Maneuvering through life’s minefields

St. Helena woman publishes first collection of poems

St. Helena poet Judith Rose is shown with a buddy, Ishi. Carolyn Younger photo

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Judith Rose looks every inch the wife, mother and grandmother, a friend to dogs and respecter of chickens and bees.

The St. Helena resident is all this and more — hardworking, determined, courageous (she once sat calmly while being swarmed by thousands of hornet-sized Cambodian bees) — and despite years of maintaining a mind-boggling schedule, she is a former librarian and teacher of English at San Quentin State Prison, a college professor, a holder of a Ph.D. in English, and a published poet.

What she isn’t is unaware.

For more than a decade, Rose was part of Women in Black and stood vigil at St. Helena’s Lyman Park for three years in silent protest against violence and war.

The 64-year-old traces her roots in activism to the 1960s and her high school days in Dover, Del.

She went on to teach with Head Start in Michigan City, Ind., while her soon-to-be husband, Tom Stockwell, worked for the neighborhood centers program. In 1970 they were among the 100,000 gathered in Washington, D.C. to protest shootings at Kent State and President Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia.

Over the years, Rose has poured her experiences and observations onto the page, filling journal after journal.

The resulting poetry and fiction have appeared individually in noted literary magazines such as Calyx, the Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, the Iowa Review and the Virginia Quarterly Review.

‘Walking the Minefield’

Rose’s first volume of poems, “Walking the Minefield,” is scheduled for release early next month by Kentucky-based Finishing Line Press. The volume has already attracted three glowing reviews, including one from Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gary Snyder, who called it “a remarkable collection, deeply lived.”

For Rose, who has been writing poetry since she was 8, the poems in the collection share an underlying connection: the story of family, she said, “and my place within it — family extending ... to the larger human family.”

The poem of the volume’s title, “Walking the Minefield,” grew out of one of the trips to Cambodia that Rose and her husband took to visit their son, Tobias, and daughter, Arwen.

Tobias and his nonprofit, Human Translation, are the impetus behind a just-completed dam serving the Balangk community outside Siem Reap in northwestern Cambodia. At the time, Arwen was managing the nonprofit’s literacy program.

Parents, son, Yinh Ya of HT off-shoot Community Translation, and a monk, Mean Somet, walked together along a rutted path lined with red warning flags, each printed with a skull and crossbones and set out by teams from the Cambodian Mine Action Committee. The chilling images are used to mark a safe path between land mines buried decades before by the retreating Khmer Rouge, and of the unexploded cluster bombs dropped from American planes.

In Rose’s collection, there is more than one minefield under consideration. “Casablanca” explores letters sent by an aunt, a Red Cross volunteer, from North Africa in 1945 to her very proper mother and hints at a sense of adventure that may or may not have survived her return home.

Rose also writes about her mother’s last year, about a memory of herself as a youngster discussing God with a childhood friend, and later of the dream and reality of being a new mother living on the family farm in Indiana, gazing at the fields beyond.

The myth of ravens

Rose gives shape to the myth of ravens, her beekeeper husband’s first swarm, an ecru satin slip, an unsettling dream of food, and finally, of her son Tobias’ gift to her of a small round bowl from a mud-hut village in Mozambique — “where,” he wrote his mother, “the children who begged from us asked for paper and pencils before they asked for money.”

The couple has made several trips to Southeast Asia, one of them a three-month trek through Cambodia and Thailand.

“Whenever you go to a Third World country, it’s always stunning, just stunning how poor people are,” Rose said. “We live such privileged lives, even if we kind of feel ourselves poor in the context of the country. But in the context of the world, the poorest of us is pretty wealthy.”

Rose and her husband have led what some might consider a nomadic life as they pursued academic degrees and careers and raised a family, Dagan, Tobias and Arwen.

Early on, their interests, schooling and jobs carried them from Marlboro College in Vermont to Michigan City, Ind.; Chicago’s Lincoln Park; Beverly, Mass.; and finally, St. Helena.

Sometimes they stayed put for a while, sometimes one or the other commuted great distances from the family home off Deer Park Road.

For a long period, Rose traveled back and forth to UC Davis as she worked toward advanced degrees in English.

“It was wild,” Rose recalled. “Most of the time we were here [in St. Helena] and I commuted. Arwen was only 4 or 5 when I started and I was teaching in order to support myself through college.”

Then came seven years as an assistant professor and director of women’s studies at Allegheny College in Meadville, Penn., and it was her husband’s turn to make the long commute from time to time.

By 2006, the family was back in St. Helena and Rose took on a four-year stint as a visiting assistant professor and lecturer at UC Davis. Now she has a job closer to home as an adjunct professor at Pacific Union College.

Although academic writing predominated in those years, Rose was still writing and publishing poetry. The ever-growing stacks of journals — “a ridiculous number,” she said — attest to that. “Walking the Minefield,” however, is the first collection.

The title poem “is a political poem in some ways,” Rose said. “One of the things that struck me in all my travels in Southeast Asia ... is that I think we have collectively forgotten our responsibility for what happened there — Vietnam, Cambodia and the carpet bombing. I was struck by how much as a country we have forgotten, if we ever knew.”

Meanwhile, she is already considering compiling a second collection, or at least the possibility.

“As pressures begin to loosen up a little — a dream indeed,” she said, and laughed.

“I’d like to, I plan to. It’s just a matter of pulling everything together.”