Last year, poet Susan Rich, a Writing It Real in Port Townsend Writers’ Conference faculty member, told conference goers that she was asked to become a Board member for Whit Press in Seattle. She was pleased about helping a press specifically dedicated to benefiting community groups through the publication of books. This winter, Susan suggested I interview founder, Claudia Mauro, upon the publication of Whit Press’ newest anthology, a book of poems by homeless women, Beloved Community: The Sisterhood of Homeless Women in Poetry.

Having met Claudia in 2004 at The Washington Poets’ Society’s first Burning Word Poetry Festival on Whidbey Island, I knew I wanted to publish an article about the press and its new anthology during this year’s National Poetry Month. I had greatly admired the anthology of poems and stories Claudia was selling at the Burning Word festival, In Praise of Fertile Ground: An Anthology of Poetry, Parable and Story. That volume had united the voices of kids and the country’s finest poets and storytellers to honor the people, places, and labor of our fertile lands.

I made a telephone appointment with Claudia to learn more about Whit Press and its newest publication and went online to read the press’ mission statement. The statement says the nonprofit press believes in the “transformational power of the written word” and “exists as an oasis to nurture and promote the rich diversity of literary work from women writers, writers from ethnic, social, and economic minorities, young writers, and first-time authors.” The books the press creates “use literature as a tool in support of other nonprofit organizations working towards environmental and social justice.”

Claudia spoke with me from Wyoming, where she was meeting with her book designer. In our conversation, I learned about Claudia’s path to becoming a publisher. After growing up in Queens, New York, she came west to go to Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, took on seasonal work in canneries in Alaska to help pay school expenses and fell in love with Alaska. In Alaska, she became an environmental conservationist and a bush pilot. She also started writing poetry. When she moved to Seattle, two friends helped her publish her first book of poems, Stealing Fire, one by designing it and one by funding the publication of 100 copies.

It wasn’t long, before her poetry book was carried by feminist bookstores nationwide, sold 10,000 copies and taught Claudia a lot about networks and how they help get books to audiences seeking particular voices. She began to feel a debt to alternative publishers for the material she was able to read as a young woman.

Today, as a small press publisher, she knows the importance of keeping the service aspect of her press and projects directly in her vision. She pays attention to serving particular communities with each Whit Press book and doesn’t pay too much attention to what she calls the “therefores,” the obstacles others see before them. She thrives on getting books out on behalf of nonprofit communities.

 Claudia recounted that six years ago, while representing Whit Press at Seattle’s Bumbershoot Arts Festival’s Small Press Book Fair, she met women poets from Seattle’s Women’s Housing, Equality and Enhancement League (WHEEL), a nonprofit, non-hierarchical group of homeless women and formerly homeless women working on ending homelessness for women. The group was sharing poetry by homeless women in stapled pamphlet style chapbooks.

Claudia was taken with the poems, and before long Whit Press was seeking funding for publishing a poetry anthology of the homeless women’s work that would be distributed nationwide.  Claudia believed that giving this poetry a national audience would raise the profile of homeless women everywhere. She says, “The impact creative writing has on marginalized populations is immeasurable. To be seen and heard is something many of us take for granted; for the homeless it is empowerment.”

Sales of the previous project, In Praise of Fertile Land: An Anthology of Poetry, Parable and Story had raised $25,000 to help save a farm. Similarly, profits from this new book’s sales would go directly to WHEEL. With a book out, she believed the group would be able to reach their goals of lobbying harder for women’s relief, building a memorial to honor women who died on the street, and creating a website that would help homeless women gain attention for their cause.

At first, arts funding sources in the Seattle area did not warm to the project, but Claudia persisted and ultimately the City of Seattle and the Seattle Foundation as well as private women donors came through, offering the needed funds.
Talking about the poetry from her friends at WHEEL Claudia says:

These women tell not only their own stories, but the larger story of homelessness as well. The end result is a cathartic and empowering experience for the writer, and a transformational glimpse into the realities of street life for the reader. Moreover, the poets form a community around the literary arts and, ultimately, through the written word, the reader becomes part of their community as well. This is the transformational power of poetry in action.

When the anthology Beloved Community, The Sisterhood of Homeless Women in Poetry came out in 2007, WHEEL celebrated the handsome book’s release with readings held in Seattle’s City Hall as well as at other events.  Claudia received a moving letter of thanks from the women of WHEEL for her years of effort in getting this book out to the public:

Because of your beautiful work, your faith in us, and your passionate pursuit of this project, we homeless and formerly homeless women truly feel ourselves to be part of a beloved community.  That is a priceless gift to us.  And that beloved community will expand, as this beautiful book reaches people who ordinarily might not spend much time worrying about homeless women.

As this book makes its way into national circulation, it will play a valuable role as a centerpiece for our work to end homelessness for all.

****

Beloved Community: The Sisterhood of Homeless Women in Poetry is a handsome 247-page volume. The poems come from the hearts, minds and experiences of women who have lived on the streets or are still on the streets. Michele Marchand, WHEEL’s organizer since 1995, is emphatic in the book’s introduction when she writes that the women of WHEEL have:

defied all odds, assumptions and expectations about what homeless women working together can accomplish.  When WHEEL started, no one thought homeless women could organize…get beyond their basic need for survival to work toward the greater good…

They were wrong…

Every day, the experience of living with, working with, struggling with and writing with homeless women reminds me of one of Raymond Carver’s last poems, “Late Fragment”:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Although the women of WHEEL certainly give voice to the concerns and life threatening difficulties of those living on our streets, they also speak unencumbered to humanity’s universal issues.

Anitra L. Freeman asks in her poem “Survival Program” how we mourn a hundred children, women, father’s brothers, lovers. Throughout the poem, she says we “Feel the absence of one small hand,” “Name one silent voice / and then one other,” “Trace the shape of one missing face / and then one more.”  Finally:

How do we save a thousand lives?
Hold one hand
Listen to one voice
Look in one face
at a time.

From the voice of someone whose presence many of us might have discounted comes the wisdom of how to stay human in a time wracked by war, poverty, and hate crimes. From the voice of someone we may have walked by without acknowledging, comes insight we can put to work in my daily lives.

From Catherine Condeff’s poem “Practice Makes Perfect,” I learn to look ahead, to keep on moving toward difficult-to-reach goals:

If practice makes perfect, then really
I thought I’d have it down by now
Sometimes feeling like a social reject
Sometimes being the circus clown
But I gotta keep on practicing
got to get it straight
Doubt I’ll get there early
But I’ll be damned if I’m too late.

In “Love, a Prose Poem,” Elizabeth Romero awakens those who are bitter, who no longer trust in love:

And all the time love would move among them,
touching unbelievers and believers alike, the way the
buttery sun of springtime touches soft-cheeked
laughing toddlers in the park and also flows over a
sleeping tramp–dark and grizzled–illuminating
the weave of his jacket, the skin beneath his stubbled
beard–love, incorruptible and kind, moves among
us always.

In a poem entitled “Trust,” Marion Sue Fischer is thankful for being able to forget, at least for a time, moments that gravely impact the lives of those who are vulnerable, creating disconnection and deep sadness. She strikes a deep cord, showing her readers that they, too, are diminished by such actions among us:

That I have seen
(what appeared to be)
Human beings

Look at me

The way a lion
Must look at
An antelope

And how evocative the poems are of living without a home:

In “Untitled” by Rango writes:

i had a one-bedroom apartment. now i have a 4′ square locker. where do i put my couch? hell, where do i put my shoes?

funny thing is, I always pictured camping as a relatively easy lifestyle. except I have nowhere to put my pack except on my back. when I had a home, I could leave things there.

recipe for seattle soup: put beans in a pot. when rains tops, light fire.

Elizabeth Romero notes the attention she pays to the streets in her poem “Carrying a Sign”:

The leaves make the street wonderful
Without them it would be entirely
Devoted to business and I would feel like dying
I would have to walk up and down
Carrying a sign
“Bring Back the Leaves”

Her words in “Slow Erosions,” another poem that uses the image of her beloved leaves, stay with me:

I want to be unafraid like the leaves.
Flutter my flutter; flash my flash.
Plummet downward seized by the wind.
Make room for the night and the cold.

In “Fallen Angels,” a poem about imprisonment, Cynthia L. Ozimek declares:

I
don’t
deny my past
but neither have I perished.
I may scream. I may be silent.
I may simply set my sight upon the furthest star above the darkest sea but as
I swim I will
gather my dreams and upon them I will build an island.

What more can any of us do with our lives’ losses, disappointments, and failed expectations? I will remember the image of an island built from my dreams that, coming together in a new formation, can save me from drowning in feelings of defeat.

All of the poems in Beloved Community: The Sisterhood of Homeless Women in Poetry flutter their flutter, flash their flash, and make room in the reader’s heart for the night and the cold. I can go on and on sharing stanzas that take my breath away, that require I sit very still and listen.

The poems written by this community of women tackle mental illness, post traumatic stress disorder, and murder. The truths the women speak, sometimes in whispered prayers, sometimes in screams and sometimes in private moments of joy and happy memories, make us meditate on what it means to be human, to have the ability to find beauty and connection to others amidst hunger, loneliness, and fear for one’s safety.

Reading the work in this volume will keep you from ever again, even for a moment, making assumptions about the homeless. Your love of life, your acceptance of its sadness, your willingness to speak up for those who need help will be rekindled.

Poetry heals people and communities. As Claudia Mauro reminds us, we cannot do without it.