Dear Literary Folk,
Happy New Year! May 2021 be a brighter, more hopeful year for us all!
Since January 2000, my husband and I have hosted an annual New Year’s Poetry Brunch, which many of you have attended over the years. I miss launching the new year with this gathering, but we’re still in the dark thickets of this pandemic, and it’s important for us all to stay safe in the weeks and months ahead.
I just submitted my grades for Fall Semester, bringing my teaching time at SRJC to a close after 29 years. In various incarnations, I’ve been teaching since 1977, and I will continue to teach private workshops, once I can figure out what such a workshop will look like. Something on Zoom, perhaps, or a hybrid, once the Sitting Room Library opens again?
In some ways, being able to tap into readings remotely has extended what I could attend, and I’ve been introduced to writers who, too, have Zoomed in from other parts of the country or the world. When we get to the other side of this pandemic, what will our vibrant community readings and literary events be like? If we’re able to gather in groups again, what size group will feel comfortable to us?
We will need to reinvent many aspects of our lives, and that can be both daunting and exciting. Let’s put our hive-mind to work on this, and please let Jo-Anne and me know if there’s some way the Literary Update can best reflect these changes.
2020 in Six Words
In December’s post, I invited you to send to me or Jo-Anne your 2020 thoughts in six words and promised to include these in the January Literary Update. Some of you responded, and what a pleasure to see the pain, frustration, hope, and humor of this year summed up so concisely! Here they are.
This old world changes in days.
—Kevin Pryne
Earth hits bottom, looking up now.
A year of haiku, new friends.
The cats and I celebrate cronehood.
—Sande Anfang
Around the house;
Little chores finished.
—Dave Murphy
Love, laughter, stronger now, than ever.
—Carol Ann Hoorn
Imaginary friends more important than ever.
—Camille Kantor
Waking to the sound of rain.
—Patrice Warrender
My appendix taken out in time.
—Nancy Long
Still this side of the dirt!
—Shawna Swetech
Hummingbirds at our feeder delight me
—Melanie Maier
Losing friends—2020’s hardest blow.
—Terry Ehret
Allies avowing, asserting Black Lives Matter.
—Kim Hester Williams
How naked my arms without hugs.
—Elizabeth Bennett
Gratefully alive—I trust Divine Wisdom.
—Deborah Taylor-French
Big, blue California sky; loving you.
Gloria DeBlasio
Honor and humbling. Despair and hope.
—Phyllis Meshulam
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Remembering Barry Lopez (1945-2020)
“To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords
that bind the earth together.”
A writer of deep lyricism, and a lover of the power of nature and silence, Barry Lopez passed away on Christmas Day. Robert D. McFadden of the New York Times wrote, “Mr. Lopez embraced landscapes and literature with humanitarian, environmental and spiritual sensibilities that some critics likened to those of Thoreau and John Muir.”
When asked about his motive for writing, Lopez said, “I can tell you in two words. To help. I am a traditional storyteller. This activity is not about yourself. It’s about culture, and your job is to help.”
Lopez won the National Book Award (nonfiction) for Arctic Dreams (1986), a treatise on his five years with Inuit people and solitude in a land of bitter cold and endless expanses. His other publications include About this Life, The Rediscovery of North America (1990) Resistence (2004), and most recently Horizon (2019).
To read more about Barry Lopez, his life, and his work, visit his website: www.barrylopez.com
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Remembering Poet Jean Valentine
(1934–2020)
By Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Jean Valentine once told me a sonnet is a little church you build to investigate a moment. I was lucky enough to get to study with her at New York University in the late 1990s and her quiet, yet firm editing voice is a gift that has stayed with me all of these years. Poems to her were living beings (here, this is where the soul is, she once said to my friend in the workshop, pointing to the page, you should start from here). Valentine’s work is haunting: clear, refined lyrics that take you to a world that is both dream and reality. She authored over a dozen books, including a late collection called, Shirt in Heaven (2015). In 2016, I wrote about one of the poems from this striking collection called, “1943: The Vision” in my column Poet’s Corner at The Press Democrat. (Poet’s Corner: ‘1943: The Vision’ by Jean Valentine) I mourn her loss but am so grateful that we will still have her valuable work for years to come.
Iris’s book Charmian Kittredge London Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer is now available for order.
____
Check out the Poet Laureate News Page
At the end of 2020, Phyllis Meshulam invited us to write from the prompt “Seeing with New Eyes.” You can find this, poems by Joy Harjo and Gabriela Mistral, and a gorgeous photo by Jerry Meshulam at this link: https://socolitupdate.com/poet-laureates-news/
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Donations to the Sonoma County Literary Update always Welcome!
Most of you know that the SCLU began during my tenure as Sonoma County Poet Laureate, 2004-2006. It has continued largely through the behind-the-scenes efforts of Jo-Anne Rosen. We volunteer our time, happily so, but there are some expenses to keep the website going, most recently an update that keeps the Update free of advertisements.
For those who regularly announce their workshops, readings, or services here, a donation of $10 to $20/year is requested to keep the update and its website going. Donations from regular readers are welcome, too. For details contact the editor Jo-Anne Rosen at sonomacountyliteraryupdate@gmail.com.
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Poems for the New Year
La Chalupa, the Boat
by Jean Valentine
I am twenty,
drifting in la chalupa,
the blue boat painted with roses,
white lilies—
No, not drifting, I am poling
my way into my life. It seems
like another life:
There were the walls of the mind.
There were the cliffs of the mind,
There were the seven deaths,
and the seven bread-offerings—
Still, there was still
the little boat, the chalupa
you built once, slowly, in the yard, after school—
From Little Boat by Jean Valentine. Copyright © 2008 by Jean Valentine.
_____
blessing the boats
by Lucille Clifton
(at St. Mary’s)
May the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in innocence
sail through this to that
From Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000. Copyright © 2000 by Lucille Clifton.
Terry Ehret,
Sonoma County Literary Update co-editor
PEN Oakland, called “The Blue Collar PEN” by The New York Times, is honoring Maya Khosla’s All the Fires of Wind and Light with the Josephine Miles Literary Award.
by Kay Ryan
On October 25, our literary community lost a great poet, Diane Di Prima. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Di Prima became part of Greenwich Village’s beat scene in the 1950s and 60s, publishing poetry, editing a newsletter The Floating Bear, co-founding the New York Poets Theatre, and later The Poet’s Press. She moved to California in 1968, lived for a time in Marshall, and settled in San Francisco where she taught at New College of California, California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco Art Institute, California Institute of Integral Studies, and
For more than 20 years, the Petaluma community has held an evening of poetry for Sonoma County and beyond to remember those we have lost. Since 2004, the Día de los Muertos Committee has included this event in its month-long celebration of the Day of the Dead. Many of you have been part of this annual event over the years, as featured readers and as part of the community reading.
Many of you already know that Sonoma County’s beloved novelist and memoirist Jean Hegland and her husband Douglas Fisher lost their home in the LCU Complex/Wallbridge fires last month. The Healdsburg Tribune invited Jean to write a feature about her experience, which was published on September 23: “Unnatural Disasters.” In the article, Jean reflects on her home and the surrounding woods, writing, “Soon after we moved there (in 1989), that forest had been the inspiration for my first novel, and it had been an inspiration, a solace and a delight ever since.” In response to a friend’s comment about the fire being a natural disaster, Jean reflects, “There was nothing natural about the Walbridge Fire. Instead, it had been caused by the unfortunate conjunction of record-breaking high temperatures, a freak electrical storm that had bombarded Northern California with over 12,000 lightning strikes, and many decades of fire suppression in a forest that had evolved to burn. It was not a natural disaster but an unnatural one, not an “act of God,” but the result of human ignorance and greed, that same lethal combination of opportunism and denial that is currently causing record flooding in China and a record-breaking hurricane season in the Atlantic.”
Iris’s just released biography is a triumph of biographical and literary research. She’ll be giving several readings/interviews in October. Here are the dates and hosts. For details, check the calendar page.
To add to the onslaught of 2020 disasters, on September 18, we lost a champion and hero, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She served on the Supreme Court from 1993 until her death, making history through majority opinions, and making waves though her eloquent and brilliant dissenting opinions. Before her Supreme Court nomination, she served as legal counsel to the ACLU, and it was during the years 1973-1980 that she prepared and argued cases that would alter the lives of American women, bringing us closer to the goal of “equal protection under the law.”
Taking advantage of the COVID hiatus, the Sitting Room Community Library is undergoing renovations to make it even more welcoming to reading and writing groups, literary researchers, workshops, readers and writers once it’s able to open again. Among the changes are new flooring in the living room/workshop space (do you recognize it her in the photo?), new shelving, new electrical system, a less cluttered kitchen area, the addition of a microwave (yeah!). JJ Wilson writes that “We are working on the several suggestions for better storage for the art collection and plan to have exhibit areas built in for revolving art pieces and a foam core board posted up near the television cabinet for exhibits.”
Join us online for our fall fundraiser with Prageeta Sharma and Matthew Zapruder, Sunday, October 11, 2020 at 3 PM Pacific time.
Sun Bear
Gail Newman and Cecilia Woloch
Book Launch for Beside the Well 
In this reading, launched less than a month and a half before the 2020 presidential election, some of our country’s finest poets address the social and political rifts that currently divide our country. Please join us for the launch of this timely and important video featuring contributors to our anthology, America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience, reading their poems and others from the book:
Rick Barot, Joshua Bennett, Mai Der Vang, Camille Dungy (pictured here), Dante Di Stefano, Judy Halebsky, Forrest Hamer, Brenda Hillman, and Evie Shockley.
Although I recognize not everyone feels comfortable engaging in political gestures, such as this open letter recommends, I pass this along at the request of Cole Swenson. Cole and I graduated from SF State’s Creative Writing Program in 1984an auspicious date! She is a poet, translator, editor, copywriter, and professor. Originally from Kentfield, California, she now divides her time between Paris and Providence, RI, where she is on the permanent faculty of Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.
“2020 marks 10 years since the 100 Thousand Poets for Change movement began. It has been a breathtaking experience to work and create together in community building with you, and to witness a global community working for positive change.
Last week, we lost a great leader of Civil Rights, John Lewis, who wisely said, “The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have.”
First and foremost, you join Phyllis Meshulam’s Poet Laureate Project: Phyllis is inviting all of us to help her create an anthology of poems for the times we are living. One section will be devoted to the theme of “Honoring Our Pain for the World.” Check out the inspiring and provocative quotes from Patricia Smith, Camille Dungy, and Joseph Zaccardi on Phyllis’s Poet Laureate page:
little prayer
Kathleen is author of three poetry collections, including Transformer (March 2020), selected by Maggie Smith for the Hilary Tham Collection at The Word Works Press. Winter’s second book, I will not kick my friends, won the Elixir Poetry Prize, and her debut collection, Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, won the Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Memorial Award and the Antivenom Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, Poetry London, Agni, Cincinnati Review, Tin House, Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals. She has received fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Dora Maar House, James Merrill House, Cill Rialaig Project and Vermont Studio Center. Her awards include the Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award and the Ralph Johnston Fellowship at University of Texas’s Dobie Paisano Ranch. Winter is an associate editor at 32 Poems. She teaches creative writing at Santa Rosa Junior College and Sonoma State University.
Researching and writing Krisanthi’s War: in Hitler’s Greece has been Ida Egli’s project for many years; finally it has been released by local publisher McCaa Books and is available on 
Lucille Clifton’s birthday was just a few days ago. On June 27, she would have been 84. In the early days of shelter-in-place, when we were singing Happy Birthday to make sure we were washing our hands for 20 seconds, a meme circulated on the Internet proposing reciting this poem while hand-washing. This was before the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, with their invitation to re-examine our identities, our assumptions, the racism that is so tightly woven into our history and society. Reciting this poem every day might move us all in the direction of empathy and necessary change.
This is how I look when I head out into the world these days. My one-of-a-kind homemade mask was a gift from Michelle Baynes, who, like many of you across the county, has been making these masks as a way to give back to the community. Thank you, Michelle!
The Irish poet Eavan Boland passed away at her home in Dublin on Monday. Since 1996, she had lived part-time in Dublin, and part-time in the Bay Area, where she taught for many years at Stanford University, and was the director of the creative writing program. Consequently, many of us in Sonoma County and Northern California had the opportunity to hear Boland read or to study with her in workshops. Over her long career, Boland became one of the most important contemporary voices in poetry. Her poetry is known for “subverting traditional constructions of womanhood,” and “offering fresh perspectives on Irish history and mythology.”
Sonoma County Literary Update 
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