Loose Leaf Notes

Colleen Redman grew up as one of nine siblings on a peninsula in the South Shore of Boston, MA during the ‘50s – ‘60s.  Since 1991, she has lived with her husband in a cabin off the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway in Floyd, a rural Virginia county known for its mountain culture, roots music, small farm homesteads and a flourishing art scene, which she relocated to in 1985.  She has two grown sons and two grandsons, keeps a small flock of chickens and tends a large garden. She is a blogger (looseleafnotes.com) who has written and photographed extensively for The Floyd Press newspaper and other regional publications.  Her poetry has most recently been published in the Artemis Journal and Floyd County Moonshine.

Losing two brothers a month apart in 2001 was a life-changing event that spurred Redman’s study of death and was the impetus behind her 2003 book The Jim and Dan Stories, which was included in a curriculum for a Radford University grief and loss class for counselors before it went out of print. With the loss of her brothers, Redman let herself descend into “the trenches of grief’s frontline.” She wrote, “If I can describe what I see from inside this hole, will it help others when they are down in one? What place is this? How deep does it go? I want to know. I’ve never been here before.” Her brothers’ deaths were followed by the passing of her father, her older sister and mother.

In 2017, Redman’s poetry collection Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife was published by Finishing Line Press and reviewed by poet and creative writing teacher Felicia Mitchell:  “She has, paradoxically, told the untold , touching on that which resides both in dreams and in life and in the borders between…” Poet and novelist Jim Minick wrote: “Loss tempered by wonder, love radiating like the moon (a bowl fired by the sun”), these poems track a life, playful yet dark, frank and funny, yet somber…”

Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife was followed by the 2021 publication of Objects are Closer Than They Appear, described by the poet as “a distillation through the rear-view mirror of poetic memoir where every remnant pulled from a dream or a memory resonates with an afterlife, as if a visitation from the same place my dead loved ones are, closer than they seem.”

As with her first two poetry collections, the poems that appear in Poems from the Dark Room are the basis of Redman’s “Grief and Relief: Soulful Aging Tour,” the call-and-response poetry readings that she does with fellow poet and author of Poetic Memoir of a Nascent Senescent, Katherine Chantal. They represent a deepening and a charting of the inner-life adventure, one that has come closest to touching and trusting the mysteries of life and death, one that brings the grace of grief full circle.  You vow not to forget / love’s lasting imprint / when life has been spent / and time no longer counts you…

NOTE- Poems from the Darkroom is available for purchase at Amazon for $13 and in Floyd at The Harvest Moon Food Store and The Floyd Country Store.