Photo caption: Carol Mikoda reading from Outside of Time at the North Adams Public Library (photo by Mary Beth Hines)
When Kelsay Books published Carol Mikoda’s Outside of Time in October, she celebrated with a reading at the North Adams Public Library. Carol was in residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) as a member of the Boiler House Poets Collective. Participating in the reading marking the tenth anniversary of the Boiler House Poets were fellow Kelsay authors Joanne Corey (Hearts), Jessica Dubay (All Those Years Underwater), and Mary Beth Hines (Winter at a Summer House), along with Merrill Oliver Douglas, Judith Hoyer, Kyle Laws, Deborah Marshall, Eva Schegulla, and Wendy Stewart.
You can read and hear more of Carol Mikoda’s work on her Substack, The Yellow Table.
Smith College, my alma mater, is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year with a number of events. I travelled to our Northampton, Massachsuetts campus for the “Come Home to Smith” events on November 1st. The campus was beautiful as always and it was a privilege to be back on campus with other alums and current students, as well as family members who were visiting as it was also Family Weekend.
It was my privilege to also attend the first-ever event of the Smith VOICES (Variety of Opinions, Interests, Cohorts, and Experiences are Supported) initiative, organized around the theme of “Joyful Care.” I enjoyed fascinating presentations on wellness for individuals and communities, offered by alums and staff. I appreciated the opportunity to interact with other alums from across the age spectrum and from many different backgrounds and communities.
I especially enjoyed the opportunity to learn new things, reflect, and deepen my understanding. Smith is a champion for liberal arts education, encouraging both breadth and depth of learning and I cherish being part of that tradition. While I didn’t have as much time and energy to wander around campus, I had to stop and learn about this research garden, tucked along the pathway between Wright Hall and Chapin House:
I also enjoyed spending time in some renovated spaces on campus. The opening of VOICES was in Alumnae House in the same room where we held our wedding reception in 1982. Later presentations were in Neilson Library. The photo below was taken in the Browsing Room and shows the official portrait of Jill Kerr Conway, the first woman president of Smith, who was president when I was a student.
To cap the Come Home to Smith activities, current president Sarah Willie-LeBreton addressed the alums and answered questions with insight and warmth. I heard from several alums and staff members how vital President Sarah’s leadership has been in these stressful times for higher education and for society in general. I also love how everyone calls her “President Sarah” with true affection. This was my first opportunity to hear her speak in person. She was astute, thoughtful, and joyful, even when touching on challenges that we are facing.
I ended the day with the Montage concert, which brought together musical groups now active on campus, over half of which were not in existence when I was a student. My favorite new-to-me group was the Wailing Banshees, Smith’s Celtic music ensemble. I loved seeing that the handbell choir, which was very small in my day, has grown to enable ringing five octaves. A newer tradition that has developed is ending with an audience participation piece. We joined in with “Let There Be Peace on Earth” with the Glee Club and Orchestra, which, I admit, made me teary.
In her will, Sophia Smith provided the funds to build and maintain a college for women that would provide an education equal to that available to men. The will states, “It is my wish that the institution be so conducted, that during all coming time it shall do the most good to the greatest number. I would have it a perennial blessing to the country and the world.” I’m grateful that Smith College continues to be a blessing and that it grows and changes in ways that honor Sophia Smith’s wishes. Having previously made their financial aid packages loan-free, Smith recently announced the Next 150 Pledge , which will make Smith tuition-free for families with incomes up to $150,000.
I’m proud to be part of the Smith College family and hope that we will continue as a “perennial blessing” for the next 150 years and beyond!
When I wrote this post on the Boiler House Poets Collective‘s tenth anniversary reading (and my birthday), I fully intended to post another couple of times during the residency, but that didn’t work out, so this is my catch-up attempt to encapsulate the rest of the residency.
Sunday was a busy day. Leery of being in an enclosed space with lots of people for over an hour, I opted for online mass. I got the above-linked blog post out and worked on an alternate bio poem modeled after one Judy Hoyer had brought to a BHPC workshop session earlier in the residency. Instead of eating with the other poets at 1:00 – daily lunches are part of our residency package – I took my lunch down the block to Main St. to await the arrival of the Fall Foliage parade. Because it was bizarrely hot (mid-80s F./29 C), I decided to wear the T-shirt that daughter T had given me for my birthday which says “This heat wave was brought to you by Big Oil.” I found a place in the shade and ate my lunch, enjoying watching the crowd, especially the little ones, as we waited for the parade to reach us.
I had read a poem at the reading the day before contrasting the full-scale parades of the my childhood in the ’60s and ’70s with the very subdued parade of 2016 where there were very few spectators and almost no children, either watching or participating. I’m happy to report that the 2025 parade was much more vibrant, with more community groups represented, including a lot of youth groups, such as Scouts, dance troupes, and sports/cheer teams. I admit that the high school bands are still at least 50% smaller than when I was a student at Drury in the ’70s, but they may grow as these younger children reach high school in a few years. I did feel sorry for the bands in their wool uniforms and the uniformed fire fighters marching in that heat, while the spectators were wearing shorts and tees. I appreciate the revived community spirit and later had a conversation with a BHPC member who lives in North Adams about recent gains in bringing together the people who have lived in the area for generations and the more recent arrivals drawn by MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) and the growing arts scene. I hope that spirit will continue to strengthen and make North Adams stronger for all the residents.
Later in the afternoon, we workshopped. I brought the alternate bio poem and was shocked that people enjoyed it. By nature, that kind of poem is more light-hearted than my usual work and I am not known for being witty or humorous, so I was happy I managed to pull it off. After that, we walked to dinner and then back to our apartment for evening conversation.
It turned out to be more than I should have attempted, especially with the hot weather and the busy day on Saturday. I had to scale back on my activity level for our final two days.
There were some highlights, though. I had a delicious breakfast on Monday morning with Cousin S at Renee’s Diner. Monday evening, we ate at Grazie in their new location. Most of BHPC’s welcome dinners on the first evening of residency had been held at Grazie when it was located on the ground floor of the apartment building we call home during our time in North Adams. We definitely wanted to visit their new home, which is larger and has a parking lot! After dinner, we had our planning meeting for next year and I was thrilled to know that all ten of us want to return in October, 2026. Exact dates still need to be scheduled by The Studios but it’s nice to know that we don’t have to do any recruiting over the winter.
A highlight of Tuesday was a morning concert that BHPC member Carol Mikoda offered during storytime at the North Adams Public Library. It was in the same room where we had given our reading, except with a colorful mat on the floor, perfect for all the bouncing, dancing, and crawling the little ones did in reaction to Carol’s singing, accompanied by her guitar. Many of the songs were original compositions and the adults present enjoyed her clever lyrics. Carol had another momentous event occur during the residency. Her newest book, Outside of Time, was released by Kelsay Books. Congratulations, Carol!
BHPC workshopping in bldg 34
Photo credit: Carolina Porras Monroy
Carolina Porras Mornoy, the new director of The Studios at MASS MoCA which hosts our residencies, took some photos of us in our beloved Boiler House at the museum and while we were workshopping. There will be an Instagram post coming next week featuring the Boiler House Poets Collective. The Studios are celebrating their tenth anniversary this month so it is especially fitting to have the tenth anniversary of the Boiler House Poets Collective as part of their observance. BHPC formed at the very first poetry workshop-in-residence that The Studios hosted in fall of 2015, facilitated by Jeffrey Levine of Tupelo Press. The poets hit it off so well that, even before that week finished, we were hatching plans to return, which we have done every year since.
I am the only “original” to make all the reunions so far. In 2020, when The Studios were closed for an extended period due to the pandemic, I took the opportunity to return to North Adams for a private writing retreat. You can read about that experience by checking out my August 2020 blog archive. MASS MoCA had re-opened by then with COVID protocols in place so I was able to spend time writing about the art there, while also visiting familiar places in the surrounding towns.
I am so grateful to the Boiler House Poets Collective, The Studios at MASS MoCA, the Museum itself, and the city of North Adams for ten years of welcome, sharing, and great experiences. Here’s to the next ten years – and beyond!
BHPC ’25 in the Boiler House at MASS MoCA
photo credit: Carolina Porras Monroy
As you may have surmised from the post about our reading on this Saturday, I am once again in North Adams in residence with the Boiler House Poets Collective at The Studios at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art).
This is the tenth anniversary year of the first poetry workshop-in-residence that The Studios offered within their opening weeks in fall 2015. I was just starting to publish poetry and only had the courage to apply because I had grown up in the North Adams area and thought I would feel more at thome there. That week was both daunting and wondrous. If you visit my blog archive for November, 2015, you can read about it in multiple posts, which manage to somewhat mask the terror of being thrown into the deep end that I felt at the time.
The saving grace, though, was my fellow poets, who were so welcoming and supportive. Even before we left the residency, we started to plan a return, and thus the Boiler House Poets Collective was born.
As one might expect, not all of our initial group of 9 was able to re-convene, so we invited poet-friends to join us. You can see our listing of poets for each year here. You may notice that there is no listing for 2020 as The Studios, understandably, were closed for an extended period because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to changes in the structure of The Studios, we now can accommodate ten members each year. Kyle Laws and I are the only “originals” in attendance this year, although we consider Jessica Dubey as an honorary original as she has been with us since 2016, our first official residency as the Boiler House Poets Collective.
My health challenges, while not as severe as they were during last year’s residency, are still impacting my energy and creativity, so I am trying to be gentle with myself and not create unrealistic expectations. My immediate focus is to make it through the reading tomorrow morning. Thanks to the wonders of alphabetical order, I will do the introduction and my poems first. Bonus: After that, I can relax and listen to all the rest of the work of my fellow BHPC poets without having to gear up to read.
I’m also excited because we will be unveiling a collaborative poem honoring North Adams as our gift to this special place that we have enjoyed so much. I will share it here on the blog at some point after the reading. I loved having a special tenth anniversary project and am thrilled that we will be able to offer it at our reading and as a special gift to the library, Studios, and other North Adams supporters as a broadside. There is also a smaller, printed version which we will have at the reading for any listeners who would like to have one.
In the spirit of not putting pressure on myself, today I plan to visit the museum and see what’s new. MASS MoCA does not have a permanent collection, so there are always new artworks to experience. There are also some exhibits that are long-term, so I will re-visit some of my old friends here, especially our namesake Boiler House. If I am lucky, something I see will spark a poem later in the residency. If not, I have some prior ekphrastic poems based on MASS MoCA art that could use revision. Or, maybe, there will just be some more blog posts.
Something that opens is my first chapbook, Hearts. In a shameless exercise in self-promotion, I’m using this post to draw attention to a post that I just finished about the second anniversary of Hearts.
Today is the sixth anniversary of my mother’s death. I know many people who, even decades later, tell me they think of their deceased mother every day. I confess that I can’t make that claim. While I spoke to my mother nearly every day of my life, this became increasingly difficult in the last months of her life as her heart failure robbed her brain of oxygen. After her death, I had many months of flashbacks to those last difficult years, while also dealing with my father’s grief. He used to talk to and about my mother often, but, over time, his own heart failure erased the memory of her death. Toward the end, he would ask when she was coming to visit him in the skilled nursing unit and all I could say is that he would see her soon.
The photo above is of the memorials we placed at the memorial park where their cremains are inurned. I wrote this post explaining their significance when we placed them in 2022.
On Mother’s Day, I went to visit their resting place and was shocked to find that our memorials had been removed. I contacted the office, hoping that they had been placed in storage but they were just gone.
Alone in the room near my parents’ grave, I cried and told them I was sorry that these special memorials had been lost.
I think that is the only time that I have spoken aloud to my parents there.
My family has been supportive of me as I’ve dealt with the loss of these special and meaningful memorials to my parents. I’ve decided to print a photo of them and put it in a plastic frame to place on the table near their grave. That way, if it disappears, I would be able to replace it easily.
In the post linked above, I wrote about feeling more at peace when we placed the memorial. I think I had come to a place in living with loss where I could set aside the trauma of my parents’ final years and deaths and have better memories surface. I’m not sure if that is the point where I stopped thinking about my parents every day or not.
What I do know every day is that my parents gifted me not only with life but also with the foundation of who I am.
Their legacy is always with me, whether or not I bring it to consciousness.
We had met when we were volunteering at the middle school our children attended. Angie was kind and caring and funny and talented and we became friends, although she had a plethora of friends already. Because we were both doing volunteering and taking care of family, we had the flexibility to meet for lunch and chat or work on committee projects. Because Angie’s good will also embraced family, she got to know my parents.
We thought that, one day, we would become grandparents and have multi-generational hangouts.
Unfortunately, a nagging cough when Angie was 50 turned out to be stage 3 lung cancer. It was a shock because she had never been a smoker. Despite all the best efforts of her medical team, the cancer eventually progressed and took her life at 54.
March 25th was Good Friday that year.
There was a charitable fund set up in her name and, for years, I gave to it every year on March 25th and on her October birthday. The last few years, though, the website has disappeared. I think the fund probably had enough contribution for it to be endowed so its work can continue.
I’ve written about Angie before here at Top of JC’s Mind and even had a poem published about our friendship and her loss.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Angie’s death was followed by the loss of my long-time parish community and the death of B’s dad, the first loss of a grandparent for our daughters.
2005 became one of the worst years of my life.
I fear that 2025 may be even worse, especially when I look at what is happening in the United States as our democracy disintegrates and damages lives here and abroad.
Personally, this will be the year where we figure out what is going on with my health and address it or the year where I have to deal with giving up what I thought my life as an elder would be.
A small problem when people are dying or being threatened or losing family members because Trump/Musk/Vance et al think they can break laws, norms, and ethical obligations and concentrate all power in the executive branch.
I am sorry that I am too weak to be out on the streets for protests and have to confine my activities to online posts and messages and phone calls.
I’m hoping we can turn 2025 around after these horrible last couple of months.
Trying – while mourning for those who have been hurt.
Ten years ago today, New York State announced an administrative ban on high-volume hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the state. (in 2021, the legislature made it a law.)
To celebrate, Food & Water Watch, one of the lead organizations in fighting fracking, has compiled a free, commemorative e-book, which you can download here.
A large coalition of organizations, environmentalists, indigenous nations, scientists, engineers, and concerned citizens had spent years advocating for a ban, helped by many of our Pennsylvania neighbors who were suffering from the harms of fracking in their communities. There had been rallies, commentary in the press and at hearings, educational events, scientific papers and lectures, and showing up at public appearances by then-Governor Andrew Cuomo leading up to the ban, which occurred when the Dr. Howard Zucker, the Health Commissioner, said that fracking was too dangerous for New Yorkers’ health, ending what had been a very fraught battle over the SGEIS (Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement) that would have allowed fracking without need for site-specific studies.
Yes, that sounds very wonky but we were lucky to have lawyers and other experts in the coalition who could break everything down for us into understandable, actionable bits.
My role in the efforts to ban fracking was as a member of the Rapid Response Team. We would receive links to articles about fracking in the media and write comments to bolster the truth and challenge misinformation. It was intense at times but it meant a lot when I would be at a rally or event and people from other parts of the state would recognize my name from comments I had written. It was good to know that my little part was helpful to the cause.
When the announcement came from Albany ten years ago, there was rejoicing from all parts of the coalition and a celebration here in Binghamton, which had been the epicenter of both the pro- and anti-fracking efforts. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend because I was sick with shingles. I was very grateful, though, and as excited as I could manage to be.
We aren’t having a party on this tenth anniversary but we are all awaiting Governor Kathy Hochul signing a bill that will add carbon dioxide to the existing fracking ban. The bill was passed in March and we have been urging her to sign it ever since.
Many bills get signed in December so it could be any day now, although I’m hoping it will be today.
It would be a fitting tenth anniversary commemoration and a reminder to the nation that New York says NO to fracking!
Update: On Dec. 21, Governor Hochul finally signed the bill. You can read the press release from coalition members here.
Today, December 7, 2024, marks the sesquicentennial of the beginning of the Vicksburg, Mississippi Massacres during the Reconstruction period following the United States Civil War.
I grant you that I would not know this were it not for Ellen Morris Prewitt, an author and fellow blogger, who has been researching this in relation to her own family history.
You can read about it all in this guest opinion piece in the Mississippi Free Press. You can also find the link through Ellen’s blog post on its publication. In looking back through her blog archive, you can find posts on Ellen’s journey of discovering her ancestors’ history and dealing with its impact on her own life.
There is a commemoration occuring this weekend in Vicksburg, recovering a history that had been largely forgotten. Thank you, Ellen, for your role in bringing this history back into our consciousness.
Update: Some photos from the commemoration are available on Ellen’s blog here.
Joanne Corey 