You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.—Poet, essayist, and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, in a letter to her daughter, 2008
Changes demanding choices, decisions, and revisions seem to be coming fast and hard to everyone around the globe. International and domestic political/social turmoil, armed conflicts, actual and pending ecological disasters—and setbacks to long-fought-for rights—are among the challenges we can almost feel forming a wall between us and an increasingly elusive better future.
A unique magazine of the arts, Persimmon Tree, as always, notes and promotes the influence of older women in the confrontation of and solutions to these formidable problems. Yet, in this issue, even as we continue to reflect the importance of our community’s creativity, we also mourn the loss, this September, of two groundbreaking women warriors in the fight for international justice and the rights of all people.
Courtesy of robinmorgan.net
Writer and activist Robin Morgan, coiner of the term “herstory,” co-founder (with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda) of the Women’s Media Center, and an editor of Ms. Magazine, died on September 5 at age 85.
Three days earlier, Morgan’s colleague Gloria Steinem, lifelong advocate for the rights of women and all others unjustly treated—and Persimmon Tree’s longtime supporter and advisor—died at age 92. In this issue, our magazine’s staff and members of our community celebrate Gloria’s life and legacy in “Gloria Steinem, Forever Resonant.” We hope you will read this tribute and add your memories to it.
But of course all women—and especially the creative, experienced older women to whom this magazine is dedicated—are still enmeshed in the struggles that consumed and energized Gloria and Robin. While this is a fact uniquely reflected in our pages, it is definitely not something new:
. . . our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see; or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.—Alice Walker, from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, 1974
In each section of this and every Persimmon Tree issue, we highlight the vital importance and influence of the creative sparks that—despite formidable obstacles—have moved older women to share their hopes, experiences, and hard-won wisdom with the wider world via nonfiction, fiction, poetry, “short takes,” visual art, and contemplations of the creative process itself.
In the one section of our magazine devoted to current issues, the Persimmon Tree Forum has, as its topic for this issue, “The Power of Choice.” Centered principally on our readers’ hopes and fears regarding the U.S. midterm elections, this discussion has elicited from our readers cogent thoughts on the importance of the choices we make every day—in our daily lives and in our arts. The Forum contributors—and every one of the women whose work we publish and celebrate—remind us of the often denigrated but always potent truth,
Your voice can change the world. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Read, reflect—and please comment on these ideas everywhere you are moved to do so in this issue. And don’t hesitate to contact me directly.
With respect and best wishes,
Peggy Wagner
Editor-in-Chief
editor@persimmontree.org
Annunciations explores the frame that art—and life—erects around women, investigating notions of self-determination and consent in a woman’s life.
“In this astounding book, the reader is led into and out of scenes that consider art, power, gender dynamics and how expectation can be upended. The female figures are aware of how they are needed — and used — and what they must do to reclaim agency.” ——Elline Lipkin, author Girl in a Forest
“Buffy Shutt’s Annunciations examines the fraught place of women in art history alongside those striving for agency in society at large, all while returning to representations of the Annunciation, a moment of intimate tension between the human and the divine, implicating the reader in a web of complicity, desire, and violation.” —–Luiza Flynn-Goodlet, author most recently of Mud in Our Mouths
“Through the lens of exploring annunciation artwork, this collection investigates and then transfigures the violence women face when agency is denied or stolen from them. These poems provide a much-needed reclamation of the narrative around the annunciation and is a delight to read from start to finish.” —-Katie Richards, author of Apple Mind.
Available from Rockwood Press.