"Going the Distance" columns published in book form; readings and community conversations coming up
poetlaure...@gmail.com
Benicia Herald’s “Going the Distance” columns published in book form, now available:
Yearning To Breathe Free—A Community Journal of 2020
Readings and community conversations coming up on Zoom
Sunday, August 28 3-5 p.m. Pacific Time
Sunday, September 18 3-5 p.m. Pacific Time
Sunday, October 16 3-5 p.m. Pacific Time
Zoom link at Library website https://benicialibrary.org/poet/events
or email poetlaure...@gmail.com for link.
Yearning To Breathe Free is the collection of “Going the Distance columns that ran in the Benicia Herald from April 1 through Election Day 2020. Published by Benicia Literary Arts, the book is now available for purchase from the BLA website, benicialiteraryarts.org/ store/product/17 and at Bookshop Benicia, and can be borrowed from the Benicia Public Library.
The project began on March 23, 2020 when lives and livelihoods were shutting down due to the COVID pandemic. I emailed Galen Kusic, editor of the Benicia Herald, “As the fears grow around the coronavirus and tensions increase about ‘shelter in place,’ I’ve been imagining a column to appear in each edition of the Herald that would voice and speak to the fears, tensions, inspirations, hopes, and oddities we are experiencing.” He responded with encouragement.
I called for contributions to the column. Many of you answered that call. Poets, writers, and people who had never previously written for publication sent their material. Not every submission was published, but everyone who submitted was published at least once. Giving voice to our community was one of the purposes of the column.
More than a collection of polished poems and essays, Yearning To Breathe Free provides the sometimes raw, in-the-moment reactions and reflections that make up a collective accounting, a community journal. As then-mayor Elizabeth Patterson commented, “How did we make sense of being scared, isolated, wanting to fix what was wrong in 2020? Challenged at every level and in every corner, our community found in these writings a consistently dependable place to calm our fears, to renew our hope and courage.”
2020 was a year like no other. Now we can look back to those early days of the pandemic and acknowledge what we went through and what we’re still going through. The losses mourned, the celebrations put on hold, the wariness and well-founded fears that linger around climate crisis, embedded racism, and threats to democracy. Yearning To Breathe Free is part of that process of looking back and moving beyond.
Mary Susan Gast
Benicia Poet Laureate 8
