Salt and Paper: 65 Candles - Softcover

Moon, Janell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0981953425 ISBN 13: 9780981953427

Publisher: RAW ArT PRESS, 2010

Synopsis

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. SALT AND PAPER is a daily reflection that is immediate and an accumulation of life experience in poetry and prose fragments placing a heartfelt, yet realistic light on difficult subjects as the author speaks of aging: a friend's slow demise with Alzheimer's; the lifelong effect of a brother's mental illness; the present, lived aging process; the interlacing of four generations--and, the creative, writing life that responds with compassion, humor, art.

About this title

About the Author:

Janell Moon is the author of five spiritual nonfiction books: SALT AND PAPER: 65 CANDLES (RAW ArT PRESS), Stirring the Waters: Writing to Find Your Spirit (Tuttle), The Wise Earth Speaks (RedWheelWeiser), The Prayer Box and How to Pray Without Being Religious (Elements, HarperCollinsUK). She is also the author of two books of poetry: Riding Free in a Blue Studebaker (Main Street Rag) and THE MOUTH OF HOME (Arctos). She has won many national poetry contests including The Salt Hill Prize by Syracuse University. Moon is a graduate of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and has a private practice as a counselor and hypnotherapist in San Francisco. In 2010 she was named first poet laureate of Emeryville, California.

Review:

A paean to natural cycles, Janell Moon s Salt and Paper: 65 Candles explores her sixty-fifth year as a young-old woman. Stretching the boundaries of genre, she uses the year s linear structure to make leaps in language, experience and image that liberate the reader from her own preconceptions about age and narrative. In this book of days, we find the writer remarkably fresh as she wonders and wanders her San Francisco Bay home with contemplation, frankness, wisdom and always curiosity. Interweaving personal narrative, poem fragment, grocery list, dreamscape, Moon approaches her hybrid-prose with an inclusiveness and fluidity, listening for the story and the spaces in between. As she lives through the questions of her later years (What s beyond the clock that measures?, When did I get big enough to hold all this life?), age seems more a function of a life close to newness, and Moon s way continually invites a wide field of discovery, a stranger even to herself, finding everything of value, where ghosts coincide with new beginnings. Dialoguing daily with the shore s natural environment and the vibrancy of a city, the creative life grounds and renews the woman, her writing a way, as she says, to plant her feet at the mouth of home. Salt and Paper: 65 Candles is an invaluable book for both its content and its craft, bearing witness to the aging process and the writing process and not being afraid to re-envision them. --Jennifer K. Sweeney

Language is a rope of glass delicate and dangerous... and Janell Moon weaves this rope poetically, imagistically to touch extraordinary depth of being. Designed by calendar days, this is a reflective journey into our shared challenges of aging, grandkids, the loss of friends and reconciling our families of origin. Her indomitable spirit comes through with each turn of the page. Lauren Artress --Lauren Artress

About this edition

• Publisher: RAW ArT PRESS
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0981953425
• ISBN 13: 9780981953427
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192