By Dana Klosner-Wehner
“I’ve always wanted to put a book out,” Pickus said. “It took me a long time to cull through what I’ve written and turn it into something cohesive and I hope beautiful and meaningful to readers.”
Pickus, an award-winning poet who has been featured in numerous magazines, said she feels that readers will be able to identify with many of the poems.
“I’ve always loved poetry since the fourth grade,” Pickus said. “I love the intensity of the feeling and the language. Things happen in life that can seem simple, but have a deeper impact when you think about it later on.”
“My son has many problems,” she added. “He’s a special-needs person. But there are things any parent can relate to. My memories of childhood are vivid for me, I hope for the reader too.”
Pickus's poetry was largely influenced by poet Linda Pastan, who she met at a Hofstra University writing workshop. Pickus is also part of a poetry workshop that has been meeting once a week for the past 20 years.
“She was very exciting to me," Pickus said of Pastan. "It was wonderful to find a poet in my early twenties who was female, and a living poet who was not insane or suicidal. She wrote about domestic life not in a trite way.”
“It was an unusually small group,” she said. “When the course ended after two weeks I handed out little slips of paper. I said, ‘you drew the short straw, we’re all meeting at your house for a poetry workshop.’”
They’ve been meeting ever since.
“It’s a very supportive, wonderful group of people,” she said. “It has become so much more than a writer’s workshop.”
Pickus also taught English at Long Beach High School for 30 years.
“The kids were wonderful,” she said. “I miss that. But I don’t miss the mounds of papers that went with it.”
Pickus enjoyed teaching so much that she still volunteers at a local grammar school where she reads to kids
individually.
She also runs writing workshops for adults.
“I love teaching,” she said. “I love taking people who’ve never written a poem before and showing them that they can. They walk away with something that they’re proud of.”
Pickus says she starts her workshops with a topic in mind. Then she shares poems from various authors on that topic. The group goes through poems and checks off lines that they liked. Then they discuss why they liked certain lines.
“Was it a wonderful metaphor that you had never thought of before and suddenly the comparison seems just right?” she asks. “Or was the line visually vivid?”
“After we discuss the poems we write,” she said, “then we share. We’re always looking at the positive.”
“New writers find that they’re able to express themselves in a way that they didn’t think they could.”
Pickus lives with her husband, Phillip and her son, Robert.
Pickus says she writes a lot in the quiet hours of the late night, but her advice for poets just starting out:
“Read,” she said. “Find authors that you look at one of their poems and say, ‘On a good day I’d like to do that.’ Then write. Find some people that like to write so you can share and help each other become better.”
All proceeds from Pickus's book will go to Alzheimer’s Disease Research. She will be reading at the Baldwin Public Library on Saturday, April 4 at 2 p.m. and at the Long Beach Library on Saturday, April 18 at 2 p.m.
To find out about workshops that Ellen Pickus leads or to set up a workshop get in touch with Ellen Pickus at Pickus@gmail.com. Her books are also available at her readings.
Comments about this story? MRusso@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 283.
