First Words
First Words is a book of feminist poetry from the heart of the Second Wave of the Women's Movement. Charlotte, Betty and I met in a poetry group at the Women's Building in Los Angeles. After the group ended, we decided to continue meeting and eventually decided to publish a book together.
Charlotte worked for a print shop, so she was our guiding light. Betty was an artist as well as a writer, so she did the illustrations, and because of my background as a newspaper reporter, I felt competent to write the introduction for the book. We gave readings together and separately at all the women's bookstores in Los Angeles. It was a wonderful experience.
About Joy Fisher (Hawaii Author)
I worked as a newspaper reporter for the Las Vegas SUN and the Riverside Press-Enterprise way back in the 1960s and 70s, then I became a lawyer. But I found I couldn't give up writing. For years, writing was my "mistress," something I did on the sly when I could free myself up from my "real" job.
In the mid-70s, I ran away to a place called the Women's Writers Center in Cazenovia, New York, for a year, where I studied with feminist icons like Rita Mae Brown and wrote poetry. Then it was back to my "day" job, but this time I linked up with some other women poets in Los Angeles, and we published a book of poetry together, First Words.
When I finally retired, I ran away to Canada and got a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, where I fell in love with writing plays. Now I'm back in the United States, at home in Hawaii, a grateful member of the Hawaii Writers Guild and have just finished my second full-length play, Gutenberg's Secrets.