10th Anniversary Celebration of IN DROUGHT TIME – Best-Selling Anthology Featuring Manchester Poets & Artist

One of Nancy Feldkamp’s paintings featured in IN DROUGHT TIME. Photo courtesy of Doug Smith.

On Friday, June 12^th at 7 p.m, Serendipity Books located at 113 W. Middle Street in Chelsea will host a reception and celebration of the 2^nd edition and 10^th anniversary of the publication of IN DROUGHT TIME, an anthology of art and poetry by area artists and poets. Featured in the book are Manchester poets Jay Stielstra and Carol Rose Kahn. Stielstra who is also a song writer has multiple poems in the book while Kahn, a nurse, wrote about an experience in a local migrant camp. Manchester artist, Nancy Feldkamp, has two paintings in the book. The reception will begin with wine and snacks at 7pm, followed by a poetry reading at 7:30pm. Books will be on sale.

IN DROUGHT TIME which presents the story of small town and rural life through art and poetry has sold nearly 1,000 copies and is one of the best selling books of Mayapple Press, a small independent press that has been publishing books since 1978.  The anthology, which includes over fifty color plates features, in addition to the Manchester contributors, nationally acclaimed writers, Laura Kasischke, Thomas Lynch, Keith Taylor, and Richard Tillinghast, all of whom are now or have been professors at the University of Michigan.

With the swift change in land use and the growth of villages into cities across the Midwest and beyond, IN DROUGHT TIME attempts to capture a way of life that is in flux and perhaps soon to be lost forever. This is a book not just for poetry and art lovers, but for anyone who has dreamed about life beyond the urban sprawl and for the many who have already fled the city for life in the country or in a small town. IN DROUGHT TIME celebrates the beauty and peace of a pastoral life but also addresses the darker side of this exodus: the loss of family farms, isolation, small town prejudice, and the homogenization of middle class life.

For more information, please contact editors Doug Smith at dougMsmith52@yahoo.com or Karen Woollams at Woollams@umich.edu. Editor-in-chief, Judith Kerman, can be contacted at jbkerman@mayapplepress.com.

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by Sara Swanson

Sara Swanson is an editor, writer and founder of the Manchester Mirror.