W R I T E R ’ S S H AC K
Poets Paula Erickson and Lucile Burt are very good at making the ordinary extraordinary. They enchant us with mud, a tailpipe, a speck of seed. How? By rendering them beautifully but also by proclaiming them sacred, joined to what we love, cornerstones in the architecture of our lives. Poems like the ones on these pages—ringing with elements of prayer, and blessing, and faith—are a form of worship, elevating the elemental to the sublime, and making us grateful to be where we are. — LAUREN WOLK
PAULA ERICKSON is a performance artist, naturalist, activist, and poet. She founded the Fleet Fund to address urgent financial needs for residents of Wellfleet, where she has lived for some two decades and change. When she’s not gathering mulch or composing flower bouquets, she might be found paddling, or clamming, or collaborating to form the Lily House, a social model community home for living and dying.
LUCILE BURT is a retired high school English and creative writing teacher currently living in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in various small press journals and in the anthology Teaching with Fire. Her chapbook Neither Created Nor Destroyed won the 2012 Philbrick Poetry Prize from the Providence Athenaeum. Her latest book, The Cone of Uncertainty, was published in 2018 by Kelsey Books. The rural landscape of her childhood in upstate New York and the narrow arc of outer Cape Cod are the landscapes of her inspiration. The work of writing poetry, with its careful attention to sound and rhythm, is a kind of meditation that helps her see connections that might otherwise go unnoticed.
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