Writers Read – Featured Reader Faith Kindness

Long-time resident of Western Massachusetts, Faith Dickhaut Kindness is a visual artist, teacher, former librarian, and writer whose memoir in poetry is entitled The Art of Waiting.

“In the late 60s during the Vietnam War,” she writes, “I was a young wife on Okinawa. The subject matter of The Art of Waiting is based on two years in her twenties when life took a direction she hadn’t previously encountered and she simultaneously faced two unknown mindsets – that of the military and that of living in a foreign culture.

When we first arrived back in the U.S. people weren’t ready to hear the stories I was bursting to tell. Writing this book became a cathartic journey that has “released my psyche to heal.” The book is organized in roughly chronological sections with headings like a symphony. Theme and variation twine through the pages that cover the loneliness of separation, being reunited abroad but not having what military brass considered a necessary function, my questioning what the U.S. was doing in what felt an unpopular war, and lingering effects of that experience after returning home.

Her work has been published in Equinox, Wise Woman Journal, and Silkworm as well as being included in the Straw Dog Writers Guild anthology Compass Roads.