ABOUT JANE
Jane Seskin is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and the author of 13 books (most recently the poetry collection OLDER, WISER, SHORTER: An Emotional Road Trip to Membership in the Senior Class). She’s also written nonfiction articles and poetry online and for national magazines and journals (20 poems published in Cosmopolitan Magazine, 4 poems in Woman’s Day). 18 of her posts have been published in the Metropolitan Diary column in the New York Times.
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Jane has been a writer-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center and Noepe Center For Literary Arts.
Ms. Seskin is a practicing psychotherapist. For 20 years she counseled survivors at the Crime Victims Treatment Center in New York. She currently maintains a private psychotherapy practice with adult clients.
In her free time she enjoys the theater, walking by the Hudson River, visiting with friends, reading poetry and mysteries (Louise Penny, David Baldacci, Donna Leon) and listening to jazz (Keith Jarrett, Houston Person, Chris Botti). Give her a piece of bread and butter and she’s a happy camper! Jane writes therapeutic sound-bites on Twitter under the title: Emotional Band-Aid. Small Steps For Change. You can follow her @jsauthorshrink. Or learn more about her at janeseskin.com.
Temptation
(From Older Wiser Shorter pg. 21)
It’s about the bike.
Wanting to ride one
this spring
when the rent-a-bike
program hit my city
but being warned off
by well-meaning friends
worried I would fall.
And then in the summer
I went to an inn
that had a bike
parked in the alley,
a little vintage
pastel blue and white
with frayed straw basket
yet sturdy enough
to know its mind.
It was all about the bike
and the memories of
freedom and mobility,
wind in the face, hair on end,
and I haven’t been on one
in more than … forty years.
When I peeked out just so
from my window in the
corner room, I could see it
sitting all by itself teasing me
one day, two days, three,
beckoning, waiting for me to
get the courage to ride. And
so I did … scared, looking
straight ahead, legs out,
flying!