Diverse Voices To Be Heard at Coffee Shop Poetry Reading

By TERESA WINCHESTER
MORRIS

On Sunday, February 18, from 1-3 p.m., the Gatehouse Coffee Shop at 129 Main Street, Morris will offer its first reading of original works by area poets, featuring Julene Waffle, Vicki Whicker and Lisa Wujnovich. The format of the reading will be “call and response,” during which each poet will read a selection of her poetry prompted by a poem just read by a fellow poet.

Waffle, Whicker, and Wujnovich come from different backgrounds and write in distinct voices. Their common thread is their participation in “Seeing Things,” a workshop offered by Bright Hill Literary Center in Treadwell since 2017. The workshop is directed by Robert Bensen, who also directed writing programs at Hartwick College for nearly 40 years.

Bensen had high praise for the three poets.

“Julene, Vicki, and Lisa make poems of great inventiveness, rich emotion, and enticing musicality—all sharing the imagery of rural upstate life, its seasons, creatures, and landscapes. Their poems are distinct and distinguished in portraying the strength and resilience of womanhood,” Bensen stated via e-mail.

Born on Long Island, Waffle grew up in Andes. The natural features of this Catskill Mountain town provided inspiration for her poetic sensibilities.

“I don’t think I could live without trees,” Waffle said.

Waffle, who now lives in Morris, will read poems from her 2020 chapbook, “So I Will Remember.” Her poems reflect her love of nature and family, her interest in current events, and her general observations on life.

“I can remember a lot of things, but not everything. That’s why I wanted to record certain aspects of my life, and I want my kids to remember, too,” Waffle said of her chapbook’s title.

Waffle did not begin to write poetry seriously until she participated in “Seeing Things.”

“Poetry grew on me as I grew and as I spent more time with it,” she said, adding that she approaches her craft by asking herself, ‘What does that remind me of?’ I like figurative language, going from regular, everyday language and finding a way to say it better,” she said.

Waffle has participated in numerous online poetry readings and has also read at Bright Hill Literary Center; nevertheless, she feels this reading will be a bit different for her.

“I’ll be reading to people I know, teach, and am related to. This makes me a little nervous” she said.

Waffle teaches English at Morris Central School and, with her husband, Jeffrey, and her mother-in-law, Mona Waffle, she co-owns Colonial Ridge Golf Course in Laurens. She has three sons, the eldest of whom is a first-year student at Hartwick College. She has taught poetry workshops online through several literary organizations and hopes to give a poetry workshop this summer at the Gatehouse.

Vicki Whicker left Los Angeles in 2011, where she had worked as a footwear designer for high-end companies such as LA Gear and Skechers for 26 years. Her destination was northern Otsego County and an 1820s farmhouse, purchased sight-unseen in response to a Facebook post asking, “Who wants to buy my neighbor’s house?”

While her farmhouse was under renovation, Whicker lived off-grid at a KOA campground. This experience led to two of her artistic endeavors—“iphoneography” and the “Dunga Brook Diaries.” Her iPhone enabled her to take pictures and edit them using one device with two apps.

“I started taking photographs because I fell in love with how beautiful this place is,” Whicker said.

“My photos are like magical realism. Using the phone is like using a viewfinder. It’s the essence I try to capture. I pull out light, shadow and color. It’s not straight-forward. It’s more like poetry,” she said.

Her photos have appeared in both solo and group shows and have been featured in “Orion,” a quarterly magazine which addresses environmental and social issues and has published such distinguished writers as Wendell Barry, Bill McKibben, and E.O. Wilson.

The “Dunga Brook Diaries” record her experiences at her farmhouse and are accessible at dunga_brook@instagram.com.

Whicker’s writings have been published in numerous anthologies. Nevertheless, she does not consider herself “a natural writer.”

“I studied and worked at it,” she said.

In Los Angeles, she took classes from Jack Grapes, who patterns his teaching approach in part on Konstantin Stanislavsky’s famed acting techniques, encouraging people to find their inner voice by working from the inside out.

Whicker’s work and study have garnered impressive results. She was recently named a winner in the “Writing for Writers” contest for a non-fiction piece titled “Snake River Saloon, Ski-Stoned, Colorado, 1982.” The contest, hosted by multi-award-winning writer Pam Houston, solicited pieces of 200 words or fewer.

In Los Angeles, she enjoyed participation in the Los Angeles Writers and Poets Collective, and so she was happy to come upon the “Seeing Things” workshop and fellowship with other writers at Bright Hill Literary Center.

Lisa Wujnovich is a poet, performance artist, farmer, and herbalist living on a small organic vegetable farm in Hancock. Over a 30-year period she has mentored many farming interns there.

“I’m looking forward to reading and riffing with Vicki and Julene. I love speaking poetry with them,” she said.

Wujnovich has two published chapbooks, “Fieldwork” and “This Place Called Us.” Her poems have also appeared in numerous anthologies.

Wujnovich did not start out as a poet, having taken her bachelor’s degree in drama from Antioch College (Yellow Springs, Ohio).

“I started working on a memoir about a friend who died and it came out as a poem. Then, I started writing more and more poems. Poetry suits my lifestyle. My poetry is deeply rooted in my own experience. It is tied to the land. It takes this land to ground me,” Wujnovich said.

Her poems in 2023 were largely driven by a house fire that dislodged her and her husband from the hay loft of the former dairy barn they lived in.

“All I could write was haiku for a while,” Wujnovich said.

Haiku is a Japanese form for three-line poems traditionally evoking images of the natural world.
Prominent book artist Roni Gross, whose works appear in the collections of The Library of Congress, Harvard, and Yale, selected one of Wujnovich’s poems, “I Knew How to Be Helpful,” for a limited-edition letterpress book.

“The poem is the story of when I was a young girl in a dangerous predicament with a predator and how my voice saved my life. It’s important for women’s voices to be heard,” Wujnovich said.

The letterpress book was recently shown at the prestigious CODEX International Biennial Artists’ Book Fair and Symposium in Oakland, California.