Studio B, 39A East Philadelphia Avenue in Boyertown, PA, welcomes the public on Sunday, June 21, 2015, beginning at 1:00 p.m. to the second poetry reading from a project featuring Jennifer Hetrick who will be sharing her poetry focused on Berks County’s manufacturing history inspired by the memories and reflections of the area’s senior citizens-often those in their 80s and 90s-that Hetrick collected through interviews.
Some of the poems weave together stories of curious details like baseball shoes made for Mickey Mantle in Kutztown, lingerie sewn in Boyertown and shipped to storefronts in New York City, military tanks built in Birdsboro around the middle of the last century and assembly lines of chocolates moving, not at the hands of Lucille Ball, but by women who worked in Reading.
Seating is limited to 30 people. Contacting thelaborsofourfingertips@yahoo.com to RVSP is recommended.
Hetrick is a freelance writer who lives in Berks County and received a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts as well as the Berks Arts Council for pursuing this project. The remainder of the project will be supported with an upcoming KickStarter campaign. The project’s title is the labors of our fingertips: poems from manufacturing history in berks county.
“Since manufacturing is an integral part of our local history and has mostly faded away as these once readily available jobs shifted to overseas countries, capturing the memories of our seniors who literally made things with their hands long ago teaches us to keep close to our history-it also honors those who kept our economy thriving for so long,” Hetrick said.
“Sharing these stories is so important, and if we don’t ask about them and then preserve them in some way, they’ll soon be lost,” she added. “Line breaks, along with less room where writing can live, helps to bring a more unique and heart-tugging form of any story to the page,” she concluded.
In recent years, Hetrick interviewed and studied with Berks County’s third poet laureate, Heather Thomas. She also followed the county’s fourth poet laureate, Craig Czury, on his Marcellus Shale poetry project based in Northeastern Pennsylvania, with local articles she wrote gaining national-level attention for the poet. The experience also offered her first official dive into hitchhiking and photographing disappearing farmland and sections of fracking pipeline installations in Wyoming and Susquehanna counties, several hours north of Berks County.
She has interviewed and written about other Berks County poets as well as several from across the U.S. as well as Turkey and Israel.
Hetrick’s poetry project will incorporate a total of three books of poetry after its completion, which will take at least three years. The books will include 25 poems each, crafted from interviews with older seniors who worked in Berks County’s mills and factories many decades ago. The first book will be released through FootHills Publishing based in Kanona, N.Y. by the end of August.
Several seniors from the poems may be at the poetry reading at Studio B as well so that those who attend can stir conversations of any old history and memories in common.
