PAINTED LEAVES: Poems by Joyce Foster, Art by Jane Smithers

(For copies, contact Painted Leaves, P.O. Box 2332, Cashiers, NC 28717)

Joyce Foster's Painted Leaves, with art by Jane Smithers, is one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen, if not THE most beautiful. I met Joyce several years back in a workshop. She had just begun to write poetry, and I could tell that she had the gift for it. Her "Imprimatur for Pleasure" was one of the first poems she showed me, so you can see why I was impressed. As she says in the Afterword, "I was in my mid-60's and looking for the courage to make a profound change in my life. Poetry, or perhaps I should say the Muse of poetry, found me. ...Now I can't imagine life without it."

Joyce was born in Oklahoma of Cherokee, English, and German stock. She graduated from Emory University with a degree in Nursing and has worked for years in Public Health, as well as training and showing Morgan horses. She also worked for awhile as a model when she lived in Florida! She lives in Cashiers, NC, with her dog Wynston.



The artist whose work illuminates these pages is Jane Smithers (www.janesmithers.com). A self-taught artist, having chosen art "relatively late in life," she has lived in New York, London, Houston, and now in Cashiers, where she paints and teaches. Visiting Jane's website is like stepping into a world vibrating with image and color.

If you go to my ncpoetlaureate blog, you will find a display of the pages from PAINTED LEAVES. I hope you enjoy the visual feast. This would make a lovely Mother's Day gift, by the way. I'm giving a copy to my own mother.

EASTER MORNING ON THE HAIRPIN CURVE

Easter Morning on the Hairpin Curve
Smoky Mountains

Is it water or
phacelia that tumbles
down the banks,
overflowing its rocky
creel, water
or trillium,
merging this morning
in one brim-
ful flagrant
resounding of
yes, She lives,
does the Earth,
our longsuffering
handmaiden raising
up dipper
by dipper the day
for us out of
her dark womb.

----KS Byer
(first published in Kakalak)

LOOK WHO IS READING, SIGNING AND WHERE

The Curiosity Bookstore in Murphy, NC and in Andrews, NC welcomes author, Paralee Dawson this Saturday, April 11th
The book is Living A Dream -- reflections of her Appalachian Trail odyssey.

Paralee lives at our end of the trail for part of the year and the other end (Maine) for the rest of the year.
She will be showing videos and signing her book in Andrews NC from 11:am - 1:00 pm and in Murphy from 1:15 pm -3 pm.

Aaron Gwyn will be at Osondu's in Waynesville, NC on Saturday April 25th @ 11:00 a.m. The World Beneath is an eerie and deep mystery. In this book a 15 year old boy is missing and the sherrif is trying to find him.
Spaces are filling up for Kathryn Magendie's Book Launch reception on April 17th at Osondu's from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Kathryn's novel is Tender Graces. Looks like a most appealling book. Please call Osondu's to reserve your book and your spot at the reception.

Freeing Jonah V Includes Estelle Rice

Dr. Gene Hirsch, a resident of North Carolina and Pennsylvania, teaches poetry classes at John C. Campbell Folk School. He has published five volumes of Freeing Jonah. The anthologies are collections of poetry from students in workshops at the Folk School and from poets in the region.
Tonight I picked up my copy of Freeing Jonah V, published in 2007. Listed among the forty-five poets featured are a number of NCWN West members: Glenda Barrett, Janet Benway, Joyce Foster, who has a new poetry collection, Mary Michelle Keller, Brenda Kay Ledford, Mary Ricketson, Nancy Simpson, Linda Smith, Dorothea Spiegel and many more.
My good friend, writer and poet, Estelle Rice of Marble, NC will be reading at the John Campbell Folk School next week. See sidebar. The following poem touches me in a special way.

Goodbye

In my heart, there is a lingering scent
of Johnson’s wax
pickled peaches,
Evening in Paris perfume,
Mennen’s After Shave,
smoke from a Dutch Master’s Cigar.

I can almost taste the Brunswick stew,
Melton’s barbecue,
fruitcake and eggnog,
chocolate-peanut butter cookies,
and homemade peach ice cream.

Bookshelves are empty,
and there is no piano
in the sun parlor.
No voice or human sound,
I hear the echo of my footsteps
in halls and hollow rooms.

Lilacs Mother planted
are blooming.
I pick a flower
to press for safekeeping.

Cardinals have returned to their nest
in the Talisman rose.
Outside the breakfast room window
squirrels chatter in the oak tree
unaware of my tears.

I shut the door and turn the key.

My Nuts and Bolts for Good Writing Seminar

I will hold a one day seminar, Saturday, April 18 at TCCC. 9:00 - 12:00 and 1:00 - 4pm. Bring your lunch. We will cover intriguing beginnings, holding the reader's interest throughout, development of characters and much more.
All writers are welcome, beginning or experienced. Students will take an active part throughout the class. I promise you will have fun and y ou will probably go home with at least one valuable tool for your writing and probably many more. Call TCCC Continuing Education to pre-register 835-4313. The fee is $35.00.
Shirley Uphouse 828-837-6007 or shirl@dnet.net

James MalONE SMITH: POET AND EDITOR

Editors of anthologies as definitive as DON'T LEAVE HUNGRY: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review work long and hard to give readers a book that will be just as important 50 years from now as it is today. Often such editors go unrecognized as the poets they are, while the more widely recognized poets in the collection draw the attention of reviewers and readers. In DON'T LEAVE HUNGRY, James Smith, the editor, has no poem included, so it's time to recognize him for his poetry. In my previous post, I called him a native western North Carolinian, and I still think of him that way, but as you'll see in the following short biography, he was born in the N. Georgia mountains. Blairsville is where my family stayed when we headed north into the mountains to visit relatives in Dahlonega. It's my paternal grandmother's native ground, and I consider it part of my native ground as well, a place that extends into the mountains of southwestern North Carolina. Forget about state boundaries.

Today is" James Smith Day" on my blog. Good poets make the best editors of poetry journals and anthologies. Let's celebrate them while we are celebrating National Poetry Month.

James Malone Smith has published oems in AGNI (online), Connecticut Review, Nebraska Review, Quarterly West, Tar River Poetry, and others. He has new work forthcoming in Asheville Poetry Review, Poet Lore, and Prairie Schooner. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction.

Associate professor of English at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia, he teaches creative writing and American literature.

He grew up in the north Georgia mountains of Blairsville but spent much of that time in his mother's home community of Vengeance Creek, North Carolina.

Here is Jim's poem that first appeared in AGNI.


HEN

Day took fire at her bidding,
the stove down to coals, almost cold,
bacon drippings in the coffee can
white as ice. She would prod embers

until flames bit at her fingers,
glut the open mouth with fat wood
and slam down the iron lid
as if she were rousing some monster.

Then she scrambled an egg for me.
But all this had happened forever
when one morning I dawdled in
as she dredged ashes, crisscrossed kindling.

The stove is out. She lights a match.
I sit at the table and wait.
Morning light flutters and stills
on the chipped enamel of the white sink.

In it, spraddled headlong (but headless!),
a large plucked chicken
in all its galled gooseflesh,
a single bloody feather stuck to the faucet.

I startle as the stove lid clangs into place.
With a flourish she reveals an immaculate
brown egg in her powerful hand
and pauses. Long enough to make sure

the break will be clean and even,
the yolk full, and heavy,
the rest as clear as water—
then cracks the world apart.



James Malone Smith

AGNI online, 2004

DON'T LEAVE HUNGRY: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

Southern Poetry Review has been so much a part of so many poets' lives over the past 50 years that it's hard to imagine the universe without it. When I was a student in the MFA program at UNC-G in the '60s, I was introduced to the journal and to its founder Guy Owen. Owen was an instructor in the program for one semester while I was there.

After his death, SPR, as we called it, moved to Charlotte for several years and then down to Savannah's Armstrong Atlantic State University, where a friend of mine and native western North Carolinian, James Smith, became Associate editor. Now, as editor of the new anthology Don't Leave Hungry, celebrating 50 years of Southern Poetry Review, he gathers this peripatetic history together in his masterful introduction. His first paragraph makes Owen's commitment to poetry, and SPR's ongoing adherence to it, clear: In many journals, and certainly in major magazines that bother at all, as Owen notes, poems are “filler,” not “the main course.” A Journal Dedicated to Poetry: that’s the logo the current editors gave SPR, and we like to think its founder would approve. For us, talking about Guy Owen is a way of talking about Southern Poetry Review.

No doubt about it, DON'T LEAVE HUNGRY: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry review, recently published by the University of Arkansas Press, makes an immediate impression on anyone who comes within a few feet of the book. Its cover design is composed of a Mark Rothko painting, Untitled, from 1953, Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.



Its title, too, surprises the eye. This is a poetry anthology? Not a cookbook? When you read the title poem, by Eleanor Ross Taylor, you will understand that this anthology offers nothing less than an invitation to feast on the art of poetry. James Smith, again, from his Introduction: Our anthology’s title derives from a poem in it by Eleanor Ross Taylor, a southern poet undervalued for years. I was delighted to find “Don’t Leave Hungry” as I read through SPR’s archives, selecting poems for this book. Not only is it strange and marvelous (that word again!) in its own right, but its commanding title has a “southern” ring to it that would satisfy Owen. Taylor’s niece, Heather Ross Miller, also in the anthology and a former staff member, described Owen as “always encouraging us and welcoming us toward that table where so many crowd and so few get fed.” Miller speaks of writers here and their desire for publication, but Owen also offered his journal as a table where he hoped readers would crowd and find plenty to feed them, no needto leave hungry.




(Eleanor Ross Taylor)

What else by way of enticement? Well, there's a foreword by Billy Collins. And dust jacket testimonials by Jane Hirschfield and Lee Smith, who says "No reader will leave this harvest table hungry--here is nourishment for all. ...These poems epitomize their eras yet move beyond, rise beyond as poetry always does, capturing time and place and lived life in a way no other art can manage."

And now for the "main course," as Guy Owen called them, arranged and introduced by decade, with Smith's usual clarity of style and presentation! As the dust jacket notes, this anthology "charts the development of this influential journal decade by decade, making clear that although it has close ties to a particular region, it has consistently maintained a national scope, publishing poets from all over the United States. SPR’s goal has been to celebrate the poem above all, so although there are poems by major poets here, there are many gems by less famous, perhaps even obscure, writers too. Here are 183 poems by nearly as many poets, from A. R. Ammons, Kathryn Stripling Byer, James Dickey, Mark Doty, Claudia Emerson, David Ignatow, and Carolyn Kizer to Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Howard Nemerov, Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, and Charles Wright."

But wait--why rush through a feast? In this first week of National Poetry Month, let's sit back and anticipate what waits for us tomorrow, several poems from this beautiful and generous anthology. And because these few poems I offer will, I hope, serve to whet the appetite for more, here is the publication information and a link to the University of Arkansas Press.

5 1/2 x 8 1/2, 380 pages
$24.95 paper
ISBN 978-1-55728-893-6 | 1-55728-892-5
$54.95 (s) unjacketed cloth
ISBN 978-1-55728-892-9 | 1-55728-892-5
http://www.uapress.com/titles/sp09/smith-dlh.html

Netwest writing groups

Coffee with the Poets
Phillips and Lloyd Books, Hayesville, NC
10:30 a.m. second Wednesday of each month.
Poets and writers are welcome, members and non-members are welcome to read at open mic..Contact Michelle Keller, mmkeller@brmemc.net for information

Netwest Poetry group, Tri-County College, Murphy NC, 7:00 pm. first Thursday of month.
Janice Moore facilitates this friendly but helpful group.

Netwest Prose Group 7:00 p.m. second Thursday of month, Tri-County College, Murphy, NC
Richard Argo dandjargo@verizon.net facilitator

Poets and Writers Reading Poems and Stories John C. Campbell Folk School, most third Thursdays, 7:00 p.m Two NCWN writers featured each month. Contact Michelle Keller, mmkeller@brememc.net

Writers Morning Out, Waynesville, NC. Contact Penny Morse,fairlight_inc@hotmail.com

Writing for Children group
Moss Memorial Library, Hayesville, NC 10:00 a.m. third Wednesday of month. Nancy Gadsby is facilitator. Writers for children are welcome to come and bring work to critique or for support in their writing. Nancy Gadsby facilitates.
gadsby@brmemc.net

RALEIGH NEWS AND OBSERVER ARTICLE

The Raleigh paper has published an article on the upcoming Student Poet Laureate awards, deadline April 15. Here is the link:

www.newsobserver.com/105/story/1464403.html

Teachers, now is the time to begin selecting the work you want to submit to NCETA from your middle and high school students.

Tomorrow National Poetry Month begins. Get ready to dance!

ESSAY BY MERRY ELRICK

Merry Elrick
merry@datadrivenmarcom.com


This I Believe: Women’s Rights Are Human Rights

I believe in human rights. Not African-American rights. Not gay rights. Not women’s rights. All people are created equal.
Except they’re not.
All men aren’t even created equal. And women go unmentioned.
When I was in second grade, all the boys were out of the classroom for some gym-class thing except for one. That left about a dozen girls, one boy and our teacher, Miss Kubly, who wore saddle shoes and bobby socks over her stockings in winter. She told everyone to pick up his pencil.
“Miss Kubly,” I asked, “Why didn’t you say, ‘Everyone pick up her pencil?’” She explained that even with just one boy in the room one had to use the male pronoun. And this was a boy too puny to go to gym. Girls just had no pronoun power. Or any other kind.
At least Miss Kubly did not say, “Everyone pick up his or her pencil.” (Too cumbersome.) Or worse, “Everyone pick up their pencil.” (Just downright wrong.)
The lesson I learned in school that day was I am not worth mentioning. That was so long ago that Miss Kubly’s stockings had seams that looked like black lines drawn up the back of her legs. The stockings were attached by murderous metal and rubber devices that dangled at the ends of bouncing elastic strips. Unless you were a contortionist with masterful motor skills, you would most certainly fumble to secure your stockings at the back of your legs. Thank God for pantyhose and other improvements since then.
Some of those improvements led to better lives for women. Despite the language lesson I had, or perhaps because of it, I founded and ran a small business for 15 years. It’s a feat few women would have dreamed of back in the garter belt days.
As a businesswoman I was sometimes asked to join various groups of professional women, a request I always declined because these groups excluded men. I was also encouraged to apply for government grants as a minority business owner. Again, I declined.
I am a person who is a woman. I expect to be worthy of mention. I will not discriminate against others and I want no special treatment. My hope is that others will behave the same.
An apocryphal story purports that President Obama, when applying to Harvard, neglected to check the box that would describe him as a man of color. He wanted, apparently, to get in on his merits. He wanted, like I do, to be judged by the same standards as everyone else.
I cannot expect to have it both ways. I cannot be treated equally while I separate myself for the sake of privilege—even when I’ve had to suffer what others don’t. Like fumbling at the end of elastic straps for metal clips that snap up and whack me on the bone.

OF INTEREST TO WRITERS

Have you visited the Whitecross blog by NCWN?
Click here to read more of interest to you as a writer.

Excerpt from White Cross School
A couple of folks have come to me recently asking for some help from writers.
The Mayland Writers’ Group in Spruce Pine is sponsoring a raffle to raise money for the Mitchell County Animal Shelter. As a raffle prize, they’d like to offer signed copies of books by North Carolina and Appalachian authors. If you are such an author, or if you would like to donate a book by such an author, or if you would like to donate anything else that might help a worthy cause, please e-mail Susan Bell or Chrissy McVay.
Also, the North Carolina Arts Council wants to know if the Network has any authors who’d be willing to do voice work for books on tape? If so, please e-mail me and I’ll pass your name along.

http://www.ncwriters.org/whitecross/

South Carolina, Here Comes Gary Carden

Gary Carden , playwright, storyteller and teacher, sent this e-mail to pass on to our readers.



" I am off to South Carolina for a three-day festival for "Prince of Dark Corners." We were down there two years ago and had standing room only. We have been invited back and they said "they had a bigger auditorium" this time. I will tell stories, conduct a workshop and do two performances of the play."



Check Rob Neufiled's THE READ for a scene from the play.

The Hod, LTZ

Here it is!
The Hod, LTZ

I know, it sounds bad, but bad is the new good. What’s an LTZ? A long thin zipper? No. LTZ stands for literary tabloid zine – a dirt cheap magazine [read free] that will give you some thrills in ways you never thought possible. Different than your average literary magazine. Funky. Wise. Artistic. Over the edge. Under the table. Like TV when it first came out – all in Black and White. Put on your sunglasses when you fan through a copy then get hooked. We’re looking for writers with a fresh style and zazz and cool artists with a graphic flair. Art that’s inviting.
Go To: www.thehodltz.com and check out our guidelines. [the website isn’t the zine] We use a template for the website. The zine won’t have a template. Send us something bad that’s good or something good that’s good. We want contributors who understand that an alternative zine enlivens creative people and stirs them to the inward search for really creative ideas and work.
FIRST ISSUE ---- End of June, 2009
Keep an eye out.
Here’s a sample from the forthcoming –

Dorothy,
call Glinda,
please: we need a new Oz.
The munchkins have gotten out of hand.
They gutted the old Oz
then ate what
remained.

Thanks
The Editors

Carole Thompson Profiled

Carole Thompson's profile appeared in THE SMOKY MOUNTAIN SENTINEL, TOWNS SENTINEL, UNION SENTINEL, CHEROKEE SENTINEL, THE GRAHAM SENTINEL and NORTH GEORGIA NEWS. Carole is a lady of many talents and member of NCWN-W. Brenda Kay Ledford interviewed Carole.

Betty Cloer Wallace goes up against Bill O'Reilly

Betty Cloer Wallace at a meeting in Sylva, NC last year.
I recommend that all our readers who love the Appalachians and the people of Appalachia, click on this link to Gary Carden's blog:

http://hollernotes.blogspot.com/2009/02/bill-oreilly-and-appalachia.html

and read Netwest member, Betty Cloer Wallace's post on Hillbilly Stereotypes and her answer to Bill O'Reilly's recent comments about Applachian people.