In early September, Marge submitted the final draft of her new poetry collection to her editor at Knopf. Entitled The Crooked Inheritence, it won't be released for well over a year, but we thought you might like to see a poem Marge wrote about the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina..

Counting the after-math

People penned to die in our instant
concentration camps, just add water,
bodies pushed to the side.

Thirst hurts worse than hunger.
It swells your brain against your skull.
it sandpapers your gut from within.

But hunger too makes people mad.
Shoot the looters who are grabbing
from flooded stores survival for hours more.

Baby is crying
Grandma is dying
and that dirty water is getting higher

Talk to the camera about why didn’t these
crazy people evacuate? Without cars,
without money, without cellphones –

Why didn’t they fly away like gulls?
Why didn’t they get on their yacht
and chug upstream? But even at the Ritz

when they ran out of food and water
the manager told tourists to “find”
food in the deserted stores.

Baby is crying
Grandma is dying
and that dirty water is getting higher

All the cats climbing the rafters
their fur sodden with stinking refuse
laden water and drowning. All

the dogs chained to porches
as the water rose, swimming in
narrowing circles. FEMA says

we didn’t know about the thousands
in the convention center, as millions
saw them on TV screaming for help.

Baby is crying softer now
Grandma is up to her chin
and that dirty water is still getting higher

Who will count the bloated bodies?
Who will weep for children silenced?
For mothers drifting like belly-up goldfish?

Only their families. If you’re not rich,
not white, not a good poster child
they don’t hurry to keep you alive.

Baby has stopped crying
Grandma has drowned
and that dirty water is still getting higher.

© Marge Piercy, Middlemarsh, Inc. 2005

The New Updated Second Edition of So You Want to Write reflects the workshop that Marge and Ira Wood have been co-teaching for many years. Of the thousands of writers they've worked with, many say they have failed to write because they can't bring themselves to write about family, friends, and those close to them.

Although there are sometimes legal issues that no book on craft is really qualified to answer, So You Want to Write discusses seven issues to bear in mind when writing about loved ones. We'll list the first four in this newsletter, and follow up with the rest of the list in the next:

After a year of relatively light traveling, Marge is on the road again this Fall.

Oct 14-15 in Seattle, Washington for a reading and a seminar exploring the boundaries between fact and fiction at the Richard Hugo House.

Oct 16-17 at Eastern Oregon State University in Le Grande, for a poetry reading.

A New England book tour for the new novel Sex Wars kicks off on:

Nov. 30 at the Odyssey Bookstore in S. Hadley, Massachusetts and

Dec. 1 at Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vermont.

Marge will be reading from the book and trying something completely new, a power point presentation starring many of the featured characters. Who knows? Could be a new trend in book tours!

Dec. 6 finds her back on the West Coast, doing a poetry reading at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon and on

Dec. 10 a benefit for Planned Parenthood at the First Unitarian Church in Portland, Oregon.

Back to the Sex Wars tour again on

Dec 15 at Brookline Booksmith in the Boston area.

For contact information and details about each visit, check out Marge's Schedule.

"2005 so far has been a busy year for me, but not the way my time usually is spent. Most years, I am on the road giving 35 or so readings, lectures, speeches, workshops – mostly paid and some benefits for local causes.

I did give a commencement address in May at Eastern Connecticut University . The students liked it because I didn’t give them the usual bullshit [you are commencing a great journey, blah blah] but talked about what they were really facing. They gave me an honorary degree as well. With my four honorary degrees and five bucks, you can get a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

I have been writing more than full time. I finished up the final draft of a novel a couple of days before Thanksgiving last fall. It’s called Sex Wars and it takes place mostly in New York City in the ten years after the Civil War. That was a turbulent time in which many of the same issues we are fighting about today were equally embattled: women’s rights, the rights of minorities, sexual freedom and repression, contraception, abortion, the rights of workers in low paying jobs, the status of immigrants, censorship.

The day after Thanksgiving, I started my first nonfiction book – unless you count my memoir Sleeping With Cats. But that at least came out of my own life. I have been writing a book about Passover – not a Haggadah, but a very contemporary approach to the holiday, which 95% of American Jews celebrate by attending at least one seder. It’s not a book for the Orthodox, but I wrote it to help Jews and others who may or may not believe in religion of any shade find a meaningful and pleasurable way to create a seder that will really work for them. I take a journey through all the items involved in the seder, from blessings to each of the ritual items and the customary foods. I share my own family and current history with the holiday, and I include many recipes I have tried and liked.

It was fun to write – researching things like figs and dates and gefilte fish and charoset, trying out the recipes, immersing myself in each aspect of the seder. I have been working on a haggadah and leading a seder for the last twenty years at least. I have included many of the poems I have written for my haggadah and some others that seemed to belong in the book. There’s nothing like it. I hope it will be useful. I surely could have used it back when I was beginning to work on a way to bring out real contemporary meaning in my own Passover activities.

I got it in to Shocken on June 15th. It will presumably come out in late winter of 2007. Then my editor at Knopf asked me if it wasn’t time for a new collection of my poetry. I wasn’t sure I had enough poems written over the past three or four years to make a strong collection. When I started going through my uncollected poems of the last few years – most of which have been in reviews or zines, print or online, but which haven’t been put in any book yet – I realized I had more than enough. On Labor Day I finished putting the book together, organizing the poems, deciding what to put in and what to leave out. It’s pretty much fun. I revise some of the poems as I go and I write new poems I think of as I’m immersed in the ones already done.

Ira Wood and I give one big annual party in our garden every July. We invited 70 friends from town and bought a lot of food. My old friend Elise Manella and I do a massive cooking for this party. We do old favorites and some new things we try – usually good, but last year the peach Bavarian cream was a disaster. It collapsed in the heat and turned into peach Bavarian soup. This year we did a peach pie instead. I like to cook. I’m a very good cook, although only an average baker – except for pies. I like to fool around with recipes too much to bake really well. Good bakers are part chemists. They follow formulas exactly. I seem congenitally incapable of obeying a recipe. I always think of some way to “improve” it. With cooking, this usually works because I have a sense of how to change things; with baking, my bad."

The early reviews of Sex Wars have been great. In a starred review Publishers Weekly says:

“This rich novel set in post–Civil War New York stars a true-life cast of characters… As they each vie for different kinds of sex-based power, the consequences of their actions echo from the halls of Congress to Manhattan 's back alleys.”

So many books are published these days (195,000 in 2004, a 14% jump over the previous year) that it's almost impossible to remember all the great books that writers have written in the past...no less find time to read them.

But the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina brings to mind the world that Marge created in her sci-fi novel He, She and It. Set in 2059, it details a world in which the effects of global warming have begun to change the earth, in which the oceans have risen to create a vast toxic wasteland of what used to be North America.

We thought you might like to read: Chapter One of He, She and It

If you've ever attended Marge's (or any other famous writer's) readings in New York City, you may have purchased a book, stood patiently on line for a chat with the author, and found yourself waiting endlessly as a guy with two duffle bags full of hard covers cajoled the author into signing every one. These are the book collectors, guys who collect first editions and obtain signatures that substantially increase the value of the book. The availability of used titles on the internet has made it easy to obtain signed, first editions, but the truth is, you can never really be sure if you're getting a pristine book that's never been read, or even the author's actual signature.

All of Marge's backlist titles are available directly from her office, most in first edition hardcover. She'll be glad to inscribe them. If you'd like to start a Piercy collection, find a backlist title that's gone out of print or give a signed Piercy title as a gift, you can order from the Newsletter.

As a working writer who makes her living from a combination of published books and personal appearances, Marge is pretty busy and doesn't have the time she'd like, except in workshops or book signings, to answer questions.Through this newsletter, however, we'd like to give curious readers an opportunity to pose a question to Marge and have the answer appear in subesequent newsletters and post on the Marge Piercy web site.

There's no way she can answer everyone's question but we can try to field a few. If you have a question for Marge that you'd like to see answered in future newsletters, please send them to the Newsletter.

That's right, we're working up a contest for the next edition. The prize? A copy of Eight Chambers of the Heart, a volume of Marge's selected poems chosen especially for the British market and published only in the United Kingdom by Penguin. In fact, it has never been available in the United States. Quite a collector's item. The question? Stay tuned for the next newsletter.