Redwing: Voices from 1888

by Katharyn Howd Machan

I began writing the Redwing poems in January of 1985, two weeks after my mother's death on New Year's Day. Maybe they were my way of making a family around me then. Maybe they're my way of saying what so often goes unsaid in families, between friends, among neighbors, the words we hold back sometimes even from ourselves. I have been creating these monologues for twenty years now. Redwing, in Tuscarora County of central/western New York State, is a place in my imagination. Each of its women and men, its boys and girls, has a story to tell. In their secrets and silences, their losses and dreams, their satisfactions and dissatisfactions, we all live, too, I think. Redwing is fire in shadow, a flame at the throat, a crimson flash in dark flight.

---Katharyn Howd Machan

The book was released January 17, 2005, the 20th anniversary of the first "Redwing" poem Machan wrote.

Paperback

First published January 17, 2005

About the author

Katharyn Howd Machan (b. 1952) studied creative writing and literature at the College of Saint Rose and at the University of Iowa and received her Ph.D. in Interpretation (Performance Studies) at Northwestern University. She is currently a member of the writing faculty at Ithaca College and is also involved with the Women's Studies Program and the Gerontology Institute.

Machan has published 30 poetry collections, and her work has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and textbooks. She is also a professional belly dancer under the stage name Zajal.