A milestone, my venerable Random House Unabridged Dictionary says, is “a significant event in the life, progress, [or] development of a person, nation”—or, I’ll add here, a unique and adventurous magazine. This issue is an important Persimmon Tree milestone. The magazine’s 75th, “Diamond Jubilee,” issue, it is a tribute to the creativity, experience, and wisdom of older women around the globe. It is also a salute to the inspiration and dedication of Founding Editor Nan Gefen and the dauntless band of women who, for just over eighteen years, have established and nurtured the international body of readers, writers, artists, and musicians who, together, form the growing Persimmon Tree community. All in all, this issue—and the many women whose work appears in its pages— give proof to the statement poet Emily Dickinson included in an 1874 letter: “We turn not older with years, but newer every day.”
Milestones also provide opportunities for looking back to see how far we’ve come—and to envision the opportunities and challenges the future may hold. In the Special Section celebrating this 75th-issue milestone, you’ll find essays by and about past and present Persimmon Tree staff, principally celebrating how the magazine has grown and developed. Several of these essays include links to articles in past issues, now preserved in Persimmon Tree’s Archives, which hold the contents of all 74 previous issues and are freely available to our readers.
Present challenges—as well as future hopes and fears—are subjects of this issue’s Forum, which addresses “The Assault on the Cultural and Intellectual Life of America.” Over the past several months universities, libraries, and organizations devoted to scientific research that benefits the nation and the world have been rocked by a variety of measures calculated to temper their independence and devotion to progress and truth. The nation’s creative arts and organizations supporting them are increasingly besieged as well, their funding removed or threatened, freedom of expression and artistic exploration under a deepening cloud. Contributions to the Forum poured in. I urge you to read and add to the discussion on this vital issue.
“To create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage,” painter Georgia O’Keeffe once said. She was not speaking primarily of the courage to create in the face of outside pressure to comport with “groupthink,” but of the courage it takes to reach into oneself and express personal truths in prose, poetry, the visual arts, and music. This issue, like the 74 that preceded it, is a tribute to the continuing courage of older women who dare to create. In our Creative Lives section, Elizabeth Zimmer writes a tribute to the valor and accomplishments of photographer Dona Ann McAdams and dancer Naomi Goldberg Haas. Poetry Editor Cynthia Hogue introduces Guest Poetry Editor Deirdre O’Connor, who, in turn, presents the compelling work of international poets. Humor, quirkiness—and a pinch of outrage—characterize the cards and illustrations of Alice Briggs, interviewed by Art Editor Greta Berman. The Fiction section includes a half dozen stories that range from lacerating to supernatural, while the six essays in Nonfiction are packed with thought-provoking revelations.
So much to enjoy and contemplate—and to remark upon, using the Comment pane at the end of each page. We urge you to return again and again, and to let us know what you think. In the meantime, in view of the challenges we now face, I leave you with the words of poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019): “I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.”
Editor-in-Chief
Persimmon Tree readers will love young Joey’s mother, Ellie, as she navigates through poverty and around a philandering, alcoholic husband to help her boy achieve his dream of becoming a classical musician. She scrimps and saves enough to take her nine-year-old boy to the San Francisco Symphony to hear Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, though she herself had never before set foot in a concert hall.
Readers will follow Joey through his childhood with its real-life pain, and watch as he, too, navigates around his father and uses his creativity to passively “get even” for his dad’s cruelty, always knowing his mother will be there to rescue him. Though their relationship is not without its trials, she models for him loyalty, persistence and hard work and allows no excuses when times are hard.
In high school Joey falls quickly and deeply in love with a curly-haired beauty, and is torn between his love for her and pursuing his musical dream. When another girl courts him and offers to help him pay his way through college and music lessons, Joey marries her, thus forming a tormented triangle love affair.
You will follow Joey as he auditions for the Sacramento Symphony and Music Circus. You will be there with him when he plays his horn with Frank Sinatra, studio musicians from Hollywood, The Beach Boys, Dorothy Dandridge and Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison.
Having achieved his musical goal, will Joey ever be able to set his personal life right?
Nanci's short stories and poems have been published in The California Writers Club Literary Review, a CWC Anthology, October Hill Magazine, The Fault Zone, the Sacramento Poetry Society’s Tule Review, Your Daily Poem, The Monterey Poetry Review, the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal and many other online and print publications.
Check out Nanci’s website for samples of her writing and art, click here to listen to the music in Tears and Trombones, and watch for Nanci’s new book of poetry coming out this fall.
Available on Amazon
Most recently, Gayle Ann Weinstein is the winner (through the Alliance for Jewish Theater) of a regrant from Canvas. She has been a resident at Ragdale, the artists’ colony in River Forest, IL, and is a recipient of a Creative Writing Certificate from the University of Chicago’s Graham School. Her poetry has been published in a number of journals, including in Persimmon Tree's