Overview

Dreams of Passing Fire is a collaborative poetry collection with two distinct voices echoing the experiences of a shared journey. Katherine January and Rebecca Ring set out in September of 2019 to traverse what they could of the Camino de Santiago, an ancient trail across northern Spain. Their plan to finish the journey the following year was disrupted by the pandemic, so instead, from the isolation of their own homes, they ventured out in words, beginning from a common starting place-a town, an image, an encounter-then diving inward. What began as an odyssey on foot became Dreams of Passing Fire. The uniqueness of this collection of thirty poems is the interweaving of two voices, two points of view on the same interrupted journey and its after-journey. Though the poems were written individually, what evolved was a dynamic conversation on themes universal to all seekers. The poems cross paths with one other as they wander on and off the trail, into the poets' lives and back. In this collection, the reader is invited into a stereoscopic rendering of landscapes both inner and earthly.

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9781962082310

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Reviews

"""A steely eye and a tender heart. These poet/photographers have both and know how to employ them to turn these pages into poignant moments, trekking along the Camino and allowing us to 'breathe the / mercy of the ages' along with them. These poems last beyond their 'moments' and remind us of the amazing buoyancy of the spirit."" -Nance Van Winckel, author of Sister Zero ""Writers Katherine January and Rebecca Ring walked the Camino de Santiago in 2019. Their plan of returning the following year was derailed by COVID, so instead they wrote paired poems. Dreams of Passing Fire offers a 'refuge of friendship/sheltering' as well as the wisdom of knowing 'many paths, but only one/at a time.'"" -Natasha Saje, author of The Future Will Call You Something Else ""Though every ounce packed for walking the Camino must be considered, Katherine January and Rebecca Ring's collaboration deftly carries divorce, friendship, a gone sister, curving roads, a hive-shaped house, field-trip children, a wedding party, an iron roof rooster, almonds, stork nests on a belfry, pre-pandemic twenty-to-a-room sleeping, a dream of multiple Marys, headlamps for dark mornings 'on the road before birds, ' shared laundry lines, calendula seeds, cairns, 'clotted sheep / around the moon, ' an alchemical cocktail, a stone alligator under a saint's skirt, a labyrinth. These wandering poets traveled 'outside the orb of the familiar' to experience how pilgrimage empties and replenishes, like spent sunflowers with 'no gold left in their faces / but when we looked // all we saw was gold.'"" -Rebecca Hart Olander, author of Uncertain Acrobats ""The dynamic friendship in these poems offers shared adventure, shared pilgrimage, that deep kind of travel that leads inward, a journey shared in which one being mixes with another, the substance of body and spirit. Even in parting after the journey, each friend carries inside themselves a love transformed by the road."" -Joel Long, author of Lessons in Disappearance"

Author Information

Katherine January is a semi-retired psychologist and full-time poet who lives and farms with her family in Bountiful, Utah. Blame it on her upbringing in rural Vermont or her stints as a Park Ranger in the American West, but seeds of all kinds have followed her home for decades. Katherine's writing has appeared in Shenandoah Valley Writers' Guild Showcase, The Potomac Guardian, Sine Cera, Green Ink Poetry, Cosmic Daffodil, Farmer-ish Press, and Last Stanza Poetry Journal. She was awarded Honorable Mention for the Byron Herbert Reece Award sponsored by the Georgia Poetry Society. Katherine's first volume of poetry, The Blue Giraffe, was published in 2010. Born in Colorado and raised in California, Rebecca Ring was lured to the province of Quebec by a smooth-talking French Canadian. They married and had children, and, so as not to be outnumbered, Rebecca became a Canadian too. She and her husband now reside in Utah, where Rebecca is a full-time writer. Along with degrees in film and education and careers in both fields in Canada and the US, she has an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She writes poetry and short stories and is at work on a novel. Her publications include Sediments Literary-Arts Journal, 21st Century Ghost Stories, and Flame Tree Publishing's American Gothic Short Stories. Dreams of Passing Fire is her first poetry collection.

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