The More the Merry

Merry Gangemi was born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1954. She started surfing at 13, and for many years surfing was the closest thing to heaven for her. She began college as a music major and studied viola with Eugenie Dengle, a first violist with the New York Metropolitan Opera. She went off to school in Denmark, and then returned to finish a BA in English Literature at New York University.

She came out in 1980, almost a year after the birth of her only child, Liz (that's Merry on the left and Liz on the right in the photo). Merry moved to San Francisco in 1996 and earned an MA in comparative literature at San Francisco State University. In 1999, she received the Audre Lorde Creative Writing Award in poetry (SFSU). Her short fiction and poetry can be found in the Paterson Literary Review, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Sinister Wisdom, and Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Wisconsin Review, River Oak Review, and Matrifocus. She is the programmer and host of Woman-Stirred Radio, which airs every Thursday from 4 to 6 pm on WGDR 91.1 fm. WGDR is a community radio station broadcasting from the campus of Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont. Merry produces the annual Tea & Poetry series every August at Perennial Pleasures in Vermont. She was the guest-editor of Sinister Wisdom 65, Lesbian Mothers and Grandmothers. She is currently working on an MFA in poetry and fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Here's a little gem of a poem by Merry Gangemi:

Coward

There was no other way to leave.

Fleeing your car at the terminal door,

eventually reassured by the rage of
engines bearing me aloft from the

mounds of words left
rotting in the August fog.

© 2005 Merry Gangemi