Synkroniciti is excited to welcome poet Jeanne Julian, now based in Maine, with “Recurrence,” written after her North Carolina home was flooded by Hurricane Florence and memorializing her grandmother and great aunt who lived through the Great Storm of 1900 which devastated Galveston, Texas, one of the largest, deadliest storms recorded. Jeanne intersperses fragments from an essay her great aunt wrote in school afterwards and remarks on the difference between the sister’s accounts. Her grandmother’s memoir essay, written much later, has little of the horrors that her sister reports. “Is it honesty or memory that falters,/ blows words into misleading disarray/ like scattered flocks?” The irony is that these recollections were forgotten until they were almost lost in another deluge: “it took submersion, Liska,/ for them to resurface, salvaged,/ along with old tools,/ books, and bric-a-brac as I tried/ to sweep clean the aftermath/ of my storm. Hurricane Florence.” Hurricanes are part of the family heritage, a trauma still resonating and resurfacing to color her own response. Jeanne gives us quite a tribute to feminine resourcefulness and resilience manifested in the art of writing, also a part of her heritage.
Read “Recurrence” in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, Vol. 6, No. 4, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Jeanne Julian is the author of Like the O in Hope (The Poetry Box, 2019) and two chapbooks. Her poems appear in Visions International, Hole in the Head Review, Kakalak, Ocotillo Review, RavensPerch and other journals and have won awards from Reed Magazine, The Comstock Review, and Naugatuck River Review.
Having visited every U.S. state, she lives in Maine, where she practices yoga, hikes with her husband, and enjoys making scones. She formerly helped coordinate a live poetry open mic in New Bern, North Carolina, and now is active with Maine Poets Society and Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.