BOOKS, ART, TRAVEL AND MORE
Take a minute to scroll through the delightful offerings in ArtsMart, and you’ll find fascinating books on every subject, for every taste, and from
every genre--poetry, memoirs, history and biography, children’s books, essays, mysteries, fiction both speculative and historical. You’ll also find
writing workshops and retreats, music, even grownup coloring books - something for each and every taste and hour and
mood.
When you purchase an item from ArtsMart, you are helping Persimmon Tree fulfil its mission of providing an audience for the writing and art of women over 60. ArtsMart’s advertising rates
are purposely set very low in order to afford to as many older women writers and artists the opportunity to connects with potential purchasers.
Persimmon Tree is an Amazon and Bookshop.org associate, which means our journal receives a small royalty every time you make a
purchase by clicking through to Amazon or Bookshop.org. The price to you is no higher, but your purchase helps Persimmon Tree continue its vital work.
Persimmon Tree readers will love young Joey’s mother, Ellie, as she navigates through poverty and around a philandering, alcoholic husband to help her boy achieve his dream of becoming a classical musician. She scrimps and saves enough to take her nine-year-old boy to the San Francisco Symphony to hear Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, though she herself had never before set foot in a concert hall.
Where We Went Through, a chapbook of poems by Nancy Nowak, traces a journey through landscapes physical and emotional. Two people, the poet and her artist husband, begin the journey together, but after his sudden illness and death, she remains to enter sorrow alone.
Poems from Linda Hogan explore new and old ways of experiencing the vagaries of the body and existing in harmony with earth’s living beings. Throughout this clear-eyed collection, Hogan tenderly excavates how history instructs the present, and envisions a future alive with hope for a healthy and sustainable world that now wavers between loss and survival.
Leaving Home at 83 is an intensely personal story yet one shared with thousands of aging women who are wondering whether to move closer to their children and leave their friendships behind or stay in their communities. Readers will see their own questions on these pages and recognize their own fears, insecurities, and uncertainties.
In the hybrid collection, Prayers for the Lost & for the Living, poetry, prose, and images convey the universality of faith and our primal strivings for connection.
For young Becky Williams, a transplanted Northerner living in the segregated South of the 1950s, childhood was cut short when her father, a researcher at Oak Ridge and a beloved biology professor at the University of Alabama, suffered a psychotic break. He died three months later at Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, the state mental institution. In this heartfelt memoir, Mlynarczyk searches through family scrapbooks, old letters, and her own childhood memories in a quest to understand her father’s mental illness and sudden death. Readers who revisit the past alongside her will see what can be gained by looking back on our loved ones in all their complexity. If we are fortunate, we experience healing as we learn to love them in new and unexpected ways.
A uniquely thrilling, first-person account of what happens when traditional ancestry research and psychic skills merge.
Dear Phebe is an out-of-the ordinary autobiography, an encounter with the myth (and truth) of Judy Wells’ own origins and destiny. Sorting through family letters, the Berkeley poet hears voices from her ancestors—three Dickinson sisters who went out west in the 1860s to seek their fortunes as pioneer schoolteachers. I loved every twist and turn of this mind-tripping story and laughed with glee when the author finds herself in the after-life with the Dickinson sisters, and then ends up returning her great-grandmother Phebe’s 100-year-overdue book to the San Francisco Public Library.
Women, the largest and yet most unrecognized population of the dance arts community, are spotlighted in renowned dance photographer Julie Lemberger’s Modern Women: 21st Century Dance, a coloring book, edited by Elizabeth Zimmer.
Randa Jo Downs’ childhood in Texas was a dichotomy of innocence and darkness. A haunting family secret lurked among her love for dancing, the escape of her vibrant imagination, and summer days spent swimming in rivers. While father-daughter incest is not an uncommon crime, it is veiled in secrecy and shame.
Season Lightly With Salt, Poems and Recipes from the Test Kitchens of the San Francisco Wild Writing Women is a joyful and sometimes bittersweet
Flashlight in the Fog holds twenty short stories, micro, flash, and longer tales of romance, fantasy, and dark, dark, dark fiction put to the page. Peek into the mind of a magician, a bride-to-be, a traveler, and more. Explore their themes of adventure, cultural misadventures, and coming to terms with life’s span from coming-of-age to aging.
What can be gained from listening to music? And what can be learned from songs? More specifically French songs?
Encounter with the Future is a political and social drama running parallel with a rapid coming of age. 
Deep Ends explores the fragile balance between treading life’s turbulent waters and mastering a survival float. A father invents his brand of cross-chest carry to save himself and his grandson from drowning in a “current of light and sound.” A mother tosses her young daughter into the deep end of a public pool in hopes she will learn to swim. A daughter becomes a lifeguard, a teacher inspired by Dolly Parton’s “can-do” attitude, and an empowerment drummer. Family, grief, survival, and climate change are the themes in Roberta Schultz’s second full-length collection.
What We Choose
It began, as these things often do, with a question that was never answered. A husband of forty-two years, gone in the blink of a December morning. The house, once filled with the scent of coffee and the rustle of newspapers, now echoing with silence. She was alone. But not defeated.
Follow this grandmother’s journey with mini-stories in poetry, illuminating her transformation from her fundamentalist beginnings towards a liberated mindset; from whiteness to an intercultural, artistic self. Poetic vignettes delve into identity, culture, radical acceptance, and learning to thrive in a marriage to an autistic man born to Korean American parents of Hawaii.
How can we find meaning in the face of aging, illness, and the inevitability of death? How can we respond to the double plague of a fierce pandemic and a divided society?
Immigrants fearful of losing the only home they’ve known. Communities divided by politics. A neighborhood becoming gentrified with some benefiting and others being harmed. Sound familiar?
Writer, Barb Drummond, grew up in a home filled with crazy antics, love, laughter, and an exceptionally unique and zany mother. Who else had a mom who baked cream pies just so she’d have one on hand to throw at people she loved?
In this tell-all memoir, Claire Kahane, born during the Great Depression to Jewish immigrants, unveils her intimate self-transformations in the course of nine decades. Determined at an early age to prove herself a free spirit in a male dominated world, the young Kahane went on the road, hitch-hiking her way into and out of risky adventures and romantic affairs. But what started out as a “road book” takes a different turn in mid-life when, influenced by a psychoanalysis and the second wave of feminism, she becomes a feminist professor, mother, and wife, dealing with their contradictory demands.
It’s November 1963, in a small town in rural Georgia. Teenager Callie Ingram is lonely and grieving the death of her beloved Nana, the only mother she’s ever known. Callie’s stuck with her stoic, inept dad and rebellious older sister. There are constant fights at home, and money is scarce. To escape the turmoil and earn a little income, Callie takes a part-time job as a waitress in a diner.
Woolf’s pen runs dry, Tesla holes up, Lincoln emerges in yet another bardo, and the witnesses for peace include soldiers under duress, models transformed to artists, descendants of forced immigrants, survivors of hurricanes. 
The cryptic prompts—fragments, really—of Brian Eno’s and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies unveiled themselves to Leslie Ullman as rough translations from an obscure language. As an experiment, Ullman used each one as a poem title, and in doing so she accessed a thrill of freedom, uncertainty, and propulsion beyond her own familiar patterns and landscapes. In the process, she found herself exploring the literary, visual, and musical arts from angles that had never occurred to her before.
“In Winter of My Life, Sherri Wright engages in conversation with memory in a debut book which evokes the extraordinary imagery of The Eastern Shore. In such poems as ‘The Garden Goddess’ and ‘The Great Blue Heron at Silver Lake’, Wright’s imaginative approach allows the reader to delve into the inner workings of the mind of the feminine, exploring contemporary issues such as domesticity, divorce, and the vast differences between generations. Questioning her own mortality, Wright allows the reader to entertain the question of regret, and the enormous joy of living life unrestrained.”
Jacqueline Miller Bachar wrote her first story in 1995— “La Fête de la Vie” (“The Celebration of Life”). She was sixty years old. The story won 1st place in the Palm Springs Writers Guild Short Story Contest and was published in the September 2000 issue of Palm Springs Life.
“Duke sauntered across the schoolyard, dragging his feet in the dirt. When he got to the fence on the other side, he slowly turned around, as if afraid of what he might or might not see. I waved. He stared back.”
“An intense, addictive drama with a hint of light at the end of the tunnel.” — Kirkus Reviews 
A powerful novel of friendship, choice, and survival—before Roe v. Wade, when a woman’s options could define her destiny.
What if you could have a different marriage without having to get a different spouse? At age sixty, marital therapist, Leah Fisher, does just that. She wants to explore the world; he wants to focus on his career. After much discussion, the couple agrees to be apart for a year, each pursuing their own dream while arranging for periodic reunions and nurturing a committed relationship.