Virtual Open Mic — Recap

On May 15, adapting to the covid-19 pandemic, WNBA-NYC held its first virtual open mic. Readers were from our NYC chapter, but members of all chapters were able to attend, providing the benefit of a greater audience. The event was moderated by Harriet Shenkman and Marilyn Berkman, whose poetry appears together in the Spring/Summer issue of the Comstock Review.

Linda Rosen

The first reading was from the debut novel The Disharmony of Silence by Linda Rosen, WNBA National Recording Secretary. Black Rose Writing released the book earlier this year in March. Going through her deceased mother’s house, a daughter is shocked to discover the Victorian lady in the painting over the fireplace has the same cameo as her mother.

When I was a young girl I used to confide in her […] as I would a […] grandma […] So who was this woman?

Linda Rosen, The Disharmony of Silence

Jacquie Herz

Jacquie Herz’s manuscript Circumference of Silence won, among other awards, the Judges’ Favorite in the 2018 Ink & Insights Novel Excerpt Contest. In the manuscript, a mother reaches out to the daughter she left at eight through letters.

You might wonder…why I couldn’t have just sat you down to talk, to
explain myself.… Only, that whenever we sit face to face, the right words escape me, they evaporate into the thickness of the air between us.

Jacquie Herz, Circumference of Silence

Harriet Shenkman

The poetry of Harriet Shenkman, WNBA-NYC University Liaison, has appeared in national and international journals. She read three poems, including “African Market” and “Modigliani Exhibit” from The Present Abandoned, her second chapbook published by Finishing Line Press,
laced with poignancy:

I’d give a fortune for a finch that soars
into the sky clutching my despair
when I see you raise your arm
to slap yourself as if you were a naughty child.

Marilyn Berkman

Marilyn (M. D.) Berkman is the WNBA’s Second Representative to the UN. She read four poems, including “Rockaway Rip,” from the Spring/Summer edition of the Comstock Review, and “Digestion” and “Memory Becomes Bearable,” respectively from the Spring and Fall issues of The Journal of Undiscovered Poets. An excerpt from “Rockaway Rip” commenting on relationships:

Any crumb and he will scream
to all of his dominion!
Get up and swim away.
Better to be ripped by the sea
than pinned by a selfish lover.

Leah DeCesare

Leah DeCesare, a TEDx speaker, won a NIEA and other awards for her coming-of-age novel Forks, Knives, and Spoons, published by SparkPress. DeCesare read a scene set in the El Ascenso café in Havana, Cuba, where the protagonist went reluctantly with friends, but then “sent them out…back up the sharp steps…and I stayed and pulsed and soared in the safety of the music.”

J.L. Regen

Self-published under the name J. L. Regen, photojournalist/suspense writer Joan Ramirez’s Secret Desires was inspired by a real-life romance of lovers overcoming odds. In it, twenty-three-year-old Margo inherits a condominium and much-needed money, but the inheritance is contingent on having a teaching job.

The secret desires she’d locked away in the hope chest of her heart would have to wait a bit longer to be set free.

J.L. Regen, Secret Desires

Sheila Lewis

Sheila Lewis, WNBA-NYC Co-Recording Secretary, teaches meditation and writing at the JCC (Manhattan) and privately. She read from a memoir-in-progress, aunts lowercase. In it, elegant psychotherapist “Sarah moved about like a hummingbird, but her words stung more than they hummed….‘You were never taught how to butter your toast,’ she’d say.… She ate forbidden foods on her bagels…until the day she died. She always had the last word.”

Want more virtual events? Check out the last WNBA-NYC event of this season: Authors Publishing in the Pandemic, starting at 7 PM tonight, June 23rd!