Here's What People Are Saying
About The Blackberry Tea Club
The Blackberry Tea Club is for women in their Glory Years—their moments, their years, their time. The club began over twenty years ago, and the Blackberrys have taught each other how to live with steel in their backbones, how to ignite the fire in their eyes, how to have the time of their lives. It is also an attitude, a truthfulness that looks at what is and greets it with gratitude and generosity.
And now it's a wonderful book.
Barbara Herrick ekes wisdom and art out of a messed up ham casserole and a whole lot more. Along with her co-conspirators, the aptly named Blackberry Tea Club (and we aren't talking herbal here), she takes off down the Payette River. She tackles body image, with a nun—when both of them admit to lying (a LOT) about their weight on their driver's licenses. She snuggles with a pig—not THAT kind—on the beach. She celebrates pianos out of tune and anything and everything—because if we can't laugh and cry, be grateful and have gumption, then we are dead.
So celebrate it all is the message, even if it hurts. The hysterectomy and the state of the world. Hold onto your hats ladies, you're in for a ride. You'll think Barbara Herrick was looking in your living room window, or you'll wish you were looking in hers. You'll want a Blackberry Tea Club of your very own. And, you know what, you can have one. Because that's what the Glory Years are about.
—Conari Press
"This could be the book that gets you through. Barbara Herrick leads with the heart and hunkers down into mid—life truth. She makes a sensible and delight filled companion for the mystery of The Glory Years. I got out my highlighter!"
—Joan Logghe, author of Blessed Resistance: Poems, Twenty Years in Bed with the Same Man, Catch Our Breath, and Sofia: Poems
"Barbara Herrick wears the middle years of her life with class, grace and phenomenal insight. She takes readers on a glorious romp down a raging Idaho river, ponders the complexities of her fifty-something mirrored self and takes time to reflect on those personal decisions that most affected her life and loves, pain and celebrations. Women everywhere should feel more empowered to risk peeling back their personal vulnerabilities in order to experience a more satisfying journey through the Glory Years."
—Judy Ware, Ph.D., conflict resolution facilitator and writer
"Barbara Herrick writes from her heart, spins words of pure silk, and invites every woman to go for the gold. Hers is a story that bounces through the perilous rapids of early life to discover sublime waters in the middle years—the Glory Years. Instead of feeling maligned and misunderstood when arriving at that certain age, readers will celebrate with Barbara who offers a refreshing map for self—respect. The Blackberry Tea Club points the way to renewed energy and buoyancy, and it does so with a giggle and a smile."
—Susan Reuling Furness, M.Ed., Marriage and Family Therapist, seasoned middle—ager and contributing author of The Writing Group Book
"Barbara Herrick's Blackberry Tea Club is much more than a woman's book. This heartfelt exploration of an American life is funny, tender and graceful. Fraught with gentle lessons, it conveys stone cold facts of the human condition and teaches us that The Blackberry Tea Club is a society we all enjoy if we are lucky enough to share Herrick's intriguing and positive perspective on the aging process."
—Colleen Birch Maile, editor, SkyWest Magazine
"Barbara Herrick's book illuminates the joyful possibilities of being a woman growing older in America today. It overflows with the sheer bliss of being alive."
—Rosemary Cunningham, author of Fifty Ways to Feed Your Soul
"Barbara does a wonderful job of reframing who we women of the 21st century are becoming and how we got there. And she does it in a manner that combines self-help, inspirational and memoir all in one. For me, The Blackberry Tea Club doesn't read like anything I've read before. It defies genre by being intimate and personal while imparting a perspective that challenges widely—held beliefs about what comes with aging. And these are the very beliefs that often become self-fulfilling prophecies that send otherwise healthy, vibrant women to therapists' offices for fear of being abnormal or, worse, trapped in futures they find unbearable."
—Marsha L. Roberts, Ph. D., psychologist
"Poignant and painful, thoughtful and thought-provoking, the stories, poems, ruminations, and reflections that make up Barbara Herrick's The Blackberry Tea Club celebrate one woman's life in transition. Herrick's voice is as original and real as the mountains, rivers and farm country of her beloved Idaho. Her recollections include a grand ride with the tea club members down the Payette River, a clever yet universal foray into ham salad that is regularly punctuated by comments from the 'Matriarchs' and an extraordinarily true-to-the-bone exploration of her family health—physical and mental—adding up to a map of the woman complete with a self—study report on her flesh that is at once both funny and honest. Hers is an autobiography of body and soul, 'miswhacks' and wonders that make the glory years a time of fulfillment and fancy."
—Alan Minskoff, author of Blue Ink Runs Out on a Partly Cloudy Day
© 2004 Barbara Herrick
