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	FITTING TOGETHER BRILLIANTLY: Margo Culley, seated, with, from left, former students Carol Potter '78, Janet Aalfs '79, Jeannine Atkins '80. Photo by Ben Barnhart.

ON AN EVENING IN APRIL seven women, arriving separately, walked into La Cucina di Pinocchio, an upscale but cozy Italian eatery on Boltwood Walk in Amherst. As each woman entered she was warmly greeted by an energetic and engaging Margo Culley: Their professor of 23 years ago easily recognized every one. A lively dinner party and discussion ensued.

The seven were among the scores of women in town for the UMass women’s conference April 28 [see sidebar]. Four of them would convene a panel at the conference the next morning, describing their intense year together as members of Culley’s "New England Women Writers" class in 1977-78.

As part of their presentation, they’d be reading from the 16 books of poetry and prose that, among them, they’ve published since that time. (The regal Janet Aalfs ’79, poet and head of Valley Women’s Martial Arts in Easthampton, would not only read but perform.)

TONIGHT, THOUGH, WAS CATCH-UP TIME. "This isn’t a reunion, it’s friends getting back together," said Culley. Whatever it was, said Ellen La Fleche ’78, who has her own editing business in Williamsburg, she couldn’t think of another class she’d taken that’s had one.

Culley says that in 29 years at UMass she’s never taught a class like New England Women Writers: a year-long course that amounted to the discovery not only of lost New England women writers, but of the students’ own selves.

"For a lot of us, it was the beginning of our intellectual lives. I felt jump-started," said Cynthia Holmes ’79, an Amherst mother of three who was going through a divorce at the time.

Classmate Carol Potter ’78, ’82G remembers feeling "this sense of mutual discovery and joy." Now a poet and professor at Holyoke Community College, Potter was a welfare mother of two when she took the class. (Her oldest is now 36, a fact that gave members of the dinner party pause.)

Back then, as Potter remembers it, "No one ever talked about kids." But not much else got overlooked: "I’ve said like 18,000 times, and I’ll say it again," said Newton psychiatric social worker Margie Magraw ’78, "I came out as a direct revelation of the class."

AMONG THE CLASS'S PROJECTS, BACK in 1978, was compiling a volume of works by and about "forgotten" women. In it, Kathy Daniels ’81 wrote movingly about her late mother, whose journals she’d been given as an 11-year-old.

Today Daniels lives in New York and is copy chief for Oprah magazine – the most glamorous job among them, the women around the table agreed. (Daniels sweetly insists she has absolutely no influence on book selections for the hugely popular Oprah reading club.)

Recovering forgotten women’s stories is a project that Jeannine Atkins ’80 of Whately, the author of six children’s books, has never put down. Writing about paleontologist Mary Anning, who discovered an extinct sea mammal known as the Ichthyosaur, was like "reliving the class," said Atkins.

"I felt this sort of slow discovery, like when you’re chipping away a stone; it was an uncovering of something beautiful."

Atkins says the New England Women Writers course was her single most influential at UMass, "and I’m grateful to Margo for that." Culley, then 37, "took a lot of crap from us," her erstwhile student added playfully. "And she still invited us here!"

Culley, for her part, was regaling the group with tales of her latest adventures – among them being invited to the 70th birthday party of Nobel-prizing novelist Toni Morrison.

"It was fashion crisis number 1," Culley was saying. "Guess where I got my gown? Salvation Army. Six bucks."

And so the evening went, until sometime into the night when they got around to passing photos of their children, and their latest books, around the table.

Several days later, describing the presentation by her former students at the conference the next morning, Culley would reflect that their remarks "fit together brilliantly around the theme of women finding voice.

"It was as though we had carefully rehearsed the presentation," said Culley. "But indeed the rehearsal was over 20 years ago!"

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