By Ventura Breeze Staff –
Mary Ann McFadden was chosen as Ventura County’s fourth Poet Laureate. The laureateship was decided by a collaborative effort from the Ventura County Arts Council and the Ventura County Poetry Project.
Her inauguration takes place on Sunday, January 12 at the Museum of Ventura County. The event starts at 2:00 pm and is free and open to the public.
McFadden lives on a citrus ranch outside of Fillmore and is an award-winning author of two poetry books, Eye of the Blackbird and Devil, Dear. She taught at Brooklyn College, CUNY and has given workshops at The New York City Libraries and at the Biblioteca in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Poet Chase Twichell describes McFaddon as a poet with a “sustained vision of her family’s past and its ongoing presence in herself.” She has a writing shed a few hundred yards into the groves where she has to be careful of rattlesnakes. Living on a ranch close to the mountain, many of her neighbors are wildlife.
McFadden’s earliest memories are of living with her mother on her grandparents’ citrus ranch in Simi Valley. After her mother remarried, they moved to her family’s citrus ranch in Fillmore where she attended school. Her father died in World War II. She never knew him. The poet within set to work, reconstructing who he must have been. Here is an excerpt from a poem about herself as a child awakening at dawn:
“And now like a mist almost not discerned,
the first cheeps of the early birds beginning far away in the fields,
moving across the earth to us,
lit like a caravan with its rich-robed musicians and its proud kings.
And I am proud of this turning, this sweep of delight
that falls over me,
glad to be a child of it, one of its steeples.
Out of my father’s bones, in green grass, in weeds in fields
of gravestones
in Southern France,
dark now, resting, I not separate from this, I wake up
and try to grow.”
