Jennifer Bosveld is poet-first and publishes in the pages of America’s small presses and literary journals as well as on broadsides, in anthologies, and at the microphones in dimly lit coffeehouses and reading venues. She received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry, 4 Pushcart nominations, a Columbus Dispatch Community Service Award, and The Pioneer Award from the National Association for Poetry Therapy—all indicative of the omni-dimensional nature of Jen’s experience with poetry both as a student of poetry crafts and a pusher for the experiential—poetry brought to public places and individual challenges. She is the Founder/Director of Pudding House Innovative Writers Programs & Library which includes Pudding House Publications (now the largest literary small press in America), Pudding Magazine: The International Journal of Applied Poetry (Pudding), and the Pudding House Writers Workshops. Read more than you ever wanted to know about Jennifer on her personal page on this website. The page you are on now is provided so you can get a better idea about main supports in this work called Pudding House—the folks, without whom, Jen says, she wouldn’t have the heart for any of it.





Doug Swisher, Associate Editor

Doug is an exceptional copyeditor and writer at Pudding House, but one with a low profile. For years he has been distracted by good ideas for everyone else’s life and has wasted his own in government jobs and collecting/dealing in coins and stamps (oh, HE thinks it’s important). He is a major coin and stamp dealer and is the one responsible for the occasional splattering of philatelic low denomination colorful and old old old postage across some of the Pudding House mail. He also has a huge collection of 15,000+ postcards, including many fine early Columbus which we might post someday on our staff’s “selfish pages” (Jen calls them) where we get to go on and on about anything that interests us whether or not it interests readers. Doug loves cats, pizza, and reading not less than 3 newspapers a day cover-to-cover to make up for Jennifer and a couple of other people who refuse to pick one up.

Doug is a retired economist with the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and lives in Columbus now, following quite a few years in Jacksonville Florida.

Doug is a screenwriter and does actively involve himself in the mutual sharing of screenplays in process with other screenwriters and screenwriting labs in America. Jen and Doug talk most about dialogue and “set direction” in language of the screenplay to make the work reflect “today” or perhaps even “tomorrow.” Screenwriting has much in common with good contemporary poetry, they believe. And Jennifer is also writing a “movie.” Jen operates out of the John Truby school, Doug milks them all. Doug has about eight stories in the works for the big screen.

Doug is a nit-picking proofreader. Any mistakes found in Pudding House Publications are probably in material that the associate editors did not see.





Steve Abbott, Associate Editor

A product of parochial schools, a liberal arts education, and the social and political upheavals of the past five decades, Steve Abbott was described by his late mother as someone who “wanted things to be fair.” Clearly an idealist or a fool, he has demonstrated his lack of economic ambition through his interests in poetry, nonfiction writing, small magazine publishing, social services, and teaching. Actually, this is something the Pudding House staff has in common—they all tend to be people who chose occupations because they are satisfying and not for any economic gain.

After stints as lead singer in two garage bands playing everything from covers of Rolling Stones to original rubbish, Steve drifted into radical hippie politics and helped found the Columbus Free Press in 1970 during the heyday of the underground press. His “Karl and Groucho’s Marxist Dance: The Columbus Free Press and its Predecessors in the Columbus Underground” appeared in Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam-Era Underground Press (Mica Press, 1991). Later he picked up an undergraduate degree in broadcast journalism from THE Ohio State University while active in the antiwar movement and issues such as civilian review of police and community empowerment. As a matter of fact, Jennifer’s intro to Steve came when she started The Justice For Jack Committee (young man w/MRDD falsely accused of the murder of Christie Mullins in Columbus made national headlines) and Steve was one of the first to financially and chronically support the group toward Jack’s freedom and proof of innocence.

The Columbus Police Division’s Red Squad charged Steve with multiple criminal charges following a signed front-page article in the Free Press condemning the shooting of a young drug dealer by Columbus police and his involvement in a demonstration protesting expansion of the Indochina War. Along with Free Press staff members and other activists, he was held on a high bail until the bail was reduced in Abbott et al. v Columbus, now cited as precedent in cases of the right to reasonable bail. A judge dismissed the charges two years later. Six months after that, confounding friends and surprising himself, he agreed to work as courtroom bailiff to Judge William Boyland, the only Democrat judge (and former lawyer for other antiwar activists) in the Franklin County Municipal Court in 1974 (“I was able to cut people a little slack in a system that has a short leash,” Abbott says). Continuing his activity in anti-KKK groups and grass-roots community organizations in Columbus and writing for the Free Press under a pseudonym, he lost the job five years later after Boyland left the bench to run for mayor of Columbus in 1979 (“Say what you will about Republicans, at least they take care of their own,” he muses). Having married with the mistaken belief that raising three step-children entering puberty at the same time was a manageable task, he went on unemployment and did some free-lance writing until he landed a job at Columbus Technical Institute as a part-time instructor of composition. During this period he also worked as a private investigator, mostly doing the sewer work of tailing and photographing errant spouses in neighborhoods not their own. Eventually he landed a job as communications director for a social service agency, where he worked for the next 10 years while continuing to teach nights at CTI, which in 1987 became Columbus State Community College.

Marriage having ended in a dissolution (but not disillusioned), he returned to OSU and earned a master’s degree in English Education. Since 1993 he has been a full-time faculty member at Columbus State, where he is a tenured professor in the Communication Skills Department, teaching composition, introduction to poetry, and creative writing (poetry and nonfiction). He is also advisor to Spring Street, the college’s annual literary and visual arts magazine which, under his direction, has earned 5 Gold Medals from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. An associate editor of Pudding Magazine: The International Journal of Applied Poetry and for Pudding House Publications, he has taught writing workshops at Pudding House, Thurber House, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, prisons in New York State, and in central Ohio bookstores.

As lead instructor in creative writing at Columbus State, he worked with other writing instructors to develop a grant-funded program to take creative writing courses into community houses in Columbus. Designed to give community residents a voice in telling their own stories through poetry, fiction, and nonfiction memoirs, “Writing the South Side Story” has become the model for an ongoing series of workshops planned to develop a literary “people’s narrative” of life in Columbus’ historic core-city neighborhoods. Steve coordinates the college’s twice-quarterly Open Mic Coffeehouse and established a noon reading series to showcase fiction, poetry, and nonfiction work by the college’s writing faculty. He also maintains Poetry Calendar Columbus, the Pudding House web site’s listing of poetry & poetry-related events in central Ohio.

Steve served for eight years on the college’s Faculty Senate, including terms as secretary and president. He was a central force in the re-activation of the Columbus State Education Association and its two union drives, the most recent of which resulted in certification of the Association as the faculty’s bargaining unit in 2001. He served 2 terms as president of the Columbus State Education Association and is now a senior association Representative (union steward).

Steve began writing poetry in high school after discovering Whitman and was later influenced strongly by the socially conscious work of Kenneth Patchen, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Lowell, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He grew as a poet through the generous encouragement and support of a community of Columbus poets who in the late 1970s laid the groundwork for the current thriving poetry scene in the city. In 1984 he was a founding member of the nationally recognized Poetry Forum at Larry’s, an Ohio State University-area bar where he has been a generally benevolent but not infrequently cranky presence ever since. He served as co-coordinator several years and continues to work on its organizing committee.

Steve’s poetry has appeared in Wind, Birmingham Poetry Review, Slipstream, Evening Street Review, Incliner, Black River Review, W’orcs Aloud Allowed, The Heartlands Today, Olentangy Review, Ohio Teachers Write, Pudding, and the anthologies Prayers to Protest: Poems That Center and Bless Us (Pudding House, 1998) and Coffeehouse Poetry Anthology (Bottom Dog Press)and is forthcoming in any number of America’s literary journals that hold poet’s work for years at a time without authors hearing a word. Steve reads at venues throughout the eastern Midwest and treasures the beautiful and varied voices of the region (“a patchwork quilt spread on an art-loft couch”). In 1999 Steve won first place in the poetry slam at the Theodore Roethke Poetry Festival in Saginaw, Michigan. Pudding House published his Greatest Hits 1981-2003 in 2005.

Favorite contemporary poets include Mary Oliver, Wislawa Szymborska, Stephen Dunn, Terrance Hayes, Jeanne Lohmann, and Wendell Berry, and he dips into William Stafford and John Donne when he needs his batteries recharged. He’ll listen to Guided By Voices, Van Morrison, the Bhundu Boys, Watershed (central Ohio favorite) and Bessie Smith in the same hour and has been known to fall in love or just become maudlin at the sound of a jazz saxophone. He doesn’t mind driving long distances alone and drums on the steering wheel a lot, likes a pint of Columbus Pale Ale or a good sippin’ whiskey when he attends the Monday night readings at Larry’s, and is opinionated about politics and music but really a cupcake at heart. He’s what most would call “a nice guy” (who doesn’t mind finishing last as long as there’s some dessert left).

Steve Abbott received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council in 1993 and was OAC writer-in-residence at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown on Cape Cod in 1994. He edited the Pudding House anthology Cap City Poets, a collection of 74 central Ohio poets, in 2008.





Kathleen Burgess, Associate Editor

Poet/teacher Kathleen Burgess of Chillicothe Ohio has joined the team at Pudding House Publications as an associate editor. With a variety of leadership assignments Kathleen will also assist on anthology development, talent scouting, and representing Pudding House at workshops, conferences, and literary events, among other things—whatever her outrageously busy teaching and political schedule will allow.

Pudding House president and publisher, Jennifer Bosveld, says “I have observed Kathleen Burgess for the past couple of years—the way she sizes up a situation, her spectacular capabilities as a poet and writer, her sensitivies to the efforts of poets and writers, her demeanor in workshops, and her sterling abilities as a proofreader and editor. She is the epitome of the quality of character and level of skill that I like to have onboard. Additionally, her social justice work is right in line with our editorial slant.”

Burgess was a guest copy editor for the Pudding House 2003 release, Elastic Ekphrastic: Poems on Art / Poets on Tour, edited by Jennifer Bosveld. Bosveld says, “Kathleen took that book up a couple of levels during the volley of editings and was invaluable to the process. We worked rapidly, efficiently, and almost spiritually...together.” It was a time that solidified Bosveld’s opinion that Pudding House would do well to bring her onboard.

Kathleen Burgess and Steve Abbott are aesthetic associate editors whose business cards read, “Run it past me; I’ve got clout.” Though submissions don’t go to them, you’d be forgiven a once per lifetime query on behalf of a poem you think belongs in our publications or a chapbook that might fit with our editorial slant. They can champion an acceptance if they become smitten with your work.

Burgess personal biography:

Kathleen Burgess spent most of her childhood in Urbana, Ohio, reading, playing the flute, riding bicycles, and wishing she were a writer but not wanting to write much. Graduating as the valedictorian who was so shy, she didn’t give a valedictorian address, she went on to Ohio State University where, after the first two years as a scholar, she looked around to find out what was really going on the Columbus campus. At a teach-in against the draft, she finally heard people talking important social issues that made sense to her. Soon she left a campus sorority to demonstrate for relevant education for students in the School of Social Work and against the Vietnam War. Apartment life in an attic on Chittenden Avenue opened a new vista: nightly rat-hunts with air rifles in the alley.

This was too much for her Republican family, but not yet enough for Kathleen. Arrested for breaking a Columbus Police Department-imposed 10:00 p.m. curfew for walking outside her apartment on Hunter Avenue during the time of the Ohio State riots and the Kent State shootings, she became the black sheep of the family when her name appeared in the Columbus Dispatch with dozens of other arrested students, many who were also victims of vast amounts of tear gas and other repression common at that time.

Following an OSU shutdown in 1970, she went to Washington, D.C., for a year, in time to be in on the buzz about the Watergate break-in and demonstrate against the war while holding day jobs selling exotic food in a Greek delicatessen and proof-reading for a large printing company.

She gathered up her flute, watercolors and paper, books, and some hand-made and hand-designed clothing, loaded her backpack, and hitchhiked south with a friend, all the way to Peru. After many breathtaking adventures, she returned to Columbus and worked as an assistant administrator at a home for mentally challenged young men, composed, sang, and played flute with several bands, including Street Root Ensemble with Larry Vellani, co-founded a video co-op called Datagang which made a video and film about rape in Columbus for OSU Libraries and the Ohio Endowment for the Humanities. Starring in the film, among others, was Judge Bill Boyland. Datagang also produced creative and documentary videos with many local artists (including David Krohn and Deena Levy) and activists of that time for Grange Mutual Insurance about the Xenia tornado, Cesar Chavez, and music, dance, and theater videos. Under Kathleen’s direction Datagang created a huge inflatable structure which housed and hosted an interactive video display at the second ever Community Festival on 16th Avenue. She watched and videotaped the Watergate Hearings and still celebrates National Resignation Day started by friend John Meysenberg—motto “Fly the Flag, Any Flag!” Before his tragic death John led a magnificent charge against the Nationwide tax abatements which had taken much needed funding from Columbus schools.

Kathleen also co-founded Orange Craft Collective on King Avenue with jeweler Eric Marlow and others, initiated and instructed music courses for OSU’s Creative Arts Program, and worked at the OSU Statistics Department. For the locally produced film Amy, Kathleen composed and performed music.

In order to become a better musician she took courses at the OSU School of Music, which led in the rich way that life leads her, to get a music teaching degree and then a job with the Columbus City Schools. There she met and married Jack Burgess who was then executive director of the Columbus Education Association. With Jack’s and friend Herb Wasserstrom’s urging, she became a building representative for CEA, and she and Jack started the first Columbus Music Teachers Committee to lobby the school board for improved teaching and learning conditions for Columbus music teachers and students. For this she received a United Teachers Profession Award.

Jack’s career took him to Chillicothe and there Kathleen volunteered at the local school and started the P.T.O. Library Support Committee which brought children’s authors to the local school. Following that project she began taking a children’s literature course toward recertification. Already used to following her artistic passions, this coursed her along another path. While searching for a final project, she was gradually persuaded by Jack to write a story from her travels. This writing experience was so rewarding that when Ruth McClain, a new friend and Executive Director of Ohio Council of Teachers of Language Arts, gave her a copy of the first issue of Ohio Teachers Write, Kathleen began writing poetry that fall and has written daily ever since. Her first submitted poem was accepted by OTW, and she served on the board of editors for the journal.

Kathleen found a permanent position teaching 600 pre-K through 6th grade general music students in the Paint Valley Schools. At the end of her first year of teaching she began taking classes toward her Master’s Degree in Education with a Concentration in the Fine Arts at the University of Rio Grande. Harvard Professor Howard Gardner’s research-based theory of multiple intelligences is the impetus behind Greg Miller’s graduate program at URG, the first exclusively MI grad program in the country. “The application of MI theory allows teachers to deepen the connection between learning, creativity, and children’s strengths while moving them into areas that need to be strengthened. The more points of involvement children have, the more integral learning becomes to their lives,” she asserts.

Having moved closer to home to Chillicothe City Schools in 1999 she, along with the other elementary arts teachers, has now lost her music classroom because of losses in school funding and so will become a teaching troubadour for children this year. “‘No child left behind’ has become a cruel joke of unfunded mandates and cutbacks while more bureaucracy and testing weigh down children, parents, teachers, and administrators all around the nation,” she says with a characteristic political take on the issue.

A self-taught writer for some years, Kathleen has enjoyed making friends and sharpening her skills in the Pudding House workshops, the monthly critiquing events which are “a smart bargain.” “Although I always wanted to be a writer, it wasn’t until I was nearly 50 years old that I found myself actually wanting to write.” She is eager to work with other Pudding House writers to help proofread, brainstorm, or whatever is going on that needs to be done.

She reads American Poetry Review, Poetry, Poets and Writers, and Pudding Magazine regularly and favors poets Seamus Heaney, Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich, David Citino, and recently Kip Knott, and Peggy Shumaker. Classical music of Ravel and Debussy are favorites, as well as jazz, especially Miles, Mingus, Monk, Coltrane, Dolphy, Hancock, and Corea. Well, there’s also world music, and whatever is just around the corner.





Rose M. Smith, Associate Editor

Ask one group of writers who know her, they will tell you she’s a performance poet. Ask another, they’ll call her a slam poet. Ask still another, they’ll tell you that Rose is a fine poet, great to workshop with, has a keen eye and a true sense of the life of a poem. Some will say she’s their favorite poet, or always deep, or one of the best readers they’ve ever heard. If you ask her, she will tell you she is an ordinary person, a poet who is also a software engineer. As to genres, she will ask you, beyond poetry, what is truly a genre. Her work builds bridges over gaps we once called poetic genres and styles. She and her work refuse to be classified.

So who is this woman, really? Rose is a quiet, shy woman who found her love for poetry in high school, encountering such poets as E. E. Cummings, Niki Giovanni, and Lucille Clifton. is 5, by Cummings remains one of her favorite collections. She began submitting her poetry and fiction to magazines in her very early twenties with little success, then changed her focus to lyrics and writings for children while she raised three daughters. She returned to writing with a more mature voice and perspective when her children neared college age. Rose began reading her poetry to public audiences at the urging of a friend in 1996, bringing to avid listeners a distinct voice, full of humanity and emotional insight.

Technically trained, Rose’s creative writing professors chided her for being in the wrong major. As a writer, she has trained in workshop with Martin Lammon, Linda Lee Harper, Cornelius Eady, Gerald Costanza, Dean Albarelli. She is a regular and welcome workshop participant at Pudding House, addressing concerns of the poem with a distinct economy of words and respect for the author’s original voice.

Rose is a three-time member of Columbus, Ohio’s National Poetry Slam team and an active poetry reader in and around Central Ohio. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Main Street Rag, Chiron Review, Poems from the Big Muddy: The 2004 National Poetry Slam Anthology, Poetry Motel, Concrete Wolf, Good Foot, The Iconoclast, Pavement Saw, Pudding, African Voices Magazine, and other journals and anthologies.

She is author of Shooting the Strays (Pavement Saw Press, 2003) and A Woman You Know (Pudding House, 2005), and an Associate Editor at Pudding House Publications. She is particular about what she releases for publication and where, and she is very likely her own toughest critic.





Fred Kirchner, Associate Editor

I would like to claim that I’ve been writing poetry since my left hand was strong enough to hold a pencil. But it was Mr. Burkle’s 6th grade Poetry Notebook Assignment that really got me started. I would give almost anything to still possess the actual notebook, but am sustained by the memory of winning the classroom cover contest, my juxtaposition of the Batsignal melting above a colored pencil sketch of Frost’s Fire and Ice lined up with all the others there in the yellow dust of the chalk tray, rainbow glitter patiently glued upon stenciled title, fracturing light from incandescent grids. Of the five originals included in the collection, all written in laborious cursive, I remember a poem about Batman, one about our calico Scout (named for the girl in To Kill A Mockingbird), and a character study of an impersonal, overpriced, robotic Ice Cream Man.

I raised my game a few notches during high school, writing the requisite angst poems. Most of those have long since been added to the landfills of Central Ohio. Perhaps this is fortunate. The poems got much better when my best friend and first critic suggested revising them. More help came from my cross country coach, mentor, and English teacher, Mr. Edward Bozeman, a poet himself, who shared his work and stayed late after school talking about Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, or to play two on two in the school gym with me and my teammates.

Then—the bohemian years between high school and college. It was 1981 and my generation, trapped in the age of Disco between Vietnam and Generation X, needed a cause. One was not immediately forthcoming. So a few years were spent writing poems in a Victorian Village efficiency, hunting and pecking them out on a manual typewriter, working at gas stations. I taught myself to type in 1987, working through a high school typing text over Christmas break.

There was a cause found—several, in fact—after returning to college in 1986. Through exposure to feminism and alternative politics, I became active in The Central Ohio Men’s Network. This group, providing child care for Take Back the Night Marches, organizing concerts, talking to incarcerated sexual offenders about healthy relationships with women and children, and staging rallies calling for an end to domestic violence, gave me the chance to meet other guys also rethinking what it meant to be a man, and what impact the traditional Western/Anglo-American masculine consciousness might have upon the world. And from this beginning, I began to reassess many of the assumptions upon which my cultural inheritance and socialization were structured.

I finished undergraduate school, BA in English, married in the Quaker tradition, fathered a son, earned an M.Ed, taught elementary school for a decade, and then went back to grad school for an MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science). Fourteen years had gone by. There weren’t many new poems lying around the house. And the marriage was over.

Alone, I began to write. A trip to Jerusalem, courtesy of the private Jewish school where I taught, inspired me, standing before the Kotel’s glowing stones in the desert night, traipsing the winding labyrinth of the Old City (where you can lose a few centuries every time its maze of history ratchets a notch or two), stumbling down slick mossy stairs through profound dark, lighter burning thumb, to reach the St. Helena (circa 1st century CE) Cistern in the bowels of the Holy Sepulcher, seeing the treasures of the Israel Museum, breaking down at Yad Vashem. I also found a stillness in which to harness the inspiration studying the life of Buddha, his teachings, and through developing a personal meditation practice bringing together all these influences.

In January of 2004, I surfaced and read at a Pudding House workshop. Jen asked me: From where do you come? Answer: Grandview.

In the last eight months, I’ve published in Talking Leaves: A Journal of our Evolving Ecological Culture, been a featured reader at the Columbus Arts Festival, and the Guest Featured Poet at The San Francisco Oven, handled my share of rejection, and sought open mics wherever they are to be found. Forthcoming work will appear in the Pudding House anthology, CRUDE: Poems at the End of the Age of Oil, and the journal HazMat.

I like to memorize Dickinson, Yeats, the sonnets of Wordsworth, and my own work. I also enjoy hearing many of the gifted regulars at Pudding House, Larry’s and Writer’s Block. Other artists, writers and musicians that matter personally include: Roethke, Frost, Plath, Billy Collins, Ella Fitzgerald, John Lennon, Margaret Atwood, Ritchie Havens, Zora Neale Hurston, Joseph Campbell, Billy Bragg, Dylan (either Bob or Thomas), Isabel Allende, JS Bach, Yoshiko Uchida, Marge Piercy, Wasily Kandinsky, Vivaldi, Frida Kahlo, Michael Chabon, and Naomi Shihab Nye. There are many other contemporary poets I am just getting to know, but not yet well enough to cite from memory. Check back. I will be taking full advantage of the Pudding House Associate discount.

I share custody of my 14-year-old son, Josh, who says he is headed to the NBA next year. My other skills and hobbies that relate to poetry in obtuse, but relevant, ways include the ability to yo-yo and ride a bike no hands at the same time; a decent jump shot; old movies—especially the Ohio Theater Summer Movie Series; and folding origami. I would like to draw and dance more. I also own three bicycles on which I’ve ridden over 2,000 km (more than 1,240 miles for the metrically challenged) since April Fool’s Day. I honestly believe that if we could force the most powerful men in the world to play a weekly game of honest basketball with each other, calling their own fouls in a church gym, or send them on a long, unsupported bike tour, there would be no more war, hunger, injustice, violence, or reality TV.

You can reach me at pedalin_poet@yahoo.com





Carol Schott Martino, Columnist

“Sometimes, looking in the mirror, I hardly recognize myself. Only when looking deep into the eyes can I find myself, the child the girl the woman, the woman the girl the child, the womanchild who was born an old lady and never grew up.” —Carol

Carol Schott Martino was born in Kankakee, Illinois in 1949. Early on she assumed the role of family chatterbox, but was painfully shy around strangers, unless they were old enough to carry the shades of a winter night in their eyes. Before she could recite the alphabet, she was writing letters on rainbow tablets to a blind, elderly aunt who taught her compassion. At age 10, when other kids were outside playing, she often spent summer days writing letters to her great grandmother, a retired teacher who lived miles away. Her grandmother red-inked Carol’s grammatical errors and sent the letters back encouraging her to keep on writing. Carol did, mostly through letters except for a brief stint as “aditor” of Neighborhood News, a four-page weekly she started in 1959. When Carol wasn’t writing, she was gathering pockets full of rocks.

As a teenager, she began writing wishy-washy love poems when a lad with eyes the shades of a gathering storm captured her heart. Her father questioned the lad’s long hair, but told her she was a good poet and encouraged her to continue writing. Maybe he was right about the poems because the lad proposed. At 18 going on 12, she married and at 19 gave birth to son Richie, then seven years later to son Jason—her two best poems ever! The verse continued to flow for several years, mostly sweet lines about the warm cheeks of a napping child and other motherly snippets.

Sometime in the mid 70s, Carol’s verse took a nosedive into “confessional sap” and then moved on to the “if no one understands it, it must be good” school of thought. Eventually, she overcame her shyness enough to join a writer’s group, a decision that changed her life. Through this exposure, and with enough constructive criticism to end the sap, she began maturing as a poet. She also found a friend, Patricia Lieb. When the group took on a bicentennial project in 1975, the two were chosen to edit a 200-page book of poems, short stories and essays by local writers. When the year-long project ended, Carol and Patricia talked about publishing a literary magazine. Shortly after, Carol and her family moved to Nebraska. During the NFSPS convention in Sioux Falls, SD the seed for a magazine was planted. Within the year, Pteranodon took flight. It had a mighty wingspan for a while and gave Carol and Patricia the opportunity to attend state conventions where they met great poets and editors, including Jennifer. But a lack of funding grounded the big bird in 1984.

While in Nebraska, Carol took poetry classes from Dr. Don Welch at the University of Nebraska Kearney. Through his teachings, she was able to release her poetry from its cocoon with hopeful wings. Dr. Welch encouraged her to find a balance of head and heart, a lesson that brought out her real voice, a lesson that allowed her to snip the stitches of her skin and expose the muscle and bone. She credits him for saving her literary life, and also for gifting her with the confidence and skills she’d later need to make a decent living as a writer.

Her family moved back to Illinois, and she continued to write poetry. Once again, her father said she was a good writer and would one day be famous. She didn’t believe him, but appreciated the huge desk he bought her with enough drawers to file the rejection slips that came in weekly. It was only after she started purging her parochial past through humor that her poems began to find good homes—homes among the pages that featured the works of Don Welch and other great Nebraskan poets, Ted Kooser, William Kloefkorn and Greg Kuzma. Some of those poems are included in Catholics and Publics which she co-authored with Patricia. Carol likes to imagine her father, who died in 1982, smiling with pride.

Following a divorce in 1984, Carol was forced to take the ribbons from her hair. Her energy was spent trying to keep her head above water while stretch marks lined her days like a tiny river searching for an inland sea. Her poetry was tucked away. She worked several years as a reporter, editor and columnist for area newspapers. During that time, she was recognized for her journalistic contributions to local veterans, soil and water conservation, and also for tackling tough assignments which directly resulted in positive legislation for all Illinois students with disabilities.

Working and raising two sons left her little time to write poetry, but she continued to express herself through a weekly column, Schott at Sunrise, which she secretly thought of as a lengthy poem. When Pudding House published a collection of those columns in 1987, Dr. Welch wrote an introduction saying, “(Carol) writes with journalistic clarity and poetic color, and always with a rhythmic variety which moves her readers forward through a series of good insights into equally vivid moods.” Those words, from a teacher/poet she admires so much, remain among the great highlights of her life.

Carol met Dan Martino in 1985, a musician/songwriter who carried the soft shades of a summer night in his eyes. He became her best friend, her biggest fan and her soul mate. They married in 1989, and he’s had the most positive influence in her life since Dr. Welch. Through his love, support and encouragement, she was able to pursue a career as a freelance writer—which she soon learned is anything but “free” when working with the personalities, quirks and deadlines of several editors. In 2001, Dan’s job took them to England, and for 2½ years they lived in Langtoft, a tiny village in the shires. Surrounded by the beauty of an English countryside, Carol’s heart swelled like a sponge and once again she turned to poetry to wring it out. During that time, Carol also wrote a “Life in England” series and several travel features. Captivated by centuries of history and literature, she often took to the road or rails. One of her most memorable adventures is the morning she spent in Oxford following Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland trail. Later that day, she and Dan lunched at The Eagle and Child pub where J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis once discussed their manuscripts. Other highlights include spending the night on the Norfolk Coast where the chilling tales and legends of the hellhound “Black Shuck” inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Hound of the Baskervilles; visiting Levenham, a medieval wool town, singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star in front of its author Jane Taylor’s house; and sitting in William Wordsworths’ grammar school desk at Hawkshead one Easter weekend while daffodils bloomed all around.

Today, Carol is back in Peoria with Dan, but if home is where the heart is, they’ve taken up dual residency. It was hard to leave the essence of village life, leisurely days of cream teas, the endless glories and historical relics, the skyscapes and countryside. Even so, they came home with a greater appreciation for America, and can no longer listen to patriotic songs without hugging each other’s thoughts and being reduced to tears of pride.

She continues to freelance for newspapers and magazines, mostly in the Midwest, but her greatest passion is the blue business of writing poetry. Other interests include wining/dining adventures with Dan, spending time with family which includes two grandchildren who are her absolute heart, baking cookies, writing letters, growing herbs, traveling, anything relating to nature, and a budding interest in history. She has a happy (yes happy) Humpty Dumpty collection and huge jars filled with rubber bugs, bouncy balls, marbles and rocks. One of her favorite pastimes is walking along the riverbank listening to the poetry of rocks. She also enjoys presenting Poetry of Rocks workshops which teach children to listen to their own stories through rocks that skip, or are thrown, into their lives.

Nebraskan poets are still among her favorites, as well as Peter Meinke, Marge Piercy, Linda Pastan and Dave Etter. Her poems and columns have appeared in journals, anthologies, magazines and newspapers in the US and Britain. Richie and Jason remain her masterpieces.





David DeRhodes, Vice President of Pudding House

“He has been invaluable in the past, getting the office and production to a place where we could think about adding professional staff,” says Jennifer.

David is Jennifer’s son, age 34, who works full-time at Aetna Insurance Company in Columbus, but who has contributed greatly to production and organization at Pudding House. At Aetna David delights in assisting clients toward enlightened use of their policies and trouble-shooting their problems. He’s been employee of the month and enjoys showing Jennifer this good side of an industry for which Jennifer has little respect. It’s a source of humor between them.

In addition to being a highly involved dad to his own two kids, Katie and Nick, David is stepfather to Tina’s Thomas and Krista, making a family of six. The photo shows David and three of the four kids with Jennifer on the front lawn at Pudding House.

David is into all kinds of music and has a broadening interest in the culture in general—whether it’s movies, religion, or social issues. David and Tina had a new house built on the far east side of Columbus.

In his youth, Jennifer’s son Christopher has worked at Pudding House as well.