Raft of Leaves e-bok

Aging, death and foreignness were personal and academic interests of Marti Parker, a professor of social gerontology at the Karolinska Institutet Aging Research Center. Parker wrote short fiction and poetry and published two novels under the pen names M. Gale Parker and Martha Gale. Raft of Leaves gathers some of Parker’s writings, along with short stories, essays and poems by other writers. Born, raised and living in Stockholm, throughout her professional life Annie Norell Beach has worked with and written about diversity, inclusion and stepping into the shoes of others. She has traveled the world, has an international family and has a strong instinct to create a space that feels like home wherever it might be. It is her conviction that the details of care invested in our surroundings and space have a fundamental impact on how we feel. In a former life, Cas Blomberg wore a badge and wielded a gun. Now she wears whatever she wants and wields a pen in Stockholm. Writing helps her forget about the freezing death waiting outside the door. She joined the Stockholm Writers Group in 2014, where she met Marti Parker and fell in love with the talented members of the group who have been supportive through prolific writing periods and droughts. She can’t imagine life without them. As a founding member of the Stockholm Writers Group, Amy Brown appreciated how a shared love of writing with Marti Parker became a deep friendship. Amy’s young-adult novel about a young American girl thrust into the unfamiliar world of Sweden while still mourning the death of her mother and struggling to reach a distant, grieving father echoed many themes that preoccupied Marti. Now in the United States, the nurturing writing community Amy founded with Marti and the SWG has inspired her to create similar groups in Florida. Paul Burns met Marti Parker in London and spent a very pleasant afternoon discussing literature at a party organized by Pat Pegg Jones. With a background in psychology, education and organizational development, it was Paul’s volunteer work with survivors of torture that reignited his interest in writing, which he then studied at university. Paul has published two novels and short stories in the United Kingdom, Ireland and New Zealand. The title, “A Fragile Frame at Eve,” comes from a Thomas Hardy poem about ageing. Ideas for the story came from family experiences with dementia and reading about Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan, the daughter of an Indian family. Noor was one of four women Special Operations Executive agents executed at Dachau on September 13, 1944. Originally from Ireland, Gary Clarke joined the Stockholm Writers Group in 2014 and as a dramatist greatly values the group’s affirmative and nurturing process. A collective critique helps form a singular text which in turn becomes a blueprint for a new group of cast and crew, which in turn develops the text further for a final group, the audience. Selling Simone, one of his plays nurtured by the SWG, premiered in Stockholm in May 2019. Sara Hendey was one of the lucky budding writers to be taken under Marti Parker’s wing. Upon arriving to Stockholm in 2011, she soon found her way to Marti’s Friday luncheons. Eventually she braved the writing waters and joined the Stockholm Writers Group. Her favorite hobby, when she isn’t teaching kids how to write, is sitting around the kitchen table with her family creating new Swenglish words. Pat Pegg Jones met Marti Parker during rehearsals of a university commedia dell’arte production. Their lifelong friendship began the following year when they coincidentally transferred to Antioch College. Over the years, as they published in the fields of social care, work, health and politics, they talked. The discussions were heated, informed, conceptual—and almost always pragmatic. Their last adventure was as inclusive, creative and meaningful as the first and encouraged Pat to undertake End of Life Doula training in 2019. Kimberly Kane is one of the many writers encouraged and supported in her workday and fiction writing by the kind, generous and wise Marti Parker. In fiction, Kimberly finds that fairy tale and fantasy give her the goggles and oven mitts or possibly fire tongs she needs to take hold of things that otherwise burn and to turn them around and inspect them at arm’s length so she can say hmm rather than running and hiding in the pit of despair or possibly just under the blankets, depending on the day. Indra-Jeet Mistry has been part of the Stockholm Writers Group since 2017. He began writing after moving from London to New Delhi in the early 2000s. His writing passion is the cultural conflicts, contradictions, dilemmas and doubts faced by the second-generation immigrant, and his recent writing has addressed themes around childhood and self-discovery. By day, he works to make our urban environments more livable, and his working life has taken him to Hong Kong, London, New Delhi and now Stockholm. Jeet is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories. Marti Parker was one of the founding mothers of the Stockholm Writers Group and was cherished by many as a source of encouragement to budding writers. She came to Sweden as an exchange student in 1974. As a professor of gerontology and a researcher at Karolinska Institute and the University of Stockholm, her day job provided the fodder for her fiction writing (under the pen names Martha Gale and M. Gale Parker), as old people just kept creeping into her stories. Ron Pavellas joined the Stockholm Writers Group in 2007. Already in his early seventies, he qualified as being old and, knowing no Swedish, as foreign. For a decade, Ron took advice from group members on poems, short stories, diaries, memoirs and two novels, which have logged a few miles in and out of the drawer. Ron has several weblogs, one named Being Old, on Memories, Aging and Death. Find them at: https://pavellas.com. In addition to contributing poems, an essay, and a short story, Ron also served as editor of the Raft of Leaves anthology. Judy Petersen left the land of beer and money for the land of milk and honey in 1983 and found a new career in writing, editing, translating and training—first as a technical writer for IBM and later as a freelancer. She participated in the first Stockholm Writers Group until kids, work and aging in-laws consumed her free time. For two decades she studied mind-body methods (Pilates and yoga). When Marti Parker was ailing, Judy gave her private yoga lessons. Judy is now semiretired but still teaches yoga and volunteers for a women’s helpline. Renate Walder is able to turn out academic texts in three languages but can’t for the life of her write fiction. She admires and envies everyone who—like Marti Parker—can create worlds and characters with words. She consoles herself with the fact that writers need readers, because if everybody were busy producing books, who would be left to read them? Dedicating herself to this task she buys countless books, mostly mysteries, and reads as many as possible.