BOOKS, ART, TRAVEL AND MORE
Take a minute to scroll through the delightful offerings in ArtsMart, and you’ll find fascinating books on every subject, for every taste, and from
every genre--poetry, memoirs, history and biography, children’s books, essays, mysteries, fiction both speculative and historical. You’ll also find
writing workshops and retreats, music, even grownup coloring books - something for each and every taste and hour and
mood.
When you purchase an item from ArtsMart, you are helping Persimmon Tree fulfill its mission of providing an audience for the writing and art of women over 60. ArtsMart’s advertising rates
are purposely set very low in order to afford to as many older women writers and artists as possible the opportunity to connect with potential purchasers.
Persimmon Tree is an Amazon and Bookshop associate, which means our journal receives a small royalty every time you make a
purchase by clicking through to Amazon or Bookshop. The price to you is no higher, but your purchase helps Persimmon Tree continue its vital work.
“The magic of this book is that in a time of global suffering, its author ‘walked to the edge of an old and used up world and hummed a tune of invention.’ Brava!” —Dante Micheaux
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Set during the 'forever wars' that followed 9/11, The Angle of Falling Light movingly explores the demons that survivors must wrestle with in the wake of tragedy. Beverly Gologorsky brings us a great cast of characters, at their center three working-class women trying to shape lives of their own in a world that seems to promise them nothing but deadening repetition.
NOT a Father’s Daughter is an intimate portrait of a woman who unknowingly declared at age eight that she would not be a puppet on a string, not a father’s daughter. Unaware of why her resolve to reject patriarchal dogma was so strong, she reflects on how she observed the world around her and fought the injustices she encountered. Interwoven into her memories and experiences, an inspiring manifesto springs forth for women and men, with equal measures of spirit and soul.
Growing up in the shadow of a brilliant older sister, with a father who dismisses her ambitions, music is the one place Ernestine belongs. Her flute teacher sees what no else does: talent, fire, and potential. For years, he is the father she never had. She excels in competitions and dreams of being a professional musician, but her father ridicules her plans and insists she attend Emory University as a math major.
A work of fiction inspired by the life of the author’s great-grandmother.
The true story of a damaged primal bond between mother and daughter that, after decades of estrangement, was finally repaired.
Lisa—a classically trained pianist, wife, and mother—yearns for something she can’t define. After she begins a study of jazz improv with an outspoken, trailblazing musician from the ’70s girl band era, a woman who encourages Lisa to let go musically and emotionally, life takes an unexpected, irrevocable turn. When they become lovers, what began as a desire to learn jazz becomes a lesson in letting go: with music, with an old way of living, and finally with life itself.
What if you woke up one morning and found you had been changed into a dragon? You learn in a dream that your pesky brother can change you back with a kiss, but how do you tell him that when you can only screech and roar? 
Barnacles sparkle, puffins glint, human practices result in fish-strewn beaches. Like blue-green algae on lakes and ponds, red tide is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Nourished by human waste and warming waters, cyanobacteria multiply in harmful algal blooms (HABs) that release neurotoxins. In a whirl of games, addictions, concussions,swimming bans, Red Tide at Sandy Bend posits a world of creaturely interdependence visceral and intimate.
Wendy Swift’s husband was incarcerated in the 1990s, leaving her alone to support her three young daughters as they navigated loss, shame, and uncertainty. The path was uneven and hard-won. It required resilience, reflection, and growth from all of them, just as it revealed all too starkly the perils of blind materialism.
When All the Girls Stopped Singing follows Zora Monro, a Washington, DC human rights advocate, whose carefully constructed life unravels after her mother’s sudden death. Hidden files and cryptic notes expose a long-buried secret about Zora’s origins—one that stretches from America’s fraught racial history to the war-ravaged nation of Sudan.
Leaving Home at 83 is an intensely personal story yet one shared with thousands of aging women who are wondering whether to move closer to their children and leave their friendships behind or stay in their communities. Readers will see their own questions on these pages and recognize their own fears, insecurities, and uncertainties.
A struggling woman is admitted to a prestigious Chicago hospital seeking help for her compulsions. Instead, her unethical psychiatrist ignores her actual problem and "treats" her as a victim of satanic ritual abuse. He uses powerful drugs and discredited forms of therapy to convince her she spent years in a cult where she sacrificed babies and committed other heinous acts.
Now What? is a revealing, witty series of reflections on living while old. Butler offers the reader a welcome glimpse into the richness, foolishness, limitations, bravado, and freedom of a vividly lived 88-year-old life.
Annunciations explores the frame that art—and life—erects around women, investigating notions of self-determination and consent in a woman’s life.
This year we celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of a great American composer. Born on July 4, 1826, Stephen Foster came to life on the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. His “Oh! Susanna” became the banner song of forty-niners during the California gold rush. “Old Kentucky Home” and “Old Folks at Home” are still the state songs of Kentucky and Florida. “Camptown Races” and “Beautiful Dreamer” are sung today, more than a century and a half after they were written.