This article is adapted from a speech I delivered at Union Church in Pocantico Hills on April 8, 2025, following a poetry reading with Dominika Wrozynski, the new program director at the Hudson Valley Writers Center. As a returning board member and founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center, I was invited to reflect on how the Center began—and what I hope we can achieve together in the decades ahead.
Many people have asked me what led me to want to found a Writers Center, and because I was recently reappointed to the Hudson Valley Writers Center board of directors, I thought that I would begin with addressing that question.
One of my earliest sources of inspiration which indirectly led to the founding of the Hudson Valley Writers Center was taking a MIT writing workshop with the great poet, Denise Levertov. A powerful mentor and role model for me and many others, she continually engaged herself in life as a poet and political activist.
Levertov’s views on the poet as witness and the poem as prayer, her boundless energy and sense of wonder, her light and airy humor, her refusal to accept injustice—all these characteristics etched her spirit onto my own consciousness. Denise Levertov was a supporter of the Hudson Valley Writers Center—for example, she did a reading for the Center and served as a contest judge for one of the early Slapering Hol Press chapbooks.
Other sources of inspiration included participating in countless demonstrations during the anti-war movement of the late 1960s and early 70s, and getting arrested in the Harvard Strike. These actions showed me how people can work together to affect change.
A major inspiration emanated from living in Washington, D.C. in two different time periods. In the early 70s, I was staff assistant to a U.S. Senator. During that period, I did not find much going on in the literary scene.
When I lived in D.C. in the later seventies and early eighties, however, the city abounded with opportunities for poets and fiction writers at all levels with readings and workshops, including those at the Washington Writers Center, then located in an abandoned amusement park, Word Works Press, and the Folger Shakespeare Library series. I experienced firsthand a renaissance in the D.C. literary scene.
But afterwards when my husband Don Stever and I moved to Westchester County, I felt as if I had gone back to live in the old suburb of stultifying memories: I was surrounded by women wearing white gloves, attending luncheons, and talking about the Junior League.
In the early 80s, I was fortunate to enroll in the MFA Poetry Program at Sarah Lawrence College where I became friends with numerous poets, including Denise Duhamel, Stephanie Strickland, and the late Anneliese Wagner, who were all instrumental in establishing the Writers Center.
Denise Duhamel, who subsequently became a widely known poet, was the first employee of the Writers Center. We worked on grants and literary projects together in our attic. When the phone rang, we would try to determine through our own ESP whether the person was calling about the Writers Center, in which case we would answer, Hudson Valley Writers Center, or whether the school nurse calling about one of my children.
For many years, Denise helped run the HVWC reading series and engaged in program development. She also published a poem in Slapering Hol Press’s (SHP’s) first collection, the chapbook anthology Voices from the River. Years later, she was the second master poet in SHP’s Conversation series, in which a well-known poet chooses an emerging poet to appear in the same collection, and I have brought a few examples of chapbooks from that series. She chose Amy Lemon, and they put together Enjoy Hot or Iced, a masterful collection about failed relationships. This month, she is one of the poets reading in the Westchester Poetry Festival on April 26th at the Masters School, an iconic literary festival created by the Hudson Valley Writers Center.
From the beginning, Hudson Valley Writers Center volunteers did outreach work, bringing writing opportunities and readings to underserved communities. We received early criticism from ArtsWestchester, then Westchester Arts Council, for being too ambitious at too young an age. At first, we held workshops in nursing homes and schools, but soon we realized that we needed to create long-term opportunities.
We established a poetry program for handicapped students at the Clearview School in Scarborough. We had to persuade the school administrators who thought that on an emotional level, the poetry would be too much for the students to handle. It was so successful that they eventually instituted a poetry workshop as an integral part of their curriculum.
We also conducted a long-term workshop at Aids-Related Community Service, and later we created a ten-year comprehensive literacy project at the Coachman Family Center which included a computer room, homework help, and writing and art workshops. The Coachman Family Center is the largest family homeless shelter in Westchester County.
From 1984 to the present, we raised over a million dollars to restore the abandoned Philipse Manor Railroad Station as the Center’s headquarters. Don Stever and Nick Robinson, two founding Hudson Valley Writers Center board members and Fortnightly Club members, worked for decades to wrest the Philipse Manor Railroad Station from the control of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, to obtain a long-term lease from the MTA, and finally to buy the building.
Restoring the railroad station was a magical endeavor since all the systems and structures had been destroyed except for the fireplace though the station had previously been a center of the community, a place of comings and goings, one of remarkable beauty with wood-paneled walls created from American Chestnut with porches that wrap around the Center and overlook the Hudson. As some may know, the American Chestnut had thrived for at least forty million years, but by the 1940s, a blight had killed four billion nationwide. We are extremely lucky to own a room paneled with this now rare wood though scientists are laboring to bring a blight resistant American Chestnut hybrid back. If anyone is interested, we can tell you how to obtain seeds or even a Chestnut tree start.
The railing around the station was kicked in by wayward teens who used the station as a secret meeting place, and who have left some graffiti on the walls, which we were told by experts to preserve. The station building hosted holes in the roof and in the floor. The shingles were asbestos, and we had to pay for an exceedingly complex operation to have them removed which included hiring flagmen and workers dressed in white jut suits for protection against the asbestos. We hired the best and most knowledgeable historic preservation workers including the late Joanne Tall, an architect who specialized in historic preservation who served on the HVWC board, and her husband architect Scott Kaymen.
The Hudson Valley Writers Center will soon be celebrating its 40th anniversary, and what do we want to accomplish in the next forty years? During the pandemic, the Writers Center established a first- rate reading and workshop program on Zoom. For the foreseeable future, it is critical for the Center board and staff to regenerate the Center’s in-person local and regional literary programming. The station itself needs to be spruced up, and I personally believe it would be important to find alternative energy sources, to the extent that they make sense, to cut down on cost and stop contributing to global warming.
In my view, the Center also needs to expand its focus to include new genres such as comedy and to develop greater depth of programming for children. We must continue to foster community and sanctuary for writers.
For the first time in American history, we must come together to fight for freedom of expression, a critical part of the struggle against authoritarianism and downright fascism to preserve our beloved democracy that our forebears fought so long and hard to create.
