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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

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)

2021

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