Putting It All Away – An Introduction
The seventeen submissions you will read here show the variety of responses to this topic—ranging from cleaning out a closet of old clothes to ridding oneself of emotional baggage to freeing the spirit to move on to a new phase of life. There are the “mildewed beach chairs” of Linda Lucas’s piece; the problem of dealing with “the insistent questions” in Mary Donnelly’s poem; the task of “living in the space between doubt and love,” as Denise Osso writes; the surprising link to the past Nancy Glowinski discovers as she goes through her mother’s few possessions; the evolving history of the French town that Andrea Carter Brown remembers from her youth; and the weight of ongoing tragedies on our minds, to which Helen Bar-Lev, who lives in Israel, attests.
The work of these and the other writers reveal the two-edged blade of “decluttering”: the sense of loss and the possibility of cleansing and starting fresh. There are internal debates, doubts, bold moves, and compromises. There is sadness, but also humor. There is the ever-present hovering of memory. Should a gift that once had meaning but no longer does be given away? Does a distant toxic relationship need to be purged? How are we to remember our lives? How are we to preserve what’s most important? In the end, I believe that objects can be thrown away but that memories can—and perhaps should—be saved if they have positively shaped who we are and have a place in whom we are becoming as we age. An encouraging number of submissions considered not only how, or if, to put things away, but how to be “beautiful in our elderhood,” as Felice Rhiannon so lyrically says.
As I read through all the submissions, the lyrics from “Me and Bobby McGee”—a song written by Kris Kristofferson and made famous (today it would go viral) in Janis Joplin’s rendition—kept coming to mind. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” The more we hold on to, the more we are weighted down by things, past relationships, and emotions that obstruct us from moving on. But what do we have if we have literally “nothin’ left to lose”? The trick is in finding the right balance for each of us. Read the seventeen pieces below for their insights. And thank you from this guest editor to every contributor, included or not, for reminding me of what a lovely gift it is to be a writer in a world that is both challenging and uncertain.
Winter Light
Light goes too early.
I’ve not cleared out those files.
So much paper.
Needing something,
searching for it, aching to remember
what information it might have had
that could show me more light than there is,
help me face the coming day,
tackle its mundane duties,
sweep the snow off the porch,
scrape the ice off the windshield,
detach the battery
and bring it inside the house for the night.
An ex-husband did that
a few times in Chicago
but now he’s dead.
Can I light enough lamps
to see those files
to sift through those papers
not just one by one
but by twos and threes
maybe even handfuls
without reading them
knowing nothing is as important
as my being here to do this
to let go of misremembered words
on pages that might have changed my life.
Let them go
and wait for spring.
Downsizing
gift or donate
shred school papers
burn ancient class notes
historical newspapers
and magazines stay
man on the moon
JFK, MLK, RFK
dump items with no
significant memory
store photos of people
the rest be gone
resist keeping clutter
“I might need”
or “come in handy”
maybe others can use
after a lifetime
of accumulation
possessions whittled
down to near nothing
what I keep
is me
Put it All Away
Into the storage unit behind the mildewed beach chairs or out in the driveway near the recycling bin or in that part of my heart where I rarely venture?
Some of it could be tossed, but I can’t do it. I’ll just leave it where it is for now. I’ll let time erase the attachment. Or at least unveil the stickiness.
Even the crevice of my soul seems full, no space, no more room, nothing else welcome there. How did so much come to be stashed in that spaceless space?
It seems easy to stack nicely, put in perfect piles lined up one after the other, all those bits that need to be put away.
The T-shirts with the hole at the neckline toss themselves, don’t they? The high school diaries go after one last reading, or maybe not. Hang on, hang on, I hear. Don’t let it go. Just put it all away.
Attachment, the Buddha says, is the root of all suffering, it’s the clinging that keeps us from liberation and blocks our enlightenment. How can my forty-year-old wedding dress be so connected to my spiritual path?
We learn to let the attachment go and pass it into the clouds. Does that mean that when we put it all away, we put it into the clouds?
Om Gam Ganapataye Nama: a chant to the Indian deity Ganesh, said to remove obstacles and bring new beginnings.
Oh how I wish all the things I want to put away are holey T-shirts, mildewed beach chairs, or really unkind people.
I am attached of course, to these bits, memories, things. I hold on with hope that somehow, something will detach me, clear the path, enabling me to march forward without actually having to put it all away.
Putting it all away is meaningless, isn’t it? Wherever we put it, we must go on and on taking care of whatever we put away, wherever we put it.
Om Gam Ganapataye Nama. Let go, my love, let it all go away.
Maple Leaf 1, watercolor by Ruth Halpern
The More Things Change
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849
Until now I have avoided the massive towers, twin cinched cylinders, plumes of steam rising day and night. At dusk, the storm clouds having all but disappeared, a breeze coaxes the steam northward. I cross the bridge to better see their reflection in the sluggish stream, the ancient Garonne diverted to cool down the nuclear power plant that gives us lights, heats stoves, turns washing machines, recharges cell phones and laptops.
The setting sun tints the undersides of clouds rose, but the plumes remain gray against the darkening blue. A friend thinks they’re beautiful.
Still, a peaceful evening. Cars zip back and forth. I am coughing. Again. Is it triggered by invisible toxins or memories of breathing the dust on 9/11? I hurry over to the other side of the bridge, turn my back on the towers.
This little town, 351 people at the last census, has a single former resident “of note,” an obscure poet who died in 1945. His Wikipedia entry has yet to be written. Poking around the internet for hours, I learn he wrote in Occitan, the language of the first poetry in France. Descended from Basque and Catalan, with a dash of Latin, it sounds like French spoken with a mouthful of pebbles, the ancient tongue persisting in local family names.
Earlier, I wrote down the names of the ten “children of Espalais who died pour La France” during the Great War. As once I had the names of the eleven residents from my home town in New Jersey who died on 9/11. Another local town bears the name “Saracen’s fortress.” Think The Song of Roland, the first French epic, which celebrates the foolhardy death of Charlemagne’s nephew and the loss of all his men. The street facing the town hall, Rue du 18 Juin 1940, is named for the date de Gaulle delivered his speech over the radio from London after Pétain’s negotiated defeat, calling on people to not give up. La Débâcle, the debacle, the word more commonly used.
Posted outside this same mairie, amid other legal notices, the marriage contract for two local women. A teacher and a gendarme, a soldier. Living together already. Surely the first such marriage in this little town since the law was changed. Félicitations, mes chéries!
Life goes on. Here, too. Adapts. A chestnut falls, just missing my head. My mother’s mother believed being hit by a falling chestnut brought luck. High up in the tree, two groups of blueish birds vocalize insistently, a territorial dispute in song. Elderly couples out for a stroll nod, wish me good evening, assuming from my backpack I am a pilgrim, heading exhausted across the river to a bed for the night. And I am. Still seeking release.
Imprinted
like a mantle of investiture
at the public library coffee shop
on a Wednesday noon, exactly
eight months to the day I left
a carefully crafted life of Soviet-like five-year-plans that held feathery hopes to break barriers, crash ceilings, do what no one in my family, and few women, had done.
California veggie, Diane Wakoski’s Greed, Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear arrayed before me while, at the lunch counter, an illustrated woman smiles, takes orders—stilettoed office workers, prematurely bald courthouse lawyers, middle-aged moms balancing books and strollered babies, unsheltered man bent under the weight of a system that leaves him no choice but to carry all he values strapped to his back like a turtle’s carapace—all come and go, sit and eat, barely squeeze into the hour.
I sit immobile—
cloud on a windless day—
savoring this slice of life
and in-a-flash
I accept that from now on I have nowhere to be but where I am—the moment almost as solemn as it was fifty years ago when I donned a white coat, took the oath of Maimonides, pledged to “turn unto my calling,” stepped into my future.
I didn’t step into my future. I rushed in, have scurried ever since that epiphany at the library nine years ago. The mantle that settled over my shoulders woven in the weft and warp of care and duty. The same warp and weft that moved my mother in Puerto Rico to feed an itinerant man who twice a year stopped by our house. She’d wash the dented porcelain dish, pile it high with part of our dinner—rice, beans, yams and, if we had any, a piece of fried fish—and bring it out to the thin-eatured man in campesino cotton clothes and straw hat who sat on the steps of our porch and ate intently. After a cup of café con leche y azúcar, she would send him on his way with two dollars she found somewhere in the house that, even I knew as a child, she couldn’t spare. It was a ritual that imprinted me, guides my life decades later. It is why I took on the mantle of healer, caretaker.
Why would I expect my golden years not to be guided by this memory I love?
This moment in my personal and our collective history demands stepping in, not dropping out. Yet I can feel my body and mind yearning to be empty of to-dos. I can hear the gears groaning “slow down,” while my need to care for family, friends, neighbors, country, world, planet grinds on. How can I stop when so many need help; when hungry folk knock; when our country’s values and humanity are imperiled; when the once wide, flowing Rio Grande vaqueros drove cattle across is so dry I can crunch across it?
How can I let go and
not let my mother down,
not let me down?
Can I, even, un-imprint?
Gold Flecks
that covered neck, face and ear lobes.
To the black liner under the eyes—
that silver powder on the upper lids,
the paint that formed two hard brown arcs
across the forehead. Goodbye
to the deep mauve lipstick with the sparkles
she thought of as her calling card.
She leaned over and yanked goodbye
to the blond wig that looked like the tail of a unicorn.
Farewell, she said, to its joyful sway.
Goodbye to the dozen rings adorning
fingers that leaped gleaming across piano keys
and to the stilettos she couldn’t walk in
that were eight inches high.
It was harder to say goodbye to the face
she once had that now lacked definition.
She wondered if it had washed down the drain
with her makeup. Maybe she needed to change
the lighting, bring in some brighter bulbs.
Goodbye to the fake gold hoop earrings
she bought at the beach that summer with Doris.
They bring out the gold flecks in your eyes,
Doris had said, pressing them through her lobes.
She couldn’t remember when the flecks had gone missing
but they had, and so goodbye to the huge hoops too.
Next she said goodbye to the tiny dress
that was so short it resembled a blouse that clung tight
to a body that no longer had a clear shape.
Honey, her aunt asked recently,
Have you forgotten to get dressed?
And could you remind me,
who are you?
In her closet, she rummaged through decades
of inherited clothing and accessories.
Goodbye to the beaded necklace with crystals
meant to protect her from marauding spirits.
And goodbye to the earrings that dangled so
long they sat folded on her shoulders.
Had her neck shrunk she wondered?
Everything would have to go.
She bagged it all.
In her bathrobe,
she sat down at the piano,
newly bared fingers gliding
with ease across the keys—
notes glinting in the autumn dusk.
80
her histories,
now quiet.
The whispers,
the crying out,
the insistent questions,
have drifted away,
like a flock of birds
into a mist.
As if resolved
in the evening air.
As if refined
to simple grace.
No more, no less
Sycamore 1, watercolor by Ruth Halpern
Clearing the Clutter
a real dust up
that both elevates and deflates
Since when was I size 8
and am I still in love
with graffiti, mufti and ink?
For the life of me
I don’t know why
I feel so luckless
as I come and go in my intent
measuring out my life
in cardboard boxes and lint
Am I not glad to be free
raising windows, throwing caution
and curtains to the wind?
Maybe I’ll settle then
erase traces
of all paltry rebellions
adjust to my robe and scuffs
and just one comfy chair
jettisoning my load
like the lone lush peony
in the glass bowl
on the table in the hall
soft pink petals
plummeting
The Relic
My newly widowed Japanese mother got rid of everything before she sold our house and fled the awful little Massachusetts town she was stuck in for almost two decades. This town wasn’t nice to me either, and I bolted for New York as soon as I turned eighteen. Four years later when my father died, my mother chose Honolulu to restart her life. I assumed that the only two suitcases she took with her were full of clothes.
An only child on my own after graduation, my ethnically ambiguous look that resembled an anime heroine helped me land a job as the social secretary to the Japanese ambassador to the United Nations. I hated it, but it enabled me to live without roommates and save money until I could figure out something better to do.
Visitors from Japan brought gifts for the ambassador—often fancy sweets or tea from the best shops in Tokyo, exquisitely packaged in sturdy wooden boxes with fine dovetailing. They would be regifted to me by the ambassador’s attaché, who presented them with outstretched arms followed by a bow. Before my mother moved, I would take them with me on Amtrak to yet again regift them to her. And when she got them, she acted as though they came from the emperor himself.
In late 2019, while organizing piles of keep, toss, or donate on the carpeted floor of my mother’s Waikiki condo, unbearably still now, I recognized a fancy wooden tea box. I opened the lid and uncovered about ten layers of carefully folded paper towels swaddled around something that looked like a dried earthworm with a ribbon tied around it.
“Guess what this is?” I texted a photo to my friend Patrick.
“A bully stick from the Dollar Store?” Patrick guessed incorrectly.
“It’s my umbilical cord! And you’re not giving it to your dog. This belongs in a museum, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, the Mütter Museum.” Patrick replied, referring to a small museum in Philadelphia that specialized in medical specimens.
Saving a piece of umbilical cord was a custom in Japan. But since I was born in a hospital in Massachusetts, that my parents convinced the doctors and nurses in 1959 to let my mother keep what was considered medical waste was pretty remarkable. They must have obliged my father, a navy officer. My parents kept this desiccated connective relic in another wooden box that had once been the packaging for English Leather aftershave in a dresser drawer along with a glass cigar tube containing my baby teeth and our dog’s baby teeth.
“Who was your mother? Dr. Mengele?” Patrick feigned horror.
“Worse. That’s how I found out there was no tooth fairy.” I sighed.
This once shared conduit was one of the few things my mother saved, upgrading to the fancier wooden box from Japan at some point. It’s in my possession now, and I take it out every year to look at on my birthday.
And Then, Let Go
In the 9-5 days, on the door frame of your office, you post a poem by Yehuda Amichai. Called “The Place Where We Are Right,” it’s about living in the space between doubt and love. On the ceiling of your office, you hang a mobile made of white paperbutterflies. They flutter and turn when somebody pops by with a question, or storms in for an answer. In your office, the floor-to-ceiling windows give you a view of streets, mountains, and the sea beyond, but you live in a state of constant triage, ruled by the demands that fill the screen on your desktop. The poem on the door frame and the butterflies above you cannot not stop you from spinning when the crazy gets too strong.
When you are finally brave enough to leave, you lower the white paper swarm into a box and drive across the country with your husband. Once the truck with the rest of your lives arrives, you set up house and make a new home. But it takes a year for you to hang the butterfly mobile in your three-season-room-with-walls-of-glass studio.
When you finally open the box and lift up the mobile, most of the butterflies drop freely to shiver with pleasure in the new air. But many—twisted together by see-through fishing wire—do not move. You hang the mobile from the arched ceiling between the skylights, hoping it will still spin above you. But the butterflies are still. You try to untangle them, but realize you cannot see the invisible filament. You decide just to live with it as is, embrace the paradox, until you just can’t. Until you are ready to take the mobile down, let it sit before you on a table, put the butterflies that can move freely to the side, and pay attention to the ones that can’t. Then you can let your fingers follow invisible fishing wire through the mass of twisted white paper butterflies and let them loose. But you realize this won’t work, that the only way to let them flutter is to cut the cords you cannot see, raise the mobile up over the table, and reattach each strand with crazy glue. And that the only way to find out if this will work is to make the cut and try.
When you were a child, you learned the song “Tis A Gift to Be Simple.” You still know the words – “To turn to turn will be our delight and by turning, turning, we come down right” – by heart. And now, each time you leave one life for another, you learn you are one thing made of many—a moving swarm of what is possible. And that to live in the space between doubt and love, you must cut the cord, and find the invisible knot. Again and again. You must flutter and turn until you come down right.
And then, let go.
Uprooted
I see myself from a distance
through the binoculars of terrorists
the shock of evacuation
the reluctance of relocation
I imagine my house destroyed
my paintings shattered
the books ashes
the cats scattered
the fragrance of the garden
left to wither
Little by little
an unanticipated acceptance
a letting-go of attachments
a gradual release,
my past erased
Prepared now,
the stone of sorrow burdens
but will not crush
Maple Leaf 5, watercolor by Ruth Halpern
Evolution of a Library
on the lowest shelf
of the farthest stack in my study
are the dustiest books
that once took me to a world
where parsing life was clever
and honorable.
How proud was I to consume all those words
and like the good ruminant that I was,
feed them back into blue books
and rarefied conversations.
Ah, to live again in a world
where nothing gets dusty
and nothing occurs that doesn’t fit
into some man’s complex system
of reality.
How odd, I think now, to take seriously
that anyone could live in a cave
without making shadow figures
to amuse children.
Or that Sisyphus wouldn’t just
plant a rock garden.
Or where cogito ergo sum wouldn’t be
the perfect excuse for idle hours
devoted to day dreams.
Dear Baruch and Rene,
Immanuel, John, and David
may there be a state of existence
where you can argue for all eternity.
I, for one, have consigned your writings
to the book drop, and dusted your shelf.
Ascension
I want to stand in a grove of
bamboo, with my brain dabbling
and puttering around in a hundred
vertical thoughts, forehead pressed
against the cool, thick curve of one
of the canes, eyes closed but still
picking up the watery dance of light
and shadow, heart full of the helium
of happiness. I would like to let go
of my whole heavy body and float
upward with no ceiling, soaring
between the poles of the upright
stems and past the tickling green
laughter of the spear-shaped leaves.
Sculpting
Buy more!
Own more!
…more possessions, friends, savings, insurance policies, goals, overflowing bucket lists.
Are we blank canvases or virgin pages or empty vessels simply waiting to be filled? Are we, as we grow older, simply a new market for passive consuming?
At earlier life stages we had seemingly endless energy and drive to splash colors and write words and fill up, over a lifetime, the page or canvas or jug until it was completely full to bursting. What is a seasoned human to do with this metaphoric life painting or epic tome or vessel of memories? How satisfied are we with this finished product?
There is a secret that could be revealed as we view the artwork of our lives, a secret pathway to a new perception of who we are.
We can see ourselves as three-dimensional, as sculptures. We have not simply been lucky enough to passively receive the gift of a block of shining Carrara marble. We can now sculpt our lives from the material we were given. With a sure hand on the chisel, we are able to rid ourselves of what is no longer contributing to our lives. We become sculptures of awareness and grace, beauty and aliveness, sensitivity and action.
Elderhood offers the remarkable opportunity to let go, to strip away all that distracts us from the process of deepening our discernment, all that clouds our ability to be fully in the now. We can find the energy to release outworn ideas, and contribute our long-unused paraphernalia to charity. Thus we make space to refine our inner possessions as well as our outer environment.
We now become the beings we were meant to be, the embodiment hidden in the marble block. Having let go of the objects and opinions, even beliefs, that have held us back for decades, we become more spacious, freer. Suddenly we are living a life of meaning where we express each aspect of ourselves authentically.
As a sculptor sees the finished work in the raw block of marble, we release what is peripheral to the truth of who we are, unveiling our true self into the world. We become inspiring beings, beautiful in our elderhood.
Happiness now radiates from us as stunning works of our own creativity. We have become living, breathing sculptures, affirming our commitment to the joy of being old.
Letting Go
You’re sorting clothes that have hung for many decades in many closets, many cities, many houses. It’s time to let them go, this collection of skirts, trousers, blouses, sweaters, dresses, coats—all of them dated, hem lengths all wrong.
This should be easy.
After moving fifteen times, you know the drill. It’s best to sort belongings before the moving truck arrives. If that proves impossible, sort while unpacking at the new place. In the worst case, jam everything into the new attics and closets—an option you’ve used too often.
A friend once remarked, “You love wherever you live, wherever it is.” Perhaps that’s why moving has become routine—there is always a good reason, and you easily adjust to fresh surroundings, different climates, new friends. Maybe that’s why you think it’s possible to move again, even when living alone on the wrong side of seventy.
This time, you are determined to sort before the moving truck arrives.
You face an embarrassingly large heap of garments you’re unlikely to wear again. To keep or not to keep—everything has to go into one pile or the other. There is no point in a maybe, might, in-another-life pile.
You remember with bittersweet accuracy buying and wearing favorites: the black-watch kilt from Scotland, an extravagant purchase at twenty-something; the burgundy skirt worn with matching tights that accommodated both flashing legs and modesty; the purply-pink, precisely tailored suit that screamed I AM NOT A SECRETARY when you joined a law firm; the navy sweater dress with Kelly green trim at the sleeves and hem, your go-to for casual weekend gatherings.
You won’t wear any of these favorites again. Probably, you’ll never do more than what you do now—slip a garment over your head, pose briefly in the mirror (pleased when it still fits), let it drop to the floor.
This should be easy.
But it’s not easy to give up these long-ago versions of yourself, because they still live, part of who you are now. If you let go of kilt, skirt, suit, or dress, you risk losing the price-conscious twenty-something, the woman who flashed her legs, the new lawyer who celebrated weekends with friends.
Sycamore 3, watercolor by Ruth Halpern
I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
what got me in a battle-royal, a donnybrook
of take-no-prisoners cleaning.
Scrubbing sinks, scouring the refrigerator,
vacuuming the rugs. Swabbing down
the kitchen floor. Finding anything to wash
& wash again—
Then—lucky break—a friend gifts me
300 old prescription bottles.
A dozen bags for Goodwill. Long story.
You’re not supposed to toss pill bottles
in the trash or even the recycling.
You can take them to Target & maybe
they’ll recycle—but who knows?
I found an Ohio ministry that sends
clean pill bottles to clinics overseas.
I thought: Only 300 bottles.
There’s the sink, the soap,
hot water. Gently tug off the label.
Remove the glue. Wash in hot water.
Dry, then pack in plastic bags.
It’s not cheap, postage-wise.
But therapeutic.
Something to do with my hands.
Something that’s not rending my garments.
Something that’s not —
That reminds me of King David:
I will make no sacrifice that costs me nothing.
Plant Catnip on my Grave
No favorite clothes, or Egyptian tokens,
No papers to document my living, no accolades,
No plaques or medals, no bouquets,
No stones.
Discard all the objects, still in boxes,
That were once beloved:
My books, my childhood souvenirs,
Diaries, recipes, photographs.
Do just this:
Plant catnip on my grave,
And what once mattered most will come,
Ghosts of beloved companions
And current strays, finding their way.
Rolling on top of the loamy earth, me beneath,
Passing cats will be my memorial,
Led home by instinct and scent.
All that I need to leave behind,
My dearest earth’s encounters.
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Helen Bar-Lev has lived in Israel since 1973. She has had over 100 exhibitions of her landscape paintings. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is the recipient of the Homer European Medal for Poetry and Art. Helen is a member of Voices Israel and the Israel Artists Association.
Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021), and The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). For years, she was a teacher and counselor. She lives mostly in Pittsburgh, PA, where she curates the Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.
Andrea Carter Brown's most recent poetry collection, September 12, won the 2022 IPPY Silver Medal in Poetry. Previous collections include The Disheveled Bed and two chapbooks, Domestic Karma and Brook & Rainbow, winner of the Sow’s Ear Press Chapbook Prize. She guest-edited the Persimmon Tree 
Nancy Dillingham is a sixth-generation Dillingham from the Big Ivy section in western North Carolina. Her collection Home was nominated for a SIBA. Latest publications include No Time Like the Present: A Memoir in Essays and Curves: Collected Stories. Her chapbook After Helene is forthcoming. She lives in Asheville, NC.
Mary Donnelly lives in Burlington, VT. She turned eighty this past July.
Jeanne Emmons
Nancy Glowinski went to art school in New York in the early 1980s, and then put all creativity on hold for the next forty years. She worked in the news business for many years, and started writing during the pandemic. She is now working on a debut novel at age sixty-six— a new writer with an old voice. Photo Credit: Evans Vestal Ward.
Carole Johannsen is an Episcopal priest, a poet, a retired hospital chaplain, and matriarch of her family, including five grandchildren in whom she delights. Her doctoral studies focused on spirituality and aging, working with elders to review and bless their past lives and plan with enthusiasm for their next years.
Deborah Kelly Kloepfer recently retired after several decades as an English professor at Buffalo State College (now Buffalo State University). She is a published poet, a fiction writer, and the author of multiple scholarly essays and the book The Unspeakable Mother (Cornell University Press).
Linda E. Lucas taught and published in economics and women’s studies for over 40 years. She’s retired, active in local voter outreach campaigns, and last year published her first non-economic poem and a literary essay. She has two adult children and one grandchild.
Charna Meyers writes poems and short fiction, as well as songs for a punk band in which she sings and plays keyboard. For the past three decades, Charna has maintained a practice as a therapist in Brooklyn, NY, where she lives with her husband and dog, Irv.
Gerry Moohr, a former law professor who wrote for academic reviews, now writes for literary journals. Her work has appeared in Persimmon Tree, Cagibi, The Maine Review, Equinox, and others. She lives in Houston and Minneapolis.
Jen O’Connor’s work is published in American Writers Review, London Journal of Fiction, and Sinister Wisdom, among others. She recently won a grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation and was a finalist for the 2024 Saints & Sinners Literary Festival Short Fiction Contest. Her plays have been produced throughout the US.
Denise Osso lives in the Hudson Valley. Her stories and essays have appeared in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Pigeon Pages, and Persimmon Tree. She has enjoyed residencies at the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation.
Sylvia Ramos Cruz is inspired to write by art, women’s lives, and everyday injustices. Her award-winning prose, poetry and photographs appear in local and national publications. Among these are Artemis (2025), New Mexico Poetry Anthology (2023) and PoetryBay online. She is a grandmother, retired surgeon, and women’s rights activist.
Felice Rhiannon is an American living in England, where she writes overlooking a fabulous garden, a five-minute walk from the sea. When she is not writing about conscious aging or contemplative poetry, she can be found somewhere delightful eating chocolate (70% dark, of course).
Margie Wildblood earned degrees in English, psychology, and counseling. Now retired from college counseling at Northern Virginia Community College, she participates in and moderates writing and poetry groups. She has published poetry and nonfiction in various magazines. She recently published a memoir, Because He Loved Me, now available on Amazon.
Linda Barrett Osborne is the author of six books on American history for middle school/young adults, including Guardians of Liberty: Freedom of the Press and the Nature of News and Who’s Got Mail: The History of Mail in America (all published by Abrams). Her adult nonfiction books include Explorers, Emigrants, Citizens: A Visual History of the Italian American Experience (Library of Congress/Anniversary Books). She was a senior writer-editor in the Publishing Office of the Library of Congress for fifteen years.
Ruth Halpern is an artist, storyteller, and Life Reinvention Coach in Ashland, OR. She’s been painting and drawing since she was a child. She enjoys focusing on florals and other botanicals that tell stories.
Lifting and timely stories, perfect timing as I am preparing to empty the pod that holds the very few items left after the flood of Hurricane Helene, plus the thrift and consignment things I’ve accumulated over the past year of living in three different homes of dear friends with lovingkindness to share.
wonderful selections!