Prologue
“Summer Home Review II Anthology is a literary labyrinth, an honoring of the written word, and a dream come true.” I wrote this for the Prologue of Summer Home Review I in 2002. It is just as true for Volume II. Summer Home Review brings together poems and prose written by writers who gather the third and fourth week of June in Boston to attend the Writers’ Workshop at the· William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequence at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, Massachusetts. It is that experience that Summer Home Review honors and celebrates.
The Beginnings of Summer Home
In the summer of 1996, after an especially draining two weeks at Joiner working in Tim O’Brien’s fiction class, I was exhausted. I knew other poets were suffering the effects of the intensity of the Joiner Center that year too. Joiner is an especially difficult though rewarding time for poets who are veterans of the war in Vietnam and some of my best friends were veterans and poets. On the last day of class, after the potluck lunch, I invited several poets to my house on the Cape for a weekend of writing: I had been working on prose for two weeks, and I needed to corral the new poems that had been writing themselves in my mind while I worked on my novel. READ MORE
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