The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of

Your Face in the Fire

Launch Date: June 1, 2024

Watch this blog for more information

* * * *

News from the Muse of the Double-headed Axe*

*The Double-Headed Axe or labrys was sacred as a tool and a weapon. It belonged to the Minoan
Goddess. It is associated with the labyrinth—“house of the double axe.”

Roi Faineant

an online literary publication

has published four of Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s recent poems.

It is difficult to find literary magazines which will publish long poems, and/or poems that take on the difficult issues of our terrible times. Hats off to the editors of this brave publication. You can find all four poems here:

The Muse of the Double-headed Axe

insists on sharing Her poem, below.

Labyrinth

Pilgrimage in the Shape of a Prayer

I.
You never know    where    you’re going
                                                until you get there
You never know    what    you’ll stumble into
                                                until you’re in it
so said the Labyrinth       one afternoon
                                                in late November
as your feet faltered     round the sudden     twists and turns
                                                 of the double-headed ax
When at last    you emerged    from that pilgrimage
                                            in the shape of a prayer
ruby red and gold trees    flared up    into a glory
                                            and you suddenly remembered    the Dream


II.
The Dream knows you    are a wandering Jew
whose bones ache    with the agony weight
of the world    forever    seeking sanctuary
forever    on a pilgrimage    in the shape of a prayer
you stumble    into    a small    Black Hole    A temple?
A trap?    A desecration of the Holy Land?    Can’t see a thing
but the bony labyrinth    of your ear hears    demonic chanting
bibinetanyahubibinetanyahubibnetanyahu
The One and the Only    Mr Security
The One and the Only    Judge and Jury
rousing your ancestors    to warn you
This double-headed ax blow    to the stomach
this manic metronome    with its hypnotic spell
means to render you    powerless    or is it
a call to witness    how swiftly sanctuary
                                                can turn    treacherous?

Nova Music Festival

Hostages

III.
The Dream knows you    will stumble
    into this damp and gloomy     spider web of tunnels
        a double-headed ax    a labyrinth of passageways
            You walk    with the walkers    who can’t see
                                                    you    seem to be    a spirit    in this underworld
                You come at last    to a well-lit room
                    a group of young people    wounded    bandaged
                        dazed    confused    held prisoner
                            Are you called to witness    the abducted?
                        Are you called to hear    what they remember?
                     Just yesterday    they were ecstatic    trance dancers
                a synchronized flow    of mandalas    within mandalas
            spheres beyond spheres    in the company    of Great Buddha
        on a pilgrimage    in the shape of a prayer    for peace    for joy
    between Jews and Muslims    loving the land they share    all day
all night    in the desert    until suddenly    at sunrise    Nirvana cracks

    gun shots    hand grenades    terrorists are hunting them    running
        running    weeping     shrieking    corpses scattered    everywhere
            and they    the survivors    abducted
                Where was the army?    We served our time
                    We would have saved us    Now we’re stuck
                        in this hell hole    without our phones
                            How can we text    our terrified mothers?
                                What would Buddha say?

Destruction in Gaza

Eye and Child

IV.
The Dream transports you stumbling    into a temple    or is it a mosque by the sea?    The Dream
shows you    the spirit of a girl who reveals    I am the “Unknown Trauma Child” of Gaza
Did anyone survive under the rubble that terrible night   when the bomb crashed into our home
like a double-headed ax?    All I could hear was    shrieking    shrieking    Then nothing a tunnel
of darkness    a sudden bright light    as the ancestors gathered    fragments of my soul
so I can visit with you    in your dream    so you can see me whole    a radiant loving child
of radiant loving people    May they come to me    as ghosts who walk the labyrinth
a pilgrimage    in the shape of a prayer    May you greet them    here in this sanctuary
made sacred by your sorrow    Sit with us    Meet my mother who was tender    Meet my father
who was playful    Meet my older brother    the joker    Meet my younger sister    the dreamer
and that unknown unborn one  in mother’s womb  who never will see   the light  of the new day
This is my family   broken pottery  shattered lineage  cast away flesh and bones  No one is left
to identify   our bodies   No one is left   to grieve   May you be our witness   our weeper
                                                                                     May you gather  and treasure  our souls

Underworld

V.

The Dream knows   you are weary                still stumbling   on difficult terrain
    This pilgrimage  in the shape of a prayer    has not yet revealed the  Temple of your Soul
        The Dream is a labyrinth   in motion            in the shape of a butterfly
            in the shape of a double-headed ax              it cuts through tumult  and you find yourself
                ascending a Rock   given a hand up            by kind people   who know   sorrow
            “This Rock”   they tell you                       “is our Sanctuary   without walls
           where all who love this land                call it Palestine  call it Israel  may gather to pray
        that the Rock will hold us   know us     help us face   the hard truth   of our history
    the hard truth   of our geography           the hard truth   of our kinship   in catastrophe
        We bring prayer rugs   and prayer shawls       We prostrate ourselves   we daven

We’ve come to hear    the Stone speak”

I am the voice    of the land you love

Hear O Israel    Hear O Palestine

I am your Mother

I say    “Enough Already!

Salaam is Sholom    Sholom is Salaam

Make Peace!”

Sacred Rock

The Muse of Deep River

The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of

Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow

by the Deep River Poets

Esse in anima (Live in the soul)

—C.G. Jung

Cover Art by Kent Butzine

The Muse of Deep River

Our way is the way of the poet, who knows that poems have lives of their own. Poems need us, their poets, to listen to them, see them, feel them, wrestle with them until their hidden natures emerge. In return they reflect us, revise us, refine us, play us like musical instruments; they shape shift our stories and light up dim corners of our souls. The craft of making a poem becomes a craft—a vessel—for knowing ourselves and our world.

from the Introduction

Those of us who are called to write poems often wrestle, especially in terrible times, with the question: What can poetry do? Poetry is a lightweight feather dipped in ink; it cannot put out a wildfire, stop a pandemic, stop police brutality or voter suppression, prevent an authoritarian coup or heal a furious fragmentation of the social contract. But it can, sometimes, shift consciousness, open doors and windows to a wider vision, a deeper wisdom expressed in compelling images which leap out of imagination or come as dream figures to initiate us into the realm of The Mysteries. The question of what poetry can do became a catalyst for change in the Deep River Poetry Circle—a workshop that meets monthly at the Jung Institute of San Francisco—when the 2016 election shocked us out of our comfortable faith in American democracy.

"Red Fishes" by Marianna Ochyra

Deep River has been meeting for over fifteen years. It emerged out of a mountain spring in my soul, when my Muse, better known as The Sister from Below, informed me that writing poetry was my spiritual practice. We write under the influence of great poets and have explored poetries from many cultures all over the world and all over America. But when the Spirit of Our Times took such a frightening turn in 2016 we realized we needed each other and poetry for support and it was essential that we ‘get political.’ We could no longer indulge the luxury of exploring for the sake of broadening cultural horizons. Poetry doesn’t boast a big bully pulpit in America. It speaks from the margins, from the depths of the river, from night terrors, about the state of our world. Making a poem is wrestling with the angel: it is shaping a vessel to hold what we fear. We understood that we need our poetry to address the attacks on our democracy by callous, greedy politicians, out for their own aggrandizement and immune to the suffering of ordinary people in a terrible pandemic. We needed language to tell the dreadful truth revealed by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many other Black and brown people at the hands of police, and by the growing consciousness of systemic and structural racism. We needed images to express the suffering caused by extreme weather events and wildfires in our own landscapes, the destruction of habitat and the decimation of species all over our earth.

So we studied the poetry of witness and of engagement, wrote under the influence of poets whose work flows between the political and the spiritual—James Baldwin, Carolyn Forché, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Judy Grahn, W.S. Merwin, Ada Limón. Our circle became a ritual space, in which great poets guided us into our own poetic expression. They showed us the ways of their soul and gave us permission to try new modes of writing. They helped create that space in which the conscious and the unconscious meet—Winnicott calls it “potential space;” Jung calls it “the transcendent function.” Deep River became a sacred river we wash ourselves in, as the Hindus do in Ganga Ma—Mother Ganges—to cleanse our souls and heal our broken hearts.

“Women Bathing” by Lionel Walden

When Covid hit we retreated to our individual homes, like cloistered contemplatives in the Dark Ages. Deep River met on Zoom. Surprisingly, the ritual of our meetings seemed to deepen, despite its virtual nature. We found ourselves writing “pandemic poems.” Someone suggested we make a collection of them. Someone else said, let’s make it broader, more inclusive of our writings. We wanted to speak to our Jungian community about what we were learning—that in bad times, the inner work of poetry is a way to tend the soul, to bring together the realms of spirit and the world. It is healing for the poet, healing for the reader; a practice which reminds us that there is a greater reality in which soul and polis, soul and nature, soul and word, mingle.

And so it was that we began gathering this harvest of our recent years together, Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow. We give it as a gift to the Jung Institute of San Francisco in celebration of its passage from a beloved old home to a transformative new home, and as an expression of deep gratitude to Extended Education, which has given Deep River support, visibility and a place to gather for so many years. We offer it as a manifestation of the Jungian belief in the creative arts as a way of healing psyche and culture. We offer it as a gift to you, dear reader. May it help you remember ‘what happened.’ May it help you find your way through The Valley of the Shadow and The Realm of the Dead, to The Tree of Life, The Living Symbol and The Way of the Soul.

A dream showed me a deeper meaning for this gift of Soul Making: In the dark, by the sea, there is a “Jungian Grave—” a white, glowing monument commemorating our dead. It is the only bright spot in this moonless, starless scene, providing a bit of light by which we see a gathering of living Jungians, sitting on logs on the beach. There is feeling of excitement and of awe. We are doing a ritual to honor our ancestors.

“Mid-Summer Night’s Dream” by William Blake

Soul Making follows the mythopoetic path of the soul’s progress from the realms of shadow and death to rebirth into embodied life through the magic of the symbolic process and the awakening of the Self. When I was editing this book I followed an intuitive structure, dividing the anthology into five sections separated by quotes from Jung’s Red Book. These epigraphs set the themes of the sections. But until the dream, I was in the dark about the collective ritual significance of the book’s arrangement as our community moves from our beautiful old home in the Presidio to a very different beautiful new home in the Mission. We are in the dark about how it will be. For many of us this move signifies an interest in engaging with our new neighborhood, as part of a growing feeling that our psychology needs to be more attuned to the outer world, though we are in the dark about how this might manifest. However, we carry a structure within us that I associate with the work of Joe Henderson—one of our founding analysts—an understanding of the initiatory path in which “to cross a threshold is to unite oneself with a new world” (The Wisdom of the Serpent p. 48)

What follows is a sketch of Soul Making, illuminated by quotes from some of the poems. Forgive me, dear reader and dear contributing poets, if I offer slight fragments from the work. Truth be told, we’re hoping you’ll buy the book, enjoy the poems, and the collection, whole.

* * * * *

Godville Game

The Valley of the Shadow

Section I

And so we had to taste hell… 

– C.G. Jung

Anita Cadena Sánchez opens our anthology with a short essay, “Why Poetry?” (p. 5) in which she writes that the 2016 election “revealed this country’s steady descent into the valley of its historically unrecognized shadow” and hopes her poems will “weave a medicine basket” (p. 5). Now there’s something poetry can do. Her first poem, “Will This Ever End,” (pp. 6–7) does it elegantly, naming our trauma, which is the beginning of healing. Here are the opening and ending lines. 

Without notice the White House grows whiter still
invisible swastikas slide off the frozen walls…

The president conflates
Black Lives Matter with hate

So I draw in breath to settle and center
Yes, I can breathe but I witness who can’t

Another black man dies
again                   and again                   and again


Kent Butzine’s poem, “In the Soup” (p. 8), places us in the messy, befuddled, ‘fine kettle of fish’ we know all too well from our recent past:

I am walking through soup
a thick heavy soup that slows
me down    makes it hard to see…

Don’t know if the soup is hot
or my soul is burning…

In a few short lines the poem takes us to the possibility of new life:

Don’t know if I’m ready to die
Or to live at last in aliveness

He brings together the opposites of death and life as they so often appear at the crossroads of our journeys.

* * * * *

Dante and Virgil in Hell by Crescenzio Onofri

The Realm of the Dead

Section II

Take pains to waken the dead… 

–C.G. Jung

In my short essay, opening this section, I argue that “we owe the dead our poems, and our awe.” This follows Jung’s idea that the dead need our attention so we can help them heal. Raluca Ioanid takes on this task for the living as well as the dead in her “Bucharest 1958 Sestina (p 46).” She gives us a powerful image of intergenerational trauma:

History churns inside the family of ghosts
we cannot forget,
unmoored by our
ancestral loss
unravelling backwards from a nightmare–dream
we search eternally for Anita and Paul, our disappeared parents…


In “Funeral Cot” Daniela Kantorová invites us into a surreal and frightening scene:

I’m rocking a funeral cot
The fire is burning…
I’m singing a lullaby
to the rhythm of bones
cracking in the fire
There is a baby in the funeral cot

What a grim image for our times, for the next generation, for the fate of humans, species and the earth. And yet, Kantorová, through the magic of her poem, finds a way out. The poem’s speaker invites the reader, or perhaps it is the Divine, to “Breath me/Breathe my dust” which would seem to breathe life and hope back into her and the poem.

* * * * *

"Tree of Zhiva" by Marianna Ochyra

The Tree of Life

Section III

I became a greening tree… 

–C.G. Jung

In her opening essay to this section Clare Marcus compares two Saturdays, one at an academic, highly rational workshop, the other, Deep River, where “the psyche was allowed its freedom to soar, explore, pour out its fantasies into the warm receptive ears of fellow poets (p. 59).”

In the drought ridden Sierra foothills Sheila deShields’ poem paints the miracle of an unexpected storm and how it transforms the lives of the “Nine crows in my backyard (pp. 66-67)” who “sway high on the row of towering trees” until the skies clear and they descend to enjoy:

The bounty
worms rise
above the soaked sable soil
while the crows
eat
and eat.


Earth is alive again, wet, full of worms, and the creatures feast on the pleasure of plenty.

* * * * *

“World Creation Music” by Marianna Ochyra

The Living Symbol

Section IV

The Symbol is the word…that rises out of the depths of the self… 

– C.G. Jung

In her essay, “A Way to Love” (p. 77), which opens this section, Connie Hills remarks that it is often an encounter which moves her deeply that sparks a poem’s beginning. She writes: “Poetry is a way back to love.” In her poem, “God of Garbage, (pp. 78-9)” a “tall muscular Jamaican” garbage man fills the poem with life and joy. His magic:


Remover of filth, ferment
Everything that is dying…

His smile, like heliotrope
in warm bloom…
I could have loved him.


Through this beautifully drawn character, we experience again, how death is transfigured by the living symbol of the man’s smile.

In my poem, “Ghazal of the Boy in My Dream,” the encounter is with a dream figure, a black boy, symbolic of the magic of poetry and dream:

After gumbo and jazz after rain on my head you befell me in a dream
Strange boy your spiraling hands your eyes ablaze cast a spell in my dream…

How long have you lived in my heart child    alphabet balm    for sorrow and ache?
You open the door to The Mysteries compel me to enter by way of the dream

The boy shows up in the context of New Orleans, a decade after Katrina. He turns out to be a psychopomp, who initiates the speaker into the mysteries—the magic of language. There are many dream poems in this collection, appropriate to our Jungian context. In “Healing the Wound” (pp. 89-90), Clare Marcus remembers a dream in which a black bird with white beak comes to heal the wound “brought by the surgeon’s knife”:

It is a coot
exploring the unconscious
to retrieve sustenance for life
diving the waters
of the Nile
algae and mollusks morphing
to messages of resurrection

What a succinct description of how dreams feed and nurture the damaged psyche and body with the riches of the collective unconscious.

* * * * *

"Pilgrimage to Shiva" by Janaka Stagnaro

The Way of the Soul

Section 5

I am weary my soul, my wandering has lasted too long… 

 –C.G. Jung

In his essay introducing this section, “How Poems Come and What They Bring” (pp. 97-99), Kent Butzine writes of the Muse, that she is “both a part of oneself and a part of the natural world, a part that is ‘wild’ and cannot be controlled.” He gives us a wonderful quote from Galway Kinnell: “There is no work on the poem that is not work on the poet.”

Virginia Chen’s poem, “Old Song” (p. 102), is a lyrical evocation of the experience of Self. The poem’s first line and refrain—borrowed from a poem by W.S. Merwin—shows the power of poetic influence on our work.

When I was me I remembered
The songs of the stars
Before I was born…

When I was me I remembered
I once was me

It is the work of poetry, as well as the work of Jungian analysis, to find our way back to the one we’ve forgotten we are. And as my dream shows—in the dark by the sea in a gathering of Jungians doing a ritual for our ancestors—we are not just individuals, we are a group with a lineage, finding our way back to our ancestral roots. And though the work of writing poetry is mostly solitary, a writing circle in which we read poets who help shape our work and become our common poetic lineage, a circle in which we share our poems and get feedback on them, can become a vessel for collective creativity even, or maybe especially, in dark times. Can an anthology created by such a group, become a crucible which can carry the spirit and soul of Deep River’s years in the Gough Street Institute library, to our new home in the Mission?

"Ancestors" by Marietjie Henning

The Muse of Inwardness

The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of

The Rabbi, the Goddess and Jung: Getting the Word from Within

by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

We’ve volunteered, ecstatically volunteered, to place these illuminated rectangles between ourselves and the world. How eagerly and expensively we buckled, surrendered the immediacy of experience, the tactile facts of our being, to a battery–operated autocrat. I ponder the spiritual helplessness, the puncture at the hub of us, that facilitated such a happy vassalage…The way…literary art responds is not by attempting to compete with it…Literary art responds by remaining steadfastly itself…, by honoring its responsibility to inwardness…—William Giraldi in Poets and Writers  Sept/Oct. 2016

The Rabbi, the Goddess and Jung, a book of essays written in tribute to the depths and the riches of Jungian Psychology—how it helps us get the “word from within”— enters the world at a time when most of us get the word from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, when the suck of all those e–mails demands our response before we write down that dream or take time to listen for the still small voice of the soul. As William Giraldi says, we are in thrall to our “illuminated rectangles.” I was moved to read his passionate defense of inwardness. I think it is not only literary art that needs to remain “steadfastly itself,” but Jungian Psychology, which does the subversive work of countering the dominant culture, honoring the “word from within” and the practice of tracking the dream. As Jung tells it in The Red Book, being a slave to “the spirit of the times” can annihilate the soul. A descent to the “the spirit of the depths” can release the spiral serpent of wisdom and creativity.

A powerful example of creativity in the service of inwardness can be seen in the paintings of Jane Zich. Her magical painting “Visionary 3” graces the cover of The Rabbi, and she tells me, just won First Place in an exhibit titled “Introspection” put on by the Marin Society of Artists. Apparently there are others who value such soul work.

The essays in The Rabbi seek to create a sanctuary for the soul, to demonstrate the ways in which cultivation of one's inner life creates sacred space. Admitting that this is not an easy practice in our hectic, fearful times, I seek to show how the word from within orients—whether it comes as gift or disturbance, guest or ghost, riddle or revelation. It may force a confrontation with one’s worst fears. It may visit in nightmare images, such as the enormous spider with hairy legs and eight baleful eyes that appeared in a dream, come to warn, it would seem, of the perils facing human nature and Mother Nature.

It is essential, especially in difficult times, to make space for what the Kabbalah calls “the beyond that lies within—” the still small voice of the Self, the long view of the wisdom traditions. In this collection of poetic, visionary essays, I tell stories of the Lady Tree who showed up when I was six, and has wandered in and out of my life, revealing her Goddess nature. Active imagination enables me to work out unfinished business with ancestors including my father and Jung. Dreams introduce me to my spirit guides, and to a dancing rabbi who insists I study Kabbalah. And that scary spider turns out to be Grandmother Spider, a creator goddess who has the power, if we recognize Her, to help us reweave our relationship with earth.

Here’s a foretaste of the book:

Introduction

Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you 
without your understanding their language.[1]

A long time ago, when I was a candidate at the San Francisco Jung Institute, I dreamt a large lion prowled the Jung Institute Library. He told me he loved me. He told me he would eat me. That’s a good summary of my story. For I have, indeed, been devoured by the fierce, wild energy of the living psyche as Jung understood it. Leo is my sun sign and my rising sign, astrologically. That lion is part of my nature.

It sounds painful to be eaten by a lion, to be torn apart by great teeth, to do time inside the dark gut of a predator. But what better description for how it feels when life forces you to surrender your conscious intent, throws you into the chaos of not knowing who you are or where you are going? Jungians—borrowing from alchemy—call this “the nigredo,”—the dark night of the soul. It happens in most people’s lives and in most long Jungian analyses. It has happened, many times over, in mine.

I have learned, as in the famous story Martin Buber tells about himself, that I didn’t have to account to God or my analyst for why I wasn’t Moses, or for that matter, Jung. I had to account for why I wasn’t Naomi. On the way to becoming myself, I came to see that though the library was my true habitat, I wasn’t a big idea person, a great thinker and theorist. It was my calling as a writer and as an analyst to bring ideas into the living flesh of personal experience in a poetic way.

It’s not enough to figure out your calling, your true nature. You have to know what time it is in your life. I was certified as a Jungian Analyst in my 50th year. An intense period of study and psychological work—of being digested by the lion of my own nature—had come to fruition. It was time to reclaim my writing life, which had been put aside while raising my family, developing a practice, and becoming a Jungian Analyst. So proclaimed my Muse, The Sister from Below.

Now, in my 70s, I am informed by the chorus of inner figures who bring me word from within, that it’s another kind of time in my life. Time to lie down with the lion and reflect on the journey; time to express my gratitude for the gifts of the Jungian Way—access to dreams and inner figures, access to the source of the word from within—my own wild and fierce creative spirit. It is harvest time—time to gather the fruits of my work and offer them as soul food to my community.

To that end, I have organized nine of my uncollected essays in this volume. As I’ve worked with these pieces—written over a period of fifteen years—I’ve been amused to see how the living symbols in my psyche have engaged and possessed me over the years. The Rabbi shows up early and shifts forms dramatically. So do the Goddess, the Lady Tree, and Jung. Words are magic, and getting the word from within is a spiritual practice, as are wild leaps into poetry.

Most of these essays were first published in Psychological Perspectives and the Jung Journal. One is a chapter in a book I co–edited with Patricia Damery, Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way. These are stories of my Jungian way, as an analysand, as an “apprentice to the alchemist”—Jung’s term for the process of terminating an analysis—as a dreamer, a tree and goddess worshipper, a conflicted Jew, a conflicted Jungian, a mystic and a poet. I offer them to you, dear reader, in the hope they will support your own practice of getting the word from within.

---

[1] C.G. Jung, The Red Book, p. 233.

The Muse of Getting Published

The little house on stilts remembers
Grandmother Fire and Flow
Grandmother Wet Lands
                   —N.R. Lowinsky
                   “Wetlands” in The Little House on Stilts

The Sister from Below

is delighted to announce the publication of

The Little House On Stilts Remembers,

by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

and Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems

by Lucille Lang Day

Co–winners of the Blue Light Poetry Award.

When the Muse Goes Public

So he published you showed up at your door
with a dervish swirl flung those litmags down
your first time words in print
did a tango ‘round the living room
                 —N.R. Lowinsky
                  “Fling” in The Faust Woman Poems

There’s nothing like getting published to get my muse singing. Understand, this is not the primal fragment of song that stirs a poem’s beginnings; it is not the private song of the poem seeking its tone, rhythm, words, vision. It is a sunlight song of completion, of being seen as a fellow creator by other creators, of being part of something greater than oneself, a journal, a press, an artistic identity—a song of belonging to the world.

Poems about Home find a Home

All the houses she’s loved and sold
remember her
call her by name
             —N.R. Lowinsky
              “Her Next Life” in The Little House on Stilts

My chapbook, The Little House On Stilts Remembers, began over a decade ago, in a time when my husband Dan and I downsized: sold our beloved but high maintenance home on a ridge, spent many months in an apartment before we found the right townhouse for our new lives. Poems about losing homes, finding new homes, grieving homes, worrying about our common home, the earth, gathered into a collection that wandered around poetry land looking for a publisher for a number of years, under different titles, changing shape, adding and deleting poems. The title poem began at our dear friends’ Lynn and Nate’s country home overlooking wetlands. That little house on stilts stirred my muse, filled me with images. The final iteration of the collection came into focus when it caught the attention of Diane Frank, the chief editor of Blue Light Press. She said she was interested in it but wanted me to go over it with a fine tooth comb and resubmit, which I did.

When The Little House On Stilts won the Blue Light Poetry Award I knew my chapbook had found a perfect home. I’ve admired Blue Light Press, and been drawn to its self–description as a press that publishes “poems that are visionary, imagistic, and push the edge,” a kind of poetry to which I aspire. As a home reflects the people who live in it—their taste, values, world–view—a press reflects the poets it publishes. To win the prize with Lucy Day, who was the first publisher to give my poetry books a home in her press—Scarlet Tanager Books—is still an amazement. I told this story in an earlier blog, The Muse of Synchronicity: Part I

A Transformation Mystery

She with her paintbrush
of shadow and light
You with your language of stones
             —N.R. Lowinsky
              “Many Houses Ago” in The Little House On Stilts
         
A book “comes out” of the inner dark, the impulse that began it—a phrase, a rhythm, a yearning, an image. Like a seed it needs time in the dark to take form. It may take months, even years to emerge out of musings and meanders, out of the handwritten and the typewritten, into the hands, hearts, eyes and souls of others who will engage with your creation—something new will be created. The long night’s journey into words becomes a thing, a touchable, visible, readable object. It will go off into the world and have a life of its own. Who knows who will read it? Who knows where it will fall into some unknown other’s inner life. Lucy and I were both delighted by the work of Blue Light’s book designer, Melanie Gendron, on our covers. She seemed to see what we envisioned, with more clarity and intensity than we had imagined possible. She and Diane Frank were the high priestesses of a transformation mystery.

Home is a complicated subject for refugees and exiles. The long central poem in The Little House On Stilts, which I see as the backbone of the collection, “Many Houses Ago” contemplates:

                   Those fabled houses from before I was born

                   home of my grandparents in the hills above Kassel

                   home of the poet Nelly Sachs on Lessingstrasse in Berlin

                   the crystal the silver fish knives the music room the library

                   the well–tempered Bach

Nellie Sachs was a visionary poet of the Shoah who fled the Nazis, as did my family. She and Paul Celan, another such poet, met through the transformation mystery of publication. He found her work in a French journal and they began a correspondence. Their story weaves through the poem which is both about the homes I’ve made with my husband Dan, and about my “other life,” in which some part of me is always a refugee.

I don’t know if my grandmother, the painter Emma Hoffman, knew of Nellie Sachs, who was born ten years after she was, in Berlin. For me they merged in Nellie’s phrase, “lioness of pain,” which describes an aspect of my grandmother that I knew well. In writing the poem these two powerful creative women merged to support what I think of as my own “refugee reality.”

Detail from my grandmother's self portrait

Refugee Realities in the Publishing World

Give me twig feather leaf bird
Give me word
that bursts
into flower
            —N.R. Lowinsky “A Life in Trees”
             in The Faust Woman Poems, p. 41

For many years I felt like a refugee in the publishing world. I had been lucky enough to get my first book, The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find Her Female Roots, published by a mainstream house, Tarcher, and then reissued as a paperback by Putnam. Naively I thought I’d have no trouble publishing my second prose book The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way. Not so. The publishing world had changed in the decade since; it was dominated by a few huge houses, and focused on potential best sellers. I also had changed, had become more of my rather weird, poetic, non–mainstream self, and had written a “visionary, imagistic” book that “pushed the edge” between inner and outer experience. It is essentially a book of “acts of imagination” —the Jungian practice of speaking to inner figures. The Sister and I trudged around the publishing world for seven lean years. I received many of the “good” kind of rejection letters, in which an editor or agent admired my writing, wished they could publish it, but was sure it wouldn’t sell well enough for the all powerful bottom line. 

During those years I was blessed to be part of the publication board of Psychological Perspectives, a journal published by the Los Angeles Jung Institute. I was and am poetry editor, and I frequently contribute poetic essays. In that circle of kindred souls I have felt appreciated, valued, and had the pleasure and reassurance of getting published. Robin Robertson, the General Editor of the journal, who has published many books, took it upon himself to tell me regularly that my publisher would come. I didn’t always believe him, until it happened. Through the good offices of my friend, Israeli analyst Erel Shalit, my book was recommended to a new Jungian press, Fisher King Press. They published The Sister, got me started on this blog named after her, and my writing life began flowering. The Motherline, which had been out of print for years, was reissued, and they were even open to my poetry, doing beautiful editions of two of my collections, adagio and lamentation, and The Faust Woman Poems.

I came to understand that the changes in the publishing landscape offer new opportunities for us non-mainstream, niche writers—small presses have sprung up and are nurturing a diversity of voices and visions in the writing and reading world.

During the bad years of desert wandering I often dreamt of getting published. The dream would show me the black and white of a published page with my work on it. When Fisher King became my Jungian home those dreams stopped. Creations are creatures, have lives and destinies. Mine long for the satisfaction of being held in published form. Now I take much pleasure in the hand span of my own books on my bookshelf, a full shelf of journals with my essays in them, not to mention several shelves of poetry journals that have published me.

Image from the back cover of current
Psychological Perspectives

And, speaking of getting published, The Sister from Below is pleased to announce a special issue of Psychological Perspectives, “The Environment: Inner and Outer.” I am proud to have an essay, “Earth Angel and the Tohu Bohu,” in this wonderful issue (V. 58, Issue 2/2015). I am one of a number of visionary writers trying to find a path through the Tohu Bohu—the chaos—of climate change, rising seas, species extinction; seeking to find a way that is at once new and ancient to be in better harmony with our only home, the earth. My friend and colleague Patricia Damery, wonders, in her beautiful paper: “Can we still experience the divinity in the natural world?” My friend and fellow board member, Gilda Franz, who introduces this issue, writes: “The unconscious is part of nature and can guide us to protect it.” I hope you’ll read this essential publication, available from Taylor & Francis.

The Little House on Stilts Remembers back cover - author photo by Nora Lowinsky