Our Spirit, Our Reality: Celebrating Our Stories
by Las Comadres de Sowing the Seeds
Paperback: 450 pages
Publisher: Wheatmark (December 15, 2011)
Language: English
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches

About

Sowing the Seeds is a collective of women writers from Tucson, Arizona. We have been active since 2000, meeting regularly once a month, to critique our writing, plan workshops and conferences, and other events to promote the humanities in our community.

In 2002 we published the first anthology of our writing – Sowing the Seeds, una cosecha de recuerdos. It was selected by the Tucson/Pima County Public Library as one of the 100 best books on the southwest that year. Our Spirit, Our Reality is our second anthology.

Writing as Healing begins the first section in this anthology of the Sowing the Seeds women’s writing group and sets the stage for what is to come. The rich outpouring of lives lived reflected through story and poetry fills the reader with a nostalgia rarely glimpsed at during the day-to-day act of living, where regrets often fill the void of things left unsaid.

Writing is a salve for life’s bumps and bruises. Through the process of writing, the transformation of giving voice to their experiences becomes the Comadres’ vehicle to creativity. This book will touch your soul, reach in and reawaken your spirit to speak your own truths.

Biography

Elena Díaz Björkquist is a writer, historian, and artist from Tucson. Her two books of short stories, "Suffer Smoke" and "Water from the Moon," are about the people in Morenci, Arizona where she was born.

Elena has been on the Arizona Humanities Council (AHC) Speakers Bureau for since 2001 and is an AHC Scholar. She not only performs a Chautauqua as Teresa Urrea, a curandera who lived in the 1900's but also does two presentations about Morenci and one on el Día de los Muertos.

In 2001 Elena became a Research Associate and SIROW Scholar at the University of Arizona. She completed a project funded by AHC, "In the Shadow of the Smokestack," a website containing oral history interviews and photographs of Chicano elders living in Morenci during the Depression and World War II. In 2005 she finished another project funded by AHC and the Stocker Foundation, "The Tubac 1880's Schoolhouse Living History Program."

Elena is one of the founders of Sowing the Seeds, a collective of Latina writers. In 2002, she co-edited "Sowing the Seeds, una cosecha de recuerdos," an anthology written by the Comadres. The project was funded by AHC. Elena has also written a full-length play about Teresa Urrea that has had two readings in Tucson. Currently she is nearing completion of another collection of Morenci stories entitled "Albóndiga Soup" and is co-editing a second anthology by the Sowing the Seeds Collective entitled "Our Spirit, Our Reality."