About the Author
Roseann St. Aubin is a native of Wisconsin who enjoyed successful early careers in television journalism, city government and public school district communications. She worked as a media trainer, assisting TV and radio professionals in bettering their performance skills, leading to an invitation to travel to the country of Bhutan to work with budding journalists in that Himalayan nation.
Writing is her first love. Once away from the business world, she served for 9 years as a co-editor of Rockvale Review, an online poetry and fiction journal. Her own work has been published in Oyster River Pages, the Blue Heron Review and other publications.
Roseann St.Aubin is a member of the Milwaukee Press Club Hall of Fame, the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and the Arizona State Poetry Society. She makes her home in Port Washington, Wisconsin, along the inspiring shore of Lake Michigan.
The Work
Poetry has been my earliest, steadiest literary love, though I will always dalliances with fiction.
I've grown as a writer with my detour into journalism. All that research, those interviews, that structure of fact upon fact in sequential order, spoken aloud for an audience - all that helped me become a disciplined writer.
But with journalistic writing, I could not present the layers I saw within the stories.
Those layers of emotion or beauty were superfluous for a newscast. But those layers s stayed with me, "mellowing" until a time I could know name their importance and meaning. And the experiences of my own life, all the wonder and loss and joy and pain, had to age within my memory. This waiting is significant to the process of creating poetry that resonates.
German-language poet Rainier Maria Rilke speaks to this insight in his
Letters to a Young Poet.
"...Poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life.
You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and
a lone one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to
write ten good lines."
And so, I strive always to write at least ten good lines. To do justice to what I have witnessed, and to the
people I have met.
***
Origin
I am a stew of humble, brilliant things. A stone soup.
An amalgam of varied histories, a fusion of my people's
drift and flight and passage. I carry the genes for
brown eyes and red hair. I am a wearer of scapulas.
I come from the seacoast of France. I ran from
starvation and plague in Dieppe. Wearing my father's
craggy coat, because my father had died, I slept in the
salt spray of the Atlantic an open deck.
I was born in the belly of Slovakia, grown up on
kapustnica and cinnamon chimney cakes. I knew the breathy
notes of the shepherd's flute, and I knew the sheep, too,
generous with their fleece, complaint at the butcher's blade.
I descend from stern women with broad bosoms.
They cleaned fish and fried chicken feet and added
caraway to sauerkraut. And I come from men who
grieved their women's deaths in childbirth.
I was a farmer in Wallonia, Belgium. I was a teenaged
Canadian lying about my age to fight with the US when
the whole world was a war for the first time. I was a tailor in
northern Wisconsin. I was a rubber worker in Akron.
My people's stories are vast and wild, brief and unadorned.
Their stories are mine. I am a squat figure of red fired clay,
a Pueblo totem for oral tradition. I am a prayer for identity,
an augury for the path ahead.
- Roseann St. Aubin, ©2026
Publications
Coming Soon
Blue Boat, Story Poems from the Midwest, is the debut collection of poems by Roseann St.Aubin. The author opens a door to her beloved Wisconsin with poems recognizing family and nature, love, life and loss
Blue Boat is set for release in the summer of 2026.
Get in Touch
Please get in touch if you have a question or request.
I am open to collaboration, poetry events, teaching and other inquiries.