A Kind of Yellow is a chapbook of 25 poems by Patricia Lee Lewis, MFA, Pushcart Prize nominee and founder of Patchwork Farm Writing Retreat. The poems tell a loosely consistent story, beginning with a little girl in Texas, and move through her pregnancy at 16, birth of her son, his mental illness and suicide. As award-winning poet Richard Jackson said of some of these poems, "...there is movement from the physical to the transcendent, from the self outward, and each poem gathers definitions as it moves along, like lines or images in a poem." The book becomes in itself, a poem.
From the first line to the last line, this book is about courage. Its unremitting honesty takes the reader beyond all convention of form, of practice, even of belief, into realms of human experience where courage becomes communion with the sacred.
- Pat Schneider, Founder, Amherst Writers & Artists
Author of Writing Alone and With Others, Oxford University Press
"I just wanted to say I like a lot of those poems. I especially like "200 Wings" and "Edge" and "Home Economics 1950s." It's a very sweet way you have of piling on the words, until we get the sense of the whole thing. "Unicorn" is another example. "There Is No Ordinary Day" is another."
- Robert Bly, Poet and author of Iron John: A Book About Men, winner of the National Book Award, and editor of Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribners).
"Just wanted to add my congratulations to what I'm sure is a chorus. How lovely (and right) that your book should have been chosen (by Writer's Digest). It is a wonderful book....I loved the poems you read from it that night at Forbes, and have been so moved reading the whole collection. I think you are the pure tobacco, if you know what I mean."
- Eleanor Wilner, Poet, translator, scholar and activist, she was honored with the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1991-1996).
Some High School students had the opportunity to study A Kind of Yellow last year.
"Lewis managed to take very sensitive issues, very private issues, and somehow make them relatable.... Lewis took us on a journey, and it wasn't always full of hope; sometimes it was too full of sorrow to see any light on the other side. But in the end, there was her strength, and that gave me strength. I felt honored, and I mean this very honestly, that she would assume our intelligence was up to par with her own."
"Everything here was a memory I would have kept secret; to write it down would be so embarrassing and frightening for me. But when I read about her, I didn't think she was bad, like I would have felt. Instead I was in awe of her strength, and her struggle, and her devotion to life and living."
On 103 acres of wooded mountainside, Patchwork Farm Retreat provides beginning and experienced writers a supportive, encouraging context in which to write. 
Patricia Lee Lewis and our team offer writing and yoga as a way of finding and celebrating what is deepest within us. 
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We invite you to inspirational weekends and rejuvenating week long writing and yoga retreats at sacred sites around the world. 
The Manuscript Series is an intensive 12 month program for writers with projects ready for critical response and new writing. 
Patricia trains experienced writers to lead writing workshops using the AWA method. 
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