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, note cards, prints and paintings, even grownup coloring books - something for each and every taste and hour and
mood.
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.
Poems from Linda Hogan explore new and old ways of experiencing the vagaries of the body and existing in harmony with earth’s living beings. Throughout this clear-eyed collection, Hogan tenderly excavates how history instructs the present, and envisions a future alive with hope for a healthy and sustainable world that now wavers between loss and survival.
How does a spirit new to the world, baffled by the family domain and its customs, but above all curious, come to discover its essence? What does any child carry into the present from ancestors whose histories have been assimilated and long forgotten? These are the questions poet Leslie Ullman explores in her sixth collection. 
Rachel Cann, born in 1942, has lived an extraordinary life. She is a courageous prolific writer with over 60 published stories in literary magazines and she received a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. In this unforgettable collection you will find her style funny, clever, heart-wrenching, and inspirational. Rachel knows how to move a plot forward, so there is never a dull moment. She leaves just enough space for the reader to use their imagination to fill in the rest. You won’t find long winding descriptions of what a chair looks like.
Our lives are filled with moments so fleeting that it can be easy to miss the great impact they may have on us. That is, unless we learn to listen when life speaks, even if only in a whisper. 
It’s 2054 A.D., and the world needs a rest from men. Women have developed a novel solution, and the men can’t wait to leave. When my taxi driver tells me he has bullet wounds from the Russian police, speaks five languages, and is teaching at Harvard, I start taking notes. After the funeral, a widow loses all her married friends. Then karma sends flowers.
As the 20th century careened towards the finish line, author Victress Hitchcock moved with her husband from their familiar urban world to a remote 160-acre ranch in the mountains of Colorado. Within months, their lives unraveled, and out of the wreckage a new path opened to a radically new way to be in the world. She was broken hearted but ready to meet whatever was to come with insight, horse sense, and humor. 
Police psychologist Dot Meyerhoff’s caseload is usually filled with cops—which is why she’s hesitant to help an adopted teenager locate her birth parents. But the teen’s godmother is Dot’s dear friend Fran and a police widow to boot. How could Dot possibly say no? Once Dot starts digging into the case, though, she’s drawn into a murky world of illegal adoptions and the choices a young pregnant woman might make as a last resort. Soon there’s only one thing Dot knows for sure: the painful truth of what happened all those years ago might heal one family—but it’s certain to destroy another.
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.
Poem after poem, Old Stranger unearths moments that shape a woman’s life. The poet’s eye is unflinching as she sees the past folded into the present. Her body is the ground of deep soul hunger. Her language is music.
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.
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.
features poems about disconnection, misconnections: the loss of friendships and identity, our voice, our purpose. At its core, it is a collection of elegies railing against and dealing with toxic relationships, from fair-weather friends, controlling mothers to narcissists. These poems invite the reader into personal experiences, public observations and the price we pay, positive and negative for our interactions with the media, our global and local conflicts, environmental challenges, the pandemic, the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. She writes about the dark underside of our lives with a sense of danger, humour and of hope for reconnection in the future with our community and our world.
Sixty-Something and Flying Solo: A Retiree Sorts It Out in Iowa is an edgy, humorous memoir with serious ponderings. An Oregon transplant with no kids and no significant other, the author is someone about whom readers could say, “I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes, but if she can make it, I can, too.” Pieces such as ‘What Not to Say at a Funeral’ and ‘Dusting and Other Insanities’ provide a backdrop for monthly accounts of her fall into retirement’s abyss where she clings to her to-do lists while she alters her diet, her wardrobe and her vow to become more domestic. When she resurfaces a year later, she’s surprised at the landscape and what has saved her.
Crooked Hearts Press publishes forgotten, overlooked, and thus disappeared women writers over the age of 55, alongside veteran writers we recognize for their excellence. 
When Amanda drops out of college to join a religious commune, her mom Susan fears she has lost her forever. Amanda revels in the freedom of university life away from her over-protective, single mom, while Susan feels adrift, trying fruitlessly to fill Amanda’s absence with romance and ambition. Amanda’s attraction to a man living in the commune and to the commune’s charismatic preacher leads her to spurn friends and family. When the commune lays claim to Amanda’s inheritance and increasingly controls Amanda’s choices and contacts, it looks as if Susan’s worst fears are coming true.
Jemma Avalon is an unconventional mage-in-training, longing to return to Everland Bay, her ancestral homeland, and find a way to join the renowned magical research institute there, like the women in her family before her. 
Persimmon Tree readers will recognize and 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 to take her nine-year-old boy to the San Francisco Symphony to hear Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, though she had never before set foot in a concert hall.
With raging talent and heartfelt bonhomie, these twentieth-century American women sang their way to stardom. All died before the age of 36. Within separate chapters, one for each celebrity, the book reveals their triumphs and tragedies, the details of their final hours, and explores the notion that frantic, constant, touring schedules may have contributed to the anxieties and dramas surrounding their early deaths. Through these illustrated pages, the reader will become familiar with these outstanding singers and their music. Endnotes, bibliography and discography are given for each subject.
Through her search for newfound purpose in her seventies, author Karen Roberts discovered that voices of encouragement were difficult to find among the popular paradigms of aging: decline, withdrawal, and disengagement, among them.
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?
A modern take on classic noir themes, Private I is a mystery thriller rooted in today’s headlines, exploring a world where technology intersects with human morality and where love, betrayal, and trust become as complicated as the machines themselves. It’s the story of a dead body, a society in decay, and the internal monologue of a woman who is still young enough to care and naïve enough to stumble. Here, however, that internal monologue is joined by a second voice that evolves with its partner.
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. 
On 9/11, Andrea Carter Brown was a resident of downtown Manhattan living just a block from the World Trade Center. September 12 chronicles her up close and all too personal experience of the attack, but, even more, the continuing horror and eventual healing of the months and years afterward. 
Ribbons and Moths is for children. But it is also for children of all ages.