The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon
Why We Love Atlanta
ZONA ROSA WRITING GROUPS
Rosemary Daniell is the founder and leader of ZONA ROSA, a series of life-changing writing workshops attended by thousands of women and some men, with events in Atlanta, Savannah, and other cities, as well as in Europe, as described in People and Southern Living. She is also the award-winning author of nine books of poetry and prose, including Secrets of the Zona Rosa: How Writing (and Sisterhood) Can Change Women's Lives and The Woman Who Spilled Words All Over Herself: Writing and Living the Zona Rosa Way, and is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in writing, one in poetry, another in fiction.
Rosemary’s work has been featured in many magazines and papers, including Harper’s Bazaar, New York Woman, Travel & Leisure, The New York Times Book Review, Newsday, The Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Mother Jones; she has also been a guest on many national radio and television shows, such as "The Merve Griffin Show,” “Donahue,” "The Diane Rehm Show,” "Larry King Live," and CNN’s “Portrait of America.”
Early in her career, she instigated and led writing workshops in women's prisons in Georgia and Wyoming, served as program director for Georgia's Poetry in the Schools program, and worked for a dozen years in Poetry in the Schools programs in Georgia, South Carolina, and Wyoming. In 2008, she received a Governor’s Award in the Humanities for her impact on the state of Georgia. She is profiled in the book Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975.
Here is her response to our request for a description of her work through Zona Rosa writing groups.
Rosemary Daniell: Zona Rosa Writing and Living Workshops
My mother Melissa was a beautiful Southern woman and a talented writer who thought she didn’t have the right to be. In 1975, as I stood beside her gurney after the overdose that would kill her (though I didn’t know it yet), I felt something stir inside me, like a pregnancy of the heart: the desire to help other women like her put their stories on paper.
In 1981, after writing and publishing Fatal Flowers, a memoir about my mother, myself and other Southern women, this desire came to life again, and I invited four women from a small writing workshop I was teaching for the city of Savannah to meet at my little flat once a month to talk about writing and life, something I expected to go on for perhaps six months. (Zona Rosa, or “the pink zone,” was at first designed for women, especially women like my mother.) Instead, 37 years later, literally thousands of women, and some men, have taken part in Zona Rosa Writing and Living Workshops in the United States and in Europe, with ongoing monthly workshops in Savannah and Atlanta.
To date, over 200 Zona Rosans and counting have become published authors, and many others are on their way to becoming published. “I speak to the highest that is in you,” goes a Navajo saying, and that is our goal in Zona Rosa. Our credo from the beginning has been, in the words of songwriter Johnny Mercer, to “accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative,” and in keeping with this, we seek to help each writer find her (or his) strengths in the genres of their choices.
Since I’ve published fiction, non-fiction and poetry books, and many pieces for major magazines and newspapers, I feel at ease with helping writers at every stage of their careers. In addition, we have many credos and acronyms to help us along the way. Prominent among them are “There are no writing blocks, there are only feeling blocks” and “Revision revises us.” These and many other writing tools are detailed in my two memoirs of the group, The Woman Who Spilled Words All Over Herself: Writing and Living the Zona Rosa Way and Secrets of the Zona Rosa: How Writing (and Sisterhood) Can Change Women’s Lives.
Also, because the workshops are supportive rather than competitive, they are a win-win situation for every member. Wherever they may be in their writing lives, we regularly celebrate one another’s successes, large and small, rather than waiting for the delayed gratification of publication.
The great psychologist Carl Jung said that “there can be no diagnosis without telling the story, and telling the story is the cure.” Many Zona Rosans have not only changed their writing but their lives, often healing themselves from trauma in the process of getting their stories on paper. As Zona Rosan Pamella put it (and printed it on a canvas bag in our honor), “I don’t need therapy, I’ve got Zona Rosa.” Pamella - a good wife and daughter, and a teacher of classical piano who also worked other jobs to help support her family - had an epiphany during a massage, and went on to divorce (and later remarry) her husband, and to give up teaching to write the brilliant novels she was meant to write, affirming the lines from Keat’s great poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” In sharing our truths, we often find beauty and healing and peace while in the process of making literary art.
0ther Zona Rosans who went on to write beautiful accounts of difficult experiences include the following:
Marianne, who grew up in a satanic cult, fled Florida where she lived as an adult, and was followed and raped after she talked to the F.B.I. about her experiences.
Jill, who cared for her small son until his death several years after he was misdiagnosed with Rocky Mountain Fever at age four, leaving him blind, his limbs amputated.
Kathleen, whose attorney husband died mysteriously the day after he’d signed over half his million-dollar estate to a defrocked nurse he’d met in an alcohol and drug rehab center where she was also a patient.
Carolyn, who lost everything—her house, her pets, her sanity—to the Lyme’s disease that also led to suicide attempts, psychiatric hospitals and electro-shock treatments.
Elsa, who, growing up in Trieste, Italy, during the second world war, was strafed by machine gun fire as she ran messages for the partisans.
Ann, who heard about her beloved son’s death on 9/11 on TV, just a month after he’d said, “Mother, if I died today, I’d die happy,” and went on to start a foundation in his honor.
Reds, a former Green Beret, who, suffering delusions possibly caused by traumatic brain injuries, hijacked a United Airlines jet to Cuba with the intention of assassinating Castro, eventually becoming the only person to be acquitted of such a crime.
Linda, a secretary at MIT, who gave up her life as a childhood piano prodigy when playing became inexplicably intertwined with her compulsion to cut herself. “But in Zona Rosa, you can bleed and smile at the same time, and not be thought a fool,” she wrote.
Claudia, a brilliant poet, and Courtenay, “my Southern Virginia Woolf,” both of whose mentally ill, addicted sons died in Georgia crisis centers (such women are of special interest to me, as over these same years, I have been the mother and caregiver to a bipolar, addicted daughter and a schizophrenic son until he died—Zona Rosans at my side—in 2009).
Thus, what I at first thought of as an aside to my calling as a writer, over time has become my mission (through the years, I have only missed two workshops, both because of illness). Today, with a new book on Zona Rosa and its members in the works, I consider leading Zona Rosa and facilitating others in fulfilling their writing dreams to be my true purpose, and I intend to do so for the rest of my life.
Rosemary drawing by Charlotte HarrellFor further information, write Rosemary at rosemary@myzonarosa.com.
See The Grapevine’s article published in 2008 for a lengthier look at Rosemary and her Atlanta Zona Rosa Group, together with some lively visual material.
Copyright 2018, Barbara Knott. All Rights Reserved.