Marianne Ware

Marianne Ware, a Guerneville poet and author who co-founded the Russian River Writers' Guild and taught English and creative writing at Santa Rosa Junior College for more than two decades, died June 21 in Santa Rosa.

The cause was an infection related to her long struggle with diabetes. She was 74.

A passionate if prickly figure in local writing and academic circles, Ware forged a late-blooming career as an author and teacher after she moved to Sonoma County in the late 1960s and joined the SRJC faculty as a part-time instructor in the late 1980s.

Ware's poetry, fiction and non-fiction were published in more than a hundred literary magazines, anthologies and tabloids. She wrote memorably of her childhood in New York state as the daughter of Communist Party members in the anthology "Red Diapers."

Her most recent published work was a 2008 collection of stories, "The Meaning of Water," on childhood, would-be poets and vegan dietary diehards. A longer work of fiction, "The Warzog Era," described as a satirical novel, is still unpublished.

Ware earned a reputation as a tireless and quixotic mentor at SRJC and in the numerous creative writing groups she participated in over the years. Former students and fellow authors praised her irreverent humor, quick wit and larger than life personality.

"She wanted you to experience her sense of things," said Kate Ferrell, a member of the locally based Redwood Writers club.

Outspoken by nature, Ware also took strong, public stances on the issues of her day. She marched against the Vietnam War, supported Cesar Chavez and the farm workers' movement and later took up a legal fight against the junior college for what she said was discrimination against her on the basis of her age and gender.

Ware said she was denied a full-time instructor position on both counts. A 1994 legal claim she filed against the college was later dismissed.

"She was dogmatic," said Wendy Whitson, one of Ware's three daughters. "She was always grabbing at a cause, picking it up and taking it too far. She certainly wasn't meant to be a stay-at-home mom."

Born in 1936 and raised in New York state, the former Marianne Horowitz spent summers at Camp Unity, which her father Max Horowitz managed for the Communist Party. Ware later described the spot as a paradise for kids.

"There was camaraderie," she said in a 1999 interview with The Press Democrat. "There was theater, folk music, dance. It was interracial, too. It felt safe there."

A notorious 1949 incident in Peekskill, N.Y. changed all that. A teenager at the time, Ware witnessed a right-wing mob attack at an outdoor concert and rally headlined by African-American singer, actor and Communist Party activist Paul Robeson. Audience members, Ware later recalled, were left with "busted and bloody heads."

"I realized we were in hostile territory," she said in the 1999 interview.

Her family later moved to Southern California where she met and married her husband David Ware in 1955.

In 1969 the couple moved to Rio Nido where they ran a riverside resort, the Stardust Lodge, for several years. They later relocated to Guerneville.

Ware started teaching at Santa Rosa Junior College in 1982. She earned a master's degree in creative writing from Vermont College in 1984 and retired in 2003.

Friends, former students and fellow authors said she was a gifted mentor.

"In her eyes, every person had worth, something to say, something to contribute," her friend Donna Champion wrote Tuesday in an online tribute to Ware.

In addition to her husband and daughter Wendy of Petaluma, Ware is survived by daughters Laurie Celli of Forestville, and Carrie Ware-Kawamoto of Pleasant Hill; seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

A memorial service is planned from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. on July 24 at the Sebastopol Community Center Youth Annex, 390 Morris Street.

-- Brett Wilkison