books – Anna Citrino—Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage

In Praise of Women Divers

This is for the woman who took her children
to the Red Sea to paddle through water their father
had never touched, though he grew up beside it
every day looking into its face.

This is for the woman who became a divemaster
though told it was dangerous and she’d be seen
in a wetsuit, how she led other women underwater
though it was illegal, teaching them the ways of fish,
discovering together another world, finding
every day is a good day to dive.

This is for the women who wore abayas
atop their wetsuits as if they were merely
onlookers while meeting the Coast Guard,
and the men on the boat the only divers.

This is for the friend who stood on the boat deck
wearing her snorkel and mask, black robe
flapping with wind, smilingly determined to explore
what lay beneath the sea’s sun-smoothed surface—
all of us others planning to join her.

This is for the women who broke the law
by choosing to dive, who probed shipwrecks
and gazed at their gaps, who entered through holes
blasted into steel holds—how vessels once so strong
no water could enter, are now broken open, sunken,
propellers forever halted, going nowhere.

This is in celebration of the women who saw wrecks
in water clear as windows, the happiness engendered when
something so big, so seemingly sturdy, in its destruction
became a place of beauty decorated with soft corals, animated
with angel and broom-tailed filefish sweeping through.

It’s Women’s History Month. I will be reading with authors, Jean Gordon Kocienda, and Pamela Reitman and Elaine Rock, lifting the voices of women from cultures across the world, celebrating them with readings of poetry, nonfiction, and story.

Come share a meal March 26 at 5:00 pm at the Aqus Cafe in Petaluma, Sonoma County, CA and listen to a few stories of some amazing women.

Seating is limited. RSVP is required: see: https://aqus.com/communitydinnerRSVP/

Hope to see you you there!

Stories shape our lives, yet sometimes people hold their stories inside and never tell them, perhaps because they are too painful, they fear might bring shame, or words simply can’t be found to tell them. Sometimes the dominant culture we live in doesn’t allow certain stories to be told or heard. When we hear them at last, those stories can be transformative.

Born in California, I had little contact with relatives living where my parents were born and raised on the Great Plains and in South Dakota. Curious about my origins, I wrote to relatives and traveled to interview them. Those interviews, together with further research of US history deepened my understanding of what it means to be a descendant of settlers, as well as the difficult social expectations and restrictions women of my ancestor’s era confronted as they worked to create lives they wanted to live. My new book, Stories We Didn’t Tell, released in September is the result of this research. Told in the voices of a family living on the Great Plains, Stories We Didn’t Tell begins when the US wars with Wyoming and Nebraska’s Native people have ended and concludes in the mid 1980s.

Spanning an era of extraordinary change, people on the Great Plains played a significant role in creating the America we live in today. Told in interconnected narrative poems, Stories We Didn’t Tell explores stories that reside inside and beneath the surface of our country’s history. The book opens during a time when women were expected to be wives and mothers and where the working world held few options for women. Farm women were to be mothers and housewives, President Theodore Roosevelt told the public in 1907, “whose prime function it is to bear and rear a sufficient number of healthy children.” While not suffragettes or feminists, the book’s female characters are perseverant and resilient as they seek to create the lives they want within the constraints of the time they live in.

“A masterful book with sweeping scope and depth, Stories expresses the courage, daring and despair of Americans settling the west. The themes in this book are as relevant today as ever. I can’t imagine a more wide-ranging history of western expansion with its undercurrents and repercussions… Stories is an important and powerful book that offers hope to the human spirit.” —Susan G. Wooldridge, author of poemcrazy: freeing your life with words.

Join me to celebrate the publication of my new book, Stories We Didn’t Tell, Saturday 27 September, at 1000 Gravenstein Hwy N, Sebastopol, CA 95472 Fellowship Hall 3:30 to 5:30 for readings from the book, music, food, and book signing.

Living on what was previously called the Great American Desert, Adah’s family of homesteaders and ranchers seek to eke out a life on the Great Plains amidst the effects droughts, economic depression, two World Wars the mechanization of farming, and the forging of modern America. Confronting the many challenges, Adah, seeks to define a life for herself larger than the confining one she was born into.

Books will be available beginning September 2 on the Shanti Arts website as well as other common locations for finding books.

Tag: books

Lifting the Voices of Women

The Extraordinary Lives of Ordinary People