The Late Years Fifteen

This is a view of the Black River in the Taiga (wild forest) in the Mezha District of the state of Kostroma, where I was taken in 1992 to see the area of Mikhail Bazankov's rodina or birth place. 

***
The Late Years Fifteen February 10, 2019

This week I proofed the first long 
chapter of my love story. He’s gone.
I’m alive. His sons and his wife live.
I live, to tell our story, our history.
At times we wanted to forget, to
escape our love. We tried and failed.
It plunged us too deep, well below
consciousness, where the Muse
dwells, and the inmost truth of our
being. Later this week, the world
will know all the details. Maybe
some of the hate will subside. What
need is war and making souls into
enemies? We got past all that at the
end of the twentieth century. Now
we have to relearn it. I lost him, but
the words still live. Those movements
thirty years ago that taught us the
permanence of love when soul is
drawn to soul. That won’t disappear
even when I die, but I have some 
years yet, and three more books
to put out into the world. We ached.
We rebelled. We hurt each other,
but we couldn’t let go. We didn’t.
Our story, our history now rests 
like those suffering ancients did

in the stars.

***
Baba Summer Part One will be published on February 16, 2019. This is the first of four memoirs about my experiences in the 90s in writer exchanges getting to know Russian people. I knew that Adelaide Books of New York City was to publish it this year, but I learned only earlier this week that it was to come out February 16, 2019. That’s a week away, folks. It might be a couple of weeks before I get the books I’ve ordered, but feel free to send in checks now for a signed copy.

Paper: ISBN-13:968-1-949680-74-9 $22.30, with tax, $24. With postage: $26 from Judy.
E-book, ISBN-10: 1949180-74-3. $9.77.

You can also buy it from the Adelaide Books website, and see some comments on my writing from Susan Broili. http://adelaidebooks.org/baba_summer.html




Baba Summer, Part One (520 pages) is a memoir by writer Judy Hogan of her first visit in August 1990 to Soviet Russia as part of a Durham, NC Sister Cities Writing Exchange with the Writers Organization of Kostroma, a city which had been closed to Americans during the Cold War.  In diary, and letters with her new Russian friends, she shares her experience, not only of falling in love with her partner in the exchange, Mikhail Bazankov, but also of many other new bonds she made with Russians: a nationally known painter, a school teacher, a translator and proof-reader at the VAAP copyright agency, and a student of philosophy.  Hogan learned to speak, read, and write Russian so as to enhance communication with her new friends.  The exchanges and their mutual projects continued through 2001, and Hogan anticipates publishing another three volumes of diary, narrative, letters, and poetry.  She names the twelve years of her intensive experience with Russians as the most important event of her eighty-one years.  This book begins in August 1990 and ends in June 1992.