First in Series of Ongoing Interviews with Christian Poets

By: Peter Menkin

Narrated by: Miranda Crandall

This first part of a series of sets of interviews with Anglican and Christian poets starts with Pamela Cranston. Note this quote following is from the beginning of the interview/article itself. A number of other interviews with poets follow: "Hopefully, the reader will agree that Pamela Cranston is an engaging and interesting woman, who as a poet has grown so much in these past years - so one well-known Western United States poet told me." Her sense of the Almighty, tastes in Biblical writing as literature and her thoughts on religious ideal, and some of her views of the 21st Century Church are touched on in this interview given by her over the phone in June 2011 from San Francisco’s East Bay to the writer’s home north of San Francisco. We spoke for an hour, when the Chaplain for the Episcopal Church USA had to leave to attend to someone.

Jeanne Walker, Poet, speaks to us of her work. This excerpt is from the beginning of that article/interview with her: Another in the series of ongoing interviews with American poets. This interview with University of Delaware Professor Jeanne Walker is part of the special subset in this series called American Anglican poets. This writer talked by phone in June 2011 with Jeanne from his home office north of San Francisco to Jeanne, who was in that morning time at her home in the Philadelphia, PA area. We spoke for an hour, and the poet was forthcoming about her work as a poet, and as an experienced University Professor of English (35 years). About being a teacher she says, "I'm fortunate not to live only with my peer group; I get to know people who are twenty-one and twenty-two. I go to class on Tuesday afternoon and it's the only Tuesday afternoon we have. It's our real life, and I talk with them about what they think about the text. The text is a meeting place for us to talk about what's important."

From an interview with Christian poet Luci Shaw, another of those interviewed in this ongoing series. This is part of an answer she gave to a question: "I find in Mary, the mother of Jesus, and her willing involvement in the drama of Incarnation, an almost infinite world of possibility for reflection and poetry. My collection, Accompanied by Angels, includes many poems about this ordinary, extraordinary young woman. She can be viewed from so many different angles. I have always seen her as a model, to both women and men, of active participation in the work of God no matter how tricky or risky it appears to be. She said Yes to being pregnant with God by the Holy Ghost, well knowing what that might do to her reputation as an unwed mother. She considered the call of God on her to be paramount."

©2011 Peter A Menkin (P)2013 Peter A Menkin