June 14 • Speaker Series • “Approaching Grief” with Alice Derry
Date: Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Time: 7:00 p.m. EST
Location: Virtual (Zoom)
Cost: A donation is required to attend this event. Please select either $10, $5, or $1 donation based on your financial capabilities. If a donation is a hardship right now, please reach out to us at info@friendsofroethke.org.
About the event:
Alice Derry will present from her new book of poems, Asking (Moonpath Press 2022) and her essay “The Most Precious Fit”— A Dialogue with C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, ” which appeared in Widow’s Words: Women Write on the Experience of Grief, The First Year, the Long Haul, and Everything in Between, edited by Nan Bauer-Maglin and published in 2019 by Rutgers University Press. Derry’s poems, written over several years after her husband died, ask the many questions of being, as she navigates acute grief and the life forward. As sources for her essay, Derry drew on the journal she kept at the time of her husband’s death and on C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed. This slim volume gave her unexpected comfort during the first years of her grief as she found that Lewis’ path matched her own.
In these years of national grief, as COVID-19 has stolen so many from us, Derry’s particular experience may provide comfort and healing to many.
Tess Gallagher, Roethke student and scholar, has written of the poems:
“Asking is what our entire country is doing—asking how to bear up under the loss of so many, these absences of our dearly beloveds. These poems answer by more than memory—by joining the beloved to the present in a way that makes asking itself an answer. An exceptional mind is at work here, lyrically, and with suppositional insistence, making a framework in poetry to approach and re-approach the death and the love—its successes and daily quandaries, its deep companioning—this is what really makes this book sing.”
– Tess Gallagher, author of Is, Is Not
About Alice Derry:
Derry is the author of six volumes of poetry, most recently Asking (Moonpath 2022), along with three chapbooks, including translations of poems by Rainer Rilke. She taught for 30 years at Peninsula College where she curated the Foothills Poetry Series, holding some 12-15 readings per year. Since retirement, she has been active in helping local tribal members access poetry and has taught community workshops in poetry. She has printed the first in a series of essays on native plants, Around the Salish Sea, collaborating with artist Fred Sharpe. Raymond Carver chose her first poetry manuscript, Stages of Twilight, for the King County Arts Prize in Seattle. Strangers to their Courage was a finalist for the Washington Book Award. In July 2022 she was faculty at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. She lives and works on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Her website is www.alicederry.com.
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