 |
| The Self Publishing Company |
|
Peering Into The Iris Peering Into The Iris: An Ancestral Journey is a personal mythology. It is a collection of my original writing from a journey traversing many paths to my Polish roots. And yet, Peering Into The Iris is not a memoir and it is not a family history. Instead, it is a gathering together of poetry, prose, and paintings, creative expressions of the patterns and themes in my life, what I value most and what has given meaning to my journey. These expressions are tributes to and in memory of my matrilineal heritage. Since the beginning of this ancestral journey, a deep interest in genealogy guided me to family stories, heirlooms, recipes, official papers, and photographs, some of which appear in this book. Beyond the family stories and known ancestors, Polish history and customs have sparked my imagination. In expressing these voices, known and imagined, I acknowledge the importance of preserving my cultural heritage and its part in my personal mythology.
About The Author For Peering Into The Iris: An Ancestral Journey, Jacquelyn Markham draws from a large body of work that reflects a rich and varied life of creative expression: poetry, prose, visual art, music, gardening, and spirituality. In selecting the pieces for this collection, she has focused on remembering and reclaiming—self, identity, heritage, nature--a recurrent theme in her work for over three decades. This collection weaves a golden thread from herself to her mother, to Grandmother Klajda, to Great Grandmother Krolczyk, and to imagined Polish ancestors, her matrilineal heritage. Born of Polish, English, and French Canadian ancestry in a small Michigan town that borders both a river and the shore of the great Lake Michigan, she was one of nine children. She attended a one room school from kindergarten to 6th grade in rural Michigan until the space program uprooted her family in the early sixties, and she migrated to the south with her parents and eight siblings. A first g! A recipient of grants and awards for literary merit, Markham’s poetry has been published in national journals for more than two decades, including Sing Heavenly Muse!, Bitterroot International Poetry Journal, South Florida Poetry Review, and Lullwater Review. In 1991, she was one of five writers nationwide awarded a residency at Wolf Pen Writers’ Colony in Prospect, Kentucky to complete a full-length choreopoem, Story Circle.
|
|
