Dear Eloise,
Well, I am in Montreal right now, have been since the end of November and will be here until the end of January. You probably guess that I just can’t be happy if I do not move. Five weeks this summer in Switzerland near Geneva was not enough! Love the place I am in right now, a part of town called Hochelaga. It used to be one for workers and is still near some big working factories on the St. Lawrence River. However, it also has wonderful running trails, a great market, a local upscale grocery store, a café full of beautiful antique table sets, two second-hand stores, and incredible people, from panhandlers to IT engineers and stage decorators. In other words, it is eclectic! The apartment I am in reflects that, especially because of Monsieur Jules!!
In any case thought I would include my latest article, which both a priest (Episcopal) and the deputy director of the Tower Center (international affairs) at Southern Methodist University loved. https://medium.com/@louiseleiften/daring-to-compete-for-a-brighter-future-5ac48a580f9
It is on my Facebook page.
To Yves from Anya has been copyrighted.
Tatiana
Amber Road: A Novel of Love and Betrayal on the Roman Frontier, is available now
He’s angered the most powerful man in the world.
Five thousand loyal soldiers guarding the frontier despise his family name.
A Germanic warlord across the river is waiting to murder him.
And he must risk them all to find the only woman he’s ever loved.
When ex-tribune Marcus Carinna is recruited by an imperial spymaster for a secret mission among the hostile German tribes, he jumps at the excuse to restore his honor while searching for his beloved Aurima. But as his troops advance into the dark menace and magic of the Amber Road, he will discover that he is not out of reach of his enemies’ vengeance—and that saving what truly matters is going to demand more heart and will than he knew he possessed.
That’s a quick synopsis of Amber Road, the second novel in a saga of treachery, love, and honor that began four years ago with Roma Amor. Roma told about the struggle of a noble family to maintain its honor in the early years of Caligula’s reign (37 AD). I wanted the sequel to be less political and more action-oriented, with the same protagonist: young patrician Marcus Carinna, now haunted by the terrible events that took place earlier, and driven to the far edge of the Roman Empire by an obsession to restore his family’s name. When his beloved, the Germanic priestess Aurima, goes missing, he must come to terms with ferocious warriors, wisewomen, and a clever dwarf as he enters the wilderness of the Amber Road to find her.
I love writing about this pivotal period when the Pax Romana was in danger, with the Dark Ages pressing hard against the frontiers. As Edmund Burke reputedly said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” My goal is to show the difference that a good man could make in a perilous time.
If any classmates are interested in producing a book, I’d be glad to share what I’ve learned about traditional vs. independent publishing, budgeting, and promotion (still working on that last one myself!). Please email me through my website, www.roma-amor.com. In the meantime, with Roma Amor and Amber Road now available online in print, ebook, and audiobook, I’m tip-tapping away on Book 3.
Sherry Christie
December 15, 2020
Faris Hall Cassell's new book,
Faris Hall Cassell's new book, The Unanswered Letter: One Holocaust Family's Desperate Plea for Help, follows Faris' quest to discover the story behind a desperate 1939 letter sent by a Viennese Jewish man to strangers in America, begging for immigration help. The dramatic true story of love and courage, heartbreak and hope, carries unsettling meaning for us today.
Martha Raver Carlson has published two books. Both are available on Amazon as ebooks or in
The House on Indian Creek: Memoir of a Maine Coast Island recalls 40 years of adventures, romance, fish and gooseberries on Vinalhaven Island. The House on Indian Creek welcomes family, friends, and dozens of students. A baby seal, wooly buggers, and even a sea-faring mattress make Indian Creek a delicious read.
The Bitter Bird is a fictional journey of people caught up in the Civil War. It is the story of Isabel Tilghman, an underground railroad conductor, and Isaac Charles Moore, a 10-year-old son of a Quaker activist, who escape from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. They find sanctuary in Sandwich, New Hampshire, a little town so far from the war, they thought they were insulated from the violence. But were they?
Carlson lives with her husband Rudy on their farm in Sandwich, NH.
Patricia Roth Schwartz
Patricia Roth Schwartz has published a book entitled Soul Knows No Bars: My Journey
Working with Inmate Poets. It is a compelling story of her work with prison inmates, bringing
her poetic prowess (editor of Pegasus, winner of Glascock Poetry Prize for Mount Holyoke) to
a most unlikely population. Our website is the perfect place to share Pat’s narrative.
SOUL KNOWS NO BARS: My Journey Working with Inmate Poets
by Patricia Roth Schwartz, class of 1968, MHC
When I was a student on campus my aspirations were narrow. I was a poet (editor of Pegasus,
winner of the Glascock Poetry Prize for MHC), and wished to remain a poet 'til the end of my
days. What else I would be doing I had no earthly idea. If anyone had told me that one of the
things I would do after college and for a considerable chunk of my life was to work with
inmates inside state prisons, and male prisoners at that, I think my little mind would have
blown out my ears. And yet it came to pass. This is how.
My work history started out spotty. First I had a job for an insurance company, which I hated. Then as a grant writer for a community college: something I also hated, due to a mentally-ill boss. After working as a volunteer for the YWCA, I was offered a job for the organization. This I loved and did for four years in the 70s, running a controversial Women's Center (my idea) inside the Hartford Region YWCA in Connecticut. Encouraged by my work with women, I entered graduate school (I had already obtained a Master's degree in English literature from Trinity College in Hartford) in a Master's degree program in counseling psychology from Antioch/New England, which involved commuting one day a week to Keene NH, while also serving an internship at a counseling center in MA. After doing all this for two years, my car died. Thus I became a psychotherapist working primarily with women, often using writing as a tool. I was still a poet, having joined a group called The Blue Spruce Poets, based in CT; each of the four members (all women) had a book published, funded by a community arts grant.
A few years later I moved to Boston where I maintained a successful private practice from a home office for thirteen years. During this time I was still a poet publishing widely in tiny, obscure literary journals. I also began to study herbalism. Sick of the city, a partner and I moved to the Finger Lakes region of New York State to a thirty-five acre property with a crumbling old farmhouse we were able to get for a song. We intended to start an herb business and I would continue to be a poet and a writer of fiction, which I had also started to do. This partnership did not last, but I stayed on. I became a community college adjunct instructor at several different institutions, once again demanding that I drive all over the place. Luckily, this time my car did not die. My poetry began to appear in more small press journals, still fairly obscure but less so. A volume of short stories had already come out in 1989 for which I won a national award. Then, after the sad passing of both of my elderly parents, the universe bestowed upon me an amazing gift: the opportunity, due to my inheritance, to cease paid work if I would live modestly and frugally. A new partnership had entered my life. My second book of poems came out, to be followed, up to the present day, by five other volumes.
One of the last adjunct jobs I had held had been as an adjunct instructor of psychology and English inside a New York State medium security prison. Despite another mentally-ill boss, I truly loved this work. When the State of New York saw fit to eliminate all higher education for inmates (a situation which continues to this day, such education being provided only at a few prisons through universities like Cornell), I lost this job. My early retirement occurred at the same time. As the incredible poet, Mary Oliver, has said, "...what will you do with your one wild and precious life?" I had to decide. I knew I would be going back to prison. I chose to seek a volunteer position at the infamous maximum security prison Auburn correctional facility in the small city of Auburn NY (the last place Harriet Tubman lived). I made this decision for two reasons: this facility was much closer to my home than the other prison; I also believed that men who had been incarcerated for long periods of time, which was more likely to happen in maximum security than medium, would have done lots and lots of writing over long years which could be brought into the program I hoped to create. After jumping through a lot of hoops (obtaining such a position is not as easy as one might imagine), I began in June 2001 to go in to this medieval fortress of a prison on a weekly basis. (Auburn is the oldest prison of its kind in the US, having been built in 1821 by convict labor.) The experiences I had every Monday night over a fourteen year period were so amazing, sometimes almost unbelievable so, yet constant in their repetition over and over for all of those years, that I knew I was going to need to document them. I wished to write about not only the individual personalities I encountered and their stories, but what happened in the poetry workshop I facilitated, along with help from certain inmates who became unofficial co-leaders of the group.
When I finished up this work in the June 2015, I took a year off, then, the next year, began to write the memoir. Because I only wrote part-time, it took me almost three years to complete the book. Then another year or more was devoted to formatting the manuscript which was amazingly difficult. (I had had a publisher lined up, a friend who had started a business putting out books, but when this deal fell through in an unethical manner which caused both the friendship and the book deal to implode, I made the decision to self-publish. Even though I believed I could find another professional publisher if I waited long enough, I would be 73 when the book came out: I felt I had no time to waste!) The volume, which came together with a lot of serious help both from my partner, who is a computer professional, and an amazing graphic designer I found, is something of which I am extremely proud.
What I recount is how I, a middle-class white woman, began to work with young men of color (whose backgrounds were everything from African-American to Hispanic to Haitian-American to Panamanian-American to Chinese-American to even a young man who had been born in Africa itself). These men, along with a smattering of white men, all came from the poorest neighborhoods of New York City: the housing projects, the mean streets, the schools full of violence and very few books, from fragmented families, usually with no fathers in sight. I could not be more different from them, and yet we were united by a common bond: poetry. I ran the class as a workshop; usually we would sit in a circle, although some of the rooms we were assigned had tables and chairs which would not permit this. First we would hold open mic (a great deal of what happened in this group was oral presentation), and then I would offer writing exercises, including one I called "Poetry Chopped," based on the TV cooking show; we used words instead of foods. Sometimes these exercises also involved small group efforts in which group poems were written, then performed as mini theater pieces.
Contrary to what many people might believe, our sessions were full of humor and often playful antics. I was treated with incredible respect, a great deal of friendship and platonic affection; we became a family. Over the course of fourteen years, with the group consisting usually of 11 to 13 men, I ended up working with over 100. I had found that maximum-security prisons, while holding men who had long sentences, did not retain a stable population. Men were often transferred from one institution to another for a variety of reasons. I had to get used to losing, from week to week, almost anybody, never allowed to hear from them again. During the course of my time in Auburn, I was able to have four volumes of the work of these brilliant, amazingly talented, often self-educated poets published. We put out a full-length anthology of their work, plus a chapbook (small poetry book usually of less than 30 pages) anthology of those not in the original book, a chapbook by one inmate, and a full-length volume by another. During this time I myself wrote a volume of poems that work as dramatic monologues, about the grim and grisly, yet occasionally inspiring, history of Auburn prison, which I had begun to research. Entitled The Crows of Copper John: a History of Auburn Prison, it is available from my website along with my memoir and all of the other books I have mentioned. I am hoping my memoir will bring to attention issues involving mass incarceration. Our current system of punishing miscreants is not working. Denying inmates higher education is stupid and ridiculous; statistics prove this to be true; there is a much higher recidivism rate for those who have not had college classes. While I respect that the profession of serving as a corrections officer is difficult and potentially dangerous, some of the behavior I witnessed openly involving racism and misogyny was disgraceful (the latter being shown toward female volunteers since of course men's prisons held no female inmates). My memoir recounts some of these experiences, along with stories of some of the other volunteers I worked with, who were amazing people.
I encourage everyone who reads article this to obtain and read my book, not in any way to serve me, but to learn the stories of these resilient, brave, and talented inmates; this is all the more important because their voices are not heard in our society, and otherwise their stories will not be told.
