Women Who Love Us
A Room of Her Own Foundation is excited to announce our partnership with Hasandra Heyward. She will donate $5 per book for the first 50 books purchased through her website Poetry with Purpose. Hasandra has partnered with AROHO because she believes in the vision of our foundation and as a woman writer would like to support and bring opportunity to other women writers.

My Soul's Symphony
by Hasandra R. Heyward

"Poetry that frees the spirit, calms the emotions, and heals the heart."




"My poetry explores universal themes of forgiveness, love, friendship, the awakening of awe,
and the courage to live life authentically. The reader is invited to contemplate each piece
and its relevance of their lives."


Heyward is dedicated to giving back to the community through her writing. Her website Poetry with Purpose reveals the importance of using your work as a tool to helping those around you. Each of her writing projects is connected to a greater cause


Visit her website at http://www.poetrywithpurpose.com/home for more information about Hasandra and to purchase her book.

Poetry with Purpose		poetrywithpurpose.com
Announcing Hasandra Heyward's Book Signing and Website! Dear friends and family, I'm excited to announce my book signing and website (www.poetrywithpurpose.com). I hope to attract lots of visitors (and prospective customers), so I invite you to visit my site now to learn more about what I am doing with my gift of writing. Currently, I have over 500 visitors a month from places as far as Tokyo. What: Hasandra's Book Signing Where: Barnes and Noble, Cumberland Location Time: 2pm to 5pm If you are unable to come to the signing you can call Barnes and Noble and place an order for a book or go to my website and email me and I will sign a copy and mail to you. I hope to see you soon! Email me and let me know you visited the site. Best regards, Hasandra Heyward

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AROHO recommendations...
                            
Breena Clarke's Newest Book...STAND THE STORM

"I loved this book. I loved these people: The Coats family of Stand the Storm are quasi-free Negroes living in Georgetown just before, during and after the Civil War. Breena Clarke has written another stirring work of historical fiction that weaves the passionate, dramatic and uplifting story of the African American aspiration for true freedom into the great American tapestry. - Gail Buckley, Washington Post


Read what Breena has to say about her new book!

Visit Breena's website to buy STAND THE STORM and her first book River, Cross My Heart.

Praise for Breena's first book, River, Cross My Heart:

“After her Oprah-pick debut (River, Cross My Heart, 1999), an African-American novelist delivers a compassionate portrait of the terrors and hopes of slaves. With its slightly clipped period language, coolly measured tone and rich supply of telling detail, Breena Clarke’s second novel delves into a compelling social panorama of black servitude in Washington, D.C., as the Civil War begins. The story winds through the war (with Gabriel Coats fighting alongside the colored troops) to reach a sober conclusion that nevertheless heralds change. Clarke’s sensitivity and her lyrical, earthy narration bring a freshness to the somber subject matter.” -Kirkus

“Breena Clarke returns with a bittersweet slavery-era saga, partially set—like her smash 1999 Oprah-pick, River, Cross My Heart—in Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown. Clarke gets the details—emotional, political, domestic, religious—right across the board and crafts complex and appealing characters. Her knowledge of the period and the novel's dense, deliberate narrative create a poignant story about the intricacies of human bondage and its dissolution, built around a family's unshakable faith in one another.      -Publishers Weekly                

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When I had children, I still found time to be a mother and to write. With struggle. With hard work.  I even exercised then... Even dreamed.We started Red Hen Press in 1994.  We publish twenty titles a year, run three reading series in Los Angeles, three in New York, publish a literary journal, give awards,  build literary community. All this at the expense of our own family, lives, relationships. And of course at the expense of the writing. Is it worth it?  Of course not.  Writing is worth something.  Children,love, being alive. Running a press?  Building literary community?  It's good... but it isn't everything.  Because you have to go it alone or with one person helping. Because everyone wants something from you.  Because creative work is like entering a river.  And building a press is like entering a desert and trying to build a fountain there.  It is a lonely business.So why did I do it?  I am on the boards of writing organizations, the Managing Editor of Red Hen Press---instead of spending that time writing.I wish I could say that it is all good, that I am glad I do it.  But that is not quite true.  I wish  I could just run the press and write.  But as Dana Gioia loves to say, my family didn't give me the inheritance I so richly deserved.  I have to teach and there isn't enough of me to live this many lives.  So I haven't really answered your question.  I wish I could write, run the press, teach and have a family life, a love life, but I haven't been able to figure how to do it all... I wish.  When the press receives an endowment...Here's hoping.

 

-Kate Gale

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Regina's Closet: Finding My Grandmother's Secret Journal
by Diana Raab

My book, Regina's Closet: Finding My Grandmother's Secret Journal was nominated for the 2008 National Indie Excellence Award for memoir and was also a finalist in the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year award.

For more information visit http://www.dianaraab.com

Diana M. Raab, RN, MFA, is a memoirist and poet who teaches writing at the UCLA Writers Program, and the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Writer, Rosebud, Palo Alto Review and Red River Review. She has two poetry collections, her latest is Dear Anais: My Life in Poems for You (Plain View Press, Sept 2008). Her memoir, Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal was the recipient of the 2008 National Indie Award for Excellence in Memoir. Her book, Writers and Their Notebooks is due out in Spring 2009.

MY GRANDMOTHER’S JOURNAL

At the age of ten years I found my grandmother dead in her room next to mine. On that sunny summer morning I knocked on her door to ask permission to swim in a friend’s pool. I called her name, but she lay in her bed beside the window, remaining perfectly still. On her stomach sat an opened Graham Greene book and a pair of eyeglasses. I touched her face and it was stone cold. With a child’s intuition, I sensed something was seriously wrong. I ran out of the room to phone my mother at work.

Within minutes, emergency vehicles lined our once quiet residential street. All I remember is two uniformed men carrying my grandmother down the creaky wooden stairs strapped to a stretcher. I prayed they wouldn’t drop her.

There wasn’t much talk about my grandmother until about twenty years later when my parents were getting reading to move from that childhood house in Queens, New York. While packing, they stumbled across her retrospective journal which she’d written after emigrating from Vienna in the early 1930s. Only after reading that document did I really understand the deep roots of her depression, which tormented her entire life, and eventually led to her demise at the age of sixty-one.

I tucked the journal away and pulled it out ten years later after being diagnosed with breast cancer. I wondered if she’d committed suicide because of a cancer diagnosis which she’d kept to herself. I hoped her written words could provide an explanation for my own health problems, but they didn’t. However, the details of her tragic life once again drew me close to her. Her powerful words sharing her being orphaned during World War I, just pulled me in. She witnessed the Russians hack up little boys in the street and soldiers march through her town.

I realized how I’d never connected with another woman in the same way. She was an extension of me. Those ten years she’d care for me, planted the seed for my writing, because not only was she devoted to the written word by daily journaling and propensity for leaving notes on the kitchen table, but she had also taught me how to type. I remember the day as if it were yesterday.

Her black Remington typewriter was perched on the vanity in her room. Each morning, I knocked on her door for a morning kiss. She then took my hand and we’d walk down to the kitchen for breakfast. One morning when I was about six years old, instead of immediately heading downstairs, she invited me into her room.

“Have a seat,” she said,” pointing me to her vanity chair.

“I’m going to teach you how to type. This is a handy skill for a girl to have, plus you never know what kind of stories you’ll have to tell one day.”

She stood behind me with her image glowing in the mirror. She took my right hand and positioned it on the second row of keys from the bottom, carefully placing one finger on each letter, repeating the same gesture with my left hand.

“This is the position your fingers should be in. When you become a good typist, you won’t have to even look at the letters while you’re typing. Okay, dear, let’s see if we can type your name.”

With my left middle finger she had me press on the “D.” Then we moved to the right middle finger and moved up a row to type an “I.” Then my pinky pressed the “A” and then something really tricky had to happen, I had to move my right thumb down to the bottom row to type an “N.” Then my left pinky typed an “A.” After each letter I glanced up at the paper to see the impression of my efforts. After reaching the last “A” in my name, I proudly looked up at my grandmother’s face in the mirror.

“You see, you did it!” she said, squeezing my shoulders.

“Like anything in life, the more you practice, the better you’ll become. You must work hard to get results; you’ll learn that soon enough, my love.”

This seemingly innocent gesture on her part instilled my own lifelong commitment to the written word. As a young girl, I wrote stories, but as a young adult, I worked my way through college typing term papers for students.

Finding the journal was my impetus in writing write my recent memoir Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal. The project which began as my graduate thesis made me me realize the strong connection I had with my grandmother. It also made me realize how depression is a precurrsor to suicide and the intrinsic value of writing and how important it is for one generation to pass on their stories to the next generation. As a result, I have become a journaling advocate to those in my community and beyond.

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