100,000 Poets for Change in Yreka, CA

On Saturday, September 29, 2012, four women poets--Dori Appel of Ashland, Oregon, Maria Elena Fernandez of Mt Shasta, California, Flannery Clouse of Yreka, California and I--met to read in a coffeehouse, Nature's Kitchen, in Yreka.

This was part of the international movement, 100,000 Poets for Change--an event that fostered 800 events in 115 countries.  Organized online and largely through FaceBook, poets and musicians gathered in Madagascar, Mali, and Mauritania to build global social and cultural awareness and to encourage solidarity among artists and musicians.

Yreka is a small mountain town surrounded by ranches and wilderness. I was curious to see what issues would emerge and how we might fit into this global community.

At first, when asked to read, poet and owner of Nature's Kitchen, Flannery Clouse said, "Since change is inevitable, I'm for it."  We laughed at our dilemma. As a writer, I don't see myself as attempting to change cultures and societies when I write--my only focus is to shape images, ideas, impressions into language and to shape that language into a satisfying whole.

In preparation for the reading, we all had to think about what change we wanted to see and to look at our writings to discover what social and cultural issues were already there in the work.

In the course of the reading, a theme emerged from our personal writings that had political heft. In one poem, Fernandez exposed the depth of Demeter's pain at her daughter's kidnap and rape. I read "Leda Talks Back," a poem that pulls back the curtain of Romanticism reveals the ugly truth of that rape.  These poems stand as voices against the recent political "War on Women."

Clouse (above) even surprised herself by writing a long and blatantly political ditty for the occasion. In one verse, she dealt with the current view expressed by one conservative who is still being supported by many of the Republican mainstream:

     Akin has said
     If a woman's raped right
     She can't have a baby
     Because she's too tight.
     Roe vs. Wade
     Must be unmade
     Because we all know that
     All of this rot
     About a woman's say
     In her body's parley
     Is a freakin' feminist plot.

For more information about the global event, visit: http://www.bigbridge.org/100thousandpoetsforchange/

True, a novel by Melinda Field, Wise Women Ink, 2011

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, great literature grows from two stories: someone goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. In Melinda Field’s first novel True, the character of young Cat sets events in motion--she is both on a journey and the stranger who comes to town.

Abandoned by her Mexican father, Cat has been raised by a drug-addicted mother and grown up tough in the streets of Phoenix, AZ. When her mother is taken to prison, Cat is forced to move to a small town and live with her Native American grandmother, a woman she has never met. To further complicate matters, the town is an isolated, predominantly white, ranching community in Northern California.

For Cat, this is a coming-of-age story. The brutality she encounters and the consequences will mark her life forever. But the novel True is much more.

The ensemble cast of characters, a diverse group of women brought together by their love of horses and their shared adventures in the mountains, is focused through Emma, a midwife who ultimately becomes Cat’s guardian. Each woman faces life-changing challenges, so that in True, Field reveals how we are always coming-of-age no matter where we find ourselves.

True is set in the contemporary west and Field evokes a palpable sense of place.  From the dusty heat of a Phoenix motel, redolent of curry and disinfectant--to the cider scent of an orchard, the crunch of apples underfoot—to the sharp-scented sage and dangerous shale of a mountain trail, the salt and blood of fear when a rattlesnake or mountain lion appears—True will transport readers from their easy chairs to a wild and authentic place.

There’s still a month of summer left. If you’re looking for a book to take with you to the beach or a book that is a vacation in itself, I invite you to read True.

For your hard copy or ebook, visit http://www.amazon.com/True-Melinda-Field/dp/097620083X