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OneWater Press™
Patricia Smith Ranzoni
289 Bucks Mills Road
Bucksport, Maine 04416
(207) 469-2225
Hazel Smith Hutchinson
616 East Republic
Salina, Kansas
Phone: (785) 825-6929
Cell: (785) 643-5594
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Mission Statement
OneWater Press™, established in 2008, is the natural confluence of a life-long collaborative relationship between sisters, Patricia Smith Ranzoni and Hazel Smith Hutchinson, whose intentions are:
- to publish limited editions believed to have cultural, historic, or spiritual significance;
- to maintain, with authors, creative say over the process;
- to nourish, with authors, working energies embodying mutual respect and reciprocity; and
- to realize a more equitable return for authors and causes they support.
OneWater™ is not a vanity press, nor is it open to unsolicited submissions at this time.
HIBERNACULUM & OTHER NORTH-NATURED POEMS
FROM MAINE'S PATRICIA SMITH RANZONI
ISBN: 978-0-692-00932-1
HIBERNACULUM:
- Location chosen for shelter during hibernation
- Bud, case, or protective covering used to survive threatening weathers during dormancy
- Winter quarters
When the owners of Bar Harbor’s new shop, Spruce & Gussy asked Pat Ranzoni if they could carry her poetry, she was inspired to envision a new collection to be offered exclusively through Spruce & Gussy and OneWater Press™ – a hand-sewn book, worthy to take its place next to the other creations they’re gathering from all directions for sale to locals and visitors from around the world treasuring authentic Maine voice and touch.
In keeping with the mission of OneWater, Pat’s HIBERNACULUM & Other North-natured Poems continues her devotion to documenting the Maine she has known, with a slant toward Mount Desert Island, down the county and coast, where she worked summers in her teens, connections told in her author account in the back of the book. Even dedication paragraphs to “North-inspirited grandfathers... never met” tell stories of deep Maine.
Her sixth collection, this one has as its cover a rich berry-ash Curtis duplex linen, hand printed with spruce and pine needles, gathering 23 pages of text hand-stitched with evergreen garden jute. Most of the poems have been published in literary journals and anthologies up and down the Atlantic Seaboard and across the country, as noted in acknowledgments entitled “Beholdens,” as Pat calls her gratitude.
These poems dwell with muskrats, mussels, bear, deer, bats, fish, frogs, blackflies, birds, turtles, and populations of unseen creatures watching and sensing human presence, known by their tracks and sign, howls, rackets and silences, through the fields, woods, waters, and skies Pat and her people have inhabited for centuries, and from which she makes melody, harmony, and rhythm – a second theme of the collection drawing from classical as well as folk music. And while HIBERNACULUM speaks Winter, it also relates, through wild and human nature, the glories of preparation, survival, and what comes after in true North.
More about the author and her other publications can be found at Patricia Ranzoni | Directory of Writers | Poets & Writers and Words from the Frontier - Poetry in Maine .
Book Order
For each copy of HIBERNACULUM by Patricia Smith Ranzoni
$17.00 + 1.00 shipping & handling = $18.00
Please make checks payable to OneWater Press and mail to:
OneWater Press616 East RepublicSalina, KS 67401Please be sure to include your mailing address.
Notice of Castine Book Publication - 2008
If you were out and about Penobscot Bay the evening of May 15 and thought you heard the skirl of the Great Highland Bagpipes, you may have been picking up the strains of Castine native son, Ernest Smith, Pipe Corporal of the Anah Highlanders Shrine Band, calling over Meadow Farm in celebration of his mother’s new book from growing up there, Scatterings from Offneck, Heirloom Poems & Photographs of Old Castine, from Jean Young Smith of Dunc’s Meadow, just released from OneWater Press. For this honor remembrance in North Castine, following a four-generation publication supper party at Dennett’s Wharf, Smith played, “When the Pipers Play” and his own original composition, “Acadian Journey,” without too much interference from black flies and with the accompaniment of the resident symphony of frogs.In her preface, Jean explains, “In my day, bits and pieces left in the fields after the hay had been cut, raked, and brought in by farm families and our horses, were called “scatterings.” They were raked up last thing and saved--like these poems--bits and pieces of life in offneck Castine. I hope you enjoy this small gathering of Maine’s history, written through the last half of my life.”The collection of poems and sixteen images emanating from her childhood home have been published through the efforts of her daughters, Patricia Smith Ranzoni of Bucksport and Hazel Smith Hutchinson of Salina, Kansas. “We consider these treasures to be musical track and echo,” says Ranzoni. “They are of a time before motor vehicles. And of a Grange and school community preserved only in worn pictures, memories, and stories passed down.” Those descended from students of, or interested in, the Emerson School of North Castine will find a 1928 photograph of the one-room school’s 8 grades including: teacher, Una Gray, Martha Webster, Dwight Webster, Annie Dunbar, Nina Webster, the author, Patricia Ordway, Donald Webster, Russell Devereux, Tom Webster, Elmer Wardwell, George Wardwell, Owen Witham and Elmont Wardwell. Of interest is a reproduction of Dunc’s “hand” from a penciled envelope addressed to his wife, Hattie Snowman Young Dunbar, of Orland, and pictures of their Meadow Farm family life through the years, from which the poems are drawn.Back cover praise from Ernie Collar of Castine and Paris, France, and George Thunder Bear of the Penobscot Nation, shows their admiration for the collection, some of which have appeared in the Patriot, Bangor Daily News “UNI-Verse” column and Narramissic Notebook. The sale of this book benefits The Conservation Land Trust of Brooksville, Castine and Penobscot, in gratitude for the gift and protection of the Frank L. Wiswall Natural Area & Dunc’s Meadow, to which all proceeds beyond publication costs are to be donated. The signed, numbered, first edition will be available through area stores and historical organizations, from Pat Ranzoni at pranzoni@aol.com (469-2225) or Hazel Hutchinson at OneWaterPress@cox.net (785-825-6929).The Author
Dorothy Jean Young Smith was born in 1916 to a young musician father of Rockland and farmgirl mother of Orland, both descended from earliest settlers to midcoast Maine. She grew up in Castine with her mother, Hattie Snowman Young Dunbar, and step-father, Duncan Dunbar, at Meadow Farm. She attended Emerson School offneck in North Castine and the Abbott High School on The Common in town, graduating in the Class of 1934.
From early adulthood, Jean wrote daily in journals and letters, chronicling life as wife and lifelong helpmate to a young upriver woodsman, WWII veteran, downriver papermill rigger, subsistence farmer, cattle trader and antique dealer; and mother of five, raised mostly in Bucksport.
In the early 1950s she won a prize from a Bangor radio station for a poem based on a popular country song. While those verses are lost in time, in the decades since, she has written notebooks full of poems she's long called “Treasures of a Totebag.”
Through the years, Jean has read mainly for family, but in recent days she has accepted invitations to read for the Peace and Justice Program of the East Bucksport Methodist Church, Bucksport Senior Citizens, and friends of the Penobscot Nation.
With this first themed collection of many, she has agreed, at last, to her children’s admiring and respectful requests for permission to seek publication.
In her 90s, Jean continues to write every day, finding great satisfaction in how her poems are being received.
Book Order
For each copy of Scatterings from Offneck by Jean Young Smith:
$9.95 plus $.50 tax = $10.45First Class mailing rates:
•1 book @ $1.34
1 book @ $1.34•2 books at 1.85
2 books at 1.85*Please make checks payable to OneWater Press and mail to:
OneWater Press616 East RepublicSalina, KS 67401Please be sure to include your mailing address.
Do you know where Dunc's Meadow is in Castine? Jean Young Smith does. There is where she grew up in a great house on a hill owned by her stepfather, a stern and thrifty Scotsman who, with her mother, raised her as his own. Now in her nineties, she continues to write poems with simple and beautiful words about her youth on the farm she loved, especially that meadow. Of the chores and animals and Castine and the people and things she holds dear. Of mystery and heritage and skinny dipping with Annie Lou. And those of us who grew up in small towns in Maine and even those who grew up in big cities anywhere, read her poems and say, "Oh yes," and "I remember," and are happier for it. Bless you, Jean Young Smith. The world is a better place because of you and your words of tender memories.
—Ernie Collar, Castine and Paris, FranceThere is a voice from the gentle rolling hills of Bucksport, Maine, as clear as the crisp air of Fall, as sweet as the sound of a baby’s giggle, and as full of life as one can possibly stuff into such a delicate frame. This voice has given us a gift of words and images from the very soil of Maine and with the eye of one who has experienced the wonderment of the way of life she shares with us in her poems. I am pleased to call this extraordinary woman my friend and honored to have had one of her poems help to consecrate the wedding of my wife and I.
—George Thunder Bear, Penobscot NationThe sale of this book benefits The Conservation Land Trust of Brooksville, Castine and Penobscot in gratitude for the gift and protection of the Frank L. Wiswall Natural Area & Dunc’s Meadow where the author, Jean Young Smith, grew up, and from whence these poems spring.
OneWater Press
Proudly Presents . . .
.Author and Poet Jean Young Smith
of Bucksport, Maine
Narramissic Notebook number 10 . . .
rolled off the press Friday, Jan. 29, 2009, featuring stories from local people who remember the hard times of the 1930s and how their families continued to make-do as they always had on farms or in our towns: Leland Bowden, Wilma Brooks, and Jean Smith. The 48-page journal of poetry, community history and pictures is for sale now at BookStacks in Bucksport, Old Things, Orland Market and Snowman’s in Orland. The publishing team of Susan White and Sharon Bray also has copies for sale @ $4.00. Contact them by e-mail at narramissicn@yahoo.com
Scatterings from Offneck by Jean Young Smith
Poetry at the Bucksport Senior Cafe . . .
A special Mother's Day season program, "Celebrating the Poetic Bond," with readings from the works of Jean Smith and daughters Linda Smith and Pat Smith Ranzoni, was offered on Friday, May 7, at 11 a.m. at the Bucksport Senior Cafe.
ELEMENTS
Lines down. Winter’s turn.
You’ve cut, hauled, split
the wood for our marooned fire
up night after night both of us
keeping the pipes from freezing.
Our one warm room fragrant
with kindling and lichened logs.
I bring in my petite boudoir chair
with curved rockers needing me
and peach velvet tufts some lady
would never guess would end
oh begin at a Searsport sale
and show you how dancey
it helps me be here by the hearth
in my long night’s gown
oh let me fold you in.
I wish for the lights never
to come back on. For darkness
to come in its own good time
and take as long as it needs.
What shine and warmth there is,
up to us. As here, now,
this candle quivering its flirty skirt
oh let me undance your shirt
these drafts just piano shivers
I’ve taught myself to play.
Humming....our stove
can’t contain the flames
we take turns stoking in its belly.
Last traces of melting ice sizzle
from the cherry and maple,
water boiling over its kettle
oh let’s bathe in this flickering power
configuring on the ceiling
this petaled oil I’ve pressed and saved
for us this wine you’ve found.
Oh stay and listen by this fire with me
burning oh give yourself to your life
let me be your wife ‘til our shadows
die down into morning.
HIBERNACULUM, page 16
The Author
Working from one of the subsistence homesteads of her youth which her husband and three now-grown children have devoted themselves to keeping in the family for generations to come, mixed-blood Yankee, Patricia Smith Ranzoni, considers the cultures of her boundary-crossing people in coastal and upriver Maine and Canada to be her literary credentials. A former child development specialist, education consultant, and mental health counselor, her unschooled documentary poetry has been published across America and abroad, been drawn from by UM departments of English, Colby’s “Many Maines” course, and is being archived by writing, history, working class, folk, disability and women’s studies and realities, in whose settings and by whose fires, near and away, she reads and recites.
She has had five collections published, most recently Pudding House’s invitational GREATEST HITS/GOLD chapbook. Among others, her poems have recently appeared in The Mind Errant, A Magazine of Sound and Fury; Illness & Grace, Terror & Transformation (Wising Up Press anthology); The Lowly, Exalted and other poems from Spineless Wonders: Invertebrates as Inspiration (USM exhibit and anthology), Untitled Country Journal; and Maine in Four Seasons: 20 Poets Celebrate the Turning Year (Down East Books). Her work is forthcoming in Puckerbrush Review, Narramissic Notebook, and two collections-in-progress: "FROM HERE, Poems from Being Born in Lincoln, Maine, An Album"; and "BEDDING VOWS, Love Poems from Outback Maine."
Pat's pantoum, "Waves, Or Did You Know My Uncle Young?" was awarded first place in the 2010 Rockland, Maine
Poetry Month contest in the adult category.
More about the author and her other publications can be found at Patricia Ranzoni | Directory of Writers | Poets & Writers and Words from the Frontier - Poetry in Maine .
Photo by Marshall Hutchinson
Costing Nothing
There are times when the moon
is brightand the chorus from the
meadow peepersfilters through my open window
bringing megreat comfort. Falling to sleep
peacefullyI am thankful for these things
that cost nothing.
Photos by Carol Ranzoni
OneWater Press™ Releases Second Book
Bangor Daily critic reviews HIBERNACULUM
Just to have a book deemed worthy of serious review by the Bangor Daily News' literary critic, Dana Wilde, is an honor. OneWater is pleased, indeed, with his recent assessment of HIBERNACULUM & Other North-natured Poems, Pat's hand-sewn collection released this summer (please see publication notice below).
Our favorite lines:
"This is an epiphanic moment rising, in diction and image, above the knots of reality, not untying them."
"These are not postcards from Camden."
For an inscribed copy: OneWaterPress@aol.com
OneWater Press™ Releases Third Book
Hazel delivers newest OneWater publication,
by Mary Jo Davis-Grant, to sister Pat on the
coast of Maine.
Guidance
Life is paradox
and contradiction
We must be
abandoned until we find
that we are never alone
pushed to the edge of awareness
that we may become aware
thrust out and off and away
that we may find our center
plumbed to our depths
that we may climb our mountain
exiled to the far country
that we may know home
Mary Jo Davis-Grant
Spirit-Speak
Mary Jo Davis-Grant
Book Order
For each copy of Spirit-Speak by Mary Jo Davis-Grant
$10.00 + $1.50 shipping & handling = $11.50
Please make checks payable to:
OneWater Press
616 East Republic
Salina, KS 67401
or
Mary Jo Davis-Grant
150 N Eunice - A
El Dorado, KS 67042
Please be sure to include your mailing address.
The Author
Mary Jo Davis-Grant, a widow, mother, grandmother and great grandmother grew up on a farm in the rough Big Spring Missouri Ozark Mountain foothills, and currently resides in El Dorado, Kansas. This crone, who speaks of how her hillbilly childhood still informs her life, finished her PhD at age 70. Mary Jo honors her life rich with blessings and knows she is on a sacred journey of paradox and contradiction where paths may be purpose and journeys may be destination. She finds much to ponder and consider in all religions. Mary Jo spent many years as an active advocate for survivors of abuse, often facilitating groups for survivors. She was a founder and member of The Alliance to Recognize and End Abuse, working locally and throughout the State of Kansas for social justice. Mary Jo has found genealogy to be a fascinating journey, especially the link with Alexander Campbell, a Scot, who was sent from England prior to the Revolutionary War to influence the Cherokees to side with the British. Campbell married a Cherokee woman and their daughter was Mary Jo’s grandmother's grandmother.
Mary Jo has arrived at a place in life where she is outgrowing her crone shoes and is ready to kick them off. Letting go, she listens to Spirit speaking to her in prayer.
Mary Jo’s style has about it the quality of epiphany — gentle but earth-shaking, simple but profound. Each poem contains the distilled essence of wisdom transmitted in sweet droplets, easy to skim, but deep enough to dive into if Spirit calls. This is the kind of book to keep on your nightstand, a lifeline to grab and flip open for insight and comfort during times of distress or depletion. —Marva Weigelt
