Joy Gaines-Friedler

"Now, I have returned to burn my diaries..." Poetry, all writing can be transformative, perhaps in the same way reading can. My second full length collection Dutiful Heart speaks to what transforms us including, joy & sorrow. It speaks to the way the heart remains true to itself in the most trying of circumstances (the mother's decline into dementia, a community seeing more of it's options in the military than in civilian jobs, the memory of, and like, the "bullet blast through a cardinal" of domestic violence....)These things are what my poetry speaks to. I've done readings all over the U.S. I teach workshops for well established writers and for communities "at risk". Because writing or reading a poem is a transformative thing I bring it to the work I do with young adults, victims of abuse and even parents of murdered children. To ask someone to write three things they saw today, things as seemingly benign as a shoe in the road is to ask people to look a bit closer at their world. By looking closer, paying attention to what we see, we pay attention to ourselves.