NCWN West Monthly Prose Workshop Will Meet

Are you writing a book?

NCWN West's monthly prose group will meet at Tri County Community College, located between Murphy and Hayesville, NC on June 10, 2010

at 7:00.

This is the same group that has been meeting under the sponsorship of NCWN West for more than 15 yrs. The first critique sessions were held by N.C.W.N. West's Cherokee County Representative Gene Hirsch for both poets and prose writrs. When the group grew too large and Gene Hirsch moved from the area, the prose writing group, as we now know it, met under the leadership of Mary E. Lynn Drew and for many years under the direction of Richard Argo. The new workshop leader is Peg Russell.

This monthly group has as it's main purpose to help prose writers finish their fiction and nonfiction writing. It is free to NCWN West members within driving distance and open to observers who consider joining. You only need be a member to NCWN to participate. There is no jury process to deside who can join. It is a group of Netwest writers who welcome other writers.

If you write essays, short stories or have novel in progress this could be the right group for you. They meet once a month, bring copies of a number of pages to share with others and get considerate and helpful feedback on their writing. I myself have participated in this monthly prose writing group, and I got genuine help on writing a novel that I am working on.

Peg Russell, the workshop leader sent this message today : "Hope to see everyone McSwain Building, room 127, 7PM."

Poet Maren O. Mitchell will Read at Coffee With the Poets

Coffee With the Poets, a monthly program of NC Writers Network West, will feature poet Maren O. Mitchell reading her original poems at Phillips and Lloyd Book Store on the town square in Hayesville June 9th, 2010 at 10:30.

After the featured poet reads, there will be an open mic reading, so come and bring one of your poems to read. Coffee, tea and morning sweets are offered by The Dessertery for $2.50.

Maren O. Mitchell's poems have been widley published in American literary magazines including Red Clay Reader, Appalachian Journal, The Journal of Kentucky Studies and a new poem is forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review. She also has a poem forthcoming in Echoes Across the Blue Ridge -

Stories, Essays and Poems by Writers Living in and Inspired by the Southern Appalachian Mountains.

Maren taught poetry writing at Blue Ridge Community College, Flat Rock, NC and she catalogued at the Carl Sandburg Home.

Want more information about poetry? www.nancysimpson.blogspot.com

STUDENT POET OF THE DAY: LINDSEY DODGE

Lindsey Dodge, a sixth grader at Macon Middle School in Franklin, has written a touching poem about the loss of her grandmother.

EVERYTHING

Everything is the same

Her clothes still hang in the closet

Pictures sit there gathering dust

There's still her place on their bed

Pawpaw doesn't disturb

by Lindsey Dodge

Lindsey's parents are Beth Simons and Paul Dodge of Franklin, North Carolina.

STUDENT POET OF THE DAY:LIA WALDRUM

(Blue Bottle in my kitchen window)

Lia Waldrum is a 5th grader at Cullowhee Valley School. The title of her poem asks, "What Is Blue?" She answers with a run of images that are a delight to read and visualize. Any of these lines could be the first line of a new poem, don't you think?

WHAT IS BLUE?

Blue is the sky on a winter evening.

Blue is a cut of sapphire sparkling on a ring.

Blue is slow and tired.

Blue is the ocean where the turtle glides.

Blue is the night, bright with glittery stars.

Blue is a mountain peeking up at the sky.

Blue is the little butterflies that flutter in the Spring.

Blue is a marker sliding silently on the board.

Blue is a leather belt.

Blue is a beautiful bead on an Indian vest.

Blue is a pair of jeans, cozy and worn.

Blue is a Spring nightgown.

Blue is a child's stuffed animal.

Blue is the wild wind whipping around the house.

Blue are the little curtains in the parlor.

Blue are the shutters on a window.

Blue is an icicle--drip, drip, dripping.

Blue is a tasty blueberry.

Blue is a humpback whale, yawning in the deep.

Blue is the sugar icing on a cake.

Blue is the wrapping on a birthday present.

Blue is paint on a wall.

Blue is a blank TV screen.

Blue is nail polish.

Blue is holding your breath too long.

Blue is a stained glass picture.

Blue are the lines on notebook paper.

Blue is a pioneer bonnet.

Blue is a carefully knitted scarf.

Blue is a sucker.

And blue is a parakeet.

by Lia Waldrum

5th Grade

Cullowhee Valley School

Lia's parents are Joe and Nelia Waldrum in Sylva, North Carolina.

CONVERSATIONS: William Everett

I'm trying a new feature on the blog today, one tentatively called Conversations, in which a writer's offering is posted for comments and responses. These need not be "critiques," as such, though I think most writers would welcome intelligent suggestions. Rather, this is to be a way for authors here in the mountains and elsewhere to engage each other in lively discussions of their work. The first feature is a poem by William Everett, novelist, essayist, scholar and poet. His website is www.williameverett.com. PLEASE LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS. LET'S SEE IF WE CAN GET A CONVERSATION GOING ACROSS THESE RIDGES!

She is ready,

purse packed,

hands pocketed in resolution,

standing by her charge.

Will she fly through puffball clouds,

piercing azure heavens like a needle?

Or will she cruise majestically across the land,

blowing tumbleweeds and sagebrush in her wake?

Perhaps the sea shall feel the power of her legs,

the undulations of her mermaid form.

For she is ready,

her glowing hair pinned sleekly back,

the keys clutched in her hand.

She is the girl with the ’55 Plymouth fins.

---William Everett

COFFEE WITH THE POETS AT CITY LIGHTS, FEATURING GLENDA BEALL

COFFEE WITH THE POETS AT CITY LIGHTS, FEATURING GLENDA BEALL


City Lights Bookstore is pleased to announce a program for readers and writers
on the third Thursday of each month, beginning June 17. Coffee with the Poets
will feature a guest poet each month, including an informal discussion and
reading. The program will begin at 10:30, with coffee and snacks provided.
Spring Street Cafe welcomes all attendees to come downstairs for lunch
afterward.

The inaugural event will feature Glenda Council Beall of Hayesville. Glenda
has published poetry, personal essays, memoir, and fiction, and she is former
Program Coordinator for the North Carolina Writers’ Network West (NetWest).
Her background is in education and she continues to teach adults through
community services at Tri-County Community College and at the John C.
Campbell Folk School in Brasstown.

Glenda's book of poetry, Now Might as Well be Then, was recently published by
Finishing Line Press. Her blog, Writing Life Stories, at
http://profilesandpedigrees.blogspot.com shares some of her own stories and
suggestions for writing your own.



City Lights Bookstore
828-586-9499
3 East Jackson Street
Sylva, NC 28779
more@citylightsnc.com
Open 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday-Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sundays
Browse and shop online at http://www.citylightsnc.com

From "My Laureate's Lasso" Poet of the Week:

Glenda Council Beall's new chapbook, Now Might As Well Be Then, from Finishing Line Press (http://www.finishinglinepress.com/) deserves many readers. I was honored to write a blurb for it. Glenda has worked wonders for NETWEST as Program Director and deserves our thanks for supporting the literary arts in Western North Carolina. Her new book would make a wonderful Christmas gift for family members. Several in my family will have this chapbook in their stockings!

Often those "supporters" are so busy making sure other writers find what they need to become better at the writer's craft that they don't have time for their own work. That's why I'm so pleased to honor Glenda as Poet of the Week. She's a great SW Georgia girl, and, naturally, I believe those girls have a leg up when it comes to writing poetry!

Here are a few of my favorite poems from her new chapbook.

Woman in the Mirror

What happened to seventeen,

when I rode my mare

free as the river flows,

jumped over downed trees

splashed through narrow streams?

What happened to twenty

when I danced in the moonlight,

my slender form dressed in a gown

white and shimmery as pearl?

What happened to thirty

when I rode my Yamaha

down fire roads, mountain trails,

long black hair flying free?

What happened to those days

I ask the woman in the mirror.

Gone, she says, all gone, unless

you remember it.

In The Dark

Lying in bed, my cheek against your shoulder,

I remember a night, long ago, on your boat.

I was afraid. I felt too much, too fast.

But love crept over us that summer

like silver fog, silent on the lake.

We were never again the same.

We stepped like children through that door that led

to long passages unknown, holding hands, wide-eyed, but brave.

Here I am years later, listening to your soft breath

and feeling your warm smooth skin.

In the dark, now might as well be then.

My Father's Horse

Stickers tear my legs, bare and tan

from South Georgia sun. Long black braids

fly behind me as I sprint like a Derby winner

down the path.

Harnessed with hames, bridle

and blinders, Charlie plods down

the farm road. Tired and wet from sweat,

he is perfume to my nostrils.

My father swings me up. I bury

my hands in tangled mane. My thighs

stick to leather and damp white hair

high above the ground.

I want to sing in glorious joy,

but only croon a child's nonsensical

words, grinning for a hundred yards

between field and barn.

My father's arms are strong.

His hands are gentle. The horse

is all we ever share. For he has sons

and I am just a daughter.

A Long Lost Year

Music making was his talent

taken for granted like water

gushing from our well until

the surgeon’s knife nicked a nerve.

The purple wreath of grief hung

over us until one day above the strum

of his guitar, his notes rang true ?

a lovely instrument restored.

We wept with joy.

His voice is who he is,

has

always been.

He sings to me again, that same

rich baritone that won me on that first

day we met. I listen with a new ear,

and like a Sinatra fan,

I mellow out.

Summer Writing Residency ARE YOU INTERESTED?

>From July 23–25, the North Carolina Writers’ Network will offer the 2010 Squire Summer Writing Residency, a full weekend of intensive workshops at Peace College in downtown Raleigh. The Residency is an intimate, affordable alternative to large conferences, and a rare opportunity to create bonds within the writing community.

Sam Ragan Award-winner David Rigsbee, a prolific and erudite NC poet and professor who has been mentored by such luminaries as Carolyn Kizer and U.S. poet laureate Joseph Brodsky, will work with poetry registrants on the problems of “Passion and Restraint in the First-Person Poem,” using examples of persona, authenticity, form, and authority from contemporary poets. This workshop gives registrants the time and focus to pay attention to the details in their work and to stay concrete and clear with language.

Past attendees have said the following about the Residency:

"The entire group brought a sense of community to my writing that I hadn't had before."—Ivy Rutledge

"I found an open, welcoming community of people who immediately accept anyone who has a desire to write."—Karen Price

More information about the Squire Summer Writing Residency can be found at www.ncwriters.org or by calling 336-293-8844.

--
Virginia Freedman
Administrative Director, NC Writers' Network
PO Box 954, Carrboro, NC 27510
(919) 251-9140

Student Poet of the Day: Abrianna Berry

Last fall the Great Smoky Mountains Bookfair sponsored a Poetry Contest for K-12 students in Macon, Haywood, Jackson, and Swain Counties. The winners were posted on my NC Laureate blog in November. Going through the rest of the poems submitted, I was struck by how many were just plain good, worthy of being enjoyed by readers of this blog. For the next two weeks I will be featuring one of these young poets daily. Each one will receive a small "thank you" from me. Please stop by everyday to read their work.

This first poem is by Abrianna Berry, who lives in Franklin, NC, and is in the sixth grade at Macon Middle School.

Squirrel Hunting With My Dad

We went up the mountain where

My dad hunted when he was little.

It was cold the wind

Whipping up the holler, trees shaking.

Me and Daddy went to the top of the mountain.

We sat down and waited and had

A silent talk.

*******

by Abrianna Berry,

daughter of Mark and Stephanie Berry

Franklin, North Carolina

Someone teaching in the 6th grade at Macon Middle School is doing a wonderful job encouraging students to write from their most cherished experiences. This young poet presents a moving and thoroughly believable scene; the wind whipping up the holler uses sound to make us feel the effects of the cold and the climb to the top of the mountain. The "silent talk" shows a depth and maturity beyond a sixth grader's years. Abrianna is already a poet, and I hope she continues to read poetry and to write it.

WRITERS' NIGHT OUT TO FEATURE KAREN HOLMES

HAVE A FUN EVENING AT WRITERS’ NIGHT OUT, JUNE 11

HIAWASSEE – June 1, 2010 – Come hear authors reading their work at the new monthly event, Writers’ Night Out at Mountain Perk Coffee House in Hiawassee, GA. This month, Karen Paul Holmes of Hiawassee/Atlanta will read her poetry on June 11 at 7:00 p.m. Her reading will be followed by an Open Microphone for those who’d like to share their own poetry or fiction. These light literary and musical evenings take place on the second Friday of every month from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Please arrive early as the event has drawn a full house in its first two months.
Karen Paul Holmes is an award-winning business writer who began focusing on poetry after moving to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her publishing credits include journals such as Poetry East, Atlanta Review and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and anthologies, including the upcoming Echoes Across the Blue Ridge: Stories, Essays & Poems Written by Writers Living in & Inspired by the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Karen enjoys reading her poetry in public, classical music, Ikebana and contra-dancing. She’ll be teaching a writing class at John C Campbell Folk School next January.

Those interested in participating in the Open Mic will have a chance to sign up at the event. Each writer will have three minutes to read fiction or poetry. The evening, which also includes musical interludes, is free and open to the public.

Mountain Perk Coffee House is located at 195 Main Street, next to Mull’s Motel. The café features espresso and other coffee drinks, sandwiches and sweets.

For more information, please contact Mountain Perk Owner, Mary Lawrence at (706) 896-9385, or Writers’ Night Out coordinator, Karen Holmes at (404) 316-8466 or kpaulholmes@gmail.com.

Rosemary Royston, poet, will read on May 12 at Mountain Perk

Reading with Scott Owens on Wednesday evening, May 12, is Rosemary Royston, poet from Blairsville, Georgia. Her work has been published in The Comstock Review, Main Street Rag, Momwriter’s Literary Magazine, Public Republic, and Dark Sky Magazine. Rosemary has led poetry workshops at the Institute for Continuing Learning at Young Harris College, and has spoken to young adults, on more than one occasion,about the wonders of poetry. She was the 2004 recipient of first and third place in poetry, Porter Fleming Literary Awards, and is currently at work on a poetry collection। She holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University.

Rosemary is a preacher's kid. She often uses this background for her poetry. Although she said she began writing poetry mostly for therapeutic reasons, she has grown far beyond that.

In June, she will teach a class for Writers' Circle.

Space, Time and Tone: The Power of Humor in Contemporary Poetry. This class will examine how humor in poetry allows the poet to go into unexpected territories, allowing for both release and examination of sensitive issues. Contact Glenda Beall at nightwriter0302@yahoo.com for more information on the class.

The evening of poetry at Mountain Perk , 7:00 p.m. on May 12 also includes open mic for anyone who wants to share original poetry or a short selection of original prose. This is an evening writers and those who enjoy good writing don't want to miss. See you there.

Scott Owens to Visit Far Western NC and North Georgia

Interview with Scott Owens,

Poet and Editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review
By Glenda C. Beall

I recently interviewed Scott Owens, well-published and highly acclaimed poet from Hickory, NC. In his book The Fractured World, Scott explores his childhood in which he suffered physical and emotional abuse and the impact this had on his life.
He says of this book, “I have found it very cathartic to write about the darker parts of my life, as you put it. I have used poetry for a long time as a sort of self-therapy, but I have also known that writing about these things was one way to help others who had been through similar experiences to know that they were not alone, and to help those guilty of the negative actions and attitudes portrayed in the book to understand that it's not okay, that what they do causes a lifetime of irreparable harm.”
In his book, Paternity, he writes about his relationship with his little daughter Sawyer.
“Sawyer is my only biological child. I have two stepsons who are both in college now, and I had a stepson with a previous wife for a few years as well.
The first new poem in this book was an occasional poem written for the Jewish ceremony of naming the new baby. The next one was written after holding her one night and crying as I realized the clichés about being willing to die for someone were not just clichés.”
He went on to say, “A lot of my poems are attempts to convey the emotional intensity of a particular moment. In a larger sense, I think I wanted to continue with these poems to finish what I had started in The Fractured World. That book ends with the disintegration of Norman, my alter ego who represents the fear and alienation that result from child abuse.

Paternity illustrates what can happen after one gets past one's past. I guess you could say that Paternity balances the scales.
Scott grew up part of the time on his Papa's 7-acre farm, part of the time in various mill villages in a nearby small town, part of the time in trailer parks around military bases, and part of the time in military housing. His parents were married and divorced numerous times, including three times to each other.
“If I include all of my stepbrothers and sisters, then my family size would rival the Duggars, but most of the time my family was my mom, myself, my three brothers, and whatever "Daddy" happened to be around at the time,” Scott said.
I asked him how his childhood affected his writing as an adult and he said, “I suspect my writing is what allowed me to become an adult, both literally and figuratively. Life has not been great for my three brothers. They have all struggled to maintain sanity and security in their lives. On the other hand, I graduated, went to college, became a teacher, and pretty much stayed out of trouble. And the only real difference between me and them is that I read and started writing at a young age and frequently went to books when I needed to get away from a difficult reality. I would say my childhood gave me the motivation and the reason to write. I see my writing as my way of redeeming that childhood.

“Your poetry is accessible and can be understood by the average reader. Do you think our modern poets, like you, are bringing poetry back to the people?" I asked the poet.
" … I think with the proliferation of poetry readings there is a growing tendency to be a bit more accessible than a lot of poetry had been for the last 25 years or so. Personally, I don't see the attraction in being needlessly obscure. I have plenty of difficult poems, but I hope that even with the most difficult the poem achieves some level of emotional or intellectual effect upon a good reader.”

I asked Scott Owens to tell us why we should come to hear him read his poetry at Coffee With the Poets, Wednesday, May 12 at 10:30 a.m. and at Mountain Perk in Hiawassee, GA that evening at 7:00 p.m. I like his answer.

“To paraphrase Dr. Williams, because while it is difficult to get the news from poetry, people die miserable every day for lack of what is found there. I do think reading and writing poetry can make a difference in everyone's lives. Poetry is mostly about seeing connections that aren't otherwise immediately apparent. That's a good skill to develop. It helps us take fewer things for granted and recognize the value of things through their connectedness to other things.
A big part of that connectedness, as you've alluded to in your questions, is the connectedness of one human life to another. This is what allows us to achieve catharsis by watching, listening to, or reading about someone else's experience. We recognize our own story in theirs and are able to learn from it. Then, of course, there is the best reason of all, because it will be fun.”

Phillips and Lloyd Books hosts a book signing for Scott from noon until 1:00 p.m. right after Coffee with the Poets on May 12.
Curiosity Shop Books in Murphy, NC will host Scott for a book signing at 2:00 p.m. May 12.
Stop in to meet him and pick up one of his books.

Contact Glenda at glendabeall@msn.com or 828-389-4441 for more information.

POETS OF THE DAY: SIX POETS FROM THE MOUNTAIN SOUTH

SIX POETS FROM THE MOUNTAIN SOUTH was recently published by LSU Press. As my last Poet of the Day feature, I'm including three poets from that volume--Jim Wayne Miller, Jeff Daniel Marion, and Fred Chappell. The LSU catalog copy appears below.

In the most extensive work to date on major poets from the mountain South, John Lang takes as his point of departure an oft-quoted remark by Jim Wayne Miller: “Appalachian literature is—and has always been—as decidedly worldly, secular, and profane in its outlook as the [region’s] traditional religion appears to be spiritual and otherworldly.” Although this statement may be accurate for Miller’s own poetry and fiction, Lang maintains that it does not do justice to the pervasive religious and spiritual concerns of many of the mountain South’s finest writers, including the five other leading poets whose work he analyzes along with Miller’s.

Fred Chappell, Robert Morgan, Jeff Daniel Marion, Kathryn Stripling Byer, and Charles Wright, Lang demonstrates, all write poetry that explores, sometimes with widely varying results, what they see as the undeniable presence of the divine within the temporal world. Like Blake and Emerson before them, these poets find the supernatural within nature rather than beyond it. They all exhibit a love of place in their poems, a strong sense of connection to nature and the land, especially the mountains. Yet while their affirmation of the world before them suggests a resistance to the otherworldliness that Miller points to, their poetry is nonetheless permeated with spiritual questing.

Dante strongly influences both Chappell and Wright, though the latter eventually resigns himself to being simply “a God-fearing agnostic,” whereas Chappell follows Dante in celebrating “the love that moves the sun and other stars.” Byer, probably the least orthodox of these poets, chooses to lay up treasures on earth, rejecting the transcendent in favor of a Native American spirituality of immanence, while Morgan and Marion find in nature what Marion calls a “vocabulary of wonders” akin to Emerson’s conviction that nature is the language of the spiritual.

Employing close readings of the poets’ work and relating it to British and American Romanticism as well as contemporary eco-theology and eco-criticism, Lang’s book is the most ambitious and searching foray yet into the worlds of these renowned post–World War II Appalachian poets.

John Lang, professor of English at Emory & Henry College in Emory, Virginia, is the author of Understanding Fred Chappell and editor of Appalachia and Beyond: Conversations with Writers from the Mountain South.

(Jim Wayne Miller)

JIM WAYNE MILLER

A HOUSE OF READERS

At 9:42 on this May morning
the children's rooms are concentrating too.
Like a tendril growing toward the sun, Ruth
moves her book into a wedge of light
that settles on the floor like a butterfly.
She turns a page.
Fred is immersed in magic, cool
as a Black Angus belly-deep in a farm pond.

The only sounds: pages turning softly.
This is the quietness
of bottomland where you can hear only the young corn
growing, where a little breeze stirs the blades
and then breathes in again.

I mark my place.
I listen like a farmer in the rows.

from The Mountains Have Come Closer, 1980 ©

JEFF DANIEL MARION

Reunion

Last night in a dream
you came to me. We were young
again and you were smiling,
happy in the way a sparrow in spring
hops from branch to branch.
I took you in my arms
and swung you about, so carefree
was my youth.

What can I say?
That time wears away, draws its lines
on every feature? That we wake
to dark skies whose only answer
is rain, cold as the years
that stretch behind us, blurring
this window far from you.

from Ebbing and Flowing Springs

FRED CHAPPELL


Spotlight

The hamlet sleeps under November stars.
Only the page of numerate thought toils through
The darkness, shines on the table where, askew
And calm, the scholar's lamp burns bright and scars
The silence, sending through the slot, the bars
And angles of his window square, a true
Clean ray, a shaft of patient light, its purview
Lonely and remote as the glow of Mars.


from Shadow Box, LSU Press

POET OF THE DAY: MARY ADAMS

My friend Mary Adams is such a good poet that words fail me. But they never seem to fail her.

So, it's not surprising that Spring Street Editions, in collaboration with Ash Creek Press in Portland Oregon, has launched its chapbook series with WCU professor Mary Adams’s Commandment. Mary’s first book, Epistles From the Planet Photosynthesis, was published in the University of Florida Press’s poetry series. Her work has earned her a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. These new poems show her to be one of the finest formalists writing today. Former NC Poet Laureate Fred Chappell says, “I have read with great admiration and genuine enjoyment the poems in this chapbook. “ He praisesThe intricate overlaying of separate landscapes and timeframes in the poems, their often “Dantean” focus, and concludes by saying that he will be re-reading this collection with pleasure, “going back and forth amongst the poems because I think I hear echoes.They seem linked to me and Commandment a whole. Congratulations on a fine performance!” Ron Rash praises the book, saying” Frew contemporary poets can match her combination of craft and feeling, which makes this new collection all the more welcome. She is a poet of the first rank.”

Commandment

By Mary Adams

When we were lonely

Love doubly

blessed us. Earth

filled us. Birth

welled like morning,

clean yearning

poured over the void

and we said

nothing could quiet this

urge, this riot, this

self-forgetfulness.

And then the doe

so wild going so

still, saw the brink

of wilderness sink

in our plenty, our

pity. Oceans for

which we longed dried

and our best laid

the world waste:

it wasn’t just

never enough love

that Jesus suffocated of.

TIME CATS
-- after Mr. Lloyd Alexander, 1924-2007


To console you for growing old, I got you a gift
to take you out of time. Not poems, which are always
ending after they start. And not knitting,
which if worn you might wear out. The best
gifts are light, but not too light, and flow
everywhere, like the ache of debt. This year
your gift should signify the infinite.
So I got you kittens, tricked by your own fingers
from the wild. Because they compound eternally,
but warmer. Because a single box contains
all kittens till it’s opened. Because a kitten
mewing makes a butterfly make a tornado.
Because a knotting of kittens extends in a plane
forever. Because a dying kitten is
impossibly light, and a lost kitten’s cry
is bottomless. And since each kitten wells
with the cat of danger, we know every cat
wears kittens like an urge. None is ever
really lost. Then cats point both ways always.
Now you are grown, here are all your kittens,
new again, like money you found in the laundry.
Heft them gently. Feel in their small hearts
your trembling. Calm them in the morning
of your fears. When you are sad, speak
them like cadences, kitten of cross-fire,
kitten of backflip, kitten of glory, kitten of
clutching, kitten of pestering and plummet, spindly
kitten, hungry kitten, kitten of solace.

POET OF THE DAY: GLENDA COUNCIL BEALL

Glenda Council Beall's new chapbook, Now Might As Well Be Then, from Finishing Line Press (http://www.finishinglinepress.com/) deserves many readers. I was honored to write a blurb for it. Glenda has worked wonders for NETWEST as Program Director and deserves our thanks for supporting the literary arts in Western North Carolina.

Often those "supporters" are so busy making sure other writers find what they need to become better at the writer's craft that they don't have time for their own work. That's why I'm so pleased to honor Glenda as Poet of the Day. Here are a couple of my favorite poems from her new chapbook.

WOMAN IN THE MIRROR

What happened to seventeen,

when I rode my mare

free as the river flows,

jumped over downed trees

splashed through narrow streams?

What happened to twenty

when I danced in the moonlight,

my slender form dressed in a gown

white and shimmery as pearl?

What happened to thirty

when I rode my Yamaha

down fire roads, mountain trails,

long black hair flying free?

What happened to those days

I ask the woman in the mirror.

Gone, she says, all gone, unless

you remember it.

In The Dark

Lying in bed, my cheek against your shoulder,

I remember a night, long ago, on your boat.

I was afraid. I felt too much, too fast.

But love crept over us that summer

like silver fog, silent on the lake.

We were never again the same.

We stepped like children through that door that led

to long passages unknown, holding hands, wide-eyed, but brave.

Here I am years later, listening to your soft breath

and feeling your warm smooth skin.

In the dark, now might as well be then.

POET OF THE DAY: LEE SMITH

(Lee signs her new book for me.) Lee Smith probably wrote poetry back in her student--or childhood--days, and she may secretly write it now, but I think she also writes poetry in her novels and shorts stories, and I have shamelessly used those to rev up my own poems when I felt my poet's engine running down.

Lee came to Asheville on Sunday to read from her new book of stories, Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger: New and Selected Stories. There was standing room only at Malaprop's Bookstore. Afterward I had time to visit with Lee and the woman who has brought her work to life on the stage, Barbara Bates Smith. Barbara's wonderful husband and my brother joined us for a glass of wine at a downtown restaurant.

Go to Barbara's website to learn more about her one-woman shows. (Mugging it up with Lee at Malaprop's)

Here is the last paragraph from "The Southern Cross." Chanel, the narrator, (not her real name, of course!) has jumped off the yacht on which she's been cruising with Larry, the man she calls her fiance but who has never had any intention of leaving his wife, as she learns near story's end. She lands in the dinghy and heads for the tropical island nearby and a new life. "Going Native," she yells back to the astonished men on deck.

A part of me can't believe I'm acting this crazy, while another part of me is saying, "Go, Girl." A little breeze comes up and ruffles my hair. I practice deep breathing from aerobics and look all around. The water is smooth as glass. The whole damn sky is full of stars. It is just beautiful. All the stars are reflected in the water. Right overhead I see Orion and then I see his belt, as clear as can be. I'm headed for the island, sliding through the stars.