A Veritable Miracle

A veritable miracle has happened, if you believe in those. A spooky coincidence anyway. (It is close to Halloween after all; ghosts and gremlins can play tricks on us and sometimes they are good ones!). I was talking to a friend and fellow poet Lynn about my old writings, lamenting the loss of my first chapbook from 1975, Five Angels, inspired by a painting of five angels on the window of Bay Area folk music legend Faith Petric. I had visited her home with another great in the folk music world I was lucky enough to befriend when she moved to my town - Rosalie Sorrels, saw the angels and was inspired to write a five part poem about it.

That was seen somehow by other poet friends and ended up being a chapbook, very small, with a beautiful silver cover published by Five Trees Press, an all woman printing collective in San Francisco.

Over the years, my few copies of the book were given away or migrated off my bookshelves. Even the one I purchased from Denise Levertov's estate a few years back (I always wondered why she had my book, but I now see she was an author of Five Trees too. I thought maybe it was because we had known each other in Boston back in the day, but I digress).

So I googled Five Trees Press, which I have done before, in the futile hope of tracking someone down who might have copies of their works. Much to my surprise I came across a website of California Printers in the Fine Press Tradition 1975-2006.  Five Trees was listed and one of the founders, Kathy Walkup, was listed as teaching at Mills College, so I went to the Mills site and got her email.

Here is the spooky part. She immediately responded saying she had been about to track me down because Mills was having an exhibition of "ephemera" mostly from her presses and my book was a part of it!  And there is a reception on November 3rd, and she has a copy I can have. This is beyond exciting, and when I get my hands on that little book, I will try to scan it all and post it here.