When Catherine Strisik visited Cambodia with her husband, Larry Schreiber, and their 10-year-old daughter, Dimitri, six years ago, the things she saw made a deep impact on her.

"Every so often, something happens that changes your life," she said.

The longtime Taos resident took in the shock and sadness of the country's violent past. The family saw the Angkor Wat Temple and the Tuol Sleng prison, where many Cambodians were killed during the Khmer Rouge regime. In some cases, Dimitri, now 16, was more brave than her mother.

"We all experienced a lot of the areas where there was genocide," she said. "It was horrific. My husband and she went to the Killing Fields. I didn't go there. She talks, to this day, of the children's skulls."

Catherine Strisik, a writer, did not begin documenting her experiences in Cambodia — where more than a million people were executed, starved to death and died from disease during the Khmer Rouge regime. She was too haunted by the images. Her memories of the pristine beaches were tainted.

"I was seeing more blood than water at times," she said. "The images stayed with me. I didn't write while I was there. I didn't write a thing about Cambodia for four months."

After she returned to the U.S., she received a scholarship to the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vt., where she began writing what is now her first published book of poems, Thousand-Cricket Song.

Strisik will read selections from the book at 11:10 a.m. Oct. 2. at the New Mexico Women Authors' Book Festival at the New Mexico History Museum, 113 Lincoln Ave.The festival's readings held Oct. 2 and Oct. 3 are open to the public at no cost.

According to a news release from the Museum of New Mexico Foundation Shops, which helps put on the event, the festival is a way to "celebrate the joy of reading and the creative power of New Mexico's women writers."

"New Mexico has a long history as a literary mecca," said John Stafford, founder of the festival and director of retail operations for the Museum of New Mexico Foundation. "We built the festival with the hopes that we can offer something to everyone in terms of world-class lectures, talks, book signings and events for both the general public and authors."

Strisik, among 110 women featured at the festival, said writing has always been a part of her life.

If she saw a poem she liked when she was growing up, she'd copy it down in a journal. She first began writing lines as self-expression, and those lines, she said, never really developed into anything.

When she was in her 20s, she began writing short stories. After a friend read one story and declared "there is a poem in your short story," Strisik decided to shift her focus. She began attending conferences and workshops, led by poets such as Santa Fe's Dana Levin, to learn more about the craft of poetry.

"A lot of my poetry has to do with the body in many different ways," Strisik said. She wanted to do more research for her poetry, so she enrolled in a massage therapy program "to learn more about the body. I did this program for a year, and it was so important to my poetry."

Though she has a manuscript of poems she has been fine-tuning for many years, Thousand-Cricket Song became her main focus for the last few years. Initially, she was leery of writing about Cambodia.

"I was afraid when writing the poems for the first year," Strisik said. "I didn't dare write the word genocide or murder."

She met Cambodian poet U Sam Oeur, to whom the book is dedicated, and began working with him. "He encouraged me to write everything I saw, no matter how disturbing it was," Strisik said. She would send the poems to Oeur and Ken McCullough, a Cambodia historian, to ensure the poems were accurate. "U Sam Oeur would call and leave messages on my answering machine, crying. He said, 'You're doing it. Just keep doing it.' That's what I feel is the importance of this book. I'm just one person who has experienced the aftermath of the atrocities in Cambodia."

Because she is a poet, she said, she told herself to let the history "be known any way you can."

Contact Ana Maria Trujillo at 986-3084 or atrujillo@sfnewmexican.com.