well i'm so pleased that we're able to do this here i want to thank town hall and all of the people who have put this together ashley sheldon katie sewell any number other people who have been working with us and our events quarter co ordinators tonight and we're honored to be here because as you know this is in the wake of the current administration's first one hundred days and it's one day after international workers day may first which originally honored a strike and kind of violent strike called the haymarket affair which was agitating  demonstrating for better working conditions for laborers in the one nine hundred century eventually it became known as may day and it's been it is an international holiday i mean most countries in the world honor may day as the you know that's the main labor day and but it kind of fell out of favor in this country because we were very strongly anti communist so we had to have a different labor day but in the wake of this twenty three two thousand and eight great recession which is still ongoing for a number of workers and former home homeowners the loss of full time living wage jobs to automation outsourcing offshoring and the shrinking of unions and the disappearing of union jobs and the growth of what we now call the gig economy right may day is once again becoming a key date so we were really glad to be able to present here in in town hall one day later and now thinking back to the earlier administration's first number of days in a this on the twenty ninth of january two thousand and nine ten days into his first term president obama signed the lilly ledbetter fair pay act this was his first legislative act after taking off office we were i was i was intrigued by this because i don't know if you know anything about the story of lilly ledbetter i'll tell you just briefly she was this is her picture on the cover by the way of the book she's looking very in very much campaign mode but what she was doing for twenty years was working for goodyear tire and rubber one of their plants in northern alabama she was what they called an area manager not one of the guys working in the you know in the factory making the tires but she was she was the only woman working in as a night manager one of the very few women working in that factory just about the time she was getting ready to retire someone anonymously slipped her some documents that showed the pay of other area managers all of whom were male some of whom were younger than she whom she had hired and trained and they were all getting paid somewhere anywhere between twenty and forty percent more than she was she of course was you know shocked and angered by that and so she filed a complaint with the equal employment opportunity commission the case went to trial she won the case what winning several million dollars of back pay and damages because you know of course if you're paid less you get less social security and she was looking ahead at her and her her social security benefits that would begin you know soon in any case she won the case and she thought she would get this money but goodyear which had very deep pockets partly because of all the money they withheld from  her they say they appealed and she lost in the appellate court on a technicality then it went to the supreme court and the same thing happened a five to four decision the case the technicality the same technicality as in the appellate court was that she should have filed her complaint within one hundred eighty days of the first unequal pay check well how do you do know that how do you do that when you don't know what other people are being being paid because to discuss your pay and compare notes was a firing offen so you know she was she was just out of luck and but with a five four decision justice ruth bader ginsburg wrote the dissenting opinion and she read it from the bench which is highly unusual for her and she said basically this is now back in the legislators court so believe it or not the house and the senate both managed to create this bill called the lilly ledbetter fair pay act which was passed just before president obama took office and then he signed it amazing they got something done you know working together so we were very interested when we heard about this and we put together this anthology we wanted to hear more about what women women in the work space which we don't hear a great deal about i hadn't i hadn't heard that much poetry by women about their work experience and so we were really interested in bringing together voices of women poets in the workspaces they occupy and we were very fortunate also to have the enthusiastic endorsement of lilly ledbetter herself who provided a statement that prefaces the anthology so you'll have a chance to look at that later and now that we have a new a new administration in power with a lot of concern for the rights of everybody not just women worker protections and democracy itself i think that the issues that we are confronting in this anthology are even more urgent and as you know also april fourth was what's called equal pay day which is when the day by which in the following year that's the day that marks the day in which on average women have to work in order to earn what men on average have earned within the twelve months of the previous year so it's taken women on average until you know a month ago to earn what men on average earned in two thousand and sixteen so that was another event that we are marking right now so what i think i'd like to do at this point is invite my fellow readers to come down and  take your seats and one of our one of our readers could not make it tonight she was ill that was examined or so i'll give a brief introduction to her and we're going to read her poem together are our readers tonight will be reading katia alexander's poem and the other the other participants readers are laura day yana harris and holly hughes who all each one of them has a poem in the anthology and all introduce each of them individually as they come up but what we're going to do i think now is i'll tell you  a alexander is a seattle poet she is a writer actor playwright and teaching artist who has been recognized by youth arts awards as well as a city artist award from the office of arts and culture of the city of seattle she's been a writer in residence at hedge book which is an amazing feat these days you know hedge book is over on would be island she is a playwright she has written black to my roots african american tales from the head in the heart that was presented at the edinburgh fringe festival and she has been the literary director for the brown box theater which is an african american theater company here in seattle and so she's written a great deal in theater and she also performs her work at a starbucks the starbucks in madison park once a month and i hope to get over there at some point and hear her tell stories and and perform so she's a member of the african american writers alliance and seattle storytellers guild so what we're going to do is read her poem sort of as a as a choral piece we're all going to take turns reading it so i'm going to pick up the is this mike working is that all very good all right come over worker who spent much of her life from very young working in the fields including picking cotton so this is a poem in the voice of non  picking cotton working her day in the fields she wake up in the darkness the darkest hour of the day just before the lord come and roll the nighttime away she the color of night her skin stretched tight across her face and the veins on her hands tell the whole story of her life protect herself from the scorching heat a sign that she knows coming she biscuits and molasses for her first meal and she gets the bins and cornbread and the ten that she carry out to the fields for her lunch pretty soon she know the cotton picking truck that's going to be coming is running late this morning so she now she to harry it's already after three o'clock  usually ready by now she has her hands on her back she's just yourself out she's going to be bent over all day long or needs is already creak work is the only thing that she done never no did she think god she can work for as long as she is able to go to work when she three to help put food on the table that's when she first start chopping c or mama made her a little ho and she done worked ever since about was a long time ago she put her stockings on until they are not her knees then she put on her  over at the heels she go sit out on the porch and wait for the cotton truck to comb in the scars she looked for the first thing of the first of the son of the son but the sun is still sleeping and got no new to come up  and nothing out this early but colored folks and the white folks who carry them to work the sun come up when it please she ain't never in her life then wake up with such ease as the sun rises in the morning she think about that song bet say that lucky old son that ain't got nothing to do cept roam around heaven all day going in and out the rose that song seem to carry her  through the day even when her back is breaking when the strap digging in the cotton sack she hauling is weighing more than she do she always picks more than eight hundred pounds she a little bit a woman no bigger than a ten year old child she flies through the rose which is longer than a mile her hands flying through the bowls sweat bawling in her eyes she wiped the sweat off her brow with the kerchief round her neck she picked her first hundred pounds before the sun even up by this time the sun hangs straight up in the sky she be near five hundred pounds and so tired she almost cry some folks try to trick the scales put her rocks in they sack she proud that she always do honest and our next reader is going to be laura day who is right next to me there she is an unrolled member of the eastern the shawnee tribe of oklahoma and a lifelong resident of the pacific northwest her mother was a carpenter who broke barriers as the first journey woman carpenter in seattle after world war two after many women had left the war effort jobs and returned to the home front right laura studied creative writing at the university of washington and at the institute of american indian arts in santa fe it's a great place and her chapbook that tecumseh motel appeared in effig to buy salt press and her first book which is here on the table for sale is tributaries from the university of arizona press twenty fifteen and she teaches public school  bellevue and lives near seattle with her husband and son so please welcome laura  thanks for coming out tonight it's true my mom was actually the first journey woman carpenter in seattle and she was working in the one nine hundred seventy s so there was a long period during world war two when there are a lot of women who are working and what was then called sort of nontraditional fields but after that was very very hard to break into those industries and i'm very proud that my mom was one of the first ones and i think that that sort of kind of wonderful example lead me into my profession which is teaching middle school although there are many women who are doing wonderful work it still requires great courage and dedication and you have to be able to face the day in unpredictable ways as well so i'm  students inspired i've actually been teaching sixth seventh and eighth graders for the last thirteen years and grammar is as many of us remember not really a fan favorite so it's really really hard to teach kids that age why we care about language and how it's used and one day a couple of years ago i was trying to teach students to understand the difference between passive voice and active voice and why we want to care about that now really a teacher's primary job in this day and age is to encourage critical thinking so when i had one of my loudest and most boisterous say why does this matter and why should we care that's exactly what you want as a teacher and he really inspired me to think about why does this matter and why should we care now at the same time i was doing a lot of research into language and how it's used in the u s government's conversations apologies and written documentation in its encounters with the sovereign indigenous nations of this country so i thought about passive voice and i thought i'd give my poem this particular title a passive voice i use a trick to teach students how to avoid passive voice circled over imagine inserting by zombies after each one have the words been claimed by the flesh hungry undead if so passive voice i wonder if these sixth graders will recollect on summer vacation as they stretch their legs on the way home from yellowstone or yosemite and the by ways historical marker beckons them to the site of an indian village where trouble was brewing where after further hostilities the army was directed to enter where the village was raised after the skirmish occurred where most were women and children riveted bramble of passive verbs and would strip hands breaking from the dry ground to pinch the meat of their young red tongues so well the next thing that i want to do before i begin to i'm going to read a couple of other poems that i really admired but i was kind of thinking about the great privilege and also challenge of reading other poems that you admire it reminds me of holding somebody else's baby you really want to i always do but you also get a little bit frightened you don't want to drop the baby you want to make the baby smile and laugh and that reminded me i did meet my husband in santa fe and my husband is so i have had a really wonderful opportunity to learn about his tribal nation i'm shani so that's   home a tribal nation so we come from these very distinct cultural groups with a lot of different traditions now in the southwest there's this really beautiful tradition where the first person to make a baby laugh it's this honored position so if you make a baby laugh for the first time you play this really significant role in their life however you also pay for this huge just i'm really honored to be able to read a few of these poems that i admire so deeply in the sand ology and hopefully you know we can make the baby laugh and not drop the baby so the first poem that i'd like to read i thought it had such fantastic and beautiful arresting images and such a deep and immediate sensation within the body this is diana garcia's cotton rose cotton blankets sprawled on the back of a flatbed truck we cradled hose our minds partially in rows of cotton to be chopped down by noon don struck in the air blackbirds rang in the willow ahead a horse trailer stretched across the road braced by youth and legs of summer breeze we didn't give a damn we'd be late we joked stalled by a pregnant mare draped in sheets later backs to the sun bandanas tied to shade our braless hands laced with tiny cuts later on the labor contractor worked us through lunch without water our dried tongues curse that mare and cotton blankets brought to full in the outlines of summer and finally i'd like to read jennifer clements william herschel's sister caroline discovers eight comets in the fahrenheit of my poles i feel their dust tails hear them rustle in my fringe sleeves shaped like a class rip stitched i have found the new lights on cloud white evenings i draw fish hooks draw the eye shank gap throat bend bar point and polish the telescope rest my eyes wait whatever the sky gives me i will take thank you laura that is a wonderful story wonderful bit of lore about making the baby laugh and paying for the party i love that i love that thank you for sharing that and for your own poem and the two other poems by diana garcia and by jennifer clement our next participant reader is going to be yana harris who is originally born in san francisco but raised here in the pacific northwest and she worked for six years as the director of the writers in performance at the manhattan theatre club in new york which is when i believe i first knew of you i think i had i wrote you a letter you know i typed it on the typewriter a manual typewriter and i sent it to you all those decades ago it was amazing but now you wanna lives with her husband in the cascades in the foothills where they raise horses and trains and  studies competes in equestrian dress saw which is like horse belly it's really beautiful she is the author of several collections of poetry and also books of pros her poetry includes manhattan as a second language and the dust of everyday life an epic poem of the pacific northwest which concerns a lot of forgotten women pioneers here in this part of the country her new book which we have here out on the table is you haven't asked about my wedding or what i wore poems of courtship on the american frontier and that's from university of alaska press yana is also the founder and editor of switched on gutenberg which is one of the first and long standing online in poetry journals in the english speaking world and she also teache poetry online for the university of washington so please welcome yana harris thank you so i've been reading fronter women's diaries reminiscences levers for about thirty years because i live on a farm i was always looking for inspiration but really leapt out at may is that the concerns of in the nineteenth century were very much still our concerns today number one they were concerned with equal work for equal pay but even before about they were just concerned with getting paid  often you know they they were not ever encouraged to work away from home but if they did and if they had to their wages were not given to them they were given to their husband because what with they do with money you know  concern was child care or if they ever had to leave that was there was no child care so the debate wasn't should you tie up your kid in the barn it was how to tie up your ok you know do you talk to the wagon wheel do past sins and if you're really desperate you did both you tied them up and put them in the barn and then the third concern was as we are today about addiction mainly at this time in the nineteenth century alcohol and opium you know they didn't have a lot of money but anybody could make alcohol fermented anything opium was was a little harder to make so it wasn't quite as rampant today so i want to read some of the poems boy in the voice of helen hodgson she was born in the eight hundred sixty she came across trails of western migration and settled first near pilot rock and then married someone who had a newspaper ran a limpia and the first very short poem she's thinking about her mother's fork her mother an eighteen and fifty seven  emigrated migrated from kentucky to ohio i often think of mother's wedding a kentucky girl fifteen clearing land burning willows w mixing seed in sand before sowing how to harvest tobacco leaves the largest children polled in hong up side down dried cured stitched into hands a late spring brought late floods hail ruined what crop remained fleeing to ohio her people surprised to find land so wide and empty without church or store and here she is all grown up and olympia eight hundred ninety new house meant i must take in piece work for our temperance newsletter the echo one because i'm the one of the few who knows short and transcribe elections speeches using the juice of oregon grape as saying tedious work but buys the junk perfume of truly sweet pansy faces and dog tooth phylis on the shade side of our cottage where my babies eloi and sarah sleep in dry goods boxes safe from flies and here's the baby sarah all grown up her actual or her given name was temperance she lives now in spokane falls husband howard and its one thousand ton husband how gone all day to the bank golfing on weekends i used to caddy for father but wives aren't allowed in high school i wanted to nurse but father feared the naked bodies of men would spoil me for marriage at the university i took a normal degree and taught near a dying silver mine wild cattle ran out of bunch grass hills through sea of mud streets to the river night hawk city not one painted building some scholars came to school hungry and without lunch pails one girl never wore shoes or coat and cough so loudly i couldn't shout over her another couldn't see the slate no matter how large the chalk letters i took my scholars down to the creek and cook fudge every day for a week accused of stealing sugar i was fired sent home to a limp where i set newspaper type after too many proofreading errors mother said i was so keen with numbers i ought to keep the books making bank deposits i met my husband so one of the characters in this epic poem or fictitious but all the events are real and when i first read of a woman a young teacher in nighthawk which is in northern but because it was destined for a illegal still run by one of the school board members all right so what other professions were open to women in nineteen century well here's one about the obvious one this is by penelope shandy shot and how are you gentlemen on this fine fall evening in the gas slit parlor five young ladies on love seats satin evening dresses reflected in gilt frame mirrors a discreet bell madame opens the panel door whiffs of cold creep from the hall where two gentlemen lift even the most ardent gentleman cannot perform impair our time is money the fellows choose the bannister up to the second floor has been polished by sweaty hands discreetly let us close the up stairs bedroom doors the people look and not out and because i live on a farm i had to read this by a little hazel strong clara in the post office i keep telling you i'm not a feminist are grew up  only child on a round so i drove tractors learned to ride when the truck wouldn't start or went to town for parts the man behind the counter told me i couldn't rebuild a carburetor or i could every carburetor the place that's necessity not feminism i learned to do the books after my husband left me with the debts and the children i shoveled snow and pitched hay when the hard man didn't come to work i learned how to pull a calf when the vet was too busy as i thought the cow did most of it herself they've been birthing alone for ten thousand years does that make them feminists it's not that i don't like  man i love them when i can but i've stopped counting on them no chain i've stopped counting on them to change my flouts or open market doors that's not feminism that's just good s thanks very much leon that was that was a great good sense yes indeed so and that is really it is really great to have people in our lives of any gender and if we can all work together it's  wonderful our next reader participant is holly hughes who is the author of passing sailing by raven and also co author of the pen and the belle mindful writing in a busy world from skinner house press this is one of those wonderful books that really inspires us to you know look at our own work  and write write new poetry and get inspired to write and she's also the editor of the anthology beyond forgetting poetry and prose about all simers disease which is from kent state university press holly has taught writing at edmonds community college for more than twenty five years as well as at a number of regional conferences and she also has spent thirty summers working on the water in alaska commercial fishing for salmon skippering a sixty five foot schooner and working as a naturalist on ships and backstage before we started she was telling us how in those early days of working on the ships gary snyder the poet gary snyder was was one of the people who would come out and be part of the these expeditions so that was a nice reminiscence to hear so let's welcome holly  thank you carolyn having put together and i'm college myself i know how much work goes into it so i'm really grateful for all the work that carol and in are coeditors did and i'm happy to be honored to be included in it and it's also such a pleasure to get to hear the poems read by the people who wrote them i fall in love with some of the poems in this book and it's just great to hear this is the first time i've heard laura and yana read these p it's it's really nice poetry is meant to be heard it's meant to be read aloud so the poem that i'm going to read does come from my my fishing days actually sort of post fishing days that needs a little bit of context so i'll start with what took me up to alaska which i graduated from a college in the midwest i grew up in minnesota but i always had a dream of alaska and so after i graduated from college i headed up there to make for graduate school and that summer i ended up falling in love with the law and buying a fishing boat instead and it wasn't what my parents expected me to do thankfully they recovered and i spent four years fishing for salmon with my college sweetheart and it wasn't a good career choice necessarily i love eating salmon but i discovered that i didn't really like killing them and so when my husband wasn't looking i slipped them back overboard if they were still not a good career choice and but i fell in love with navigation and we ended up running tenders for four years going up all along the alaskan coast out to the aleutian islands and it was a wonderful really satisfied my desire for adventure beautiful country big cities lots of storms i got my fill of adventure as a matter of fact but got to see a lot of beautiful country during those years i also had a lot of sea time so i ended up with my ended up studying for a coast guard license so i had a license to run hundred tonne vessels and so i ended up skippering this sixty five foot schooner and that's what i was telling the story about gary snyder we had some wonderful people aboard in those years it was a nonprofit organization called resource institute and then after that i ended up working on a friend's boat working on deck again and the poem i'm going to read takes place after coming back to working on  it's interesting because the poem that i submitted for carolyn's anthology is not necessarily about how difficult it was to be a woman in a very male dominated profession but it was something i wrestled with every day poem the collection of poems that i ended up writing out of that experience sailing by ravens is really uses the metaphors of navigation and i fell in love with the beautiful rich language of navigation and this poem takes place sort of midway through the book and the book is there's a narrative arc to it and it i won't give the tell the ending but basically i'm just learning to sort of navigate to make my own way so working on here it is coiled the line down against the sun the old timer said clockwise on and ten years later my arm still breaststroke the familiar movement loop upon loop rolling the line a quarter turn against king feeling the resistance give way in my hand and stiff fibers yielding the line knows how to lay if you let it now all the old loops come back in my hand swim down the line by heart and the line remembers all its lives the past for minutes fibers how they intertwine coal oil upon coil circling emptiness all to make way for the next in another life i think i would have been a scientist and i think that was part of the appeal of alaska the time on both from a very early age i still can't explain it except that i found out later my great great grandmother had may have married an english sea captain so i guess i have it in my blood but i read rachel carson at a pretty early age i read the see around us and then of course later silent spring and just fell in love with the work of scientists and especially someone like rachel carson who is such a beautiful marriage of poetry and science such a beautiful writer and so i've written quite a few poems about women scientists myself and i just pull my mina read is not one i wrote but by sarah lindsay about marie curie and i remember also learning about her in probably in grade school or middle school anyway but i have written poems about rosalind franklin who helped didn't get a lot of credit for it but it helped with the discovery  photographs that helped watson and crick figure out the double helix and also barbara mcclintock who is a geneticist and this is what i love it's a great story she has this wonderful  line she was studying corps and she would go out in the cornfields at night and listen which is not necessarily what most scientists were doing at that time and she said you have to listen to you have to have a feeling for the organism  so anyway i love that story and i think it's important that we get more women into science and i think it's important that we listen to what the scientists have to say so that's my little political plug ok this is sarah lindsay radio and i will laura's words and being really honored to be reading this poem his gifts to her were theory patience equilibrium and a pile of dirt industrial waste he loved to watch his wife glow with determination pursuing discovery of a hidden element past your rainy i'm by the light of her hunger i should like to have a beautiful color he said he would buy her boots to wipe out the sore bone he did she leaned over a boiling bat during her dirt reduction or on our she looked like any skinny house from bent to her bubbling sauerkraut she looked like the first woman who would be awarded a nobel prize as well as the first to falter in knees before a hill a brown  through with pine needles and press her filled hands to her face she boiled her tons of pitch blended down to a scraping of radium nearly the size of their baby's smallest fingernail just the why proof of its existence and her it permeated their clothes their papers peeled their fingers entered their marrow and slowly  he mildly alluded to rheumatism he stroked her radioactive hair with a radioactive hand colorless shining radium dark and in contact with air chemically much like calcium it would stream like calcium through her brain cells in her later years alone and make memories glow in the dark illegal schooling a needed rooms subsistence on t v and chocolate wine with her husband for a few hours sleep cracked hands and weakened legs and twined united gaze resting on the vial of radium salts they kept beside them every and then the last poem i chose because i had left the deck of the fishing boat in traded in for the walls of a classroom as carolyn mentioned i've been teaching for quite a few years and it has its challenges and i think this poem really captures some of the sort of bittersweetness of spending ten weeks with your students and then watching them walk out the door at the and some stay in touch but a lot of them don't so this is by kathleen mcclung and i also chose it because i met kathleen she's a fine poet she's a poet from the bay area and she came up for the right on the sound conference where i was teaching and for a couple years and really enjoyed working with her so i'm honored to read her poem she tends to she works and form a lot this is a sestina and i won't try to i won't take the time to try to explain this sestina except briefly to say that there's a pattern of repeating words and you might hear them there are six repeating words but it's a pretty seamless so you'll have to listen hard night school final you murmur two nails joe prepared to write in ways unique to each semester and by rote i stroll the narrow paths dusk blurs tonight i had to test like maps then pens begin to dig car bark or sprinkle slow faint wisps of sentences some kno some guess and i refrain from staring as i guess you want trust not suspicion as you write my gaze breast is brushes each forehead tender slow almost a mother's gaze as this term and unchanging knocks quiet urgent at a door open and go but first show mastery tonight what must you labor mind body heart to our exam and may sift who's read from those who have not but slow absorbing deepening requires long slow inquiry  lasting years beyond this night we don't have years we're temporary and with stapler backpacks long wave you guess i will be fair with letter grades you're right old school examiner my aim sharpen vision he quit mines for a dilemma as pens have not yet shaped for study honor slow approaches plural not texting to write what matters most you twenty three scatter tonight we will not meet again oh sure when i'm a guest be stroh's arcos supercuts well and perhaps this way i learned a lot there is no and her learning will agree i glance at pens and faces now full concentration yes this room almost home almost your slow the speed of cypress trails this night of harvesting mind fruit this fertile right my pen will forage slowly late tonight among the guests is pre wild to write a tribe of thinkers in a forest without and thank you thank thanks so much charlie that was that was lovely and very lyrical the sistine a is one of my favorite forms and if you have ever committed a sistine or you know you will find that you're going to be a repeat offender quite frequently which is wonderful i thought maybe to conclude i will take the liberty to read one poem in here by this is kind of a fun one and it will sort  of ease us out eventually into parking lots where we where we need to go after this event is over but i'll read this and then we'll have a little question and answer and then we can enjoy the rest of the evening and look at the books this is a poem by leslie in newman who lives in massachusetts she's also known as a children's book author and motivational speaker she was the author of heather has two mommies which is a very somewhat controversial children's book and it still gets banned in classrooms which of course helps sales greatly this is a poem i think you know many of us have had sort of low level office jobs and i think this will give you a sense of one of those low level office jobs it's called adjustment one shifting piles i and you'll notice that the technology is somewhat older you wouldn't be able to write this poem today because the movements are not quite the same i place a pile of credits to my left and a pile of debits to my right after i type the numbers from the debits on to the credits i pile the debits on top of the credits then i pull the carbons from the credits and separate the copies into piles i interface the piles and bring them over to the files where i file the piles and pull the files making a new file of piles then i make files for the pile that had no files and put them into a new file pile i take the new file pile down the aisle down over to the table where mable makes labels for april to stable i take the new labeled stapled filed pile back down the aisle over to the file to be interfered with the pile of filed files after i file april's piles i get new debits from debbie and new credits from  carry carry and debbie's debits back to my desk and place a pile of credits to my left and a pile of debits to my right after i type the numbers from the debits on to the credit it's ten o'clock and we have exactly fifteen minutes to go down to the cafeteria and drink coffee or go out into the parking lot and scream thank you so much this was this was a lot of fun here but if anybody has any questions how do we do this you come up to the microphone if you have any questions if you could come up to either this microphone or that microphone and ask a question so we all can hear you and we can also hear you on the recording of the event tonight we have about ten minutes for questions so we'll see how many of you can get through i know you also have a couple of questions i have a couple of questions in case people are very busy filing piles or just you know i don't want to come up and all the way up to the microphone but if you do welcome a look forward to hearing from you ok well i have a i have a question i would like to ask this of each of the three and i also probably could answer it as well what in writing your own poems did you gain greater insight into the world of work or into your own work space your own life as affected by your work or your work as it a i think that working as a teacher lends itself really beautifully to being a poet and i think one of the reasons that i feel they have this great interplay back and forth is you're living a lot of the time in sort of the land of ambiguity and the tension between unanswered questions you have to kind of learn to let that the way you from one movement to the next instead of being mired down in it so you need like this great depth but also a light mess so i think that thinking about my relationship between work as a poet and work as a teacher it helped me gain a deeper appreciation for  the kind of thinking that i do in both professions and also how much i sincerely enjoy the work that i do and so i think that it was a nice moment of reflection for me to think about that but if i don't get written between eight and eleven in the morning it's gone so how i can read other people's work i can do research i can really read the stuff i've written and write it over i'm on the same timeframe as you know i do the same thing i try not to check e mail until eleven because when to check e mail it's gone yeah yeah but i want to i'm going to go back to my fishing days which was decades ago now but i just want to talk about how writing helped me get through a tough time and that i was keeping a journal all the years that i was fishing it was a male dominated profession i felt very alone it times and i  just turned to my notebook and i took a lot of books with me and somehow reading other poets and reading and writing myself sustain me through all about and so when i put this collection together a lot of it was just going back to my journals and kind of mining them working with the navigational imagery but also i was grateful that i kept so just for anybody who's interested in writing my one of my little bits of advice would be just journals are really helpful and i think we have reached the conclusion of the program and i want