In February, Jeri chairs a Panel at AWP (Associated Writers and Writing Programs) Conference in Chicago. Then she heads to Washington, D. C. to be a Visiting Fellow at George Washington University. Jeri will collaborate with Professor Leslie Jacobson, Head of the Department of Theatre and Dance, on staging her verse novel-in-progress.
In June, Jeri is off to the Blue Mountains in Katoomba, NSW, to take up a Residential Fellowship at Varuna – the Writers’ House, novelist Eleanor Dark’s former home.
Jeri’s most recent critical book is co-edited with Graeme Harper: Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy (Multilingual Matters, UK, 2008).
Two poems from Jeri’s verse novel-in-progress appeared in Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses, published by Yarroway Mountain Press in 2008 (order online at yarrowaymountainpress.com).
For senior secondary students and adults. In the heart of this finely balanced collection, Jeri Kroll confronts the devastating effects of Alzheimer’s disease as well as the mother-daughter relationship in its final stages.
What the reviewers say:
“The painful ambivalence of ageing’s inverted parent/child relationship . . . is brilliantly captured in poems such as “The Toxic Parent” and “Lift Off.” The toughness of truth tempered throughout by tenderness, this is a perceptive and beautifully balanced tribute.”
- Katharine England, The Advertiser, 8 May 2004.
“This is a wonderful collection and the teacher in me cries out for a class set of The Mother Workshops. While the texts themselves could be read primarily by senior students as exploring the poet’s changing relationship with her mother…they can also be read, more generically, in relation to all parent-child relationships, about the moments when the lines of authority and power waver and the baton – or distaff – is passed to the next generation. Furthermore, as intertextual treats for teachers and students, readings from The Mother Workshops would superbly complement and enrich texts by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Simone de Beauvoir, Audre Laude and Virginia Woolf…”
- Anne Magee, feature in Viewpoint 12 [3] Spring 2004 23.
Mickey Opie is almost thirteen and going crazy. Life hasn’t been the same since her beloved grandmother died and her best friend moved away. Her parents fight, her teacher’s a control freak, her school’s very own Mafia, the Greasy Hand, keep stealing her lunch and she’s cursed with hair that looks as if mice have nested in it.
But no one at home is interested in hearing Mickey whinge, so she begins to write letters to the living and the dead – the Minister of Education, Bill Gates, J.R.R. Tolkien, Napoleon, Freddo the frog (she’s a chocoholic) . . . and most of all to her late grandmother.
Mickey does have one thing going for her – her great imagination. Mickey writes to George Lucas as well, sending him instalments of her wild sci-fi fantasy about her alter ego, Space Chick Mick, where she really lets her hair uncurl.
Mickey’s Little Book of Letters offers a novel within a novel – a space fantasy as well as a witty and moving story about the uncertainties of early adolescence and the transformative power of grief. It’s a portrait of the artist as a young girl becoming aware of her talents – and having a lot of fun doing so.
