Poet Creates from the Heart

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Poet Ellen Kempler hikes in Big Sur.
Poet Ellen Kempler hikes in Big Sur.

Laguna local Ellen Girardeau Kempler is this year’s winner of the Blackwater International Poetry Festival held each July in County Cork, Ireland. “It’s the first acceptance I’ve had in many months—after many, many submissions and rejections,” she said.

The Blackwater poetry group, to which one must be invited, is known for holding readings in the street and in boutiques, barber shops, banks, pharmacies, cafes, hairdressing salons, shops, restaurants, pubs, and at the Grand Hotel in Dublin. From a field narrowed to six finalists Girardeau Kempler was named the winner by competition judge, Dutch poet Tsead Buinja.

She receives a trip to Fermoy, a village of 5,800 on the River Blackwater, where she’ll join an international group of poets for readings and workshops in the surrounding towns.

The winning poem, “Birthday Wish,” is one of three Girardeau-Kempler wrote about her dad, a theoretical physicist and avid reader, who died in 2015 after a fall and a blow to his head. The trauma and the surgery that followed transformed his usually introspective personality. “He suddenly became very outgoing; family was everything, but the physics and reading turned off,” she said. “Birthday Wish,” inspired by a gift requested for his 82nd birthday, will be published in Ireland’s Blue Max Review, the festival anthology.

Girardeau-Kempler’s poems have been published in Spectrum, Orbis, Arrow and other small presses, and they have won first place for the past three years in the annual Laguna Beach Library poetry contest. She is a member of the American Academy of Poets and the American Association of Writers and Writers Programs. The Amherst Writers Program has certified her as a workshop leader. She was an editor of Spectrum literary magazine, which has published the work of Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Rexroth.

Girardeau-Kempler’s essays, opinion pieces and feature articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor and the Huffington Post. In 2015 she was runner-up in Transition Abroad’s annual narrative travel writing competition.

After a career in mass communications, Girardeau-Kempler now works as a free-lance editor and skipper of her website Gold Boat Journeys, offering custom-designed itineraries and advice for people seeking creative ways to travel well for less. “The best part of winning the Blackwater International Poetry Competition is the opportunity for cultural exchange with an international group of writers in a country that more than any other place in the world speaks the language of poetry,” she said.

The prize “is a reminder to all … creatives never to take rejection personally and to keep working and submitting,” the poet said.

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