Join us for a special member meeting with three featured members who will be reading from their published works. Here is more info on our speakers:

The daughter of florists and granddaughter of a prolific gardener, Claire Arbogast was born in 1950. She grew up among the winding streets and deep front porches of historic Irvington on the eastside of Indianapolis. But her life took a wide turn as books and the times challenged her limited perspective of the world. This questioning wove its way into her very fiber, leading her to try on different ways to live, different ways to love, and different ways to write with the hope of opening up conversations and attitudes.

After a few years of exploring (southern Indiana, Chicago, California, The Farm in Tennessee, Albuquerque, touring the country in a handmade camper, Fort Worth, and a couple winters in Alaska), she earned a degree in journalism from Indiana University-Bloomington and went on to work in communications, living in Fort Wayne, Bloomington, and Cincinnati.

These days, she gardens and writes in Bloomington, Indiana, relishing every sweet day with a thirst for sorting, rejecting, and adapting to the infinite stream of ideas that flow into our lives.

Tracy Mishkin recently published her first full-length book of poetry, The Way The Salt Falls, with Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Tracy is also the author of three chapbooks, I Almost Didn’t Make It to McDonald’s (Finishing Line Press, 2014), The Night I Quit Flossing (Five Oaks Press, 2016), and This is Still Life (Brain Mill Press, 2018). A graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Butler University, she lives in Indianapolis with her family and fewer than ten cats and dogs.

The Way The Salt Falls is about failing and trying to do better on a personal and political level. The poems are written both from my perspective and from those of other people: a visual artist, a refugee, an elderly man, Jacob from the book of Genesis, a cancer survivor, a bureaucrat.  I like to say that the “story” of The Way The Salt Falls goes from worse to bad, which is better than the other way around. Still, there’s hard-won hope at the end of the book.