Author Talk: Mending Prayer Rugs by Kathleen Hirsch

Mending Prayer Rugs is a meditation on the hidden ways in which women suffuse the life around them with their spiritual force: their creativity, passion, and enduring devotion. Kathleen Hirsch has spent a lifetime listening to women in every imaginable context: on the streets, in painting studios, at playgrounds, churches, walking country lanes and healing in detox facilities.

In each of these settings, she has witnessed the often-invisible work of creating value, transforming grief, mending conflicts, out of scraps of muslin, fire and day-old bread, a windswept chapel by the sea. These poems offer portals into the inner lives of women, both nameless and famed, exploring realms of emotion and moral discernment often overlooked by conventional histories. After reading these portraits of courage, endurance, wit and grace, it will be hard to see ordinary women in the same way again.

KATHLEEN HIRSCH was an award-winning journalist before turning to literar…