Welcome!
We’re excited to welcome you to the first issue of a new online quarterly publication WOMEN RAISE OUR VOICES, a platform for women artists and writers to submit & publish their work…a place to raise our voices and to be heard. Each of the quarterly issues of WOMEN RAISE OUR VOICES will have a theme. We chose Women and Gardens as our first theme based on the understanding that a return to nature, to our plants and flower gardens that feed our bodies and nurture our souls is a necessary part of restoring balance and wholeness to ourselves and our world. Just as the Greek Goddess Artemis became known as the Lady of the Wild Things because she shunned life on Mt. Olympus, preferring instead the wild forest places, so too do we seek to restore the wild places in our minds and hearts with our gardens!
Marjorie’s New Mexico Magical, Mystical Garden, Home to Fairies, Bees, Butterflies & Hummingbirds
The women writers and artists featured in our first issue have all been influenced by their gardens, each in her own unique way. Please enjoy the efforts of the Wild Women Write team & the women who submitted their creative expressions to bring you the first issue of Women Raise Our Voices!
Women & Gardens
Women’s ancestral knowing of how to tend and grow plants runs deep in our veins and connects each of us through the mere touch of Gaia’s soil. For the creatives whose work fills this newsletter, this connection is sacred in the smallest moments, in their gardens of loss and memory, in the worn out and worn down, kneeling in pain and sweat and gratitude, to look up and capture the last light of the day. The contributors to Women and Gardens embraced the awe and wonder as well as the angst and anguish of the everyday and we’re excited to share their creative expressions with you.
Poetry Finalists
Ode to Last Year’s Hose by Megan Baldrige
Over-Elmed by June by Megan Baldrige
Substrata by Rebecca Leeman
Grow by Sheryl Guterl
Gardener’s Haiku by Rebecca Jo Dakota
Goodbye Saskatoon by Faith Kaltenbach
Ancestral by Gina Ogorzaly
First Blush by Andrea Penner
Flower Fairies by Faith Kaltenbach
Wild Strawberries by Dee Horne
Prose Finalists
Still Life with a Crow by Janet Marugg
It was snowing as she sat on her garden bench, white flakes fell and blended into her hair. In her hand, a shock of yellow. A crow on the bench beside her was iridescent blue-black on the white world. It felt like a long, beautiful moment to take her last breath.
This is how she knew her end: she always dreamed exactly what would be – late but easy births, serendipitous encounters, objects found, and lives lost. Even her daydreams inserted into the softest moments of an ordinary day were sharp with the crystalline quality of prophecy.
Planning a Garden that Grows a Seed by Claire Reutter
In third grade, we were given the assignment to write about what we wanted to be when we grew up. I had no idea, but I liked seeing my mom plant flowers.
I approached my teacher. “Um, Mrs. Walsh, What are those people called who take care of flowers?”
“Florists?”
A Garden of New Beginnings by Carolyn CJ Jones
As I clung desperately to the table, the storm raged, tossing the anchored sailboat in all directions while waves slapped loudly against the steel hull of the boat that was my home. Despite my numbed terror, I watched the rain through my tears and the closed portholes while I drank my last beer. After summoning up the courage, I wiped my eyes and suited up for the row into shore to get another six-pack.
Little Deaths by Susan Troy
When Spring approaches, I typically begin the process of planning the garden: Which rotations will be necessary, which seeds to start, amendments to add, fences to repair – all the necessary tasks to feed and nurture another season’s bounty. But tonight, as I struggle to comprehend yet another loss, my thoughts move in another direction. Tonight, I am reflecting on the opposite – putting a garden to rest.
Her Garden by Laura Civitello
It’s not my garden, it’s her garden. We met half my life ago and immediately felt oddly related, like long lost cousins. We became sisters over time.
I’ve known this garden for half my life, too, in all its iterations. It was more ambitious, more organized back then, with rows of corn entwined by their companions, the cucumbers, and carrots, beets, and zucchinis all relegated to their areas. Sometimes, just as it was all ripening, they would go on an extended vacation, leaving me to care for the house, the garden, the pets, and to eat and give away what she’d labored to grow.
Gratitude by Rebecca Jo Dakota
Gardens are an act of hope and faith, of course, but also of continuity and loyalty. Somehow the memory of fresh peas, plucked from a farm field owned by my grandparents’ neighbors, saturated me with such pleasure that every March, in spite of awful weather, I kneel and plant peas.
In a corner of my suburban yard, fingers nudge the earth aside, I dent it slightly, plop in the pea seed, ease the soil back into place, and give it a little pat of love. Sometimes I plant several rows, sometimes just one. The soil isn’t the best, being mostly ground up granite from the nearby mountains, but it’s willing. And so am I. Year after year, in that awful cold wind, I kneel and plant.
Art Finalists
Solstice Sunset
Photograph by Magdalena Lily McCarson
Who I Want To Be When I Grow Up
Collage by Gina Ogorzaly
When Fate Takes Hold
Photograph by Tamara Roske
Dahlias in New Mexico
Photograph by Bonnie Rucobo
Bachelor Button Flowers
Photograph by Kristina Daniels
Maitake with Fleabane in the Garden
Photograph by Angela Werneke
Primrose in Morning Light
Photograph by Angela Werneke
Moments of Wonder
Photograph by Carolyn CJ Jones
Kitchen Corner: Grandmother’s Wisdom
Kitchen Corner is a place to connect us back to our Roots. The roots and leaves known to our ancestors that our grandmothers used for kitchen medicine have remained potent and reliable. What herbs did your grandmothers and mothers use to treat illnesses when you were young? It’s time for us to call forth that wisdom so we can begin to treat our ailments with roots, leaves, stems and a bit of common sense.
Acknowledgments
Our deepest respect and gratitude to all those who submitted entries for this issue: Megan Baldrige, Janet Ruth, Janet Marugg, Tamara Roske, Sheryl Guterl, Faith Kaltenbach, Kathamann, Angela Werneke, Rebecca Leeman, Carolyn CJ Jones. Susan Troy, Laura Civitello, Gina Ogorzaly, Andrea Penner, Dee Horne, Kristina Daniels, Claire Reutter, Freesia Karen Peterson, Bonnie Rucobo, Magdalena Lily McCarson, Kristina Daniels, D. Inui Moss, Kathy Ray, Nereida Correa and Kasandra Ross, Karen Greenslate, and Rebecca Jo Dakota.
We couldn’t include every single poem, prose or art piece submitted, but we certainly enjoyed reading them and appreciate you for sharing! We hope you’ll submit again in our future newsletters! To show our appreciation to all who sent in contributions, we did a random drawing of names for one individual to receive a free copy of the co-editor and expert gardener Yvonne Scott’s book, Simply Garden Small. The winner is SHERYL GUTERI. Congratulations Sheryl!
Our gratitude also goes to the teams of Wild Women Write members who gifted their time and consideration to bring you the summer solstice edition of Women Raise Our Voices. Thank you to Dairne McLoughlin, Kristina Daniels, Rebecca Leeman, Andi Penner, Gina Ogorzaly, and Dunya Moss. It took a village to raise this garden and we thank you all!
The Editors
Editor—Marjorie St. Clair is an adventurous spirit at heart whose interests have guided her in many diverse pursuits from teaching, writing, coaching, artist-musician-performer, to spiritual mystic.
Coeditor—Rebecca Jo Dakota writes for joy. A longtime resident of Albuquerque, she loves New Mexico skies, grows poppies and peas, cultivates friendships, wins blue ribbons at the state fair pie contest, and shepherds a web site, PiePals.com.
Coeditor—Yvonne Scott is a writer, organic grower, herbalist, and community organizer. Her manual, simply garden small!, is available on Amazon. She now lives on nine wild acres of woods, herbs and pollinator gardens near the Shawnee National Forest, in southern Illinois, the traditional lands of the Osage, Miami, Kaskaskia Kickapoo, and Shawnee.