WELCOME to Christian McEwen’s website. You will find excerpts from her published books, as well as an example of her uncollected prose. There is also an excerpt from her short film, Tomboys! co-produced with Julie Akeret.
McEwen is the editor of two lesbian anthologies,
Naming the Waves: Contemporary Lesbian Poetry and, with Sue O'Connell,
Out the Other Side: Contemporary Lesbian Writing, both published by Virago Press in the U.K. (1988), and Crossing Press in the U.S.A. (1989).
She has also edited
Jo’s Girls: Tomboy Tales of High Adventure,
True Grit & Real Life (Beacon Press, 1997), and, with Mark Statman,
The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing (Teachers & Writers, 2000).
A collection of her poems,
In the Wake of Home, was published by Meadowlark Press in 2004.
McEwen teaches poetry to teachers through the Creative Arts in Learning Program at Lesley University. She also works as a writer-in-the-schools through the Teachers & Writers Collaborative and ALPS (Alternative Literary Programs).
Funding assistance for readings and workshops in Massachusetts is available through the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
www.mass-culture.org
Click here to e-mail me.
Website created in January 2008 using the Authors Guild Site Express service, and maintained and updated since by Christian McEwen.
Author photographs by Jo Morrissey. All text by Christian McEwen 2008.
Since 1984, I have led writing workshops all over the United States, from the far reaches of the South Bronx to steamy Georgia. I have also taught in the British Isles, in Scotland especially, under the auspices of the Scottish Poetry Library. My favorite residency was with the Spey Grian project, for which I taught poetry and journal-writing, tacking round the western isles on a hundred-year-old sailing boat.
I have worked with all ages between six and ninety, with a special focus on elementary school children, college students, and senior citizens. Back in the 1990s, I taught a course in nature poetry at the New School in New York, which later gave rise to my anthology,
The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing, co-edited with Mark Statman. Each January, I teach in the Winter Studies program at Williams College, helping students to develop “a mind of winter” through playful exercises in writing and drawing.
I have taught similar workshops, tailored to specific age groups, at the Smith College Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, and at numerous schools and community centers. In 2005, I worked with three classes of ten and eleven-year-olds in Stirling, Scotland, writing poems based on the natural history of the Firth of Forth.
I am also very interested in oral history and the family memoir. For three years, I was the writer-in-residence for an intergenerational theater group called Roots & Branches, which brought together a group of Jewish seniors with acting students from New York University to create and perform a full-length play. I have also taught the basics of oral history to college students at the New School, and to several groups of elementary school children.
In recent years, I have become increasingly interested in the use of contemplative practices in education. Most of the teachers I work with (and the children too) are battling almost unimaginable amounts of stress. They barely have time to eat their breakfast, let alone to muse, to remember, to imagine, to dream. How can I help them to stop and smell the roses, and then, with any luck, to write a poem? For the past two years, I have been working on a book entitled
World Enough & Time, which attempts to answer that question. It has to do with slowness and creativity (and joy!) and that ways in which they can be mutually nourishing. Whatever subject I am officially teaching, that river of s-l-o-w-n-e-s-s continues to run through.
I am available to read my own work, or to teach writing workshops (both poetry and prose) through the Massachusetts Cultural Council. You can also email me at
ChristianMcEwen@aol.com.
