As is true of many writers,
my writing started with words scribbled in notebooks hidden away in bedroom
desk drawers. As the years passed, my interest evolved from writing for my own
emotional needs to constructing well-written pieces with the goal to be of
value to other people as well. After completing a bachelor's degree in business
administration, several years of attending workshops and writing groups, and
participating in local readings, I returned to school to complete a Master of
Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College. My first book of poetry, Where We
Start, was published by Cascadia
Publishing House in March 2007.
I was first introduced to
Wising Up Press when I submitted poems for the anthology Families: The
Frontline of Pluralism. The
description of this anthology begins: "The difficulties of living up close
and personal with diversity - of sensibility, race, culture, class, or religion
- is the subject of the stories, memoirs, and poetry in this anthology."
This could describe the focus of my writing as well. It has been influenced by
my experiences growing up in the Mennonite community, which has become the
background for a probing exploration of the relationship between individual
identity and community loyalty. This tension has been expanded as I also
creatively investigate my husband's unique and difficult Eastern European
upbringing, born and raised in the former Yugoslavia with a Serbian Orthodox
mother and Bosnian Muslim father where community and religious loyalty turned
into war.
Following my experience
being published in Families, I was invited to join the Wising Up Press Writers
Collective and have found a family there. This collective has given me a
writing community, so important after leaving the community of graduate school.
More importantly, this community shares my goal as a writer of "finding
the we in them, the us in you." I love being counted among a group of
writers who are "talented, experienced, realistic and idealistic."
Like the works published by Wising Up Press, my
writing is a part of the tradition of Auden's Prospero poet, one who seeks to
delineate values and respond to "our historical existence with all its
insoluble problems and inescapable suffering." My poems aim to seek this
stance without simplifying or preaching, using a keen sense of paradox and wit,
an openness to surprising turns, and willingness to defer comfort and
resolution. I continue to strive to write poetry that meets these goals and
being a part of the Wising Up Press Writers Collective helps me do that.
