Dianna Henning
Ms. Henning was born and raised in Vermont. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Published in, in part: The Kentucky Review, The Main Street Rag, Crazyhorse, The Lullwater Review, California Quarterly, Poetry International, Fugue, The Tule Review, The Asheville Poetry Review, Clackamas Literary Review, South Dakota Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review and The Seattle Review. Won fellowships to Bread Loaf and Dublin Writers’ Center. Longlisted in Aesthetica’s Creative Writing Award in the UK and published in their Annual 2014 along with fifty-three other writers selected by the judging panel. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Blue Fifth Review, Dec. 2015 for a flash fiction piece which was also nominated for the Queens Ferry Press Best Small Fictions 2016 anthology, ed. Stuart Dybek.
Dianna taught for California Poets in the Schools, and through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Project. She has been a recipient of several California Arts Council grants which allowed her to teach at the Stockton Youth Authority, Stockton CA and at Diamond View School in Susanville CA. Her new book is “Cathedral of the Hand,” published by Finishing Line Press. Dianna lives in Lassen County on six acres with her husband Kam and her malamute Sakari. She facilitates The Thompson Peak Writers’ Workshop in Lassen County.
BETWEEN YOUNG AND OLD TIME
I am reading a book loaned to me by a very old woman.
Her hands are on the pages and they are slipping into mine;
flesh of a book against my brow as I close my eyes to rest.
What I love best about this book recommended by an old woman,
is how a single strand of silver hair becomes my bookmark—
between two pages, a single strand of hair tells where I left off.
Where I left off is not where I am or where I intend to be.
Further into the book than ever imagined is a story about being
an old woman who reads a book and recognizes herself
in a character. The old woman looks out from the book,
an old woman’s eyes large as an oasis and clear as sunlit sand.
Her hand is a vine of many veins that intertwine and signal something.
Something close and dear as song expresses itself on her lips.
She is sipping lyrics from the air through the straw of a strand of hair.
Her hands are on the pages and they are slipping into mine.
