Joanne Allred is the author of four poetry collections: Whetstone, which won the Flume Press Chapbook Competition, Particulate, Bear Star Press, and The Evolutionary Purpose of Heartbreak, Turning Point Press, and Outside Paradise, Word Poetry Press. She was born and grew up in Utah, but has spent most her adult life in California, where she taught for many years in the English Department at California State University, Chico. Her poems have appeared in many publications including Women’s Review of Books, Prairie Schooner and Quarterly West. With her husband and dog and a lush companionship of wildlife, she lived many in Butte Creek Canyon outside Chico, whose landscape often serves as backdrop and subject for her poems. Her home here burned to the ground in November 2018 in the “Camp Fire.” Outside Paradise chronicles the experience of losing most everything in the fire and beginning again.
Ode to Ella
Because it was a Holiday Rambler Savoy—the 34 foot
And two slide-outs new-to-us trailer—we
Christened her Ella after Fitzgerald, who became famous
Kicking up her heels singing "Stomping at the Savoy.”
Her charms were compact and a bit worn but we were
Overjoyed, my husband and I, to inhabit our own space after
Months of crowding our good-hearted daughter.
Except for no septic capacity and swaying when we walked, she was near perfect.
Admittedly, she became an icebox when it froze outside, and hot as a flapjack
Griddle in summer. She leaked a little in aggressive downpours.
Aztec-patterned throw rugs, a nubby white cover for the
Inexcusably ugly sofa, morning sun streaming through the open door—
Not a dream house but cozy and sweet. A kind of coming home.
As the song titles—each containing the word home —that shape these acrostic poems suggest, Joanne Allred’s OUTSIDE PARADISE is at heart a meditation on home. Having lost her canyon dwelling to a wildfire, the so-called Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise, California, the speaker in these poems finds herself exiled from the life she had been living. How one’s sense of self is entwined with place, possessions, and known pathways, becomes a central inquiry. Is home finally a place or a state of being? As the title’s allusion to the lost biblical Paradise implies, being thrust suddenly outside one’s established life, dispossessed, unveils a difficult human truth: in our separateness from source “we all hunger for some gone primal home.” And so we sift ashes of memory and myth—as the poems in this collection do—trying to recover a sense of continuity, belonging, and trust that a “path that madly ricochets over scorched ground” could lead to wholeness.
Sarah Pape teaches English and works as the Managing Editor of Watershed Review at Chico State. She is the Co-Director of the Northern California Writing Project. Her poetry and prose appeared in The New York Times, New England Review, Passages North, Ecotone, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Forgive the Animal, was published by Cornerstone Press (2024). She curates community literary programming at the 1078 Gallery and is a member of the Community of Writers. Check out her website for more: www.sarahpape.com.
Kin
Believe me, we erupt from split roads
and waterways, from truck hitch
and rivet. Born under the upturned. Borrowed
from blackberries, bush-warm.
The earliest places scooped from placental
chicken shit, ghosts in the dust-riled hose spray.
I thought you might be home. Built from fish
scales and plucked dart boards, margarine,
National Geographic spines. Might’ve broke
your dollars for penny candy in brown paper,
rotisserie chicken and pickled pig’s feet.
Did you know the mud-skirted boards,
cracked heels, and softened blacktop?
Were you there snapping geranium stalks,
turning green thorns into scissors? Before
all of this, I had a daddy in corduroys,
hung over his arm, river-caught.
I circled like river sediment, shallow
in the pan till gold shone through. Maybe you
were born at the bottom of something too.
(Originally published by JMWW in May 2022.)
Upcoming Events |
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2025 | |
3.8 | Shawn Pittard and David Koehn |
4.12 | A Celebration of Bill Knott (group reading) The Naomi Poems in conjunction wth Black Ocean Books |
5.10 | |
6.14 | |
PAST EVENTS
2025
February 8 Joanna Allred and Sarah Pape
January 11 Lee Rossi and Nick Minges
2024
November 5 Joshua McKinney and Susan Kelly-DeWitt
October 19 Dave Boles and Chris Olander
September 14 Jamil Jan Kochai and Torsa Ghosal
August 17 Alice Templeton and Christina Lloyd
August 10 VOICES 2024 Reading D. R. Wagner Memorial Issue
June 8 Sally Ashton and Cami DuMay
May 11 Rick Robbins and William O' Daly
April 13 Luisa Giulianetti and Terri Dawn Kent with Frank Gioia
March 16 Danny Romero and Nancy Aidé Gonzalez St. Clair
February 24 Frank Gioia and Beverly Parayno
January 13 Dan Rounds and Richard Lopez
February 24 Frank Gioia and Beverly Parayno
March 16 Danny Romero and Nancy Gonzalez St. Clair
2023
December 16 Matthew Cooperman and Aby Kaupang
December 9 Molly Fisk and Tricia Caspers
November 11 Paul Aponte and JoAnn Anglin
October 14 Gail Entrekin and Stewart Florsheim
Septermber 30 Camille Norton and Stella Beratlis
September 9 Mary Mackey and Joshua McKinney
August 12 Judie Rae and Ensemble
July 22 D.R. Wagner and Dave Boles
June 10 Terry Ehret, John Johnson and Susan Cohen
May 20 Lois P. Jones and William O' Daly
April 29 Elizabeth Robinson, Randy Prunty and Alexandra Mattraw
April 22 Tim Kahl and Eugene Berson
March 25 Alice Pettway and Lara Gularte
March 11 Bill Gainer and Todd Boyd
February 11 Rooja Mohassessy and Tamer Mostafa
January 14 Brad Buchanan and Gary Kruse
2022
December 10 Jeff Knorr and Jeanine Stevens
November 12 Linda Jackson Collins and Kim Kralowec
October 29 Yuyutsu Sharma, Katy Brown and Allegra Silberstein
October 15 S'more Poetry & Song at The California Railroad Museum
October 8 Lara Gularte and Dianna Henning
September 10 Linda Scheller and Gary Thomas
August 12 Emmanuel Sigauke and Aeisha Jones
July 21 Paco Marquez
July 9 Catherine French and Lisa Dominguez Abraham
June 11 Stan Zumbiel and Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
June 5 Poetry Picnic in McKinley Park
May 14 Jon Davis and Greg Glazner
April 27 Doug Rice, Jamil Jan Kochai, Tristan Beach
April 9, 2022 Zia Torabi and Bob Stanley
March 26, 2022 Susan Kelly-DeWitt and Albert Garcia
Mar 17, 2022 Bin Ramke (a Discussion with Joshua McKinney)
Dec. 4, 2021 Four for the Quarter: O' Daly, Halebsky, Straight Out Scribes
Sept. 25, 2021 Four for the Quarter: McKinney, Knorr, Levine, Gourdine
July 24, 2021 Evan MyQuest and Lelania Fowler
July 10, 2021 Sue Daly and Lara Gularte
June 26, 2021 Bill Pieper and Julie Woodside
June 19, 2021 D. R. Wagner reads from DISTANT LIGHTS in Sacramento
June 12, 2021 Jeff Ewing book release for Wind Apples
May 27, 2021 Lucille Lang Day Literary Lectures: Native American Poetry: Traditional and Contemporary Visions and Themes
May 13, 2021 Jennifer Sweeney [Literary Lectures] To Remain in Perhaps: A Deeper Look at the Lyric Poem
May 7, 2021 Natasha Sajé and Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
April 24, 2021 D.R. Wagner Live in Locke book release reading for DISTANT LIGHTS
April 22, 2021 Literary Lectures with Maxine Chernoff
April 16, 2021 Jennifer and Chad Sweeney
February 25, 2021 Steve Cirrone: Shakespeare as Science Fiction
February 11, 2021 Bob Stanley: The Poetry of Carolyn Forché
January 28, 2021 Karma Waltonen speaks about Margaret Atwood
January 14, 2021 Frank Stanford: A Talk by John Amen, Greg Brownderville, & John Erwin
2020
November 31, 2020 MALDEF Reading