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 fulfil 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.

At First Sight is for all levels of writing experience. It combines touring and writing, and offers relaxed, focused time to write in the great state of Oaxaca. At First Sight will offer guidance for beginning writers and will help experienced writers to recharge and to develop new work.

You’ll have time to write on your own and to learn more about writing in classes and discussions. We’ll take a look at how we approach and incorporate new sights, new people, new sensations. How much do you imagine? What do you want to know? What are the facts? What matters to you, at first sight? What do you want to see and what do you want to turn away from? Where is your story, your poem, in this new arrangement of shadow and sun?

Donna Hanelin, published poet and writer, has been teaching creative writing in northern California since 1988. She lives half the year in Oaxaca where she offers writing workshops and hosts a weekly open mic. Donna fell in love with Oaxaca at first sight and even as they both age, remains loyal to her first impression.

 
 
“In Winter of My Life, Sherri Wright engages in conversation with memory in a debut book which evokes the extraordinary imagery of The Eastern Shore. In such poems as ‘The Garden Goddess’ and ‘The Great Blue Heron at Silver Lake’, Wright’s imaginative approach allows the reader to delve into the inner workings of the mind of the feminine, exploring contemporary issues such as domesticity, divorce, and the vast differences between generations. Questioning her own mortality, Wright allows the reader to entertain the question of regret, and the enormous joy of living life unrestrained.”
— Tara A. Elliott, poet and Executive Director of Eastern Shore Writers Association
 
 
Available from Amazon and Bookshop, from the publisher Kelsay Books, from the author’s favorite local booksellers, Browseabout Books in Rehoboth Beach DE and Books & Books in Key West FL, and from your own favorite bookstore.

 
Jacqueline Miller Bachar wrote her first story in 1995— “La Fête de la Vie” (“The Celebration of Life”). She was sixty years old. The story won 1st place in the Palm Springs Writers Guild Short Story Contest and was published in the September 2000 issue of Palm Springs Life.

“I have to go through the process with a germ of an idea, then rewrite, rewrite, struggle, pain and agony, and then, voila,” she wrote in 2001.

There was a lot of “voila” between 1998 and 2001 when eight of the fourteen stories in this collection were written. Perhaps helping her husband battle cancer to remission at the time led to an unleashing of creative energy.

“I have written four books during stressful times of illness,” she wrote, “my mother’s cancer, me with rheumatoid arthritis, Paul’s cancer, and my cancer. Isolated and separated from society and normal activity, the mind turns inward. The concentration of the inner self seems to release a productive period of creativity. It is an escape from the real world with all its inherent problems.”

“Is it in the knowledge of death that life is truly celebrated?” the author asks. “I believe it is so.”

The stories and poems in this collection explore themes of grief and loss, the celebration and continuum of life, fulfillment of pledges made between friends, rediscovery of the self after trauma, and the value of family.
 

Available from Amazon

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.

Ember Days begins with ritual and ends with prayer as the poems tunnel through Wednesday’s jammed boulevards, Friday’s worthless cash, Saturday’s prodigal feet.

“Gilliland is a poet of witness and spirituality, grappling with climate devastation while also interrogating world policies and politics.”
— Best American Poetry

“Gilliland waltzes smoothly between the cheeky and conversational and the lyrical.”
— LitHub

“I am spellbound by the largesse of vision and the beauty.”
— Cynthia Hogue

Mary Gilliland is the guest poetry editor in the winter 2022 issue of Persimmon Tree.

Order from: https://www.codhill.com/product/ember-days/

Find out more at https://marygilliland.com/

“An intense, addictive drama with a hint of light at the end of the tunnel.” — Kirkus Reviews

It is the Civil War, Susannah Shelburne, age 36, is living in South Carolina. Although she and her husband oppose the Southern cause, their only child Francis is a Confederate soldier. When Francis is wounded in Tennessee, Susannah leaves home to find him. Under her care his condition improves, but he soon becomes a prisoner of war, and Susannah strikes a wrenching personal bargain in exchange for his parole. Soon, though, news from South Carolina makes it clear that returning home is impossible, and Francis’s worsening mental state necessitates a high-stakes escape plan.

There is a wildness hidden beneath Susannah’s demure façade, leading her into unconventional, courageous decisions that put her at odds with her husband, her son and her community. Adversity also brings her more fully into the realities of the people of color in her life.

Measure of Devotion’s themes—political differences among families and communities, the urgent need for transracial understanding, a woman’s existential search for control of her own life—are the persistent issues of our national consciousness.

“Measure of Devotion is a debut novel that is bound to enter the canon of classic Civil War literature. That it’s told from a woman’s viewpoint makes it unique.” — Hungry for Good Books

Available from Regal House Publishing, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, and your local independent bookseller.

For more, go to measureofdevotion.com

 
A uniquely thrilling, first-person account of what happens when traditional ancestry research and psychic skills merge.

It begins with a whisper from Terri’s long dead great-grandmother, as she steps into a labyrinth on a hot summer day: “You must write our stories.” It makes her wonder, who was her great-grandmother? And who were her ancestors?

Terri’s troubled childhood left her disinterested in her family history. But with this beckoning from beyond, she decides to investigate. As research into her heritage deepens and conventional methods fail to provide all the answers, she begins to see a way to use her psychic skills to connect directly with those who came before her.

A cast of characters emerges. From servants, inventors, psychics, sea captains, and whiskey barrel makers to enslavers and Freemasons, her ancestors step forward. They all have stories to tell.

Terri’s psychic skills push the boundaries of what is possible in ancestry research. Misconceptions about the paranormal and psychic mediums are explored and explained in a practical manner.

Honest, heartfelt, and inspiring, this tale may spark your interest in discovering your roots and exploring your own psychic potential.

“I loved the interplay between traditional genealogical research and the author’s own psychic discoveries. Terri Blair weaves together the present with the past in this beautiful story of her own family’s history. I recommend this book for a dreamy walk through life and the afterlife.” — Amazon Reviewer

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, and your local independent bookseller.

 
Flashlight in the Fog holds twenty short stories, micro, flash, and longer tales of romance, fantasy, and dark, dark, dark fiction put to the page. Peek into the mind of a magician, a bride-to-be, a traveler, and more. Explore their themes of adventure, cultural misadventures, and coming to terms with life’s span from coming-of-age to aging.

All have been previously chosen for publication in online magazines and anthologies, and are now compiled here in one volume. 

When you have just a few minutes or an hour to spare, whether you’re in the mood for a laugh, a cry, or some goose bumps, reach for this collection with more engaging stories from the author of Unintended Consequences.

Author Patricia Ann Bowen has published a medical time travel trilogy, a short story collection about women in challenging circumstances, and a serialized beach read. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies and numerous online publications. She’s taught short story writing in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), and launched and led The Retro Writers, a critique group of short story writers for the Atlanta Writers’ Club. She resides on a small island in South Carolina, has four sons, grandkids all over the world, and two cats in the yard. 

You can connect with her and her other work at www.patriciabowen.com.

Flashlight in the Fog is available from Amazon.

Randa Jo Downs’ childhood in Texas was a dichotomy of innocence and darkness. A haunting family secret lurked among her love for dancing, the escape of her vibrant imagination, and summer days spent swimming in rivers. While father-daughter incest is not an uncommon crime, it is veiled in secrecy and shame.

Comfort, Texas is a poignant memoir that explores why Downs’ father hurt his family beyond measure and why her mother did not protect her. It is a testament to the resilience of one spirit and the transformative power of using storytelling to understand and reclaim her childhood. Downs emerges not only as a survivor, but as a fierce lesbian feminist, theater artist, and child welfare advocate.

Downs dissects the crime of incest with a sharp blade. She examines a compelling body of work on the history of father-daughter incest in America and discovers a shocking betrayal of women and children going back generations. The psychoanalytic and legal professions depicted girls and women as unreliable narrators of their pain and trauma and only out to make trouble for their abusers. Downs joins the voices of second-wave feminism in challenging those cruel beliefs.

Her stories and essays will deeply resonate with other survivors and the people who care about them.

Available from Barnes and Noble.

For more information, visit the author’s website

 
“Duke sauntered across the schoolyard, dragging his feet in the dirt. When he got to the fence on the other side, he slowly turned around, as if afraid of what he might or might not see. I waved. He stared back.”

The heart-catching stories in Ada Glustein’s memoir, Being Different, tell a universal story about feeling different and longing to belong. She recounts tales of growing up in a Jewish immigrant family during and following World War II, and the experiences that stand out during her school days, not knowing how to fit in to the world beyond home. She reflects on her years of teaching diverse children who also experienced life as “different.” With her deep understanding of the importance of belonging, as seen through her own eyes and through the eyes of the children she encounters, she finds her own sense of belonging through helping those children find theirs.

Ada’s stories are told with humor and pathos: spilling the wine at her family’s Passover seder; slamming down her books when provoked by one of her Masters at teacher’s college; barely holding in her laughter at the antics of the woman who is housing her during her teaching practicum in a rural school; realizing that she has not included the right flesh color for one of her students to make his self-portrait; clutching three barefoot children outside in a blizzard, while waiting for the alarm bells to stop ringing; and, befriending the class bully to help her know that she, too, is an accepted and valued class member.

These stories remind us to embrace the visible and the invisible differences we all share as human beings on this planet.

Available from Amazon.

Set against the backdrop of the war in Israel and Gaza and the war in Ukraine, in the months leading up to and following the 2024 American presidential election, the poems in The Weight of Light explore the choices we make collectively and as individuals in a democratic society and the potential consequences of those choices.

Available from Amazon

Women, the largest and yet most unrecognized population of the dance arts community, are spotlighted in renowned dance photographer Julie Lemberger’s Modern Women: 21st Century Dance, a coloring book, edited by Elizabeth Zimmer.

Lemberger, who has been photographing dance for almost two decades, transformed her photographs into illustrations almost ready to color and then added psychedelic, floral and abstract backgrounds for the figures “to dance in.”

The 92 page volume features today’s leading dance innovators and interpreters, and celebrates their diverse genres and perspectives.

Modern Women: 21st Century Dance is a perfect gift for children-of-all-ages including grandparents and grandchildren, especially those who love women, dance and art.

Two options available:
Coloring book for $20

Shipping & handling is $5 each for U.S. addresses. Please contact for International shipping costs.

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

It’s November 1963, in a small town in rural Georgia. Teenager Callie Ingram is lonely and grieving the death of her beloved Nana, the only mother she’s ever known. Callie’s stuck with her stoic, inept dad and rebellious older sister. There are constant fights at home, and money is scarce. To escape the turmoil and earn a little income, Callie takes a part-time job as a waitress in a diner.

And there she meets the man who will upend her life. Nick Gamble, a charismatic, married businessman with a family, is twice her age and looks like a movie star. He charms the naive Callie into a love affair that must be kept secret from the town at any cost. When Callie’s sister goes missing and her dad’s health fails, she becomes her father’s caretaker, all the while keeping up “A” grades, her job, and liaisons with Nick.

But it turns out Nick has troubles of his own. As he becomes increasingly unavailable, Callie’s love edges toward obsession. Then Nick’s world explodes, and Callie’s alone again, this time facing the most excruciating decision of her life.

Available from Amazon and Bookshop.

 
Where We Went Through, a chapbook of poems by Nancy Nowak, traces a journey through landscapes physical and emotional. Two people, the poet and her artist husband, begin the journey together, but after his sudden illness and death, she remains to enter sorrow alone.

As novelist Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters, writes, the book is “an intimate memoir constructed of concise, finely detailed poems—like snapshots of the world by two people seeing the world together: some as delicate as watercolors, others as deep as X-rays. When one person [dies], it’s devastating. This is a stunning book—in all meanings of the word.”

Poet Beatrix Gates (The Burning Key) describes Nowak’s book as “lit with beauty, and raw with the devastation of all her familiar loves.” Where We Went Through, according to Sharyn Wolf, author of Love Shrinks, “is a rich book, multilayered and textured, and I will go back to these poems again.”
 

Available from Finishing Line Press, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.

In the hybrid collection, Prayers for the Lost & for the Living, poetry, prose, and images convey the universality of faith and our primal strivings for connection.

“In Prayers for the Lost & for the Living, Dina Greenberg explores what it means to be human. Ultimately, time and place do not make us what we are. At the core of our being, it is yearning for connection, for care and concern, for deep love. In these poems and stories, the churning of one’s heart provides the tension: grief and hope, these are our defining emotions. Greenberg reminds us that hope is stronger.”
—Jill Gerard, Lecturer University of North Carolina Wilmington, Editor Chautauqua Literary Journal.

“This is a brave book, a subversive book…Greenberg asks for our empathy, our identification. One poem, “First Born,” asks for us to empathize with a mother elephant whose infant is stillborn. And with Greenberg’s masterful writing, how can we not. She doesn’t shy away from the hard experiences of life but she lets us know the importance of tears, that really feeling our grief is the way that will bring some relief.”
—Anne Becker, Poet Laureate Emerita, Takoma Park, Md.

Available from Sligo Creek Publishing, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop

 
 
In this tell-all memoir, Claire Kahane, born during the Great Depression to Jewish immigrants, unveils her intimate self-transformations in the course of nine decades. Determined at an early age to prove herself a free spirit in a male dominated world, the young Kahane went on the road, hitch-hiking her way into and out of risky adventures and romantic affairs. But what started out as a “road book” takes a different turn in mid-life when, influenced by a psychoanalysis and the second wave of feminism, she becomes a feminist professor, mother, and wife, dealing with their contradictory demands.

“Claire Kahane has written a memoir for our times: an account of a life spent in pursuit of lived experience long before it was permissible for women like Kahane to do just that. Rich and lively, vivid and bold, Nine Lives is bound to reach a wide and responsive readership.” —Vivian Gornick, essayist, critic, and author of numerous memoirs, including Fierce Attachments, The Odd Woman and the City, and Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader.

“Claire Kahane’s memoir is a riveting account of a life dedicated to self-discovery. The early part of it involved living dangerously, but her later role as professor, mother, and wife grows naturally from those initial experiences. Her story is also a vivid mirror of the times, from the fifties to the present.” —Robert Alter, translator of the Hebrew Bible and author of numerous books and essays on European and American literature from the eighteenth century to the present, as well as literary aspects of the Bible.

“Claire Kahane’s Nine Lives recounts a history of wild wandering and wayward romance en route to self-discovery.  A sophisticated scholar of psychoanalysis, Kahane is also a deft writer whose life journey takes her from an immigrant home in the Bronx to motherhood and love, with stops along the way in Mexico, San Francisco, Greenwich Village, Paris, Tangiers, Ibiza–and more.  The decades she evokes in her memoir, starting with the fifties and culminating in the present, come vividly to life as she travels the world.” — Sandra Gilbert, poet-critic and-coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic, No Man’s Land, and Still Mad.

Available from Brandylane Publishers, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and your local independent bookstore.

Encounter with the Future is a political and social drama running parallel with a rapid coming of age. It is a true story of an 18-year-old girl who arrived in London from behind the iron curtain alone. She became an emigrant when her country was invaded by Soviet Union in August of 1968. She went from sleeping in the telephone booth at London’s Victoria railway station, to waitressing, then becoming a model, actress, even a James Bond girl.

This engrossing memoir is told in series of essays, some previously published, some wholly new.

Encounter with the Future is a mirror of an unforgettable journey filled with fear, pain, veracity, and laughter.

“Pavel is a natural storyteller and shrewd observer with a deep understanding of people. She keeps readers engaged across decades, continents, and pages.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Pavel manages, from her present and sophisticated vantage, to evoke the innocence of youth.”
— Nicolas Delbanco, author of Why Writing Matters

“A touching tale of a woman who makes it through the tornadoes of life and still comes out centered.”
— Goodreads

“Beautifully written and captivating…it will make you look differently at your own life.”
— Cindy Myers, author of Mile High Mystery

Available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, and your local independent bookstore.

 
 

 
 
“’How to save a bird-ling or a world? How to save a springtime?’ Terrifying questions like this loom before us all, at this haunted moment ⎯ yet when the night demands we kneel, Margo Berdeshevsky dreams up rare new postures. She starts from ruin, her planet ravaged and her body long past nubile, but spawns miraculous fables, the offspring of Mother Goose and W.S. Merwin. One has the radium-glow of south Pacific bombing lanes, another exhales the toxic dust of Vesuvius, but all nay-say the glowering darkness. A remarkable accomplishment, this hybrid raises a ‘tumult of hands that reach through smoke keening ⎯ call it — salvage — scream — prayer.'”  ⎯John Domini, author of the Naples Earthquake I.D. trilogy

“Composed of lyric essays, line broken poems, revamped fairy tales, erotic myths, and histories clothed in see-through shifts, wearing Eau Sauvage men’s cologne, Kneel Said the Night: a hybrid book in half notes, is a lush, authoritative masterwork. This Red Riding Hood gathers flowers and details in her basket, and generates revivified archetypes—’menstrual-colored canary,’ ‘full paunch moon’—that can only emerge from an imagination fed by solitude and desire (and Paris). ‘I’m the woman who asks how close is death, how near is God,’ Berdeshevsky writes, and in this intimate, audacious collection, the answer is very close, and very, very near.”–-Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, Pulitzer Prize recipient

Available from Amazon, Bookshop.org, or Sundress Publications

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.
— Bridget Connelly, Forgetting Ireland

With Dear Phebe, poet Judy Wells has produced a cutting-edge work of art that combines family ancestry research with poetic interrogations. Each Dickinson sister she profiles has a unique trajectory to California; all are waylaid by what Jane Austen called “the marriage plot.” Wells sings to them, dances with them (and away from them), challenges them, excavates them from a box of letters into the light of the 2lst-century and a world they could not have imagined. This book is a wholly new form, fusing history and poetry, inspiring both disciplines.
— Lauren Coodley, author of California: A Multicultural Documentary History and The Same River Twice

“Go West, young man,” is the famous command, but young women also heeded this advice. Among them were Judy Wells’ great-grandmother Phebe Marsh Dickinson and her two sisters, Delia and Abbie, distant cousins of Emily Dickinson, who came to California from Massachusetts in the late 19th century. In Dear Phebe, Wells chronicles their stories in poetry and prose in narratives that are so compelling I didn’t want the book to end.
— Lucille Lang Day, Married at Fourteen: A True Story and Becoming an Ancestor

For more about Dear Phebe and the author, go to her website: http://www.judywellspoet.com

Dear Phebe can be ordered directly from the author for $27.95 (22.95 + 5.00 s/h).
To pay by check, make the check out to Judy Wells and contact her at jwellspoet@att.net for her address.

To pay by PayPal/credit card, send $27.95 to jwalfredsen@yahoo.com.
In “What’s this for?” include Dear Phebe, your name and address.

What can be gained from listening to music? And what can be learned from songs? More specifically French songs?

Play it Again, Jacques attempts to answer that question as it traces the life story of an American in France, accompanied, nourished and enriched by the French singer/songwriters she encounters along the way. From composer Michel Legrand and lyricist Jacques Demy – the brilliant creators of the legendary Les Parapluies de Cherbourg – through Charles Aznavour, his intense vibrato ardently portraying the Montmartre of yesteryear, to the contemporary Francis Cabrel singing an ode to Toulouse while managing a nod to the troubadours from the Middle Ages… this book is a tribute to French artists who have made their mark on the author’s sensibilities, expanding and deepening her world by offering up joy, comfort, greater understanding, and charm.

Twenty chapters feature twenty singers who have accompanied her over the years, from the young girl in 1968 anticipating her student year in Bordeaux through 50-odd years into her future after a full and layered life in Paris…from the watchful jeune fille to the more settled grandmother, from youth to gently-aged, from curious and swept away to still curious and liable to be swept away.

In tracing her musical itinerary, Meredith Escudier offers a personal window onto French life and a bridge into contemporary French culture and music. Play it Again, Jacques is for music lovers, Francophiles, or anyone helpless to resist the lure of a musical voyage.

Available on Amazon

 
 
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.

“This remembrance is a poignant love letter to the father Mlynarczyk has spent a lifetime grieving.” — Kirkus

“Haunted by her father’s psychic crisis and his early and unexpected death, Mlynarczyk brings us on a poignant journey, exploring her father’s violent breakdown and coming to terms with a past weighted with fear and silence.” — Julia Miele Rodas, author of Autistic Disturbances

“This memoir exemplifies the healing power of writing as a path through pain.” — Mindy Lewis, author of Life Inside: A Memoir

“From Seed to Tree to Fruit does what good memoirs must do: explain the present by helping us to understand the past.” — Wendy Ryden, co-author of Reading, Writing, and the Rhetorics of Whiteness

Available from Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes and Noble.