An Apple in Her Hand

A Collection from the Hudson Valley Women's Writing Group

By Colleen Geraghty, Kit Goldpaugh, Eileen Howard, Tana Miller, Mary K. O'Melveny, Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, and Kappa Waugh

Subjects: Poetry, Fiction
Imprint: Distribution Partners
Paperback : 9781949933000, 138 pages, December 2018

Table of contents

Introduction
An Apple in Her Hand

Ciotóg
Colleen Geraghty
Apples or Oranges
Eileen Howard
What I Hold
Kappa Waugh
One Succulent Bite
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
The Apple Was A Pomegranate
Tana Miller
The Kitchen Witch
Kit Goldpaugh
An Apple in Her Hand
Mary K O’Melveny

Remembrance
Tidewater, VA, 1949
Kappa Waugh
Fade Out /Fade In
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Where the Big Bass Bite
Tana Miller
The Mathematics of Parking
Mary K O’Melveny
My Real Mother
Colleen Geraghty
Leopard Housecoat
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Things My Mother Taught Me
Kit Goldpaugh
My First Pet
Kappa Waugh
Four, Five, Six, Seven
Kappa Waugh
I Met My Mother’s Body at Loehmann’s
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Joy
Candlemas Day
Kit Goldpaugh
The Barefoot Contessa’s Visit
Tana Miller
Barefoot Burglar
Kappa Waugh
New York Seder
Eileen Howard
Love Nest
Mary K O’Melveny
My Husband Wanted a Swimming Pool Poem
Kappa Waugh
The Squirrels (And Samantha Cristiforetto) Savor Their Day
Eileen Howard
Nocturnal Turtle
Eileen Howard
I Hold Your Hand
Tana Miller
Visibility-Breaking Silence
Cease Fire
Mary K O’Melveny
Stations of the Cross: Station 13
Tana Miller
Becoming a Ghost
Colleen Geraghty
Empathy
Mary K O’Melveny
A Poet Trapped in an Ant Colony
Tana Miller
Spit and Soot
Mary K O’Melveny
Conversation
Eileen Howard
A Boy on a Bus
Mary K O’Melveny
Vermeer’s Lady Writing
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Resistance
Speckled Egg
Tana Miller
A Gathering of Sybils
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
January 21, 2017
Kit Goldpaugh
Portrait of a Gazan Stargazer
Mary K O’Melveny
Death’s Door
Kappa Waugh
Six Minutes, 20 Seconds
Mary K O’Melveny
Man’s Best Friend
Kappa Waugh
Kindness
Mary K O’Melveny
Showcase of Sacrifice
Colleen Geraghty
Resilience
The Beer House
Colleen Geraghty
Punta Mujeres: Land of Grief
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Wallpapering with Mom
Kit Goldpaugh
Hiking Montana
Eileen Howard
Hemerocallis Fulva (Beauty for a Day)
Tana Miller
Yellowstone Hot Springs
Eileen Howard
Holy Martyrs
Kappa Waugh
Transformation
Bess’s Lament
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Grieving Stones
Colleen Geraghty
Feeding the Fire
Eileen Howard
God in the Air
Kappa Waugh
Epigenetics: Traumatized DNA
Eileen Howard
Dog Star:Walking my Dog in Logan Park
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Snow Morph
Eileen Howard
Similes
Eileen Howard
A Moment is an Eternity
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Aging
Ripples in Time
Eileen Howard
Miriam
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Spindrift
Colleen Geraghty
I Am Your Dutiful Daughter
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
The Wasp
Eileen Howard
Cross at the Beach
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Emergency Room Redux
Mary K O’Melveny
Drought
Tana Miller
Ethel
Kit Goldpaugh
If I Think of My Life
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Bearing Witness
Fraudulent Objects
Colleen Geraghty
Notes from a Tehran Marketplace
Mary K O’Melveny
Have You Seen?
Mary K O’Melveny
Jump Jim Crow
Tana Miller
Every Soft Thing
Colleen Geraghty
The Sounds of Truth Vanishing
Mary K O’Melveny
Madison, Wisconsin, May 1970
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Acknowledgements
Authors’ Biographies

A collection of poetry and prose by a Hudson Valley–based group of women writers.

Description

The authors of this collection are seven older women from diverse backgrounds who are members of a long-standing Hudson Valley writing group composed of academics, a social worker, a psychiatric nurse, a teacher, and a lawyer. Some are retired, some are still working, some are musicians. All are volunteers, activists, and artists. The sections of the book—Remembrance, Joy, Visibility, Resistance, Resilience, Transformation, Aging, and Bearing Witness—grew from the authors' individual passions and from their collective perspective of being women-of-a-certain-age in a culture that tends to render older women invisible, irrelevant. This collection is filled with honest, insistent poetry and prose that demands to be heard by readers of all ages, genders, and perspectives.

Colleen Geraghty is a professional social worker, musician, and artist. She is a certified Amherst Writer and Artists facilitator, founder of The Story Cottage, and regular presenter/facilitator at numerous writers' festivals and conferences, including "Women at Woodstock." She facilitates regular writing workshops, Story Cottage and Story Cottage Words, at local and out-of-state venues. Her stories and poems have appeared in Wallkill Valley Writers Anthology 2012 and 2013 and in A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley. Her story, "The Beer House" (included in this book), received first prize in the Hudson Valley Writers Guild 2013 Short Story Contest. Kit Goldpaugh taught writing for over thirty years in the Hudson Valley to students ranging in age from middle school to college. Over that time, she participated in the Bard Institute for Thinking and Writing program, the Hudson Valley Writers Workshop, and was awarded both a FIPSI summer grant on composition and an NEH fellowship on Women and Fiction. Kit has read at local poetry reading events. Eileen Howard is a retired psychiatric nurse, an active writer and photographer as well as an active hiker and lover of nature. She lived in California, Hawaii, and Nova Scotia before landing in New England and then the Hudson Valley. Many of Eileen's poems bring a photographic lens to the natural beauty of our environment. She has done readings at local Hudson Valley events.

During a thirty-year career as a teacher,Tana Miller authored language curriculum guides for her school district, cofounded and facilitated a grade 5–8 annual literary magazine, presented award-winning Whole Language workshops in Hudson Valley public schools and at the New York State Reading Conference. Her work has been published in several feminist journals and in A Slant of Light (Codhill Press). Tana was a selected reader at the Newark Public Library and has been a featured reader at local gatherings, libraries, and book stores.

A retired labor rights lawyer, Mary K. O'Melveny commutes between Woodstock, New York, and Washington, DC. Mary's poetry has appeared in various print and online journals as well as on various blog sites such as Women at Woodstock, "Writing in a Woman's Voice," and "The New Verse News." Her work has been awarded recognition in several national writing contests; her poem "Cease Fire" (included in this book) won the 2017 Raynes Poetry Competition. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, A Woman of a Certain Age (Finishing Line Press, September, 2018).

A SUNY Distinguished Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, Jan Zlotnik Schmidt's work has been published in many literary journals, such as Alaska Quarterly Review and Kansas Quarterly, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize Series. Jan coedited, with Laurence Carr, A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley. Jan has authored two poetry volumes published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She Had This Memory, 2000). Her chapbook The Earth Was Still was published by Finishing Line Press and another, Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time, was published by Word Temple Press.

Kappa Waugh recently retired after twenty happy years as Reference Librarian for Vassar College. She was born into a family of writers and began her own writing as a young woman. Kappa's poetry was published in school and college literary journals and, during her twenties, in BlackRock. More recently, Kappa's work has appeared in three editions of Legacies, in a poetry anthology, and in A Slant of Light, and on the blog site "Writing in a Woman's Voice." Kappa has read at numerous Hudson Valley literary venues.