Twirling in a Beam of Light: A Woman's Life in Poetry - Softcover

Kirkwood, Judy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1950495574 ISBN 13: 9781950495573

Publisher: Lucid House Publishing LLC, 2024

Synopsis

This book started in the 1970s when I was a writer of poems, having graduated with a Master's Degree from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois, Chicago. I don't believe any of the poems in my original Masters manuscript survived, but some of the people depicted in it did, mainly me and my then boyfriend, then husband, then ex, and our friend Paul, who remains a Chicago character even if he lives in Indiana. Marriage is a fragile enterprise. A long one, like mine (35 years) is a history of more than two people. It is places and times, ideas and dreams, families of parents, children, and grandchildren, friends, houses and seasons. Yes, there was an actual balcony, and a pink room, and of course we are all small planets orbiting around each other and the sun, shooting stars and eclipsing our own radiance. Our stories continue with or without us. It wasn't until the poems for "Twirling in a Beam of Light" were in order that I realized the whole was really a memoir of growing from a girl, safe with her parents' voices in the background, to a girlfriend, wife, mom, work career and the transformation that aging offers. These poems are about joy and loss, grief and celebration, seeing oneself in context as the world changes. The message is you can start over and make a home among strangers, you can open the door to a new beginning, and no matter how many dark nights pass, you can fly through the day on a dust mote twirling in a beam of light.

About this title

About the Author

After receiving a Master's degree with a specialization in poetry from the Creative Writing program University of Illinois, Chicago, fifty years ago, Judy Kirkwood was mystified as to how to put that expertise into practice-so she became an editor. Eventually her passion for poetry and art led to co-founding a papermaking studio in Madison, Wisconsin, and producing limited edition books, broadsides, and paper art exhibited and sold all over the country at galleries rare book rooms of libraries, and gift shops, including at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. Then she realized that all writing can (and maybe should) be informed by poetry. A prize-winning author of hundreds of articles on travel, lifestyle, health, personality and business profiles for magazines and digital media, including her motherwarrior blog on adolescent addictions, Judy now focuses on editing, co-authoring and ghostwriting, and book doctoring for both fiction and nonfiction. Her books include "Please Don't Cut the Baby!: A Nurse's Memoir," the story of Marilyn Fayre Milos, the mother of the intactivist movement. She has returned to her poetry roots with "Twirling in a Beam of Light," a different kind of memoir. A Midwesterner by birth and temperament, Judy now lives in Delray Beach, Florida, with the certainty that there will be more lifetimes in different places.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lucid House Publishing LLC
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1950495574
• ISBN 13: 9781950495573
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 78