Westside Women Writers

Grateful Conversations is a portrait of a group of female poets from California, who come together each month to hone their craft and share their verse. Known as Westside Women Writers and active as a group since 2008, they include Millicent Borges Accardi, Madeleine S. Butcher, Georgia Jones Davis, Lois P. Jones, Susan Rogers, Kathi Stafford, Sonya Sabanac, Ambika Talwar and Maja Trochimczyk.

The volume includes poems written for seven workshops and poetic self-portraits of the nine writers. Many photographs by the poets (Madeleine S. Butcher, Lois P. Jones, Susan Rogers, Sonya Sabanac, Ambika Talwar and Maja Trochimczyk) provide illustrations. 

In the words of the WWW founder, Millicent Borges Accardi, this is “a community of women writers working together to support each other with strong attention to craft, to grow as writers and as people in community.” The editors, Maja Trochimczyk and Kathi Stafford state: “Poetry is an elusive gift. The women whose work is reflected in this volume have supported each other in their ongoing writing—some of them for as long as ten years.

We express our support and gratitude to all the family, friends, and fellow writers on this journey with us. Our group expanded and contracted: some women travelled a lot, others moved away; still others had to deal with illness and pain. Yet, we continued to meet and share poems, to be an inspiration for each other, especially in ‘arid’ creative times. We are fascinated with the diversity of poetic responses to the same prompt – be it word, image, or place. Thus, we present poems from our workshops and field trips, hoping that our readers will find their diversity refreshing. The only criterion for inclusion of a workshop in this anthology is to have at least three poems that resulted from it.“