"The poet cannot escape his or her obligation to bear witness to the times." —Maxine Kumin

CHECK OUT

"Judith Barrington: Literary force and feminist pioneer" OREGON ARTSWATCH, August, 2021

“The Wound,” a poem that came out of that experience was featured with an audio recording and an interview on the PBS Newshour’s poetry page.

A short movie about Long Love: New and Selected Poems, Salmon Press, 2018. https://youtu.be/W_5r5Y8fjkE

My short (under 2-minute) movie "Love" based on one poem, selected by Cinema Poetica for the Ashland Film Festival, 2017.

Oregon Cultural Heritge Commission: The 100 Oregon Books

The Oregon State Library: 150 Oregon Books for the Sesquicentennial

Oregon ArtBeat, Poetry in Motion, Oregon Public Broadcasting click here

Soapstone: Celebrating Women Writers

This website was designed by
Marcia Barrentine.
May her memory be a blessing.

Top

WHAT'S NEW

Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs, will be published by Oregon State University Press in the fall of this year, 2024.

Here is a brief description:

I was hardly an obvious candidate to become an ardent, committed radical feminist in the turbulence of the Second Wave. I had embarked on a work life at BBC Television that was predictable for a young woman of my background, but that path had been interrupted by the untimely death of my parents, and my flight to a job in Spain. Back in London in 1972, I stumbled by chance into the very heart of the Women’s Liberation Movement, which rapidly ushered me into a consciousness raising group, and thus changed my life overnight. 

With a passion unlike any I had felt before, I put activism for the movement at the center of my life alongside my beginning, but serious efforts as a writer. I moved to Portland, Oregon in 1976 and found my way into a thriving women’s community, quite different from the one in London. 

Virginia’s Apple is a collection of fourteen linked literary memoirs written over a span of years. Although each one stands alone, they are linked; characters recur and, taken together, they create a larger narrative. Many of them capture the exhilaration, the wildness, the love affairs, the surprises, and the self-invention, as well as the confusion and conflicts of those heady times.

Another theme of the collection is life as a lesbian before feminism—before I had even heard the word—as well as the sometimes precarious existence of an out lesbian long before it was commonplace

Woven throughout is the slow unfolding of delayed grief over my parents’ drowning when I was nineteen.

A few of the memoirs in Virginia's Apple:


“The Walk Home” was published in Creative Nonfiction, summer 2016, and won its “best essay prize” for that issue. It was reprinted in Creative Nonfiction, spring 2021 as one of its “favorite prize-winning essays.” It is a "Notable Essay" in The Best American Essays 2017. “True Empathy or Understanding is Rare,”an interview about the memoir by Brianna Snow.

“Wild Patience” is the story of my friendship with Adrienne Rich, and how she helped set me on the path I took as a writer. It was written for this collection.

“Veronica” is the story of my fluke connection with Veronica Lucan whose husband Lord Lucan attempted murder her in 1974, which remains one of London’s major crime obsessions. It was a “notable essay” in The Best American Essays 2014.

“Nicolette,” was published in the anthology Hers3:Brilliant New Fiction by Lesbian Writers, Terry Wolverton and Robert Drake, eds., Faber and Faber.

“Poetry and Prejudice” was published in The Stories that Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write About the West, Teresa Jordan and James Hepworth, eds., W.W. Norton. it was selected by Susan Orlean to win the Andres Berger Award from Northwest Writers.

Top