Celebrating Women As You Never
Imagined!

Deeper Into the Pond
A Celebration of Femininity
 

Co-authored by award-winning poets
Magdalena Ball
and
Carolyn Howard-Johnson

A Military Writers Society of America
Winner of the Bronze
Bronze Global E-Book Award 2013

Deeper Into the Pond is an e-chapbook and paperback published in the time-honored tradition of poets everywhere. That is, it self-published  by the poets. That makes it as new, in its way, as it is traditional.

You'll love hearing Magdalena Ball
 read "Jupiter's Moons"
from Deeper Into the Pond here:

Jupiter’s Moons.

And see her new trailer of one of my favorite poems
from Deeper Into the Pond.

Paperback and e-copies may be ordered from Amazon:
 

• For a review of  Carolyn's chapbook of poetry that traces her life.

• To purchase Tracings at Amazon.

• Carolyn's first person essay, "Beating Time at Its Own Game."

About the Authors

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. Her short stories, editorials, poetry, reviews and articles have appeared in a wide number of printed anthologies and journals, and have won local and international awards for poetry (including the Roland Robinson literary  award), and fiction. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel Sleep Before Evening, a nonfiction book The Art of Assessment: How to Review Anything and two other poetry chapbooks Quark Soup, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Cherished Pulse and the other books in the Celebration Series.  She runs a monthly radio program podcast  www.blogtalkradio.com/compulsivereader

Carolyn Howard-Johnson's first novel, This is the Place, and Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered are both award-winners. Her fiction, nonfiction and poems appear in national magazines, anthologies and review journals. She speaks on culture, tolerance, writing and promotion and has appeared on TV and hundreds of radio stations nationwide. She is an instructor for UCLA Extension's Writers' Program and has shared her expertise at venues like San Diego State's world renowned Writers' Conference, Dayton University's Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop and SPAN's (Small Publishers Association of North America) annual conference. Carolyn  was recently awarded Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment by the California Legislature; her home town's Character and Ethics Commission honored her for her work on promoting tolerance and the Pasadena Weekly named her to their list of "San Gabriel Valley women who make life happen" for literary activism. Her nitty-gritty how-to book, The Frugal Book Promoter won USA Book News' Best Professional Book 2004 and her chapbook of poetry, Tracings, was honored by the Military Writers' Society of America  for excellence. Published by Finishing Line Press it is available on Amazon 's new and used feature. 

About the Cover Artist

Jacquie
Schmall

Fourteen business cards predate the 1990’s when Jacquie turned her attention to all things theater, and film. Alphabetically through 1994, her jobs/projects, read like this: deep tissue massage, ghost writer, hypnotherapy, medical research, newspaper writer/editor, real estate agent, sales (retail, wholesale), secretary, and travel agent. Subsequently, she added, actor, art director, assistant casting director, model, producer, set decorator, and set designer.

In her spare time, Jacquie occasionally painted, and developed a style she calls “rainbow geometry.” After spending time in theater productions, and on film sets, she was compelled to paint a series of watercolors reflecting the powerful energy of women in the process of co-creation. The painting on the cover is one of them.

Jacquie says life’s highway has lots of off ramps, so why not try more than a few, really enjoy the ride, and take time to enjoy the scenery by the side of the road.

Jacquie lives in San Diego. She holds a B.A. in Zoology from the University of Connecticut, and an M. S.in Microbiology from Long Island University.

Jacquie's colorful work was chosen from among many others in a contest conducted by the poets for the most suitable artwork.

Reviews for Deeper Into the Pond

Reviewed by J. R. McRae

 This is a rich tapestry of a celebration.

 It opens with Carolyn’s verse and a ballad of marine exotica and moves to the name bearing poem “Narcissus Revisited” which mirrors the suffocation of ‘progress’ that gives  freedoms with one hand and takes with the other.  Here the deadly oil slick wall kills as readily as any of glass – progressive killing -

 Those who feel 
new freedoms like I, some later-borns 
unaware that they are new, accept
the yellow-bright shimmer 
spread across the surface 
as if it were our doing 
or our due.

 The next poem makes a nod to John Masefield’s “ Sea Fever” but taking it in role reversal  with ship at dock and the poet manning the great swooping cranes that  unload.

 I want to go down to the sea at dawn 
with a lunch bucket and thermos, 
[and then]. . .  pull 
and push the big gear shifts to make a boom
tall as a building turn, swing down toward carloads 
of gravel, clamp chunks of whatever freighters 

 I love the bittersweet of “Ariel” and its death-defying reach in to the unknowable.

 You need 
the music to tell your story, 
to find it, to understand it
to know the truth,
to reach above the 
ocean's surface
where 
others 
live.

 Death is horribly present in the all too revelatory “what I once would have called a little tiff”. Those of us who have lived long enough know too well of what she speaks…

 i learned 
to call a spat a spat, 
an inheritance something
more than money,
an argument, 
a fight-to-the-death.

 Magdalena’s opening poem both celebrates and denounces the hippy freedom of a generation that chose to ‘love’ but not their children well.

 secretly leaning in for more
parenting I didn’t get
punishment I 
deserved
no rod spared
here
no spoiling.

 “Time Out” speaks of the guilt trip that is motherhood if you are, as many creatives are, a perfectionist and time your merciless master .

 I shoot a response
what now?
two bullets of frustration land in 
her timeless lap
as she slips off.

 Magdalena has  written a powerfully poignant tribute to all those  frightened elderly flood victims, trapped in rising waters and psychologically unable to leave their lives behind –

 You pretend 
three hundred netfriends
hold your virtual hand
take you places
that don’t involve
leaving 
home
the perpetual womb
shroud
you’ve pushed into. 

 Magdalena’s  “Coming Back ends the collection with an almost whispered reverie on love and loss in a no man’s land of guilt and recriminations –

 No one dared point a finger.
We tried not to look at her but it was hard.
So we looked out of the corner of our eye when
we walked past, our heads thrown back fake
laughter all the while drawn towards the silence
of that pain the peripheral gravity that wouldn’t
let us settle into our evening of forgetting.

This collection offers the feminine take on life, love and everything in between and does it with élan!

~ J.R.McRae’s short stories appear in anthologies such as Basics of Life [ALR Anthology], 100 Stories for Queensland, Stories for Sendai, Road Trip, The Spirit of Poe, Tribute to the Stars, Pot Luck, and more, as well as journals Wired Ruby and Rose &Thorn. Her poetry/haiku have won awards and are published in numerous journals and anthologies including Quadrant, Long and Winding Road, Antipodes and Divan. Artwork / photography by JR features on covers of Ripples, on ABC Pool and in issues of The Mozzie. As J.R.Poulter, she has 12 books for children and education published, including major award winner, “Mending Lucille”. She once worked in a circus!

Sample Poems
from
Deeper Into the Pond

 Ariel

Memory's two voices,
the you-girl
suffering the moment
and the you-now
who interprets.
You promise yourself
you won't fear the secrets,
won't tell what happened
without the feelings.
You deny yourself that
and you become Ursula
stealing your own song,
leaving yourself gurgling
under the sea. You need
the music to tell your story,
to find it, to understand it
to know the truth,
to reach above the
ocean's surface
where
others
live.

          Carolyn Howard-Johnson (c)

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