by Catherine Marenghi

This article is part of a continuing series on poets and poetry with roots in San Miguel de Allende.

Judyth Hill is a poet who defies definition. She is also a teacher, activist, editor, performer, mentor, baker, and storyteller. And she has a deep connection to San Miguel de Allende.

Reading her list of credentials is exhausting. Her internationally acclaimed poem "Wage Peace" has been published worldwide, set to music, performed, and recorded by choirs and orchestras. Hill is the President Emerita of San Miguel PEN Centre, the local branch of the international writers' organization, and currently chairs the PEN International Women Writers Committee. She is editor-in-chief of Wild Rising Press and offers individual manuscript editing and mentoring. She is the originator of the poetry process WildWriting. She conducts workshops at conferences, including a long association with the San Miguel Writers' Conference. She is co-founder and co-director of Poetry Mesa, a global poetry community. She has led WildWriting Culinary Adventures in Taos, Slovenia, Italy, and Ireland, and she is a certified Anusara Yoga Special Subjects instructor.

Hill has the distinction of only once pitching her work to a publisher. Instead, publishing offers came to her. Among her published poetry books are Writing Down the Moon, Dazzling Wobble, Baker's Baedeker, The Goddess Cafe, Hardwired for Love, A Presence of Angels, Men Need Space, Black Hollyhock, First Light, and Tzimtzum. Her poems are widely anthologized. Also known as a noted food writer and journalist, she was the Santa Fe, NM, restaurant critic for the Albuquerque Journal, as well as the creator and owner of Santa Fe's popular bakery, The Chocolate Maven.

And that doesn't tell the half of it.

Judyth teaching
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Poetry Teacher

I first encountered Judyth Hill at the San Miguel Writers' Conference in 2014. I had signed up for one of her poetry classes, because her classes garnered rave reviews. However, I didn't know what to think when she emailed me and other students in advance, suggesting we prepare for the class by buying a notebook or journal, preferably hot pink, and decorating it with sparkles and sequins. Her email was peppered with exclamation points and words in all uppercase.

That was not what I expected, and I felt some trepidation on entering her workshop. However, I was completely won over at our first class. Her exuberance was founded on rock-solid discipline and method. Among the practices she taught was "rollover and write." This required keeping a journal on the bedside table to capture ideas that emerged in dreams and dream-like states that might otherwise be lost. Another practice was developing lists in various categories, like names of flowers, waterways, or women's names, thus creating an inventory of material for future poems.

Behind Hill's wildly energetic exterior, I discovered a serious and thoughtful poet with an ability to inspire students as no other teacher I have ever known. This was confirmed by a conversation with another conference attendee, Lois Read, a woman in her early eighties when I met her in 2014. After a long career in art, theater and teaching, Read studied poetry with Judyth Hill in San Miguel, and she credited Hill for opening her eyes to the possibilities of writing poetry. "Since then, I found poetry to be my preferred way to observe and reflect upon daily life. Thanks to Judyth, I have published a new poetry book every year since," she told me. Lois Read's last book was published posthumously in late 2024.

Judyth in her 40s
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Poetic Beginnings

Judyth Hill was raised in New York City. Her early love of poetry was instilled, in part, by her mother, who read aloud classic poems like "The Charge of the Light Brigade" to her children.

"Of course, my first poems were rhymes. I had iambic pentameter and rhyme stuck in my head – that's what was read to me. I also adored Dr. Seuss books and their playful rhymes.".

She remembered a writing assignment from her third grade teacher, Mrs. Latner. The topic was Thanksgiving. Her teacher thought Hill's essay was "too advanced" for an eight-year-old to write. She was convinced her parents had written the assignment for her.

"That's when I knew! This was something I could do—I was destined to be a writer."

Hill began memorizing poetry at an early age. She recalled walking around at night reciting poems aloud to herself. Her mother had given her T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which she memorized at about age ten. Around the same time, she began to keep a notebook of words she loved and poems she had memorized; keeping journals became a lifelong habit. She also composed a substantial collection of original poems as a child. "Thankfully, my mother saved everything I wrote, and I found all those childhood writings after she died. I still have them."

Judyth kept on writing; she was elected the official songwriter at her summer camp, when still very young. "I became known as that kid, the one who knew all the song lyrics and wrote poetry."

That passion continued when Hill went to The Dalton School, a prestigious private school, starting in eighth grade. "That was THE place to go in New York City at the time. People like Robert Redford and Norman Mailer sent their kids there. It was very chic and Bohemian.

"My parents weren't like that. They were smart and educated, but pretty conventional—kind of 'country-club Jewish.' And Republicans! I didn't feel I belonged with the hip kids who went to Dalton; it was very intimidating. I wrote poetry in secret then. But I never stopped writing."

Hill particularly remembered meeting acclaimed poet Jane Cooper, a guest one night at a friend's home. At the age of twelve, Hill accompanied her friend and Cooper to the Guggenheim Museum to hear Adrienne Rich read her poetry. It was Hill's first poetry reading.

Listening to Adrienne Rich, Hill felt an instant connection and thought "She knows. She knows. She knows."

It would not be Hill's last encounter with Jane Cooper. She later met her again when she studied at Sarah Lawrence College, where Cooper led the poetry program for many years.

"When I first signed up for her class, I didn't immediately realize that I had already met her in eighth grade until I got her book and saw her author photo. I went on to study with her for four years. She was my advisor."

Hill developed an early knack for crossing paths with famous poets. While attending Sarah Lawrence, her part-time job was to drive poets to their readings. This was because she lived off-campus (on the Upper West Side) and her father, who had a car dealership, gave her a '66 Plymouth Valiant to commute to school. Her passengers included Jean Valentine, Diane Wakoski, and Galway Kinnell.

The Chocolate Maven bakery
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The Santa Fe Years

After graduating from college, Hill moved to New Mexico. In Santa Fe, she launched a popular bakery called the Chocolate Maven. "I was baking all day, then I would clean up and teach poetry in the evening. My bakery had a beautiful tearoom where I was teaching."

She was simultaneously running a movie theater, raising a family with two children – and writing poetry.

"I found that baking is a lot like writing poetry. It's about understanding the science of it, the relationships of the ingredients, the proportions of flour to sugar. There' a discipline to it, and then there's the aspect of experimentation. It's something palpable. You can see it, touch it, taste it."

Her brownies were even the inspiration for a poem. Here is an excerpt:

"I was the original Chocolate Maven! I developed all the recipes. We also did wedding cakes. The most famous was a Day of the Dead-themed wedding cake for Robert Englund, the horror film star who played Freddie Kruger."

The cake was so distinctive, it appeared in a story in The National Enquirer. "And I thought, oh my God, I always wanted to be The New Yorker, and now I'm in The National Enquirer!"

Poetic Development

Hill recalled feeling some anxiety about publishing in her early twenties. "I understood that what I needed and wanted in my life is to be a poet. I was in book agony. I did not want to be 30 years old without having published a book."

She published her first poem in the New Mexican and became very visible on the Santa Fe literary scene. She joined writers' groups and read at libraries and other venues.

Then she hatched an idea: she could make and print a poetry book herself. In an age before digital publishing or self-publishing as currently defined, Hill found that her experience in designing posters and schedules for her movie theater could be applied to self-publishing a book.

She cobbled together 25 copies of a chapbook called Baker's Baedeker: Poems. The cover had a map of New Mexico and chocolate chips all over it. And she sold every copy in a single night in a reading at her bakery.

"There were poems about brownies and about my bakery. The Chocolate Maven was such a scene. People were crying and having affairs and stealing cookbooks, and it was just a maniac scene. But it was very wonderful."

That night a man came up to Hill and he said, "I see that you can hand-sell books like crazy. I have a press in San Francisco, Pennywhistle Press, and I want to publish your first book."

And so her first book Hard-Wired for Love was published – just in time before Hill turned thirty.

The story would repeat itself. At future readings, she found herself in the unheard-of position where publishers were approaching her and asking to publish her books. Sherman Asher Publishing and La Alameda Press were among them.

"This was my life, I was just insanely out there. I've always been this way."

Part of what drew publishers and readers was Hill's energetic and uninhibited performances.

"I was a maniac. I taught poetry naked in a hot tub up at 10,000 Waves, a gorgeous Japanese spa in Santa Fe. On a dare, I walked naked down Hyde Park Road, while playing a tambourine. I mean, I just did it— that's who I was. I did anything."

At one of her writing groups, Hill met Ron Moody, a performance coach and acting teacher. Moody was hired to coach the group before a big reading at the at the library in Santa Fe. When Hill read her poem, Moody said, "You've got to pull it way back. You are blasting everybody out of the room!"

That was the start of Hill's learning how to hone poetry performance skills, when to modulate and when to raise her voice. She would go on to teach these skills to others, and would later coach speakers as part of her work at the San Miguel Writers' Conference.

At the same time in her early career, Hill began to see that poetry had multiple roles in society. "I understood there was a bardic role for poetry, that you could inspire allies and be a voice for a cause. It's something that I wanted in my life, to be a bard for justice. It means you write a poem when it's needed. That's different from writing from the muse, or from pure inspiration. I call those two energies, 'the mule and the muse.'"

Hill had made the acquaintance of Mary Lou Cook, who was a legendary activist in Santa Fe and something of a spiritual mother. Cook was a leader in Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, because of Santa Fe's proximity to Los Alamos. Each year Cook presented an award to an outstanding opponent of nuclear power, and she asked Hill to write a poem for each year's honoree.

One year the honoree was poet Denise Levertov, and Hill's poem garnered her an introduction to Levertov. For Hill, it was a defining moment. Levertov was a hero to her, a very active protester of the Vietnam War, as was Levertov's husband, Mitch Goodman.

Hill had been an activist herself, all her teen years in New York City, working in Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker soup kitchen, and organizing picket lines in front of local grocery stores to support Cesar Chavez's United Farmworker's Grape Boycott

"So, years later, here I am in Santa Fe, and Mary Lou Cook says, 'Denise, I'd like you to meet a Santa Fe poet, Judyth Hill."

"But I had never said of myself, 'I am a poet.' I still didn't feel I had the right to say it. Instead I said, 'I write poetry.' It was too much. I could not crown myself that way."

"For me, the work of being a poet is very big. For those of us who love poetry and write poetry, we serve poetry. We don't use poetry to get things. We serve poetry. And part of our job is the Dharma lineage, to support other poets and share their books and be excited about what other people are writing and champion them. There's room for every voice. Even if you've never published, and just write in your journal. There's room for that, for every level. It's a habitat!"

Judyth with her siblings, the Schwartz kids
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Saying the Unspeakable

For a long time, Hill had wanted to write a poem about her experience with childhood trauma and sexual abuse. "Every time I would try to write about it, I wrote gruesome poems that were so cringy. They were unbearable for me and unbearable for the audience. You need to find a way that is bearable for you and others."

One of Hill's consistent practices is to write about very ordinary things – furniture, makeup, food. In this way, she discovered an approach to writing about very deep things that are difficult to confront directly. It was a way to say the unspeakable, in a way that was safe for the audience and safe for the poet.

"While writing about other things, your psyche will speak up. While playing with words and experimenting with diction, my psyche spoke up. And that was how I wrote 'The House That Jack Built.' It is one of my favorite poems."

"There's something about the musicality of the words, even if they don't rhyme. There's something about the words that I remember. Maybe it was all the memorization I did. I taught myself how to have something singing in my head that I listen to.

"And that's really the deep way to write. When something sings inside your head and you hear it, and you write it down. Because writing poetry is listening."

Arrival in San Miguel

Hill eventually sold her bakery to focus on her career as a poet, and the bakery has continues to be a success to this day. She moved to San Miguel in 2009 and settled on a property just outside San Miguel, which she named the Simple Choice Farm. There she began teaching poetry classes.

"People came to my house, and I cooked like crazy! I made two huge feasts, breakfast and lunch. And always, always, there was chocolate."

Hill focused on teaching modern poetry and provided what would become one of her trademarks: voluminous handouts. She taught from those handouts. There was Ezra Pound, Robert Bly – the poets she had studied all her life. Students read these works in class and went home to work on their own poetry.

When students shared their works with the group, Hill cultivated a practice called "praise culture" – encouraging students to give feedback on their peers' work that focused on praise.

Hill recalled the brutal way college teachers often reviewed their student's poems, crossing out most of it and circling a line or two. "How can you learn that way?" she wondered. "I suspect a lot of people were discouraged from ever writing again. So I teach praise culture, to pay attention to what's good, what's working in each other's and our own work, and to learn from that."

"It is also rigorous. I teach classic poetic forms – sonnets and ghazels – and writing from nature, the whole thing. And also creating word lists, I call a 'Poetry Cupboard' and singing aloud vowels and consonants, and working with silence. I call my method WildWriting."

Hill was developing a San Miguel following. At the same time, she joined and became President of San Miguel PEN and began teaching at the annual San Miguel Writers' Conference, a relationship that would continue over 15 years to the present day. In addition to teaching poetry workshops at the Conference, she manages live poetry readings by attendees, a practice that became an integral part of the program and has expanded year after year.

In 2018, Hill started noticing some changes in her health. Her energy was flagging. Errands were exhausting. She needed to sit down when she cooked. "One day I realized I was sick, and I just got sicker and sicker and sicker."

The last class she taught from her farm was from a bed that had been set up in her teaching room. She told everyone in the class, "I can't sit up. I'm going to teach lying down."

After this last class, Hill was suddenly incommunicado. Friends began to worry after not hearing from her in many days. She had seen a few doctors who made house calls, but they weren't able to diagnose her condition. They prescribed drugs, but nothing helped. She wasn't able to walk or eat. She was in constant pain.

One day a friend arrived at her door and was alarmed by Hill's condition. She told Hill, "I need your sister's phone number now. Your family needs to get here tonight."

Her sister did rush to San Miguel and immediately brought in a top local physician, Dr. Roberto Luis Maxwell Martinez, considered the dean of medical practitioners in San Miguel and a critical care specialist. "My condition was very grave. The doctor wasn't sure that I was going to survive."

Maxwell brought in a top surgeon from nearby Queretaro, and together they diagnosed her condition as pancreatis, which would have been fatal if left untreated.

"They saved my life. One of the hardest things was being told I was too sick to live in San Miguel. So my sister flew me back to the United States, where I spent a month in a hospital and then a month in a care facility. That was in Evergreen, Colorado. And that's where I live now."

Throughout her sickness and long recovery, Hill never stopped writing, even through occasional bouts of haze and delirium.

"I do many kinds of delicious work as an activist, editor, and teacher, and best is always returning to that ecstatic place where all I'm doing is writing and reading the work aloud and working on words and working on language and being in the language. Because for me, it's about hearing that inner voice, a voice I've learned to trust. And that's the greatest gift that I have in my life – my trust in whatever I'm hearing. I write it down and then I work on it."

A Sea Change

While recovering from her illness in Colorado and working her way back to health, the world became sick – with Covid. In 2020, the San Miguel Writers' Conference and nearly every public activity was shut down. But in this crisis, Hill saw an opportunity.

She began working closely with Tina Bueche and Patty Garcia, who had been leading figures in producing the San Miguel Writers' Conference and had successfully transitioned the Conference to an all-online format using the Zoom platform. Hill began to see the possibilities of using Zoom to reach an international poetry audience.

Early in 2020, Hill became a pioneer in doing international poetry readings featuring poets in multiple locations, from Mexico to Uganda to the U.S. to Austria, leveraging her contacts through PEN International. While other writers were tentative about using Zoom, preferring live venues, Hill saw that one could overcome international barriers and include more poets while reaching a broader global audience than was ever before possible.

Hill credits Bueche and Garcia for their expertise in the Zoom platform and fine-tuning sound and lighting to assure the most professional results. Hill became a driving force behind new modes of sharing poetry. The Zoom platform became a bridge between the Covid years and the world that followed.

With Bueche's and Garcia's support, Zoom was leveraged to create Poetry Mesa, a poetry community that delivered special in-depth poetry programs featuring distinguished guests like Mark Doty and Naomi Shihab Nye, as well as fundraising events to support Ukrainian poets in wartime, or exiled Iranian women poets.

What's Next

Hill continues to work internationally, supporting human rights and writers' rights through PEN International; she is the current Chair of the International Women Writers Committee. And a particular labor of love is teaching poetry to children aged four to nine. "I've always been this way," she reminds.

Plans for future books include a cookbook with recipes and remembrances from the Chocolate Maven. Poetry books are a given, Hill said. And possibly a memoir!

Hill quoted an American poet named Eduardo Corral, a professor of English at North Carolina State University. He wrote, "Try your best to put aside the prevailing aesthetics. Keep your focus on your language, on the good work of shaping your language. Your work should be shaped by what sings to you, by what bewilders you. You are singular. Staple down the language that's purely inside you."

In consonance with Rainer Maria Rilke: "To praise is the whole thing...," in her best-known poem, "Wage Peace," written in the wake of the Twin Tower bombings, Hill finds a way to praise at a time of suffering. She offers the opportunity to explore the territory that breathes between this world and ourselves, between heart and hand, pen and paper, and the skills to expand that territory.

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Catherine Marenghi is a local poet, novelist and memoirist who has been active in the San Miguel literary scene for more than a decade. She has published three poetry books, a memoir, and a historic novel. A native of Massachusetts, she has made San Miguel her permanent home.

www.marenghi.com

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