About me and my work
I am a poet who works in many forms including essays, prayers, stories, plays, healing rituals, eulogies, memoir and poetic documentaries of my travels and historical studies. As the offspring of two first generation parents (one from a Swedish immigrant and the other from two Eastern European Jews escaping pograms) I was steeped in inherited feelings of absence and longing. The Portuguese word for this, Saudaude, expresses so much of what drives my writing. That longing for me manifests as a search for meaning, which I believe is the most powerful creative force behind all art.
What is important to my work
The Story
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Stories are how I best hear, understand, heal, and move through the tangled labyrinth of life. These include the stories of family, friends, children, aging body parts, strangers I meet only once or read about in the news and historical figures. The stories of my spiritual quest, my parenting, my losses, and what the natural world is telling me are also important to my writing.
The Names
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Because I believe that what is named lives, naming is a magic act. I feel charged in my writing to name that which has touched me and to help others do the same. In poetry naming is a form of prayer, the act of remembering by naming grows our resilience.
The Places
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A Rabbi once told me we all come from some place. When I write I am grounded in the place I come from, which I believe is a Holy space. It makes sense to me that one of the Hebrew names for God, HaMakon, means The Place. My writing is inspired by the places I have sojourned and the places where my ancestors have dwelled.
Homage to my influences
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Eve Marker, my mother, was a librarian who exposed me to all the classics of children’s literature with particular influence from the Grimm's fairy tales, Norse myths and the Little Lame Prince and his Traveling Cloak
Mr. George Doyle, my 5th grade teacher, turned my Silver Lake School classroom upside down when he created his own integrated curriculum centered around the enterprise of creative writing. Mr. Doyle was attending law school at night and during the day he had us drawing up contracts, hiring our classmates as illustrators, publishers, and copy editors, and prompting us to write stories on topics such as grief and a journey through Hell inspired by Dante’s Inferno. It was cathartic to write about how the mean kids who had picked on others were boiling in cauldrons being pricked by pins. I was hooked.
Jerry Hickerson, my 11th grade English teacher, was the first to see the poems that had been hiding in my journals since middle school. He encouraged me to publish these in the school year book and to make my own books. He also exposed me to writers who would have a lasting influence on my life. After studying their work he took members of our class on a road trip to visit the homes of Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. He brought Alan Ginsberg to our school and taught the story of Maya Angelou's life soon after it was published.
Other influences include my study of Greek classics, mythology, dramatic literature and the creative process at UC Santa Cruz under teachers Audrey Stanley, John Lynch, Mary Kay Orlandi, Norman O. Brown, HD Kitto , and William Emerson. After an intensive year of graduate study reading all the works of Shakespeare I studied playwriting with Joan Holden of the SF Mime Troupe. I wrote several plays in verse, one based on the myth of Perseus and Medusa which was performed with puppets, dancers and musicians. More recently I have incorporated my study of Zohar, Jewish prayer and ritual into poems for women led Shabbat services. Cantor Linda Hirshorn has made two of these poems part of her congregations' services.
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My work also incorporates years of study of child psychology and work as a school psychologist in the public school where I learned from the stories of hundreds of children.
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I have also had the privilege of working with talented San Francisco Bay Area poetry teachers Kathleen McClung, Diane Frank and Jannie Dresser, and writing with a group led by Maya Stein.
