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We release the assumption that there is only one destination for distinguished arts and letters to paint a new world where our room is the waves
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Dear Sister Artist, Writer, Reader,
Our December edition of WAVES presents the final section of Waves: A Confluence of Women’s Voices anthology. This transcribed Q&A between the luminous Maxine Hong Kingston and the women of the 2015 AROHO Retreat marked the end of what we called the Waves Discussion Series and the launching of a boundless call and response into the virtual ocean of WAVES.
Whether you are a contributor to the anthology, or to the digital WAVES editions that have followed, an appreciative reader and submitter, or any or all of these, we are grateful for your presence to receive this monumental work. Its waves have only just begun.
Early in 2024, please look forward to a series of invitations to commune with the anthology’s hundreds of resonant voices and partake in a journey to co-create and evolve WAVES beyond our initial imagination, amplifying its form and impact in the real world.
Until then, we, the sister artists and writers of AROHO, wish you the happiest of holidays and a boldly creative New Year.
Darlene Chandler Bassett, Tracey Cravens-Gras, Saranya Francis, Karina Puente, and Bernadette Smyth
“Air in the Waves” by Anonymous
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The process of story and art and poetry is magical. You can take the terrible things of this life and transform them into beauty and art and truth … You write down any of your terrible feelings, your anger, your hurt, you rant and rave, write down what’s ugly, and write down contradictions, and you name names too. And then you write down what’s shameful, what’s illegal, you put it all in there and don’t hold back … and as you write along, understanding starts to happen. Also, you write from points of view. So your worst enemy, the people you hate, the ones you’re angry at, you write from their point of view, too. And so you understand everything. And then, by the end of the book, there is understanding and compassion. And there’s realization, there’s revelation, there’s recognition, there’s resolution, all of that happens in the magical shape and form of a poem and a story.
“Waves Returning: A Q&A with Maxine Hong Kingston” from Waves: A Confluence of Women’s Voices
“Olive Branch” by Rosalinda Ruiz Scarfuto
The image depicted here is a fusion of contrasts; the softness of lace juxtaposed with the roughness of an olive branch … Together these elements form a bridge across the canvas unbroken in strength and elegance, much like women who have worked side by side in the olive groves over time … I offer here my olive branch … to rub out the roughness in the world with its soothing oil, especially today in times of unrest.
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There it is. The space and time
Between you and the adopted daughter
had undone like tired stitches,
All pull warped, in doing so, released.
If Newton and Einstein were alive
You’d like to think they join forces
to study this, come up with a new theory.
One in which swallows can pull
lives out of a silent abyss,
Catch them in a net, and toss them
skyward, together, toward the dawn
“Newton’s First Law of Gravity” by Elizabeth Cohen
“Journey Inward” by Rebecca Scheckman
In sum this work is about: Spiritual understanding of the self in the world and connected to everything. Finding a connection to the light within the body that is in everything, that is all things.
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What have you created when your hands were full?
What have you created when your heart was full?
