Books symbolize a desire to preserve history, to dream, to create, to share, and even if I can’t read the language they’re written in I believe in their power. Though aspects of our cultures may differ, when we read we discover that we’re all looking to be seen and understood, to be loved, and to feel like our lives are meaningful.
Tag: Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2019
Spotlight: Words & Images
It was a childhood of inspiration and creativity. Some summers were spent in the mountains of upstate New York, helping my grandmother at the tourist home she owned on Main Street waiting tables and hanging crisp white sheets on the line, singing and entertaining guests after dinner. At college, I had the opportunity to spend my junior year in Siena, Italy. My early experiences gave me exposure to a world of creative minds and alternative life styles.
Spotlight: Margot Farrington
I never consider how I’ll read a poem while writing it. When reading it to listeners, the greatest gift I can give them is spontaneity. Something in the read or recited poem should always remain fluid, open to surprise.
Spotlight: Yolanda Wisher
My goal isn’t usually project completion or “making” time for everything. It’s simply about acknowledging and honoring my impulses to create, however or whenever they emerge. I like to let a project take shape on its own, let it evolve around my life and living, rather than force it to adhere to a certain timeline.
Spotlight: Marya Hornbacher
Voice, to the extent that it is a thing in itself, is not a static or stable thing. A writer’s voice changes with time, and all the time. With every piece, every character, every subject, perhaps with every line, a writer’s voice has to change. I would worry that writers whose voices do not change over time would get tired of hearing themselves talk. This is not to say that that voice is fully and wholly new each time a writer writes; but each time a writer changes, so too does her voice.
Spotlight: Diane Gilliam
When you don’t know the story of your people, it’s like somebody reached in and snatched out a big chunk of your backbone. You need your backbone. You need your whole story, as much of it as you can get. And it needs to be the story as your people lived it, not the official version. That is part of poetry’s work in the world—to help keep alive stories that we need to live by.
Spotlight: Nancy Agabian
So performance got intertwined with my self-definition and with finding my voice. Since then, performance has helped me to understand voice — especially spoken language vs. written language. It has allowed me to feel the pressure of a listening audience, which helps to edit and craft a text.
Spotlight: Ellen Meeropol
The best encouragement I can give to other literary late bloomers is that age brings a depth and width of life experience and wisdom to our work, as well as understanding about how complex our world can be. This ability to reflect on what we’ve seen and thought, to dig deeply into big questions, is a potentially amazing resource usually not available to young writers.
Spotlight: Marilyn McCabe
Even if I’m not writing specifically about the Adirondacks, the nature reflected in so much of my poetry is invariably this kind of nature: dark pines, rushing streams, a bumpy horizon designed by departing glaciers and old tectonic shrugs.
Spotlight: Ginnah Howard
That, and yes, this first May poppy’s
burst into scarlet guffaw (after weeks
of nodding tight-lipped hush.)
After inevitable March, May
and we are—praise the gods—
budding, bursting, juicy
again. – Ginnah Howard
Spotlight: JP Howard
praise daily poems in my inbox
how they make me laugh in one stanza,
then break my heart the next
praise how poets hold onto our first loves,
and scent of mama, now gone
praise how we nurture our child self,
gently wrap her around stanzas,
baby girl is resilient
praise our spunk and our sadness,
let our writing heal
Spotlight: Keisha-Gaye Anderson
The market was a living thing. Its flesh was mounds of mangoes, sweet sop, naseberry, bananas. The steady calls of the higglers, its rapid heart. And those women with heads tied with colorful scarves, and legs splayed wide with skirts cascading between like waterfalls, were its bones.
Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2023 