DIARY OF A POET: An Imaginary Life
New and Selected Works by Karla Andersdatter

Diary of a Poet is a Collection of New and Selected Works, a fictional memoir covering the years of her life from 1940 to 2005. It is composed of short stories, fairytales, essays, and excerpts from her novels and poetry collections, as well as new unpublished work. Here she creates a novel in the form of an imaginary diary written by a poet named Annie Valor. Exploratory, lyric, imaginistic, colorful, more gestaldt than plot, it is 'life lived,' and a further expansion of a large body of work by the author. It is no wonder that in this imaginary diary the author has "turned a life of lyric poetry into narrative, and ends by turning narrative back into fable and folktale." (see introduction).

Born in San Fransisco, Ms. Andersdatter still lives along the Pacific Coast. She has always considered a book to be a 'sacred object,' and a work of art.

"Deeply philosophical-psychological, a sense of everything vanishing as one approaches death gives her work great power and evocativeness... forever viewing Man in terms of Time and Eternity.
If St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, and Jung had started writing poetry, these are the kind of poems we would have seen. She really brings you into her world. As always, Andersdatter is pure power."

Hugh Fox, Reviewer for Small Press Magazine

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Of Love and Promises
By Karla M. Andersdatter

". . . a magical tale in the spirit of all great myths . . . a revisionist myth, in the feminist way. The language is poetic and stunning, delicious reading for a foggy day." Christine Swanberg
"Juxtapositioning Pagan and Christian religions and a woman's perspective of deception and truth makes this book an intriguing read. The greatest draw for me is the element of surprise, but what sustains the story is the spirituality: grace, healing, gratitude, and humble heroes whose ability to negotiate and reconcile gives the reader exemplary models. The 'flash-forward' device works particularly well to heighten the story's themes." Kathleen Hughart

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When The Red Truck Turned Over
By Karla M. Andersdatter

  Ms. Andersdatter's newest collection of poems. Here's what Steve Sanfield says about it: “Andersdatter is a true daughter of the ‘Muse’, as well as a muse herself. I spent the hours before dawn reading her poems. I was touched by so many and felt so much in turn; glimpses of hard-earned wisdom bubbling up, or perhaps the vision that comes, not when we simply accept our lives, but rather only when we embrace it, in all its complexities. As I travel with her up and down the California coast that is so familiar to me, a sweet sadness begins to drift in like the first light of day, and then I came to ‘Sixty-Four Thank-yous,’ which I read again and again, and finally read aloud, and now I go out the door into the world— singing!
“Much later, after returning from town, I tell you I kept thinking of the power and profundity of ‘When She Said She Never Loved You’ and of Andersdatter’s heart commitment to love and to poetry. This may well be her very best collection, just as her fourth novel ‘OF LOVE AND PROMISES: the Story of Tristan and Iseult Retold in the Words of Iseult’ was the best tale telling I’d heard from her over these years (how many now? 35?) She’s just getting better and better.”

Steve Sanfield


“Deeply philosophical-psychological, a sense of everything vanishing as one approaches death gives her work great power and evocativeness . . . forever viewing Man in terms of Time and Eternity. If St Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, and Freud had started writing poetry, this is the kind of poems they would have come up with. She really brings you into her world. As always, Andersdatter is pure power. . .” |

Hugh Fox

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TAMBOURINE
A collection of memoir, poetry and fiction by nine women authors

Karla Andersdatter
CB Follett
Cathy McFann
Brenda McManus
Sharon Sue Savage
Rosemary Sheppard
Doreen Stock
Christine Swanberg
Sandy White

TAMBOURINE

"When you mingle
in the singing tme of
my silent heart
I am drawn to the light,
remembering whispers
and promises
within the tangled net
in which I dwell,
a singular fish
unable to speak
unable to breathe
aloud, unable
to believe
until
the words of you
enter my heart. Then
there are tambourines and bright
parrots in the landscape of
my forest."

Karla Andersdatter

TAMBOURINE is a rare collection of the interior worlds of nine women.
    Published in the first year of the new millenium, it speaks in the voices of nine contemporary women in the particular genre of their choice. It is a book that wants to observe and record the past in order to face the future with clear vision.
    As a collection it is a fascinating read, filled with humor, delight, passion, insight, beauty, and forgiveness.
    With each author’s brief biography, we are placed in the context from which these words emerged. The text has a ‘tree-like’ connection to the multi-branched lives of women, women who are fragile, strong, courageous; who are friends, lovers, mothers, grandmothers, writers and artists.
    We call their language, a ‘Language of the Exquisite’, an interior language used to speak to the hearts of those who long for and create intimate connections with themselves, with others, and with the earth.

TAMBOURINE is a beautifully designed book with a four color cover, 5 1/2” X 8”, perfect bound, 123 pp.
ISBN# 093530121 It is distributed by Barnes & Noble, or can be ordered from the Publisher at:
P.O. Box 790
Sausalito, Ca 94966
phone:415 383-8447
fax: 415 381-1938
email: inbetweenbooks@atthebutterflytree.com

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A Notable Woman
By Kathleen Hughart

Here is the story of a 94 year old woman, Annette Hughart, as told to her daughter-in-law Kathleen Hughart. Kathleen's interview brings us the true voice of this notable elder/author, in the form of a fascinating memoir. Charming!

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Trickster Tales
By Rosemary Sheppard

"After 30 years of teaching pre-school children, Ms. Sheppard has, at last, found time to turn her talents to writing for the adults of a larger classroom. . .in this collection of Trickster Tales, you will find the shapeshifting of the trickster, the delight of the magical, the justice of good endings, the humor of a female Mark Twain, examining as in any classic fairytale, the relationships between men, women, plants, animals, and their Almighty Creator." Karla Andersdatter

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WHITE MOON WOMAN
or the Education of Imogene Love
By Karla Andersdatter

    "It's beautiful, powerful. I am moved beyond words. At page 61 I stop reading. I'm reading too fast and this is a story that must be savored not gulped. I'm wondering why I'm so moved and realize that on my personal journey it is God who dies and is resurrected. Imogene is always watching out the car-train-plane windows reading signs of the walk-way-beauty that will die again and be reborn as Billy or Orisha Loa or a country song."

Rosemary Sheppard

    "This book is a journey from poetry to prose, from past to future, from orchards to epiphanies, from the West Coast to the East, and from beginning to end it is unforgetable; a woman's destiny, her heart and mind, an epic of sorts ..."

Amy Joy

    "Ms. Andersdatter has created a new genre ..... called 'Imaginary Non-Fiction.' "

Margaret Rose

    "Collectible words with a memorable rhythm ... lovely writing."

Simetra

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    "As for Joe, I don't understand why he wants to kill everything. Last summer he pulled up a clump of wild onions, those lovely plants with little white bells for flowers, just opening because it was spring. He threw it into the filed behind the house, scattering mud across the porch. "Goddamn weeds!" He was shouting. But the day was sunny and beautiful, and on a day like that his rage is pure white terror to see. He was shouting at the white bells, as if there were no place for weeds in this world. "Well, I am a weed and love is a weed, and you cannot kill his weed called love, no matter how you shout and curse and throw it away. Love always wins in the long run, no matter how many times you pull it up or poison it. It still comes back. It sprouts up anywhere you leave a little bit of yourself open to good earth. You cannot kill love because it is the ultimate power — the core of the fairy tale. You cannot kill love because it takes another shape, like a goddess or a rose or Scheherazade herself; a small wounded child, or a bird with a broken wing, a warrior who refuses to kill his opponent, or sometimes, like Spartacus, one who does. I could write a book about that, but today, all I want is a small bouquet of wild onion bells."

—from Lil's journal p. 107 Wild Onions by Karla Andersdatter

Wild Onions
By Karla Andersdatter

    A provocative love story by KARLA ANDERSDATTER whose first novel, The Doorway, was "recommended for every fiction collection" by Library Journal. Wild Onions, Ms. Andersdatter's second novel, is told in the poetic impressionistic style for which the author has been previously acclaimed. Set in a small community on the Northern California Coast, it explores the tangled fragrances and intriguing streams of consciousness of the interior world of women. It is a tapestry of love stories collected in four books embracing the years 1970, 1941, 1970 again, and confronting the future in the year 2038, where we encounter the final tale. Wild Onions is a timely and heartwarming story, its characters unforgettable, their psychology what we all need to forgive, and the future as set forth by the narrator, not immutable; not yet. Wild Onions is another "heartfelt and thoroughly engrossing" novel by a California writer who stills sings with passion and praise about the land she lives with and loves.

Plain View Press

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The Woman Who Was Wild
And Other Tales
By Karla Andersdatter

    This original collection of ten contemporary fairy tales reawaken the feminine principle through stories of lost goddesses, love, and healing the environment.

    Each fairy tale has a commentary by Crittendon Brookes, a Jungian analyst in San Francisco, and each fairytale is written as if Hans Christian Anderson come to life in feminine form, in order to create those remarkably beautiful tales.

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The Doorway
By Karla Andersdatter

   They were all wounded children. From the violence of their beginnings they emerge as adults of the seventies and eighties, carrying their pasts into a confusion of tangled emotion and relationship.

  "A well written, thought provocative slice of life, set in the '70 and '80s,. Recommended for all fiction collections."

—Sue Mevis
Library Journal

  "An eloquent contemporary love story set in the San Francisco Bay area, and woven around three characters who form a love triangle. We learn the disturbing personal histories of these three well-etched characters through alternativing chapters, each containing their interior monologue and dream imagery. This innovative splintering of storylines creates dramatic tension and mirrors the characters' fragmented lives. ... Heartfelt and thoroughly engrossing."

Mary Banas
Booklist, ALA
Library Journal

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The Broken String
By Karla Andersdatter

   "The language is simple, but if you keep reading suddenly you find yourself inside (her) vision like Alice or Cocteau's Orpheus, passing through the looking-glass, and all the simple stuff gets wrapped up in a vision of birds, butterflies, beaches, summers coming and going...."

Hugh Fox
Small Press Review

   "Poems frankly lyrical and unabashedly concerned with love — 'A shimmering other life, alive and leading us' is an allergorical peoem in eleven parts ... the whole bookconstitutes a further development of a fine mature talent."

Noel Peattie
Sipapu

   "Her work becomes really interesting when you reach back into your own memory and evoke a time, and the feelings that were present for manuy of us, feelings now gone. Great and generous peoms!"

Steve Sanfield
San Juan Ridge

   "She joins the growing numbers of nature writers who mourn the desecration of the planet and use their writing as testament. Her work reflects the inner soulscape of a pilgrim seeking higher ground upon which she may envision the whole. This book is remarkable in its ability to portray those feelings at the outer edger of perception, almost as if the poet is creating a new language ... the transformative process so familiar in fairytale and myths. This book is a 'mark in time / a distance never too far / a star in the heart.' "

Mary Donahoe, Ph.D
University of Oregon

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Naked in the Garden
By Karla Andersdatter

Photo by Bill Maleck
From the back cover

About her work:

   "These disturbing and powerful poems must be read over and over agan. Andersdatter can be compared with Carolyn Forché but her experiences ... are conveyed in a simpler, folksier style."

Bloomsbury Review

   "She brings a meticulous sense of craft, an acute ear for the hidden melodies in language, and an ability to share her consciousness ... but it is in her love poems that she brings to bear the fullest measure of her passion, intensity, awareness and relentless self-knowledge, as well as good old fashioned romanticism and clean eroticism — reminding us that love is not just a four-letter word."

Paul Thorson
Marin Scope

   "In this book Ms. Andersdatter takes us from one coast to another, across the Atlantic, over the Mexican boarder, down rivers, in and out of airports. The landscape is as varied as the rhythms and voices in her poems, rhythms and voices too often lost in today's tchnostrerile, political, and bureaucratic languages. Her poems often read like an easy walk through a field both known and new, where a sudden image or thought will pull the reader into subteranean power and fragility."

from the Introduction by
Dr. Walter Barker
University of Rhode Island

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The Girl Who Struggled With Death
By Karla Andersdatter

   "From California to Central America, in the flesh, Karla Andersdatter works her loom of resisitance to the forces of death and destruction. This book affirms poetry as the language of the struggle for consciousness of humanity's inmost needs."

Jack Hirschman

   "An important and redemptive book ... she calls forth the hunger in us all for the forotten love and connectedness that might yet save our souls and our planet. Hers is a powerful and healing voice—eternal, wise female, as struggle both defiant and disciplined."

Walter Barker
Univ. of Rhode Island

   "The lament and determined rage that fills these poems is amazingly singular in purpose and conviction. Karla Andersdatter, writing about the homelss children of Central Ameirca, illustrates the invincible spirit ... in poems like 'A poet in the Third World.' "

Daily World

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THE RISING OF THE FLESH
By Karla Andersdatter

"A varied articulation of that midpoint (that consciousness) of all we may become, rising from the myriad encounters that are our lives. Her vision places this rising in the flesh in its largest sense—the flesh atomic, the flesh as earth and world, the flesh as word..."

Doreen Stock, D'Aurora Press

"In The Rising of the Flesh Ms. Andersdatter gives us 'woman-knowing,' and as far as I can see, that's the only way we'll make it to the next century. But how hard it is to forgive love for being inadequate, to accept that without blowing each other up."

Susan Bright, Plain View Press

TRANSPARENCIES: LOVE POEMS FOR A NEW AGE
By Karla Andersdatter

"The poems in this book reach a vibrant lyricism ... without dealing with self pity or sensational confessions"

A.D. Winans, Second Coming Press

"Seldom do the sensuous and spiritual blend so naturally"

Jim Heynen

"This book might more correctly be subtitled 'Love Poems for Living'"

Miriam Patchen

I DON'T KNOW WHETHER TO LAUGH OR CRY 'CAUSE I LOST THE MAP TO WHERE I WAS GOING By Karla Andersdatter

In this book the poem "'Don't Invite Me to Los Angeles' catches for me, as no other poem I know, the frustration of existence in the backstreets of that city, the stagnation of dying values among the freeways, commercial madness, and tinsel..."

Naomi Clark, San Jose State University Department of English

Spaces
By Karla Andersdatter

   "Who wrote this book?

child
girl
beachcomber
daydreamer
schoolteacher
wife
mother
divorcee
woman
maybe you ..."

From the back cover

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At the Sacred Pool
By Karla Andersdatter

QUESTION

If one were to wake
in the star fading time
when small birds, finch
bright and sparrow brown
begin their journey into day.

would it all return
in one gigantic rush,
that knowledge of love
that entered our lungs at birth
and sent us
reeling into life,
to seek it
the rest of our lives?

"Her poems touch the outer reaches, those edges so elusive and difficult to place in metaphor or image.
She recreates nature, 'the otherness', of love,
a magic mixture of clarity and every day vision, moment by moment she gives us
the extravagant ... if you enter her world you will want to go there again becaue there is something universal here, something we recognize as our own, something we want to move toward."

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   When he opened his eyes again she was still there, watching him. Her black hair hung straight to her shoulders and she wore a headband of ruby colored beads woven into a macrame band. Her brown eyes stared out at him from behind the round lenses of her spectacles. Her dress was of a coarsely woven fabric, and richly red.
   "Who are you?" said Elmo.
   "A fairy," she answered.
   "But I don't believe in fairies," he said.
   "Most people don't believe in talking frogs either," said the tiny creature, and laughing she shook the little ruffled apron she wore around her tiny waist. Sparkles glittered off it, and Elmo once again began to feel that strange and wonderful feeling wash over him.   
   "Oh my," he said, "that takes my breath away! What is your name, and what are those wonderful sparkles that keep jumping around you?"
   "My name is Lorinda, and these 'sparkles', as you call them, are whimsies. I've invented them so that people will feel good. I was out this morning giving them their final test."
   "This is really nice!" said Elmo, trying to catch a few with his long tongue.

—from page 3 Witches and Whimsies.

Witches and Whimsies
By Karla Margaret*
Illustrated by Diane Mayers

   Witches and Whimsies is a modern fairy tale for children and adults, revealing the history of witches, the power of 'whimsies', how to get rid of the 'scaries', what to do when your wishes don't come true, and how to survive when everyone doesn't live happily ever after.

*(Karla Margaret is a nom de plume of Karla Andersdatter)

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MARISSA The Tooth Fairy
By Karla M. Andersdatter

   MARISSA The Tooth Fairy has been a favorite of children since 1976. A second edition is in the works.

Chapter Four
PRINCE CHARMER, THAT
TOE MUNCHING, TOOTH
STEALING OLD LOONEY!

    "Gone! What did you do with it?" asked the fairy.
    "I ... I ... I lost it."
"Lost it! Great galloping ostriches! How could you do that?"
    "I don't know," sighed Jennifer, "it just fell out of my hand and bounced on to the floor, and when I looked for it I couldn't find it Mom looked too, but she couldn't find it either. It just disappeared!"

23

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MARISSA The Tooth Fairy, 2nd Edition
By Karla M. Andersdatter

   MARISSA The Tooth Fairy had been enjoyed since 1979 by teachers, elementary children and the author's children and grandchildren.

"Ms Andersdatter, In Marissa the Tooth Fairy, brings us "an amazing performance, a style that flows like maple syrup, a book that deserves to be on the shelves of immortality like Alice and Dorothy. Deborah Koff's illustrations are Daliesque realism that practically talks." Hugh Fox Reviewer for Small Press Magazine

Chapter Four
PRINCE CHARMER, THAT
TOE MUNCHING, TOOTH
STEALING OLD LOONEY!

    "Gone! What did you do with it?" asked the fairy.
    "I ... I ... I lost it."
"Lost it! Great galloping ostriches! How could you do that?"
    "I don't know," sighed Jennifer, "it just fell out of my hand and bounced on to the floor, and when I looked for it I couldn't find it Mom looked too, but she couldn't find it either. It just disappeared!"

23

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The Never Nuff Nasty
By Karla M. Andersdatter

"I'll take your food, your toys, your clothes. I never NEVER have enough!" says the Never-Nuff Nasty. How the twins and the Grin family transform this greedy monster into a "bright, light-hearted kind bird", is delightful. Illustrated by the author's grand daughter Emily Billings. . . Perfect for grandparents to mail to their most beloved grandchildren, to be read aloud to ages seven and under.

Commentaries include the following from Katherine Heartburn, Marilyn Monrovia, and Marlena de Trick:

"This little book pops into mind whenever I hear a child whining 'Can I have more candy Mom? Please can I have more candy?" I wish it had been around when I was raising my children!"

"I recommend this book for use in all primary classrooms . . . so adorable!"

"The children were spellbound! They loved the sound of the language, the long words, and the rhyming text."

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Follow the Blue Butterfly
By Karla M. Andersdatter

   "Follow the Blue Butterfly is amazing."

Gary Snyder

From the book:

    After some time, the butterflies began to leave the pattern of flight. Gradually, one by one and two by two, they returned to the top of the pines, alighting among the brownish-colored undersides of the thousands of Monarchs that covered the treetops like molasses. They folded their wings, and hung upside down like brown leaves.
    "Look, Ellie, they cover the whole top of the grove," whispered Scooter.
 

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In the Footsteps of a Princess
By Karla M. Andersdatter

Author's Notes: