Blog o’ Gnosis

When I was in college back in Santa Cruz in the 1980s, there was a women’s poetry collective known as Moonjuice that held poetry readings and self-published their own poetry anthologies. That is how I became acquainted with the wonderful Maude Meehan, whose book of poems Chipping Bone I loved. When I was looking for Ellen Bass’s poem Then Call It Swimming to post here last year, I found it in one of the Moonjuice anthologies still on my shelves.

A couple years later, the Kensington Ladies’ Erotica Society came out with their first book of erotic short stories. Around that same time, the Women’s Songbook Project in Berkeley published the anthology Out Loud: A Collection of New Songs By Women. If I tried to recall all the grassroots women’s publishing projects I have come across from that era to this, I could go on for pages. In fact, just a couple weeks ago a friend sent me an announcement for a new anthology of women writers she’d been published in.