Explore the vast range of titles available.

“I returned to the same respiratory therapist for my annual checkup. I told her that her words to me, ‘You look good for your age,’ had inspired a book. ‘Wow!’ she said. ‘You wrote a whole book about that?’ ‘Twenty-nine kick-ass writers wrote it,’ I said. She gave me a thumbs up.” From the Preface This is a book about women and ageism. There are twenty-nine contributing writers, ranging in age from their forties to their nineties. Through essays, short stories, and poetry, they share their distinct opinions, impressions, and speculations on aging and ageism and their own growth as people. In these thoughtful, fierce, and funny works, the writers show their belief in women and the aging process. Contributors: Rona Altrows, Debbie Bateman, Moni Brar, Maureen Bush, Sharon Butala, Jane Cawthorne, Joan Crate, Dora Dueck, Cecelia Frey, Ariel Gordon, Elizabeth Greene, Vivian Hansen, Joyce Harries, Elizabeth Haynes, Paula E. Kirman, Joy Kogawa, Laurie MacFayden, JoAnn McCaig, Wendy McGrath, E.D. Morin, Lisa Murphy Lamb, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Olyn Ozbick, Roberta Rees, Julie Sedivy, Madelaine Shaw-Wong, Anne Sorbie, Aritha van Herk, Laura Wershler

The twelfth edition of Monash University's creative writing annual features work byestablished and emerging writers on the theme of Futures: What has been; what isnow; what is coming.

Creative writing graduate students-living in post-Katrina Louisiana and struggling for a means to aid their devastated community-ask their peers about the stories they are telling concerning the hurricanes, how their peers construct their individual hurricane narratives, and how the creative process/discipline bears on the material we call history. The authors frame the discussion around Ronald Grele and Alessandro Portelli's writings on narrative. They argue that the oral history informant and the professional storyteller are linked by certain common pursuits and practices and thereby create common byproducts as well and that these connections offer useful insights into the study of oral history. In this essay, they work to bring the two disciplines together and to explore possible overlaps so that we might benefit from a place of new understanding not yet imagined.

Francis shares how he found himself in tears at this summer's 2012 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop at Brown University. During that joint session, Francis felt it important to discuss not only what the participants risk, but what the instructors risk in their insistence upon attention to craft, broad study, eclectic reading, and in the students' taking personal stock, then challenging them to use what they have within them, to not rest with a poem that works, but to insist upon a poem that dares not only convention, but their own emotional comfort.

A poem is presented.

During the 2012 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, our fiction participants extended the spectrum of emerging voices through their abundant talent and energy. During the faculty reading, poetry instructor Vievee Francis presented her statement of poetics, outlining her process of imagining the world through a \"panoply of eyes,\" an approach that considers the wide spectrum of voices. The individual voice and the collective cultural history shared space.

Pardlo comments that a poetry workshop discussion must concern the poem and not the character of the poet. Many workshop instructors stress that the speaker and the poet are not one and the same in an effort to depersonalize the workshop and minimize the stress of critiquing poems that deal with such deeply felt remembrances. It is an understandable impulse to want to address the superficial mechanics of a poem rather than address the uncomfortable revelations yielded by close reading. But these are the wrong reasons to distinguish poet and speaker. The necessary and right reason one should insist on the distinction between poet and speaker is that the speaker is always a projection.