And If I Go With Child?
Reimagining the Mysteries of Tam Lin
by Charlotte Hussey
RITONA is pleased to announce the publication of And If I Go With Child? : Re-imagining the Mysteries of Tam Lin, by poet Charlotte Hussey.
‘His boneless fingers bend
to conjure newborn shapes
from perturbed clouds of matter,
a slippery, pink brood they fall
all around, or from me?
I wake, hands crossed
over my heart.’
Through twenty-seven poems, Charlotte Hussey explores the initiatory potential of the ancient Scottish faery story, “The Ballad of Tam Lin.”
The ballad tells the tale of a woman’s haunting encounter with a figure trapped by the Faerie Queen. In And If I Go With Child?, Charlotte Hussey becomes the story itself, and speaks beautifully in her poems of the power of redemptive love.
Charlotte Hussey. A poet, creativity coach, and dancer.
Charlotte Hussey grew up on a sandbar fronted by the Atlantic and backed by a tidal marsh, a primal site for her poetry. She published a prose poem about a kingfisher eating goldfish from a lawn pool in “The Portland Press Herald” at age 9.
Her first passion was dance, one hard to follow as a child in rural Maine. At 13 she started practicing yoga, while attending a Quaker boarding school. Later, she worked for Dr. John Pierrakos, the founder of Bioenergetic Therapy, who inspired her to ground self-expression in bodily awareness. She is a certified Kundalini yoga teacher A-Z Belly Dance teacher who has studied Authentic Movement, Jazz, Afro-Haitian, Egyptian, and Moroccan dance and has been a member of Terpsichore Dance Troupe.
Charlotte has completed a Warren Wilson College MFA, involving an in-depth study of Yeats’s metrical revisions, and a McGill University PhD, a self-study of her own poetic process with a bit of H.D. thrown in for good measure. Training with Eric Maisel to become a certified Creativity Coach, Charlotte now helps others carve out their own personal art practice.
Charlotte teaches medieval literature and creativity courses at Dawson College in Montreal. She has taught academic and creative writing at McGill University and on Northern Quebec native reserves.
Her poetry and academic writing have appeared in Canadian, American, and British journals/anthologies. She has published a chapbook The Head Will Continue to Sing, and her first poetry book, Rue Sainte Famille, was short-listed for Quebec’s QSPELL poetry award.
Awen Publications has brought out her second collection, Glossing the Spoils.
