About Therese |
Therese Fitzmaurice recently published her fourth collection of poetry How to Love this Woman (Feb. 2016). Many poems in that collection are featured in her current recording project with musicians, Jesse Jonathon and Amy Day. Her work explores the inner landscape of a life lived contemplating the intersection of spirit & flesh, individual & tribe, offering & receiving. She is currently utilizing her professional skills to create and sustain community events, rituals and workshops with the mindful intention to inspire participants to become fully present with the everyday miracle of being alive.
Therese FitzMaurice, along with Vanessa Vrtiak, cofounded A Reason to Listen poetry collective in 2004. They host the wildly popular, 10-year-strong, Humboldt Poetry, the first Thursday of the month at Siren’s Song Tavern in Eureka. Together, they have a magnetic and magical presence on stage and off. They have co-written and performed two full-length choreo-poems (Excavating the HIstory of Love and Resuscitating the Sequence of Sacrifice), toured nationally and performed at notable poetry venues including the Nuyorican Café and the Apollo in NYC. They continue to perform and teach in high school and college classrooms, the Humboldt County jail, churches, baby showers, writing groups & conferences. In addition to her work as a poet and performer, Therese has served the community for sixteen years as a professional educator as high school English teacher, preschool director and parent educator. After studying at University of San Francisco's Center for Teaching and Social Justice, Therese earned a teaching credential at Humboldt State University. She has since closely studied the explosion of mindfulness research and its relevant application to education, family life and art. Therese’s daily life is tuned to the rhythm of life with her two children and husband on the rocky bluffs above the Baduwot River in McKinleyville, CA. |
Sample Work
|
|
great skies
by Therese FitzMaurice Inspired by Pat Schneider’s poem About, Among Other Things, God. the archetypal housewife clad in apron, home surrounded by sycamores, pantry filled with home made jam-- she calls to her children come. come home and those words pressed into the pulped fibers of our Grandmother’s lungs, rise rise within me like the dust of a midwestern mentality suspended in the expansiveness of great skies, where dreams float like cumulus clouds toward a heaven imagined elsewhere. there are no sycamores on our corner lot or even in our west coast neighborhood, perched above the pacific ocean but the intimacy within the vast grandeur of that archetypal poem crawls onto my lap in the form of a three-year-old girl with delicate skin & golden strands of divinity, soft & silky against my face. how can heaven possibly be anywhere but here in her mother’s arms? |