Clearly Meant presents Judy Bebelaar

On February 27, 2016 Judy Bebelaar was the second poet in the reading series. My supervisor at the library had asked me to brand it. I stared for a while at the name of our branch library, the Claremont, and it resolved into Clearly Meant. Because what else is poetry but what is clearly meant? 

I became acquainted with Judy through Katharine Harer (one of the poets with whom I worked on the Poetry & Pizza series). But the Claremont Branch is also Judy’s local library, so when she walked in the door one day to ask about some book or other, she moved up my list of possible readers. Getting local writers was a priority. I was already thinking of Clearly Meant as a neighborhood series. I knew other poets who lived nearby. A resource to take advantage of!

I ask the guest poet to provide enough poems for a chapbook, which I put together and make available free at all the Berkeley library branches for the month leading up to the reading. I prefer the poet give me poems that they can talk about during the discussion period. It’s nice to have the option of talking in depth about a poem, especially one the audience is holding in their hands. 

Judy was eager to talk about a project she’d been working on for some time, a book about the teenagers she knew in the Peoples Temple. 

And Then They Were Gone: teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown by Judy Bebelaar and Ron Cabral was published in 2018. Recently Judy emailed me wondering who she could talk to about a presentation at the library. I posed the question to my supervisor. My supervisor said, “This is something you’d like to do?” I hadn’t thought I was going to be doing any programs during our covid days. My poetry programs were on hiatus, both Clearly Meant and the monthly Poetry Circle. Why not? I said. Might as well do a zoom. I’ve participated in a zoom poetry reading or two from home. But I hadn’t hosted anything. 

So I got the in-house instructions for librarians on how to do remote programming, and Judy and I put her talk on the calendar. April 16, 2021. I think it went well.