Looking Back, Looking Forward: Celebrating 75 Issues

Persimmon Tree’s Founding Editors at the Official Launch, Mills College, Pasadena CA, March 15, 2007: (left to right), Marcia Freedman, Sandy Boucher, Chana Bloch, Martha Boesing, Nan Gefen (founding Editor/Publisher), Gloria Steinem, Jan Holmgren (Mills College President), and Sandra Butler

Every day, I am moved by the creativity, amazingly varied experiences, and enduring dedication to artistic expression of the women whose prose, poetry, art, and music are featured in our pages. It’s a joy to work with and learn from and about those we publish—and to hear from our subscribers and others who visit our website and comment on what we publish. But more than a joy, it’s a constant reminder of how vital Persimmon Tree’s mission is as the journal dedicated to publishing the inspiring and thought-provoking works of older women.

This is our 75th, Diamond Jubilee, issue. Persimmon Tree made its debut in spring 2007, featuring fiction by E. M. Broner, Jane Lazarre, and Marilyn French; nonfiction by Sandy Boucher and Daphne Muse; the poetry of Ruth Stone introduced by Sandra Gilbert; and photography by Melanie Manchot. More than eighteen years later, we are still going strong—and hope to grow stronger and increase our reach over the next eighteen years.

Below you will find essays by some of the women who have been so important to the life of this journal. We begin with Founding Editor Nan Gefen, who, when contemplating possible names for the new magazine, looked out her window one fall day to see a dauntless persimmon tree still rich with its nourishing fruit.

One day in 2006 I was in a very bad mood. I had just heard that a friend, an excellent writer who had successfully published several novels, was having trouble getting her most recent manuscript accepted. It was a matter of her age, or so she said, and she supported her opinion by telling me about all the older women she knew whose work was being rejected in the same way.

I knew there was truth in what she was saying because of stories I had heard, and my concern grew. It simply was not fair that the talent and creativity of older women should be judged as less worthy than that of others. We have so much to contribute, such smarts, such wisdom, and it was wrong to be pegged as “undesirable investments” by agents and publishers because of our age.

My anger was also stoked by my own anxiety as a writer. Over sixty at the time, I’d published two nonfiction books and was working on short stories and a novel. But I wasn’t having much luck getting my stories out, and who knew what would happen with the novel? If more famous older women writer friends were being rejected, what were my chances?

Feeling disheartened, I did what I often do at such times: I took a long shower.

I usually do my best thinking in the shower. As water beats down on me, the boundaries of my thoughts loosen, and sometimes a completely new idea or solution appears. And afterwards, I know something I didn’t before and move on with greater clarity.

That day, however, I was not looking for a solution to the issue of literary exclusion; I only wanted to feel the comfort of warm water. Still, the shower did its magic, and as I stood under the flow, an idea began to form in my mind of creating an online literary magazine by women over sixty. As far as I knew, no such publication existed. The magazine would be a place where our voices would be honored and heard, and although it would have high standards, any woman could submit her work and be seriously considered whatever her publishing background. Most of all, its existence would be saying to the world: Yes, yes, we too exist, Look at our talent and imagination!

This was the beginning of Persimmon Tree. It would take a year to refine its concept, gather together an editorial board, and choose a name. Our first issue was published in 2007, and after that the magazine grew as a healthy persimmon tree does, absorbing the elements around it and producing more each year. The magazine now includes all the arts, and it has published hundreds of women writers, poets, artists, and musicians, giving them visibility and voice. Under the expert guidance of our editor, Peggy Wagner, and our excellent publisher, Jean Zorn, it is thriving. And as always, it is making a proclamation: We are here. We women over sixty are an essential, valuable part of the creative and artistic landscape, and we have a lot to say.

Persimmon Tree photo at the bottom of Editor’s Note, Issue #22, June 2012.

The inimitable Sue Leonard was Persimmon Tree’s second editor in chief, inheriting the mantle from the incomparable Nan Gefen just in time to publish Issue #22 in June 2012. Under Sue’s leadership, Persimmon Tree gradually evolved from its earliest manifestation as primarily a literary journal into a showcase for the visual arts and for music as well. Sue served for exactly 10 years: her last issue was #61 in March 2022, having stayed, as Nan had before her, long enough to ensure that Persimmon Tree would continue to flourish under the guidance of a gifted new editor in chief, as committed to Persimmon Tree’s unique mission as she and Nan had been.

With Cynthia Hogue as chair of a search committee that included all of the editors, we advertised, interviewed, and deliberated before choosing Peggy Wagner to be Persimmon Tree’s third editor. Sue’s ascent to the editorship was decidedly less formal; you might even call it casual. Here’s how Nan Gefen described it:

I joined Persimmon Tree when Sue did. In fact, I joined because Sue had. She phoned me one day in early 2012, not long before the first issue under her editorship was to come out, to ask if I would join what was to be a very informal group of women whose main job description would be: helping Sue with Persimmon Tree. We met about once a month, at first, over potluck dinners at the big round oak table in Sue’s comfortably homey kitchen; there were five of us to start—Sue herself, Kitty Cunningham, Natalie Levy, Gena Raps, Elizabeth Zimmer, and me. Marcia Freedman and Wendy Barker were also in the group, but they were in California and Texas, respectively, and much time would be spent at each meeting trying to figure out a way to hook them in long distance. Although Nan had stepped down as editor, she continued as publisher until 2016, but, in order, I think, to make the editor-in-chief succession clear, did not join our meetings, even long distance. Later, after Linda Boldt joined the group, we moved the meetings to Sunday afternoons, and the venue to Sue’s equally comfortable living room. But food was still a centerpiece of every meeting. Food and conversation.

Sue led her group just as she edited manuscripts, by an inspired and inspirational combination of intuition and indirection. I remember the meetings as informal, chatty, and almost devoid of attention to the business at hand. But in archetypal Sue style, much was getting done. Interspersed in the chatter, the next issue was taking shape; the editing and production problems of the moment were sorting themselves out.

Mostly, we ate and talked and laughed. A lot. I once asked Sue what her criteria had been for choosing us. “You were the people I wanted around my kitchen table,” she said. And, at another time, she added that she’d needed to start again after John Leonard, her husband, lover, friend, and frequent co-editor, died. “I needed a new project, new friends; you were all women I wanted to know better than I had.” More recently, she added, “You were the people I wanted. It was a simple as that.”

I am sure those were her most obvious motives in selecting us; but, looking back, I think she also acting out of an intuitive sense of what Persimmon Tree needed. Though none of us New York newbies knew it at the time, we each had something different to bring to the magazine: Sue was a line editor extraordinaire; Kitty and Natalie were artists; Elizabeth a consummate editor/proofreader; Gena was already serving as Persimmon Tree’s music editor; and I, to my surprise, turned into a managing editor and back-of-the-book person, especially after Nan stepped away from her role as publisher and Marcia Freedman’s failing health forced her to relinquish her advertising and fundraising duties.

I visited Sue recently. She and her cat Pumpkin welcome visitors into her sunny StuyTown apartment, painted pumpkin to mimic the light and set off the paintings—many by old friends—family photos, and the overflowing book shelves, several of which feature copies of John Leonard’s books. I asked Sue to share some of the highlights of her time as editor. “What did you like best about being an editor?” As an editor, Sue had never minced words. As an editor emerita, however, she was diplomatic, preferring not to name any of the writers whose work she had nurtured: “I loved all the different kinds of writing that came across my desk. I loved the different ways in which women were imaginative. And I also very much loved the editing; I loved taking a piece that was good enough—that was deep enough and rich enough to be worth editing—and turning it into something much better.”

And what, I asked her, did you like least? She chuckled. “There were a few times when turning somebody down proved to be painful. They took it very badly. I remember one woman vividly, because she was especially upset, and she said, ‘I’m having my reading group on Tuesday, and I’ll get back to you with what they have to say.’ She did get back to me, to tell me they’d said, ‘She should have turned you down.’ Her reading group leveled with her; I felt bad for her, but not that bad, because she should have accepted what I’d told her.”

Sue stopped me, as I was leaving; she wanted to be sure I’d include another of her favorite Persimmon Tree memories. In 2020, after years of lining its Mall with the statues of famous men, Central Park at last unveiled its first statue of a woman. To make up for lost time and perhaps to quickly even out the gender numbers, the larger-than-life bronze monument, sculpted by Meredith Bergmann, depicts three women – Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. “Gena went and took pictures, and I wrote the text for it. Thank god they did something, finally, and it was nice to be able to write a piece about it.”
 

Coterie of Circles by Marsha Smilack, photograph from Marcia Smilack, A Reflectionist, Issue #49, Spring 2019

As Persimmon Tree celebrates its 75th issue, I rejoice in the works of the impactful poets featured in these pages through the years, such as the visionary founder of Cave Canem Toi Derricotte, youngest U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, first indigenous U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets Naomi Shihab Nye, and foundational feminist theorist and poet Alicia Ostriker, to name but a few luminaries. In addition, we publish the poems of our readers—some renowned and some published for the first time—writing their hearts out, making what we do worth it! In honor of this remarkable journal of the arts by women over sixty—and for all—I offer five short meditations on this ancient art form:

1. As the great African American poet and activist Audre Lorde stated sixty years ago, “Poetry is Not a Luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams.” Her original title was: “Poetry Is Not a Luxury (for the Systematically Oppressed).”  The parenthetical part has dropped away with time, but it’s timely to remember Lorde’s context, specifically Black Rights, Women’s Rights, and LGTBQ Rights in the 1960s, for they are again under threat. Lorde’s words are timeless, but as we discover how the words speak to us today, sage women speaking our truths in poetic measure, we learn how poetry is not a luxury.
2. Writing to the Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian, lamenting the challenges of writing poetry during the Troubles, Adrienne Rich addressed her with wisdom and empathy in a poem collected in Dark Fields of the Republic: “Medbh, poetry means refusing/the choice to kill or die.” The power of poetry is that it counters such destructive alternatives by offering other choices: to create and to survive.
3. Often, in times of great loss, such as the death of a loved one, poetry is the language in which one can manage to speak one’s soul. Reading the new collection, Still Water Carving Light, by a recently widowed friend, former poetry editor Peggy Shumaker, I thought of how poetry allows us to dwell with and also to face grief. The sublime language of poetry at once honors and transcends individual sorrow. I was so moved by Peggy’s delicate portrait of a beloved friend, the marine biologist Eva Saulitis, who had made her life’s work the study of a pod of orcas living in Prince William Sound. After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, as Eva herself was succumbing to cancer, she persisted in “listening // underwater for the language / spoken only by this pod,” for she knew that without her recording, even the memory of the pod would eventually be lost. The pod had stopped reproducing after the spill. Mourning seams Peggy’s poem, “Gifts We Cannot Keep”—but the gifts that cannot be kept can be housed in poetry, and passed on.
4. There are gifts that take and gifts that “bright exult me now,” as one of our featured poets, Alice Fulton, put it. Gifts that give, no strings attached. The latter of such gifts include nature’s organic process of photosynthesis, wherein plants conjure life from light, inspiring us with their defiance “of so much that is cruel,” as a former director of the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona, Alison Hawthorne Deming, remarks in her new collection, Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower. Alison writes in an homage poem, “Desert Light,” of the gift offered by an early donor to the Poetry Center, Helen S. Schaefer, who “understood that art is necessary/and rare.”
5. Poetry calls us to encounters with others, with the deep knowing we hold within but rarely acknowledge. Reading a poem’s precise and exacting language focuses our attention, opens our hearts, like prayer or meditation. “The heart is a poetry maker,” Joy Harjo writes in An American Sunrise, “and we do not use words to make war,” but peace and beauty, which bless us with their wisdom:  Let the blessing begin.

Persimmon Tree was originally the brain child of Nan Gefen and friends living on the West Coast. Esther Broner often went to California and knew many of the women. When Nan decided to step down she asked Esther to help her find a new editor. Esther approached Sue Leonard, who had been an editor at The Nation, but Sue was reluctant. Esther, who could be magically persuasive, asked a few more times and in 2012 Sue accepted.

I had already done a few interviews for the magazine at Esther’s suggestion. The idea of an online magazine was terrific for music, because recordings could be included with the interviews.

Sue invited a few friends, myself included, to make up an editorial group. We were four or five and would meet in Sue’s kitchen over dinner to socialize and plan issues. Often there was more socializing than editorial talk. We now have editors throughout the country and are no longer either East Coast or West Coast specific. The magazine has grown, adding important new sections. Meetings are no longer social events over a kitchen table, but on Zoom and geographically diverse, with an agenda and a real budget.

Many interviews stand out in my mind. What many have in common are the voices of women’s particular experiences facing roadblocks and the vulnerability and extraordinary effort and courage it has taken to build careers in the 21st century.

This year, The Only Girl in the Orchestra, about the double bass player Oren O’Brien, who joined the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1966, won the Oscar for best short documentary. In 1967, Evangeline Benedetti, cellist, became the second woman in the New York Philharmonic. Evangeline related the events of her audition, which are worthy of a documentary, when I interviewed her for Persimmon Tree in 2012: “Why did you come to New York to audition? You’ll never get in. They won’t take a woman.” said her teacher the night before the audition. And when she came to her audition at Lincoln Center, her cello fell, and the neck broke. All hands around helped Van find another instrument; she played for Leonard Bernstein and he gave her the appointment to join!

In 2010 a call came in that the well-known science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin had collaborated with the musician Elinor Armer on a large-scale piece, and they were up for an interview. I knew nothing about science fiction and didn’t realize the momentousness of the offer. When Le Guin died, our interview came up repeatedly on internet searches. It was so interesting to learn, in the course of that interview, that someone as successful as Le Guin had struggled to find her voice:

My early books were pretty male-centered. A lot of my work was published in genre fiction—science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction was an extremely male and macho field when I started writing it. Feminism taught me that I couldn’t go on doing that. It just wouldn’t work anymore. I had to write as a woman. That was very interesting and kind of scary, a risky business for me.

In 2021, I interviewed Alina Bloomgarden, who wanted to present jazz during the summers at Lincoln Center, where she was a staff member. She brought the idea to the administration, but it took four years for her to be given the opportunity to formally propose the series; it was thought that audiences would be rowdy, and the series would never sell. Much to everyone’s surprise the series sold out, and the audiences were made up of intellectuals. Alina hired Wynton Marsalis, again to the surprise of the administration! The series was a proving ground and resulted in expanding jazz series and festivals in this country. And Lincoln Center built a special building dedicated to jazz, becoming the first center of its kind in the country.

During my 2013 interview with pianist Oxana Yablonskaya, she explained how she had to leave Russia because her son, as a Jew, would not have a musical education or career. And, in 2024, harpist Nancy Allen discussed traveling as a soloist with a baby. In my interview with her in the the winter 2025 issue, Josephine Mongiardo-Cooper gave advice on how to sing. And, in her moving 2022 interview, Donna Weng Friedman described how her political refugee father, who had been a professional in China, came home exhausted from a menial job and heard Donna practicing a Chopin Waltz. He rushed to the kitchen and grabbed her mom to dance. This touching vignette grew into a short film, Never Fade Away, which was shown repeatedly in Times Square and won many prizes!

The unlikely combination of an online computer bulletin board and a midtown Manhattan memorial service led to my association with this journal of arts by older women. I was a longtime fan of the writing of John Leonard, a legendary and nearly ubiquitous cultural critic who edited the New York Times Book Review, wrote about television for New York magazine, chatted on CBS, and finally, along with his wife Sue, edited the literary coverage at The Nation before his death in 2008. His memorial service, at the Fourth Universalist Society of the City of New York, was announced on Echo, and I planned to attend.

His widow, Sue Leonard, was, like me, a member/contributor at Echo, an early venture in computer communications founded by Stacy Horn at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Horn deliberately set out to recruit many women and artists into its ranks. Founded in 1989, it swelled to over 4000 participants in its early years, when few people actually had email addresses or any business in cyberspace. Sue and I were (and still are) among the eldest women on the site, which promoted active discussions of a range of cultural subjects and also arranged for its contributors, most of them New Yorkers, to meet “face-to-face” at local bars and, occasionally, at each other’s homes. Many of us became fast friends, and though the population of the site has shrunk dramatically over the decades, some of us still gather regularly, often at Sue Leonard’s apartment.

In 2012 Sue was invited by the editorial board of Persimmon Tree to become its second editor-in-chief, at the retirement of founding editor Nan Gefen and the transfer of the magazine’s base from Berkeley, CA, to New York City. I had been laid off, along with many colleagues, from my position as a senior editor at the Village Voice, and was spending altogether too much time online pretending to search for work. Traditional print media was crumbling and gigs for dance critics were scarce. One day my email yielded a query from Sue: would I serve as proofreader for Persimmon Tree?

It took me about two minutes to say yes, and here I still am, all these years later. I’ve been introduced at very close range to a number of wonderful poets, to fiction writers of all stripes, and to contributors of nonfiction and short subjects. I’ve met fabulous women who’ve become my new colleagues and friends, as we’ve hashed out the issues of keeping the magazine alive in a difficult economic period. I’ve learned the traditional meanings of the persimmon: both sweet and tangy, it symbolizes good luck, longevity, patience, perseverance, transformation, and good fortune. May all these things continue to rain upon us.

Modern Women: 21st Century Dance, A Coloring Book

by Julie Lemberger, edited by Elizabeth Zimmer

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.

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