|
Grateful Conversations: A Poetry Anthology
Edited by Maja Trochimczyk and Kathi Stafford May 2018, Paperback, 280 pp., black/white illustrations, ISBN 978-1-945938-22-1 ($24.80) Color Paperback, 280 pages with color illustrations ISBN 978-1-945938-24-5 ($98.00) E-Book in EPUB format with color illustrations ISBN 978-1-945938-23-8 ($10.00) Moonrise Press is pleased to announce the publication of Grateful Conversations: A Poetry Anthology, edited by Maja Trochimczyk and Kathi Stafford. Grateful Conversations is a portrait of a group of female poets from California, who come together each month to hone their craft and share their verse. Known as Westside Women Writers and active as a group since 2008, they include Millicent Borges Accardi, Madeleine S. Butcher, Georgia Jones Davis, Lois P. Jones, Susan Rogers, Kathi Stafford, Sonya Sabanac, Ambika Talwar and Maja Trochimczyk. In the words of the WWW founder, Millicent Borges Accardi, this is “a community of women writers working together to support each other with strong attention to craft, to grow as writers and as people in community.” The volume, illustrated with photographs by the authors, includes poems written for seven workshops and self-portraits in poetry of the nine writers. The workshops include such themes as: writing on a prompt, ekphrastic poetry (inspired by Van Gogh, ancient Greek sculpture, and contemporary art at the Broad Museum), site visits to museums (Norton Simon Museum, Getty Villa, The Broad, The Museum of Jurassic Technology), grandparents and rivers. The table of contents with a list of poems is posted on the Moonrise Press Blog. |
|
|
PREFACE
“In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.” — Wisława Szymborska
Poetry is an elusive gift. The women whose work is reflected in this volume have supported each other in their ongoing writing—some of them for as long as ten years. We express our support and gratitude to all the family, friends, and fellow writers on this journey with us.
Our group expanded and contracted: some women travelled a lot, others moved away, still others had to deal with illness and pain. Yet, we continued to meet and share poems, to be an inspiration for each other, especially in “arid” creative times.
The title of our anthology “Grateful Conversations” comes from a prompt by our “Fearless Leader” Millicent Borges Accardi that was given back in 2010 to a then-smaller group. It resulted in poems that remained among the favorites of their authors. Indeed, writing and participating in a poetry group leads to may “Grateful Conversations” – filled with appreciation for different sensitivities and life-experiences, and for shared interests in the poetic craft.
During the workshops, we often had the eerie experience of bringing poems on related themes without planning this in advance. Interestingly, the “communion of minds” also permeated the critiques: if most poets thought that a line, ending, beginning or a metaphor were awkward, too wordy or uninspired – it was clear that revisions were in order. The idea of putting together an anthology based on our workshops was born in early 2016 and it has taken over two years to assemble the materials.
We are fascinated with the diversity of poetic responses to the same prompt – be it word, image, or place. Thus, we present poems from our workshops and field trips, hoping that our readers will find their diversity refreshing. The only criterion for inclusion of a workshop in this anthology is to have at least three poems that resulted from it.
We asked poets to contribute mini-essays about their personal experience with poetry and the Westside Women Writers group. The poets selected their favorite poems for a self-portrait. Poems in this section may or may not have been presented for critique during our workshops; some poems may have been previously published somewhere else. They have been chosen with great care to represent what each poet thinks of herself – as samples of her most important work, or testimonials to the most significant steps in life journey, commemorated in poetry.
We are thrilled to reach the finish line and present to our readers poems, essays and photographs by Westside Women Writers.
Let the Grateful Conversations continue…
Maja Trochimczyk and Kathi Stafford
|
|
|
ABOUT THIS BOOK
"Grateful Conversations, edited by Maja Trochimczyk and Kathi Stafford, brings to its readers a wealth of women's wisdom and talent. This beautiful book contains poetic self-portraits of nine poets that form the Westside Women Writers group. The poets selected their own favorite poems that represent their worldviews and experiences; they also provided illustrations - photos of nature and families. A large portion of the volume is dedicated to verse based on shared themes, prompts, or site-visits to museums. Wisdom comes with age, and all nine poets featured in this anthology are over 50 years old so they have lived through a lot. While I feel compassionate towards the tragedies they describe, both personal and of others, I particularly like poems about family, the little blessings of daily life that are too often overlooked and should be cherished, with gratitude and grace. Rarely can one find in one place so many deeply moving and inspired poems, about the traumas of the past, the gifts to be cherished in the present, and hopes for a bright future."
~ Marlene Hitt, author of Clocks and Water Drops (Moonrise Press, 2015)
"Nine women poets converse, wake us up, send us to higher ground. Grateful Conversations carries us in and out of the emotion of memory, family, spirit, solid things and landscapes. Unlike much modern poetry, the nine writers present life and hope, not death and loss. This anthology gives us abundance, not scarcity, joy, not the grating irritations of guilt, fear and dissolution. There are generous portions for each poet: Accardi, Butcher, Jones-Davis, Jones, Rogers, Sabanac, Stafford, Talwar, Trochimczyk each get twenty to thirty pages of poetry with photographs taken by the poets and also there are seven sections of workshop poems. These are poets on quests for spiritual renewal, yet the poems are not sticky with New Age platitudes, but articulate, moving, textured and the reader is grateful, uplifted. “Look at these dogwood blossoms/caught in the act of flying,” writes Lois P. Jones. We look and we fly.
~ Alice Pero, author of Thawed Stars
"Grateful Conversations, edited by Maja Trochimczyk and Kathi Stafford, brings to its readers a wealth of women's wisdom and talent. This beautiful book contains poetic self-portraits of nine poets that form the Westside Women Writers group. The poets selected their own favorite poems that represent their worldviews and experiences; they also provided illustrations - photos of nature and families. A large portion of the volume is dedicated to verse based on shared themes, prompts, or site-visits to museums. Wisdom comes with age, and all nine poets featured in this anthology are over 50 years old so they have lived through a lot. While I feel compassionate towards the tragedies they describe, both personal and of others, I particularly like poems about family, the little blessings of daily life that are too often overlooked and should be cherished, with gratitude and grace. Rarely can one find in one place so many deeply moving and inspired poems, about the traumas of the past, the gifts to be cherished in the present, and hopes for a bright future."
~ Marlene Hitt, author of Clocks and Water Drops (Moonrise Press, 2015)
"Nine women poets converse, wake us up, send us to higher ground. Grateful Conversations carries us in and out of the emotion of memory, family, spirit, solid things and landscapes. Unlike much modern poetry, the nine writers present life and hope, not death and loss. This anthology gives us abundance, not scarcity, joy, not the grating irritations of guilt, fear and dissolution. There are generous portions for each poet: Accardi, Butcher, Jones-Davis, Jones, Rogers, Sabanac, Stafford, Talwar, Trochimczyk each get twenty to thirty pages of poetry with photographs taken by the poets and also there are seven sections of workshop poems. These are poets on quests for spiritual renewal, yet the poems are not sticky with New Age platitudes, but articulate, moving, textured and the reader is grateful, uplifted. “Look at these dogwood blossoms/caught in the act of flying,” writes Lois P. Jones. We look and we fly.
~ Alice Pero, author of Thawed Stars