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Merryn Rutledge

ReVisions – poetry and stories


Writer and Teacher

Thanks for dropping by. 

 For years I wrote around the edges of two careers. Then about twenty years ago I began a series of first-person narrative poems of real people, mostly women who are written about instead of being allowed to speak for themselves. Gradually I let my own voice and vision emerge in poems about my native Arkansas, grief experiences and nature as emanant.

 My poems have appeared in the Speckled Trout Review, Borrowed Solace, Poetry Porch, Aurorean, Pudding and The Mountain Echo.

 I first befriended poetry in high school when an iconoclast teacher taught Plath and poem writing instead of the standard American lit survey. She was fired; I was in love. Thanks to another teacher and Smith College’s rare book collection of original works, I later fell for William Blake, then Eliot, Frost and Dickenson–and writing.

 In my first career teaching literature and writing at Phillips Exeter Academy, I was inspired by my colleague Dolores Kendrick, a prolific writer and later poet laureate of Washington D. C.  

 I now live near the Massachusetts shore, where I write, sing, practice Tai Chi and enjoy the fellowship of area poets and the writers in the creative writing group I lead.

 On the writing sample pages you’ll find some of my other writing—a book, essays and research on leadership and social justice that have appeared as book chapters and in peer-reviewed journals when I was running my consulting firm ReVisions LLC, now recast as ReVisions, an umbrella for teaching creative writing and coaching aspiring writers.