BOOKS, ART, TRAVEL AND MORE
Take a minute to scroll through the delightful offerings in ArtsMart, and you’ll find fascinating books on every subject, for every taste, and from
every genre--poetry, memoirs, history and biography, children’s books, essays, mysteries, fiction both speculative and historical. You’ll also find
writing workshops and retreats, music, even grownup coloring books - something for each and every taste and hour and
mood.
When you purchase an item from ArtsMart, you are helping Persimmon Tree fulfill its mission of providing an audience for the writing and art of women over 60. ArtsMart’s advertising rates
are purposely set very low in order to afford to as many older women writers and artists the opportunity to connects with potential purchasers.
Persimmon Tree is an Amazon and Bookshop.org associate, which means our journal receives a small royalty every time you make a
purchase by clicking through to Amazon or Bookshop.org. The price to you is no higher, but your purchase helps Persimmon Tree continue its vital work.
It took me forty years to write my story. Hundreds of drafts in desk drawers, computers and even in my dreams. The beginning I knew, but the end was lost with my first husband. And I just couldn’t make it up.
When Tave wakes up alone in the hospital, she barely remembers the car wreck. Far from home, dazed, and despondent, she struggles to face the challenges of her new paralysis—all while worrying about her partner, Les, also severely injured in the accident, now cared for by her homophobic parents who refuse to allow contact. In rehab, Tave relearns life skills and comes to recognize that her future will be completely different from what she’d imagined. 
“Gwen Suesse’s latest book, Notes from Planet Widow, serves as a powerful antidote to the pain and insecurity women who’ve suffered a loss profoundly understand.” —Shawn LaTorre, for Story Circle Network
In Snakeberry Mamas Mary Alice Dixon’s words from the wild conjure an Appalachian landscape of lust, where sex, song, and witchy women charm the reader with chant. From the crossroads of Witcher Way Holler to the waters of Hungry River, these poems carry you into a magic world of owl-women, dandelion girls, and the memories of dead mothers alive in the heartwood of trees. In these liminal places grief makes knife blades of red pickled eggs; a goddess offers salvation in tongue of fire; a hellfire-and-brimstone suffragette shares a recipe for britches with balls. Mary Alice Dixon makes poetry that muses mountains and maps gardens you will never want to leave. 
Dr. Alanna Davidson’s life is upended when her father is shot and paralyzed the same night a cutting-edge medical robot is stolen from his laboratory at DARPA. Three years later, the crime remains unsolved. 
For young Becky Williams, a transplanted Northerner living in the segregated South of the 1950s, childhood was cut short when her father, a researcher at Oak Ridge and a beloved biology professor at the University of Alabama, suffered a psychotic break. He died three months later at Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, the state mental institution. In this heartfelt memoir, Mlynarczyk searches through family scrapbooks, old letters, and her own childhood memories in a quest to understand her father’s mental illness and sudden death. Readers who revisit the past alongside her will see what can be gained by looking back on our loved ones in all their complexity. If we are fortunate, we experience healing as we learn to love them in new and unexpected ways.
How can we find meaning in the face of aging, illness, and the inevitability of death? How can we respond to the double plague of a fierce pandemic and a divided society?
Leaving Home at 83 is an intensely personal story yet one shared with thousands of aging women who are wondering whether to move closer to their children and leave their friendships behind or stay in their communities. Readers will see their own questions on these pages and recognize their own fears, insecurities, and uncertainties.
Rosie Sorenson’s award-winning book shines a piercing light on medical error and the power of advocacy. If You’d Only Listen plunges readers into the chaos and confusion that can accompany a critical medical journey. Rosie’s “midwestern tomboy grit” is tested at every turn as she confronts misdiagnoses, communication failures, and a system that often seemed more adversarial than supportive. Through a combination of fierce advocacy, meticulous note-taking, and an unyielding refusal to be ignored, Rosie became her husband Steve’s lifeline—catching errors, asking the hard questions, and refusing to accept vague answers or dismissals.
Stories that become our memories are even better when we share them. We recall the details, the conversations, the ups-and-downs and colorful backdrops.
NOT a Father’s Daughter is an intimate portrait of a woman who unknowingly declared at age eight that she would not be a puppet on a string, not a father’s daughter. Unaware of why her resolve to reject patriarchal dogma was so strong, she reflects on how she observed the world around her and fought the injustices she encountered. Interwoven into her memories and experiences, an inspiring manifesto springs forth for women and men, with equal measures of spirit and soul.
In this captivating memoir, Shepherd examines her first great love, with a man thirty-four years her senior. In 1968 and at age 21, Shepherd found a low-level corporate job, where she met Bill Shepherd, an unhappily married, 55-year-old senior executive. That they had a fling is unsurprising for the time. What is surprising is that they stayed together, for twenty years and two children, despite their age gap, differing religions, and society’s expectations.
“Nanci Woody’s poems move from the sorrow of loss and the anger of betrayal to the joys of children and grandchildren. They vary in style from free verse to rhyme with several sonnets among the narrative poems. But it’s the music of Woody’s poems that enchants us; I particularly enjoyed her rhyming poem “If I Could Be Your Instrument.” Nanci’s poems, like the knots in our hands, tell the truth, even as individual poems provide the reader with a bouquet of blossoms.”
Set during the ‘forever wars’ that followed 9/11, The Angle of Falling Light movingly explores the demons that survivors must wrestle with in the wake of tragedy. Beverly Gologorsky brings us a great cast of characters, at their center three working-class women trying to shape lives of their own in a world that seems to promise them nothing but deadening repetition.
Now What? is a revealing, witty series of reflections on living while old. Butler offers the reader a welcome glimpse into the richness, foolishness, limitations, bravado, and freedom of a vividly lived 88-year-old life.
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Barnacles sparkle, puffins glint, human practices result in fish-strewn beaches. Like blue-green algae on lakes and ponds, red tide is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Nourished by human waste and warming waters, cyanobacteria multiply in harmful algal blooms (HABs) that release neurotoxins. In a whirl of games, addictions, concussions,swimming bans, Red Tide at Sandy Bend posits a world of creaturely interdependence visceral and intimate.
From the Amazon reviews
Woolf’s pen runs dry, Tesla holes up, Lincoln emerges in yet another bardo, and the witnesses for peace include soldiers under duress, models transformed to artists, descendants of forced immigrants, survivors of hurricanes. 
Dear Phebe is an out-of-the ordinary autobiography, an encounter with the myth (and truth) of Judy Wells’ own origins and destiny. Sorting through family letters, the Berkeley poet hears voices from her ancestors—three Dickinson sisters who went out west in the 1860s to seek their fortunes as pioneer schoolteachers. I loved every twist and turn of this mind-tripping story and laughed with glee when the author finds herself in the after-life with the Dickinson sisters, and then ends up returning her great-grandmother Phebe’s 100-year-overdue book to the San Francisco Public Library.
It’s 1998 in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, where the close-knit Italian-American community clings to its traditions. The week of Halloween a shocking discovery shatters the festivities, when the body of an unpopular neighbor is found on her balcony, disguised as a holiday witch.