Welcome to The Book Canopy: Read, Enjoy, Discuss.
Do you love to kick off your shoes, lean against a tree, and crack open a good book? Well then — Kick off those shoes, find some shade, and join authors and readers under The Book Canopy for a monthly virtual discussion about literature and life. Check below to discover our current selection, upcoming meeting details, and how to buy this month’s book.
April Selection
Jane Schulman
Where Blue is Blue
Zoom discussion with the author on
Sunday, April 11, at 2:00pm EST. Sign up HERE.
Join author Jane Schulman for an online discussion of Where Blue is Blue, her poetry collection that celebrates all kinds of love – romantic, spiritual, for children and and those who are disabled, for nature and the city. The poems express wonder in everyday moments and at times of special challenges. You’ll find poems about outboard motors, lost iPhones, and seagulls along with a neighbor losing her eyesight, a child whose hearing is going, and a lover’s cancer diagnosis.
The heart of Where Blue Is Blue is a woman who cares for two dying parents and is forced to reevaluate her relations with them, with herself, her children, her husband, her work, and her faith. The poems of Where Blue Is Blue speak with truth and authenticity. We at The Book Canopy are grateful for the opportunity to visit Jane’s unique mind and heart in these unguarded, quiet poems where blue is blue.
April’s discussion will feature Jane in conversation with friend, poet, teacher, and cultural activist Esther Cohen.
Register Here.
Be part of April 11’s discussion of Where Blue is Blue.
Jane Schulman
I wrote poetry as a teenager but lost it along my way to study politics and philosophy, paint, marry, raise children, work as a speech pathologist. But I always wrote – always driven to make sense of our crazy, blessed world. One morning, on a beach in Lavallette, pen and paper in hand, I had a flash. No more journals. Keep writing but shape the words into poems.
When I came home that evening, I found in the mail a flyer about a writing class at Barnard College called “Translating Silences” and joined right away. I’ve not stopped writing since – primarily on my own but also in classes, workshops like Bread Loaf and The Frost Place, retreats, and informal groups. A high, high point was travelling to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico in 2009 for the first of many women’s writing retreats with AROHO – A Room Of Her Own, where I met Esther Cohen and Mary Johnson and so many creative, inspiring writers who still keep me buoyed with their passion for reading and writing.
And I persevered and wrote and revised and reorganized and wrote more and now published my book, Where Blue Is Blue, with the terrific small press, Main Street Rag. In the book, I explore themes of love, death, disability, and wonder in the everyday. Poems have appeared in Mezzo Cammin, Sixfold, The Lake and many others. I was born in Brooklyn and live in Jamaica, Queens and am the mother of four sons and six grandkids. A seeker and finder of voices, I also work as a speech pathologist in a Brooklyn public school with children with autism and learning challenges. I look forward to talking with you and with Esther Cohen on April 11. In the meantime, find me at janeschulman.com.
Esther Cohen
A while ago my then agent, still my friend but agent no longer, asked if I would go with her to Ghost Ranch, to A Room of Her Own. She was invited as guest agent. Maybe I could somehow teach. She paid for my ticket. When we arrived, I who belong in big cities, New York in particular, fell wildly in love with the non-city that is Ghost Ranch. Even the ersatz coffee seemed amazing. (My then agent didn’t like it much. She left the next day.)
That’s where I met women who will be my reading and writing friends forever. One of those women was the poet Jane Schulman. We continued to see one another in New York on occasion. She’d come to visit, or we would sometimes meet at a kosher vegetarian Indian restaurant in the West 90’s and talk and talk and talk about every single thing. Much of our conversation involved her very beautiful poems. I’m so happy that they exist for us all in this collection.
…Esther Cohen reads, writes, teaches, and is a cultural activist. She writes a poem most days on overheardec.substack.com.
Join us.
Be part of April 11’s discussion of Where Blue is Blue.
Want a signed, personalized copy?
Jane will sign and mail you a personalized copy of Where Blue is Blue for just $15, including shipping if you purchase it here. We also recommend obtaining a copy from Kew & Willow Books in Kew Gardens, Queens, or directly from the publisher.
A taste of what’s to come….
Jane, you’ve published a remarkable book of poetry, your first book, at age 70. What’s that about? I think it’s about life. I wrote poetry in my teen years and wrote prose since then but didn’t start writing poetry seriously until the age of 50. At that point, I began writing every day, reading widely from the Psalms to Rumi to Wordsworth to Whitman to Sharon Olds. I took in-person and online classes, joined writing groups and week-long workshops, studied poetic forms, apprenticed with experienced writers -- all to master the craft while digging deeper into mind and soul to grapple with death, illness, love, disability, and the many challenges and joys we face in our crazy, blessed world. So, twenty years to write a first book. Is that too long? Or is it just what it needed to be while living parallel lives of love, community, and service?
Jane, you’re a very social person with many responsibilities. First, there’s your immediate family: four sons and their spouses and six grandchildren. Then, extended family, close friends, full-time work, communal commitments to your synagogue and groups you’re passionate about like the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom. Writing poetry requires a lot of alone time. How did you keep writing with so many demands on your time and energy? Yes, my life is packed with responsibilities. But with all that, I’m really an introvert and need daily solitude to maintain my equilibrium. Writing for me has always been a refuge, a place to plunge into what I believe and feel and think. I need to sit in quiet and struggle to make sense of the blessings and challenges of this life.
How does your work as a speech pathologist inform your writing? I work in a public school in Brooklyn with young children with severe speech and language delays due to autism, cerebral palsy, and cognitive and medical challenges. I teach them to shape thoughts into words, sounds into syllables, words into phrases, sentences into stories. Some children use pictures or manual signs to voice their thoughts and feelings, say what they need and want, and interact with people in their lives. These children fill me with wonder and delight and inspire me to tell aspects of their stories. In Where Blue Is Blue, you’ll find a poem about a child learning to hear again, a child with a head injury, another who learns to trust people in his world, and a story about a child stepping off the bus Monday morning to come into school, to the place he said is “where blue is blue.”
Releasing a book in 2020 comes with special challenges. How did you manage such a successful release? Where Blue Is Blue was accepted for publication in October of 2019. I’d sent the manuscript to many contests and publishers for months and collected a long list of “declines.” Then one day I had an acceptance and the next day, a second acceptance. I’m so glad I moved forward with my publisher, Main Street Rag, which kept the publishing process moving – pandemic or no pandemic. In March 2020, they requested photos and a bio. By April, they needed blurbs. By May and June, final edits and building a website. During the darkness of the pandemic, what a joyful distraction to be bringing the book into the world step by step by step! By the summer, I was sending out emails, Facebook postings, and texts to market Advance Copies. Of course, since the book was finally published in October 2020, it’s not been possible to do bookstore, university, and other live readings, but we’ve had a number of Zoom readings and more are planned for the Spring.
Do people need to read your book before the April 11 event? It’s not necessary to read the book before the event. You’ll get to hear a number of poems read, hear the background of some, and stories about what triggered the writing. After the reading, you might want to get a copy to have on your bedside table to read on your own. Here are three poems to whet your appetite.
NEW SOUNDS
Robbie rolled his bulldozer back
and forth across the carpet.
Making no sounds.
He didn’t turn when the doorbell rang,
the parakeet sang, or when his Dad
and I called his name.
By two months old, he wore hearing aids
on grape-sized ears. We didn’t mind.
He was with us, laughing
and aping our silly faces, growls,
and woofs. Then the right ear went.
He knew. We knew.
He got bigger, more powerful aids.
And he was back. Squealing.
Babbling.
One Monday, the left ear, “the good ear,”
went bad. He yanked out the hearing aid
and yelled Ear, Ear.
With little hearing left to lose, we took
a chance on cochlear implants
and prayed and prayed.
* * * *
Now - when an airplane flies
overhead, Robbie looks up,
sometimes confused,
mapping new sounds
to the silver flash his eyes
already know.
When we walk to Prospect Park,
he doesn’t know where
to turn first,
starlings splashing in puddles,
bells on the ice cream truck, cries
of a boy who flipped off the monkey bars.
As night falls, we skip home,
slowing to count evening stars
and mimic the gravelly hoots
of owls roosting high
in the Norway spruce
that ring the park.
UNDERCOVER
Tongue clicks. Wolf whistles. Hoots.
A Chevy pickup slows. Out the window,
a guy yells, “Hey babe! Lookin’ good!”
Jogs at dawn felt like target shoots.
Today a Buick approaches.
Heart speeds as the car slows and passes.
I forgot the cloak of invisibility
drapes my shoulders now I’m sixty.
Age spots freckle my hands and arms.
Children I teach love to run
their fingers along veins on the backs
of my hands. Topography of long life.
In the bathroom mirror, lines
criss-cross below my eyes and tiny cracks
parade above my lips. This face
no longer matches who I am.
Every cell is different but how far
do I stray from the “who”
I was at ten? twenty? forty?
At dusk, I’m jogging again.
A Mustang turns the corner.
Slows. Passes by.
Wrapped in my new cloak,
I’ve eased into this latest splendid someone.
A winging monarch butterfly
in a meadow of milkweed.
Beauty unnoted.
THIRSTY ROOTS
We buried my father on a rise
under a jack pine where steam rose
from the fresh-dug grave, colliding
with January air.
My sons unloaded the casket
from the back of a pickup and walked it
to the open grave, a Star of David
carved on the coffin lid.
For years my father railed against
synagogues, Zionism, all kinds
of God talk - evangelical
in his atheism.
But in the end, when I asked
one last time if I could bury him
when he died, he shrugged and said
if it means so much to you.
It did. It does. As his last gift,
he let me bury him a Jew.
Now the Star of David rests
above his chest as thirsty roots
of the jack pine mingle
with heartache and nettle.
Register Here.
Join us for April 11’s discussion of Where Blue is Blue.