A little self-google last night led to my finding that Inheritance Of Aging Self was listed as #36 in new releases in death, grief, and loss poetry. A little lower today, but still a solid top 50 hit! Thank you so much to everyone who has purchased the book!
Deeply grateful to Leeya Mehta for her lovely and thoughtful mini-review of Inheritance Of Aging Self at the end of her review of Joy Harjo’s new book at the Washington Independent Review Of Books! You can read the review here.
Look what I was working on this weekend! Inheritance Of Aging Self is just about ready to go to the printer and into the mail. Thanks to all of you who have purchased copies so far, I really appreciate it, they should be in the mail to you in early October. I will be posting information on fall readings next week.
When I started to think about how to market Inheritance Of Aging Self I read every article and book I find about the topic. One suggestion that clicked was to contact your hometown newspaper. For me that was an Oh Snap moment because I had been a columnist for one of those newspapers way back when. Which led me to send an email to the current publisher of the Arizona Jewish News, Shannon Levitt, to let her know that 50 years later, one of their Teen Talk columnists was still writing and attached a press release about my book.
She promptly wrote back and asked if I’d like to do a guest column for the wait for it…senior section. Which in an I feel so old sort of way makes perfect sense, so I accepted her kind offer. Then I tried to remember something about my experience writing that column way back when which was when I realized that I had kept those columns. And there they were, the original newsprint versions, carefully saved in my file cabinet.
I had a lot of fun writing my guest column, weaving in the history with a bit about my book, which includes a number of poems, a number of which were inspired by events and people that were part of my Arizona landscape.
You can read my romp down memory lane here, and below in all it’s glory is a pic of me from my Teen Talk days.
I am delighted to be participating in this year’s Write Women Book Fest on October 9, 2021, noon-5pm edt. This will be a hybrid event taking place online and at the Marietta House Museum in Glenn Dale, MD. The schedule is still getting worked out but I’ll post more information when it is available. This wonderful event was founded by Heather Brooks to, “lift up women authors and publishing professionals”, and is a cooperative endeavor with the Prince Georges County Parks Department.
I was delighted to have the opportunity to read at Cafe Muse’s Poets vs The Pandemic series last night, along with Ann Bracken and Miles David Moore. Great thanks to Henry Crawford and Karren Alenier for hosting this wonderful series. I read from Inheritance Of Aging Self as well as a newer poem about quilting. Have a listen below. My reading starts at the 40 minute mark.
I will be reading along with Miles David Moore and Ann Bracken at the July 21rst Poets vs The Pandemic reading sponsored by Cafe Muse. The reading begins at 7 pm and will last for an hour. I’ll be sharing several poems from Inheritance Of Aging Self as well as a pandemic poem or 2 and some new work.
The readers were chosen based on all of us being poetry reading organizers, Ann is one of the organizers of the Wilde Readings in Columbia, MD and Miles was the force behind the long-running Iota readings in Arlington, VA, and I founded the DiVerse Gaithersburg (MD) reading. As I’m sure they will both agree, it is always fun to be the reader and not the organizer every now and again. Many thanks to Henry Crawford for all the work he has done to organize this series. Read more about MIles and Ann here.
The reading will be on zoom and you can register here for the link. It will also be available later on You Tube because as Henry pointed out in an email, one of the purposes of the series is to “document DC area poetry during the pandemic.” As a huge fan of documenting things, I’m so glad that they are doing this because our poetic voices during the pandemic are an important part of helping us to make sense of what we’ve all been through.
Come join us for a wonderful evening of poetry!
Back in the BP (Before Pandemic) days, circa late 2019, Eve Burton (the librarian who is our liaison at the Quince Orchard library for the DiVerse Gaithersburg Poetry Reading) and I started talking about having a local poets poetry collection at QO that would feature, to begin with, poets who had read at DiVerse. We both thought it would be a great accompaniment to the readings as well as the poetry workshops that Eve facilitates. Eve talked with her manager and got the necessary okays to get the ball rolling and we put out a call to the poets and books rolled in. The books were sent to be catalogued and then everything shut down. And stayed that way for more than a year with our books inaccessible.
Finally with the re-opening of the library, they have come back and are now shelved and we’ve put out a second call to those who missed the first opportunity to contribute their titles. The books will be housed at QO but can be checked out online from Montgomery County Public Libraries. Here is a picture of the first books on the shelves (except those that were already checked out when the picture was taken!). More coming soon. What an amazing resource for anyone who wants to read more work by local poets!
As I believe is the tradition, I chose “Inheritance Of Aging Self” as the title of my book through a process that involved auditioning 556 different options (by auditioning I mean throwing darts at them and playing eenie meenie miney mo), meditated, consuming substances that I shouldn’t have, and enduring months of angst and sleepless nights.
Despite that unfortunate process, I think the title of this volume is a good descriptor of what’s inside the cover. It is also the title of one of the poems which is based on a conversation that I had with my mother a few years before she passed. I was visiting with her and we were getting ready to go out. She was taking awhile and I went to check on her and found her in front of her vanity brushing her hair and staring at the mirror. I asked her if everything was okay and she threw down the brush and angrily told me, “I do not know this old lady”.
She had developed some memory issues over the years and when she said that, I was badly panicked that she had just taken some precipitous leap further down that path. Cautiously I asked her what she meant. Her reply was one of the most righteous rants ever about how she still expected to see her sixteen year old self when she looked in the mirror. When she saw her elder self instead, it was like seeing her grandmother and that pissed her off! So we spent a few minutes shouting out all the things that pissed us off about growing older and we both felt much better and went on about our day. That conversation inspired the title poem as well as another poem in the collection, “Mirror Image”.
Here is the title poem as it was displayed recently in the Maryland State Arts Council’s “Identity” exhibition.
With Inheritance Of Aging Self now available for pre-order from Finishing Line press, I wanted to come up with some fun book swag. Fortunately we quilters tend to have a lot of fabric scraps around that are begging to be put to good use. So some of mine became handmade patchwork bookmarks that are going to people who pre-order my book and tag me on social media to let me know they’ve ordered the book! Before I sent them out, some of them posed for a group photo:
Lucinda Marshall, photo by Jaree Donnelly