012 Jenny Hudson

                                                   





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Poet Dennis Daly Oct 2, 2012

Dennis Daly was born in Salem Massachusetts. He graduated from Boston College with a B.S. degree and earned a Master of Arts degree at Northeastern University. At Northeastern he studied poetry under Samuel French Morse.

For ten years Dennis worked for the General Electric Company. He became a union activist and was elected into the leadership of the 9000 member Local 201 of the International Union of Electrical Workers. During this period he published and edited The Union Activist and the North Shore Union Leader. He also was the managing editor of the Electrical Union News.

Dennis has been published in numerous magazines and small poetry journals such as The Sou’wester, The Lyric, Boston Today Magazine, Soundings East, Tendril, Poetry &, Dark Horse, Green House, Lyrical Somerville, Muddy River Poetry Review, Istanbul Literary Review,Wilderness House Literary Review and is included with two other poets in a chapbook entitled 10 X 3, published by Northeastern University Press. He also has completed a verse translation of Sophocles' Ajax, which was published in a recent issue of Wilderness House Literary Review.  Dennis reads his poems regularly at Stone Soup Poetry in Cambridge MA and the Walnut Street Coffee Cafe in Lynn and has featured at a number of venues. He is a member of the Bagel Bards, a group of poets and artists, who meet weekly in Somerville. He also regularly writes literary reviews for the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.

His first book of poems, The Custom House, was published by Ibbetson Street Press in June of 2012.
His translation of Sophocles' Ajax was  published as a paperback in July of 2012 by Wilderness House Press.
In addition Dennis has published travel articles and many op-ed pieces in the Salem Evening News. He is currently working on another book of poetry.

Dennis lives in Salem Massachusetts with his wife, Joanne. They have four adult children.

Sept 11, 2012 Jim Vrabel -- Playwright/Performer-Homage to Henry: A Dramatization of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs

            Jim Vrabel is a local historian and the author of When In Boston: A Timeline & Almanac (Northeastern University Press).  He is co-author of John Paul II: A Personal Portrait of the Pope and the Man (St. Martin’s Press).

            A long-time neighborhood activist and former city official in Boston, he now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

            Jim attended the Graduate School of English at the University of Iowa, which is where he first encountered John Berryman’s Dream Songs.  After expecting others to do it, he composed Homage to Henry: A Dramatization of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, an 80-minute one-man play by taking some 90 of the most brilliant and autobiographical of the songs - in whole or in part - re-ordering them  and adding a very few lines of connecting text. 

            The play received a staged reading at the Charlestown Working Theater, and has been performed for the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers at Boston University and at the Oberon Theater as a benefit for the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge.

            Paul Mariani, Berryman’s biographer and a poet himself, calls Homage to Henry “a sad and very human story, as stark in its way as anything in Samuel Beckett.”

            Jim is looking for additional opportunities to perform the play and can be contacted at jimvrabel@gmail.com

Sept 4, 2012 Poet Manson Solomon

Manson Solomon-- Manson Solomon emerged from the womb with a mission to be a writer with a large trust fund. Said trust fund being inexplicably absent, he took the road more traveled, acquiring graduate degrees in Economics, Psychology and Philosophy from the London School of Economics, Columbia and Harvard, engaging in various academic, artistic and entrepreneurial pursuits -- in New York, London, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Nova Scotia, Wellesley, Cambridge -- while also taking the less traveled road, generating exquisite poetry and commenting astutely on the work of others from deep in the woods of Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Aug 21, 2012: Rachel Popek--- Executive Coordinator for the 100,000 Poets for Change

Rachael Popek is the Executive Coordinator for the 100,000 Poets for Change event at the Boston Public Library, working alongside R Jeffreys, Program Organizer and Co-Chair http://writestep.blogspot.com/ and Kathleen Bitetti, Coordinating Liaison and Co-Chair http://www.kathleenbitetti.com.  

On September 29th, 2012, the "100 Thousand Poets for Change" project will be the largest, single Poetry reading in the history of the world. This event will also be archived, recorded and stored at Stanford University in California, and simulcast throughout the globe on that day.

Rachael is also the Producer for the popular Write Step Radio Show with R Jeffreys http://www.blogtalkradio.com/writestep on Blogtalk Radio. She is a Master Pastry Chef by day, working for MultiGrains Bakery as an R+D Specialist and Quality Director. Rachael also owns Sweet Elegance Confections, her own small business, making custom cakes and pastries for special events.

Aug 28, 2012 Elizabeth Searle

 Elizabeth Searle is the author of two works of theater and four books of fiction: CELEBRITIES IN DISGRACE, a novella and stories; A FOUR-SIDED BED, a novel nominated for an American Library Association Book Award and MY BODY TO YOU, a story collection that won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize and a 2011 novel, GIRL HELD IN HOME. The New York Times Book Review called her novella Celebrities in Disgrace “a miniature masterpiece.”


Elizabeth Searle's and Michael Teoli's Rock Opera, TONYA & NANCY THE ROCK OPERA-- as well as her and Abigail Al-Doory Cross’ original opera, TONYA AND NANCY: THE OPERA-- have drawn worldwide media attention. In May, 2006, at the American Reperatory Theater’s ‘new space for new works,’ Tufts Music premiered the opera, which is based on the infamous Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan ice scandal. The opera drew coverage from-- among other media outlets-- Associated Press, ESPN Hollywood, Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, the London Times, The Daily Show and National Public Radio. Searle and composer Teoli created the full-length Rock Opera which premiered in February, 2008, drawing media coverage from GOOD MORNING AMERICA, CNN, CBS and FOX. A critically acclaimed new production of the rock opera was produced by Harborside Films and performed at the American Repertory Theater's Oberon Theater in January, February and July of 2011

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Searle’s short stories have appeared in magazines such as PLOUGHSHARES, REDBOOK, NEW ENGLAND REVIEW AGNI, and KENYON REVIEW and in anthologies such as LOVERS and DON'T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME. She won the 2010 Boston Literary Death Match and the Lawrence Foundation Fiction Prize. She received her MFA from Brown University
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Elizabeth has taught fiction writing at Brown, Emerson College, Bennington MFA, Stonecoast MFA, and the University of Massachusetts (Visiting Writer, 2007-08). Her novella CELEBRITIES IN DISGRACE was produced as a short film in 2010 by Bravo Sierra Productions in 2010 with script co-written by Elizabeth. She served for over a decade on the Executive Board of PEN/New England and founded the Erotic PEN readings. She teaches at Stonecoast MFA. Elizabeth lives with her husband and son in Arlington, MA

June 26, 2012 Becca Chambers author of Beyond the Great Abyss

 

    Beyond the Great Abyss by Becca Chambers

Beyond the Great Abyss
Becca Chambers
Transformations
$18.00

Review by Renee Schwiesow

“Love and truth are the most powerful forces in the universe, and they reside in all of us as the embodiment of our eternal spirits, ready always to lead us to joy, true love and happiness.” In “Beyond the Great Abyss,” Becca Chambers takes us on a journey of her own personal transformation that includes three years of lessons in love and truth.

The cover to “Beyond the Great Abyss” may appear to be a woman shape shifting and, perhaps that is, after all, the correct way to look at the transformations. Half human and half owl, the woman on the front cover depicts the symbolism of the totem animal within. Owl medicine brings healing, clarity and wisdom. A feminine energy, the owl represents freedom, the moon and true seeking. Chambers recognizes that the journey she shares, condensed into a three year period of awakening, is a lifetime experience. In conjunction with an intuitive, an energy healer and other individuals placed in Chamber’s life for specific purpose, she was able to transform her physical dis-ease from the inside out. For many years, Chambers suffered from depression but through a commitment to her own psychospiritual health that led to her becoming a natural health healer, Chambers was able to alleviate her painful symptoms. Chambers holds a B.S. in Biology and a graduate degree in Naturopathy.

Through journal entries, Chambers shares her woes, her joys, her setbacks and her growth. Her ailing father is an ever-present intuitive support system for her while she struggles to understand the chaos of the other male relationships in her life and what they are mirroring back to her. There is no narrative in between journal entries. Therefore the book reads like a diary, allowing the reader to feel as if they have become a voyeur in Chambers life, but also with a feeling of wanting more cohesiveness at times, something to cushion the entries, like discs between the vertebrae that act as a shock absorber and help keep spinal movement supple.

What rings clear is Chamber’s love for her father despite her struggles with male figures in her life:

“Last Monday Dad hemorrhaged in his colon and nearly bled to death. Lots of transfusions and eventually he stopped bleeding. He had been on Coumadin, a blood thinner, because of a small stroke a year ago. Now the Coumadin nearly killed him – typical Western medicine. . .Now much of the time he doesn’t make sense. I’m the only one who understands him at all. I get right up close with my ear next to his mouth, and my mouth to his ear, and I can hear him and communicate. The others? They are so sure he isn’t there that they don’t try.”

Clearly Chambers is agitated throughout the book by her father’s downward spiraling, but also honored to be there for him and to listen to his intuitive guidance.

Chambers comments further on the owl from her cover toward the end of the book. After her long journey, she says that she recognized that the swiveling head of the owl is a metaphor for being able to see all sides of a person and also to view situations from all angles.

“The Great White Snowy Owl of the North has flown over my house and landed in the tall pine at the corner, where my yard meets the wood. . .I am the great White Snowy Owl now, with all the power and wisdom of its ancient and legendary symbolism. How I got there from the broken child I once was, and that grim and desolate place where I dwelled for so many years is the subject of this book.” Becca Chambers

June 19, 2012: Poet Jean Monahan

 

JEAN MONAHAN is the author of three books of poetry: Hands (chosen by Donald Hall to win the 1991 Anhinga Prize); and Believe It or Not and Mauled Illusionist, both published by Orchises Press (1999 and 2006). She has received several awards and an artist residency at Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Poetry, The New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, and Salamander, as well as in several anthologies. Her MFA in Creative Writing is from Columbia University's School of the Arts.

May 24, 2012 Poets Sue Guiney and Ruth O'Callaghan

The Work of Sue Guiney

Though born and raised in New York, Sue Guiney has lived in London for  twenty years where she writes and teaches fiction, poetry and plays.  Her work has appeared in important literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic,  and her most recent novel , A Clash of Innocents, was chosen to be the first publication of the new imprint Ward Wood Publishing and was published in September, 2010.  Her first novel, Tangled Roots, was published by Bluechrome Publishing in 2006.

    Sue also has two published poetry collections. Her Life Collected was published in 2011 and the text of her poetry play, Dreams of May, was published in 2006  and has been performed frequently in  theatres and literary festivals.

   In 2005, Sue founded the theatre arts charity called CurvingRoad, in which she still serves as Artistic Director.

    Sue has always worked to find a way to combine her literary and charitable efforts. Most recently, this has led her to focus on modern day Cambodia. Her novel, A Clash of Innocents, is set in Phnom Penh against the backdrop of 2007’s beginnings of the UN Tribunal to bring the remaining members of the Khmer Rouge to justice. In March of 2011, she brought that novel back to the Cambodian people who inspired it, and through a series of charity booksignings and workshops held throughout SE Asia, helped raise funds for a Literacy Through Creative Writing program which Sue has developed for the street children of Siem Reap. These efforts have led to a unique, on-going English language program which is now being taught both on-line and on-site, with Sue’s commitment sending her back to spend at least one month a year there. She is also presently writing her third novel, to be published in 2013, which will also be set in present-day Cambodia.

   Growing out of this interest and commitment is Sue’s recent appointment as Writer in Residence to the SE Asia Department of University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
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                                                           Ruth O’Callaghan




Ruth O’Callaghan holds the prestigious Hawthornden Fellowship and is a prizewinner in international competitions. Translated into six languages she has read world-wide, including Asia and Europe and her recent successful tour in the USA included audiences of nearly a thousand. 

An international competition adjudicator and editor she hosts two poetry venues in London where both the famous and unknown read side by side. As a mentor and workshop leader both in the U.K and abroad, she works with experienced poets to enable them to approach their poetry with a new perspective and with novice poets to achieve a first collection. Both a reviewer and interviewer Ruth is at present compiling a book of interviews with some of the most eminent women poets throughout the world. 

In 2010 she was invited to Taiwan where she was awarded a gold medal for her poetry. The same year she was also awarded a Heinrich Böaut;ll residency in Eire. In 2009 she was awarded an Arts Council grant to visit Mongolia to collaborate with women poets on a book and a C.D. available from Soaring Penguin. 

Her first two collections, Where Acid has Etched (bluechrome 2007) and A Lope of Time(Shoestring 2009) have completely sold out. The latter has been re-printed whilst her latest collection, Goater’s Alley (Shoestring), was published in March 2010 and has already had to be re-printed twice. She is, at present, working on her fourth collection. 

Ruth has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies and her full collections are: 
  
Where Acid Has Etched (bluechrome 2007) 
A Lope of Time (Shoestring 2009) 
Goater’s Alley (Shoestring 2010)

May 15, 2012: Debra Spark author of Pretty Girl

Debra Spark is author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint, The Ghost of Bridgetown and Good for the Jews. She edited the best-selling anthology Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America's New Young Writers. Her popular lectures on writing are collected in Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing.
The Pretty Girl, a collection of stories about art and deception, will be published in 2012 by Four Way Books.



Spark has also written for Esquire, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, The Washington Post, Maine Home + Design and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth, Maine.

May 8, 2012 Jessica Treadway

Biography


Jessica Treadway is the author of Please Come Back To Me, a collection of short stories published by the University of Georgia Press in September 2010 as winner of the 2009 Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction.



Jessica Treadway's previous books are Absent Without Leave, a collection of stories (Delphinium Books/​Simon & Schuster, 1992), and And Give You Peace, a novel (Graywolf Press, 2001). Her fiction has been published in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Glimmer Train, AGNI, Five Points, and other journals, and has been cited in The Best American Short Stories anthology.



A native of Albany, New York, she received her bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Albany before working as a news and feature reporter for United Press International. After moving to Boston to study for her master’s degree in the creative writing program at Boston University, she held a fellowship at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and taught at Tufts University before joining the faculty at Emerson College in Boston, where she is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing.



In addition to her fiction, she has published essays and book reviews for publications including The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, and Glamour. She wrote the libretto for composer Ellen Bender’s opera of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun and served as literary co-translator of “A Crowning Experience” by Kostiantyn Moskalets in From Three Worlds: New Writing From the Ukraine.



Jessica Treadway has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. A former member of the Board of Directors of PEN-New England, where she served as co-chair of the Freedom to Write Committee, she lives in Lexington, Mass. with her husband, Philip Holland.