tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91112931916582185742024-02-26T09:33:17.262-08:00A Map of the World Jennifer Horne's websiteJennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.comBlogger60125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-84201143538972517242021-10-21T11:29:00.029-07:002024-01-22T15:33:59.962-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQQhitUfiRzy0Oxqw4RRHJdgSUVIdu9MPMEDFN7HaRtXqWR_aLXEWqapEHcrPHZ0_AZM5oSsYUD-eYZaUCWV-hvTeO-u57ByDhyilxRCHijpL2tQo1At9fiTxU-qLHyu6yEPEZZkEXXAq1qDRlTwhGoHMYEW5SZFsJYQuqUbSJstFNA5J_k-MVPh--ZQ/s1080/poetry%20shelf.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="608" data-original-width="1080" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQQhitUfiRzy0Oxqw4RRHJdgSUVIdu9MPMEDFN7HaRtXqWR_aLXEWqapEHcrPHZ0_AZM5oSsYUD-eYZaUCWV-hvTeO-u57ByDhyilxRCHijpL2tQo1At9fiTxU-qLHyu6yEPEZZkEXXAq1qDRlTwhGoHMYEW5SZFsJYQuqUbSJstFNA5J_k-MVPh--ZQ/s320/poetry%20shelf.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">CURRENT PROJECTS:</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author</span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Now available </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817361365/odyssey-of-a-wandering-mind/"><span style="font-size: medium;">https://www.uapress.ua.edu/9780817361365/odyssey-of-a-wandering-mind/</span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging</span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press, NewSouth imprint, May 2024</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Co-edited with Jay Lamar, and with Katie Lamar Jackson and Wendy Reed</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Letters to Little Rock </i>(poems)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Forthcoming from Kelsay Books, Fall 2024</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"> Below, you'll find a variety of blog posts from the past ten years. </div>Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-48980885647007350322021-01-17T14:56:00.000-08:002021-01-17T14:56:03.206-08:00Echoes of Bucharest<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><p></p><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I’ve been thinking about Romania lately. Almost thirty years
ago now, I lived there for an academic year with the man who’s now my husband; Don
had a Fulbright fellowship to teach American Literature at the University of
Bucharest. I’d lived abroad once before, in England, but I was unprepared for
the hardship and disorder in that recently liberated country. Only a year and a
half before, the Romanian people had overthrown their monomaniacal, brutal
dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu. He had impoverished the country, destroyed the
livelihood of or imprisoned or poisoned or killed anyone he saw as an enemy, shredded
the social fabric of the culture by sowing mistrust and disinformation. He demolished
a large part of old Bucharest and starved and froze the population to build his
massive, gaudy “People’s House,” a testament to his narcissism.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">After the revolution, when we arrived, the country was
struggling to regroup and to form something like a democracy. Without access to
the embassy commissary, we bought groceries where everyone else did, and I
remember how, because of so many shortages, people would stop you on the street
if you were carrying home toilet paper, or oranges, or fresh fish. Where did
you buy it? How long ago? Lines would form as people rushed to get whatever
they could, based on word of mouth. Only a week after we got there, we heard
that miners from the Jiu Valley with a history of violence were coming to the
city to air their grievances as part of a strike. We stood beneath large trees
in the dark and watched as government tanks rolled down the broad pedestrian
avenue of Tineretului Park, near our apartment block, staging in preparation
for the miners’ arrival. The next day, the Embassy contacted all the Fulbrighters
and told us to stay inside until further notice.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The parallels to this moment are not exact. The history of
Romania even in the one year we were there is so very much more complicated
than I’ve outlined above. But in the last weeks I’ve had flashbacks to that
time, as we dash here and there and make endless phone calls to an overwhelmed
state hotline and send emails to whoever we can think of in the hopes of
getting an elusive vaccine shot, as we watch the nation’s capital and all state
capitals prepare for violence on Inauguration Day from those who are hostile
toward anyone who smacks of being an intellectual or a liberal or an elite, as
we await the departure of a would-be dictator who cares only for himself and
the monuments to his grandiose sense of self.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">In Bucharest, I had the comfort of a credit card with a $1500
limit, enough to buy a one-way airplane ticket home if things got too bad. Secure
in my late-twentieth-century smugness and early thirties optimism, I thought that
in the U.S.A. civilization was ascendant, civil rights were solved, and I’d
never see shortages, riots, or aspirational fascists in my country. I see now
that I was naïve, that just as Bucharest, once known as “the Paris of the East,”
could be so diminished, so could we, if we don’t open our eyes and face the
discordant music of this time.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">As I’ve worked on writing this, the momentum of rhetoric keeps
trying to take me to a statement of political uplift and a call to action. But
for this poet, at this moment, that feels premature. What feels true is what I
know about writers and artists: that we are the noticers, the trained
observers. We are able to see the one telling detail that will make something
come alive for others, to convey a human truth. Artists and writers open themselves
to everything, serving as a kind of filtration system for society, often
feeling more than is comfortable and thinking more than is easy. We stand for
beauty when things are ugly, and for meaning when so much seems meaningless. Whatever
else you may choose to do in these strange times, I am sure of this: if you
create something, then you are part of the ongoing remaking of the world, a bulwark
against destructive forces, and that matters. </div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQTUbr4Gn2GwU2OUcMvoiIIBwJWshm8jE_OzYlxeuKiFxq-isFibOYFpD1WQNNJTVpqkxBzyiNQoHMfgmosBl_13b8_JvMKQe0OKiWRYWiwWkjHyxeAmbHxeDAK4SDYXatIRbg8FyTLqbu/s1508/Romania+with+Don+and+students+91+92.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1508" data-original-width="1088" height="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQTUbr4Gn2GwU2OUcMvoiIIBwJWshm8jE_OzYlxeuKiFxq-isFibOYFpD1WQNNJTVpqkxBzyiNQoHMfgmosBl_13b8_JvMKQe0OKiWRYWiwWkjHyxeAmbHxeDAK4SDYXatIRbg8FyTLqbu/w189-h264/Romania+with+Don+and+students+91+92.jpg" width="189" /></a></p></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">With Don and some of his students 1991-92 school year, Bucharest. <br />(I now regret the frumpiness of that mint-green dress, but I had never packed for Romania before and thought it would be versatile and washable.)</td></tr></tbody></table>. <br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLnTjHGt-9fXy0ihlp0vUIH64LNL-eYfo3pwEtfr-iARjp-HoHovMnTPivDvDw6WY2nndHuc9ZVsK8UYpFwB1dvT3QKbfKVfqgGyJpqJgmqPzDRMxJIspX69eSK3hrkcctm2TXXE3jHoGT/s1536/Romania+from+our+apartment+block+1991.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1088" data-original-width="1536" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLnTjHGt-9fXy0ihlp0vUIH64LNL-eYfo3pwEtfr-iARjp-HoHovMnTPivDvDw6WY2nndHuc9ZVsK8UYpFwB1dvT3QKbfKVfqgGyJpqJgmqPzDRMxJIspX69eSK3hrkcctm2TXXE3jHoGT/w276-h196/Romania+from+our+apartment+block+1991.jpg" width="276" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The view from our apartment in December.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp1qy4a3kv-xAN5imz24d9JPZg3sABrRAkp5lmzx2D9uJAOhrWMqjFykUtIgroYrfvNiGBXRPd96Aakiig5gPe09uPZ-m0KdSLG-q8xlcmTMGUtpfB574xCersGJR4w9K-oGukd2mgwQww/s1804/Romania+Parcul+Tineretului.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1228" data-original-width="1804" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp1qy4a3kv-xAN5imz24d9JPZg3sABrRAkp5lmzx2D9uJAOhrWMqjFykUtIgroYrfvNiGBXRPd96Aakiig5gPe09uPZ-m0KdSLG-q8xlcmTMGUtpfB574xCersGJR4w9K-oGukd2mgwQww/w285-h194/Romania+Parcul+Tineretului.jpg" width="285" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Parcul Tineretului, Bucharest<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> </p>Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-36097159801704485772020-09-08T09:26:00.000-07:002020-09-08T09:26:55.074-07:00<p> </p><h4 style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">Gardening
Through the Pandemic</h4><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSR1ISl9I8RugkYkm9nNwc4Jt42iRPam5O81eEHADMep0pFhyphenhyphenAbVjb3jJ55aBndTZ6lUYselqBlhA41WmzQlgiQdHb4amArAST3JmVJu-R5pT6xXcDPxtidCdTa9Gzy2Z6yxnPItaNu9t_/s2048/2020+black+eyed+susans.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSR1ISl9I8RugkYkm9nNwc4Jt42iRPam5O81eEHADMep0pFhyphenhyphenAbVjb3jJ55aBndTZ6lUYselqBlhA41WmzQlgiQdHb4amArAST3JmVJu-R5pT6xXcDPxtidCdTa9Gzy2Z6yxnPItaNu9t_/s320/2020+black+eyed+susans.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">In
April, when it was becoming clear I’d be staying close to home for several
months, at least, I thought about what to plant. I love gardening, but we
usually travel for a couple of weeks or more in the summer, and I’ve gotten in
the habit of growing plants that can endure some neglect. This year, however,
I’d be home and able to tend my plants daily.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">Where
I live, people were slow to recognize the severity of the pandemic and
reluctant to wear a mask, and early on, when we had little knowledge of how the
virus was transmitted, I feared going to the garden center. So, like half of
America, I went to order seeds online and found that I was already in the
territory of “back orders” and “sold out.” The seeds I finally did get were
unreliable: some tomato seeds took a month to germinate, even in prime potting
conditions, some of the green bean seeds <i>never </i>came up, and one “Italian
green” squash created beautiful, abundant vines and leaves and one large
squash. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">The
green beans and other varieties of squash were in the big beds my husband dug
and filled in during the first couple of months at home, beds in our sunniest
places with rows and hills of plants meant to produce produce. My gardening, in
our mostly shady yard, has shifted to large pots on the sunny patio, and I
generally enjoy buying flats of whatever flowering plants strike my fancy that
year in coordinating colors and varied shapes and textures. The other half of
the patio is herbs—basil for caprese salads, along with parsley, chives,
oregano, thyme, and rosemary. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">Unwilling
to go shopping and risk my and my husband’s health, unable to get all the seeds
I wanted online, I mostly made do with seeds I’d saved, plants I’d overwintered,
what I found in the yard, and what came up on its own. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">I’d
saved basil seeds from earlier years, and garlic chive seeds as well. I ordered
way too much parsley seed and found that it did well in pots but not so much in
the ground. The oregano had overwintered, and in three pots nestled together in
a wagon has made a kind of elevated hedge. Rosemary starts are easy, so I got
several going and transplanted them into pots.<o:p></o:p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1GaQL0h6f3lYAk0GgBsfyfhOBk16ISdoVX-1_G5OWDvlwoy3J8go00AYy61a9AXFS9P0GTMZgFMKZgeAptxeB4u7_PD9rtyAMJuulczsAmlpRluhL0o0Kzskbwi01_oDsldm-SmKRFgeM/s2048/2020+chives+basil+oregano.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1GaQL0h6f3lYAk0GgBsfyfhOBk16ISdoVX-1_G5OWDvlwoy3J8go00AYy61a9AXFS9P0GTMZgFMKZgeAptxeB4u7_PD9rtyAMJuulczsAmlpRluhL0o0Kzskbwi01_oDsldm-SmKRFgeM/s320/2020+chives+basil+oregano.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">A
geranium that made it through the winter indoors moved outside to hang from a
beam, and the begonias that nestled in a windowbox pot next to the house
decided it was their moment to bloom, big. Happiest of all were the coleus,
which had started from shoots my hairdresser gave me in February when I admired
her healthy plants. She cautioned me quickly not to thank her for them or they
wouldn’t grow, so I didn’t. I haven’t gotten a haircut since then, but I think
of her every day as I admire the three-feet-tall, lime-green plants, with tiny
white blossoms that attract hummingbirds. Similarly, I have several new
gardenia plants that I started from cuttings from a plant that overwintered
outdoors.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><o:p></o:p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_d8C3s6HvWJUtKj-gKCrM3HEEGwrchd5mDdslJV7EiwNrJjS1zv2pGB81I7zBNmGqB3MJ8pIyDDjDl0IyL-11gd_KpBA5QrkvPY16prdBcZJL5BooeTfgVKYIDw7qnRKxbbYWmgbwhzOS/s2048/2020+coleus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1152" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_d8C3s6HvWJUtKj-gKCrM3HEEGwrchd5mDdslJV7EiwNrJjS1zv2pGB81I7zBNmGqB3MJ8pIyDDjDl0IyL-11gd_KpBA5QrkvPY16prdBcZJL5BooeTfgVKYIDw7qnRKxbbYWmgbwhzOS/s320/2020+coleus.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">We
live in the woods, so there are growing things everywhere.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">I found some small nandina bushes and
transplanted two into big blue-glazed ceramic pots for symmetry. A few plants I
dug up at the edge of the woods just appealed to me for their color or shape,
although I have no names for them, and as I surveyed the yard I found a tiny
shoot from a fig tree my stepdaughter had given me several years ago. It had just
barely survived in that spot, but I put the little rescued sprout into a huge
pot and suddenly it was growing like nobody’s business.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">It’s
been a time of volunteers, and I had plenty of those in my pots as well: the
perennial pink salvia I first bought at the University of Alabama Arboretum’s
annual spring plant sale years ago, an event I always loved because I connected
with gardening friends I rarely saw otherwise; black-eyed Susans that come up
in the yard and now live abundantly in pots as well; the sprightly, purple-blue
torenia and stately, yellow-flowered nicotiana a friend gave me from her garden
in years past; a cantaloupe vine that came up in a pot last year from composted
soil, and then reappeared this year, producing only a single golf-ball sized
green fruit, but lots of pretty yellow flowers. The same friend who gave me the
torenia and nicotiana gave me a moonflower plant this year, and I’ve loved
having its gorgeous white flowers, with a delicate scent, right next to the
door. I’ll save those seeds for next year. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">The
marigold seeds that came in the mail did do beautifully, planted in the pots
with the tomato seedlings that finally started growing, producing late-summer
cherry and pear tomatoes. I wrote this poem about them, in response to a prompt
from a poetry discussion group I’m in:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">Companion
Plantings<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">It
was the marigolds<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">that
reminded me<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">on
a blazing August morning <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">how
different plants<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">can
grow companionably<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">in
the same soil.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">A
dragonfly, black and sleek,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">keeps
returning to the same<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">support
pole, surveying<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">the
cherry tomatoes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">He
is the soul<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">of
a dead relative.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">I’m
not sure who<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">but
I believe <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">he
observes me<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">with
familial affection.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">On
a certain day<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">the
marigolds<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">and
cherry tomatoes<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">harmonized
their hues<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">deep
oranges<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">confirming
affiliation.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">When
I stepped outside<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">I
could see <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">what
they had done<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">tuning
themselves to perfection<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">while
I slept.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTdwXLYDouhjmHJ7GNdoS0sxLLrGxdLRCLFMBhZay68vOI6DuKMh4-i3A5bz_sljUiNybZZ7r7Ks7t2X8oP5G2c_yRVLTuk2gD586InuPpW1WyEs7J6g7cRSuu4CQa4Yv76471m92m4Wkp/s2048/2020+marigolds.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTdwXLYDouhjmHJ7GNdoS0sxLLrGxdLRCLFMBhZay68vOI6DuKMh4-i3A5bz_sljUiNybZZ7r7Ks7t2X8oP5G2c_yRVLTuk2gD586InuPpW1WyEs7J6g7cRSuu4CQa4Yv76471m92m4Wkp/s320/2020+marigolds.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">In
this poem, I express a sense of connectedness that I feel to nature and to
people, living and dead. This season of life, this pandemic year, has reminded
me how connected I am through plants to so many people, and of how seeds and
plants take their own time and their own course. Even as I pick green tomato
hornworms off my tomato plants and lament the damage they’ve done, I marvel at
their ability to blend in with the plant’s structure and color, and when I read
about them to remind myself which moth these caterpillars become (it’s variously
known as the sphinx moth or five-spotted hawk moth), I learn that, unbeknownst
to me, their pupae survive the winter underground. I have to admire that kind
of perseverance. I’m thinking, now, what to plant when cooler weather arrives.<o:p></o:p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR-hT9zT1tHn5khyphenhyphen9DrsrYs94PcWSkxu7I2TJAPKFbJPDUT0i2LMzqQPStTdpnkKKWevgasAnu-FY2fGIB3Dc9VJo0HCbs9vRdCxNiLd7etc0-3SCzkU3Gwm49cetlRc4UJ92Axjd754Jm/s2048/2020+morning+glory.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1152" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR-hT9zT1tHn5khyphenhyphen9DrsrYs94PcWSkxu7I2TJAPKFbJPDUT0i2LMzqQPStTdpnkKKWevgasAnu-FY2fGIB3Dc9VJo0HCbs9vRdCxNiLd7etc0-3SCzkU3Gwm49cetlRc4UJ92Axjd754Jm/s320/2020+morning+glory.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><br /></p>Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-59609890402757921222020-05-17T12:07:00.000-07:002020-05-17T12:07:45.039-07:00<span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">A poem for the Alabama high school graduating class of 2020:</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's long been a tradition for poet laureates to write an "occasional poem" to mark specific occasions or moments in time. In these unusual times, I've been moved to write an occasional poem for the Alabama high school graduates of 2020, titled "Beyond the Numbers." The text and video are below; feel free to share.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dydjUuBy4oRyTGHV44W6OtqR5Rs617ZoT2HrsQGG8JF8tLKIuK6_MlLwI30HM6ZVDnHfU6OJea9ZoFBOmwimQ' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Beyond the Numbers<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>—for
the Alabama high school graduating class of 2020<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You are from 67 counties<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>in
a state of 5 million people<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>a
quarter (or so) of whom are under 18.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You are 50,000 in number,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>in
a state of 52,000-plus square miles,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>more
than a square mile for each of you!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You are from Mobile, Montgomery,
Madison, and maybe even McMullen,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>from
Birmingham, Bessemer, and Brilliant,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Tuscaloosa,
Trussville, Tuscumbia, Tuskegee, and Twin,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>Alabaster,
Auburn, and Allgood.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You’re told you are the future, the promise,
the hope—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>and
you are, but you are also<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>sad,
tired, frustrated, and discouraged—at least sometimes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You see so many numbers in the news
these days:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>gatherings
of 10 or more, 50% capacity,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>not
to mention the number of infections, the almost 500 deaths.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So what’s beyond today? What’s beyond
the numbers?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>You
are. Unique. A once-in-a-worldtime life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>A
life that can be inventive, courageous, kind, outrageous,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>bring
joy, humor, hope,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>and
open up to the unknown.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This one life. Yours.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That
no numbers can define.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Congratulations!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>Now,
begin.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 9;"> </span>By
Jennifer Horne<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 4.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Alabama Poet Laureate<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span>Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-6535400081183478152019-08-24T09:39:00.001-07:002020-02-21T07:00:31.056-08:00A Tribute to Toni Morrison<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">After the passing of Nobel Prize–winning
author Toni Morrison on August 5, 2019, Don Noble and I were invited by Dr.
Donna Estill, Dean for Humanities and Social Sciences at Calhoun Community
College, and Dr. Stephen Spencer, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Athens
State University, to participate in a tribute to her. These are my comments
from that event, slightly edited for this blog post.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Tribute to Toni Morrison<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">August 23, 2019, Alabama Center for the Arts, Decatur, Alabama<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Thank you, Dr. Estill and Dr. Spencer, and thanks to the Alabama
Center for the Arts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I’m happy to be here as a representative of Alabama’s literary
community, and honored to be a part of this tribute to Toni Morrison. When we
honor a writer, we not only honor her individual words but assert the value of all
writing, and the value of literature in our lives. Everyone here today believes
that writing matters, that books matter, and that when a writer as fine as
Morrison dies, we should mark her passing and celebrate all she gave us. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">As someone who has worked in the world of magazine editing and book
publishing, I’m going to talk a bit about Morrison’s work and influence in that
world. For those of you who want to be writers, working for a literary magazine
or a book publisher is, first, a wonderful way for an aspiring writer to gain
insights into the different steps of the publishing process, how editors work
and think, and what work is being read and published. And you don’t have to get
stuck in either/or binaries about your work, either. An article in Slate.com
discussed Morrison’s work at Random House as an editor, beginning in the
mid-60s, and how she believed that writers need not compartmentalize themselves,
saying, “<span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">I read books.
I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job</span>.”
Indeed, in addition to her novels and to her work as one of the first literary editors
to champion and nurture black writers, she wrote many critical essays,
including a collection titled <i>Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination </i>(1992). She saw no reason to limit herself to one role
in the literary world, but claimed all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">One of the things Morrison helped do was to erase the idea that
writers should be limited by sub-categories, in a time—the sixties and into the
seventies—when someone might be known as a good “woman writer” or a novel might
be good within the circumscribed realm of “black writing”—that is, good within that
limited range. Through her writing and her influence as an editor, she taught
the world that <i>all </i>experience was sufficient experience for a great
novel, that any kind of writer was simply that, a writer, and that if the
material were rendered with skill and art, it could reach any reader. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Those fortunate enough to work with her as their editor recalled
her range of vision when it came to other writers. Activist and writer Angela
Davis, who worked with Morrison on Davis’s autobiography, said that “Toni was
an absolutely phenomenal editor. She paid so much attention to detail yet did
not insist on having a work become a reflection of her own ideas. She asked me
questions that challenged my imagination—she asked me to remember differently.
Our relationship was grounded in that editing relationship, which became a
friendship as well.” (“8 Women Writers…”)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">So many writers, beyond those she edited, were inspired by Morrison’s
work, black women especially. Maya Angelou said: “In the midst of my misery, I
wrote a letter to Toni Morrison. We hadn’t even met at the time, but I wrote a
letter to her to say thank you. Thank you very much for not only seeing me …
but seeing me as an African-American woman and loving me. This is what this
woman has done through ten books: loving, respecting, appreciating the
African-American woman and all that she goes through, whether it’s in <em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-feature-settings: "lnum"; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: lining-nums; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">Beloved</em><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">, </span><em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-feature-settings: "lnum"; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: lining-nums; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">The Bluest Eye</em><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">, whatever it is.” (“8
Women Writers…”) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Tayari Jones, author of <i>An American Marriage, </i>described the
process of reading <i>Beloved </i>as feeling “contextualized,” truly seen,
through eyes that understood her as kin, not as other. (“8 Women Writers…”)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Morrison’s work as an editor also fed into her writing. Working on
a book titled <i>The Black Book, </i>published in 1974, a pictorial history of
African American life, from slavery to the mid-twentieth-century, she studied
what one writer listed as “things like the head braces that had once held slaves,
bills of sale, photographs, sheet music, newspaper clippings, and other
artifacts that she and the project editors accumulated over the course of
putting the book together.” (“Women & Literature: Toni Morrison”)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The writer and critic Ismail Muhammed said of <i>The Black Book</i>
that “It taught audiences new ways to think about black history, as something
that could be studied from the ground up through the actions of black people
themselves, rather than through the social forces that surrounded them.” In
addition to that, for Morrison, all of those items she studied were material to
inspire her own writing, taking, for instance, the story of the actual slave Margaret
Garner, who would rather have killed her children than let them be taken back
into slavery, and transmuting it beyond what she called “a lump of statistics”
into the novel <i>Beloved.</i> (“Women & Literature: Toni Morrison”) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Morrison, was, of course, celebrated for the art of her fiction
writing. As Alabama’s Poet Laureate, I am delighted to be able to share some of
Toni Morrison’s poetry with you. She is known, in her novels, for her lyrical
language, but was not known as a poet. Nevertheless, in<em><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;"> </span></em><em><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-style: normal; padding: 0in;">2002,</span></em><em><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;"> </span></em><em><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-style: normal; padding: 0in;">Morrison “offered
five original poems for a limited-edition, letterpress book to help fund the </span></em>[Black
Mountain] institute’s work advancing freedom of expression.” These have
been described as “Morrison’s first and only foray into verse” and I’m
going to read three of them: “Eve Remembering,” “I Am Not Seaworthy,” and “It
Comes Unadorned.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(All five poems are at: <a href="https://believermag.com/five-poems-by-toni-morrison">https://believermag.com/five-poems-by-toni-morrison</a>/)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The poet Elizabeth Alexander, who read her poem “Praise Song for
the Day” at President Obama’s first inauguration, said: “I can only gesture
towards the holistic grandeur of [Morrison’s] vision, her consistent historical
excellence, and her invention … The integrity that never flags and the profound
love for black people in all of our complexity that animates the work. In
encountering and imagining black people as infinitely fascinating and worthy of
her sustained artistic attention, Morrison gives us a sterling example of how,
while great art is great art, sometimes great art also ennobles a people.”<strong style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-feature-settings: "lnum"; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: lining-nums; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"> </strong><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">(</span></strong>“8 Women Writers…”) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">If you haven’t yet read any of Morrison’s work, I hope you will go
directly to the library or a bookstore and find one of her books and read it.
The best experience of an author is her words, and thankfully you have many to
read. You will not soon run out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sources:<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“8 Women Writers on What Toni Morrison Meant To Them,” by Erica
Schwiegershausen. Aug. 6, 2019, <i>The Cut</i>, <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2019/08/what-toni-morrison-meant-to-women-writers.html">https://www.thecut.com/2019/08/what-toni-morrison-meant-to-women-writers.html</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Five Poems by Toni Morrison,” <i>The Believer</i>, Aug. 6, 2019, <a href="https://believermag.com/five-poems-by-toni-morrison/">https://believermag.com/five-poems-by-toni-morrison/</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Toni Morrison Was So Much More Than a Novelist,” by Ismail
Muhammed, Aug. 6, 2019, <i>Slate.com, </i><a href="https://slate.com/culture/2019/08/toni-morrison-criticism-editor-playing-in-the-dark.html">https://slate.com/culture/2019/08/toni-morrison-criticism-editor-playing-in-the-dark.html</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Women & Literature: Toni Morrison,” by Daniel Donaghy, Sept.
5, 2006, OUP blog, <a href="https://blog.oup.com/2006/09/women_literatur/">https://blog.oup.com/2006/09/women_literatur/</a><u><o:p></o:p></u></span></div>
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Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-21870470402322437982018-08-14T07:19:00.002-07:002018-08-16T07:14:37.037-07:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Ernest
& Hadley & Sara & Clara<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Reading
and traveling go together like wine and cheese, each enhancing the pleasures of
the other. In preparation for a trip to Paris this summer to attend the Hemingway Society conference, I decided to reread <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Moveable Feast, </i>Hemingway’s memoir of
his years as a young writer in Paris, written near the end of his life and
published after his death. In discovering the city, he discovered his life as a
writer of fiction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I
had not read Paula McClain’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Paris
Wife</i> when it came out in 2011, so I decided to read it alongside <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Moveable Feast. </i>I would read Hemingway’s
mostly true words about Paris in the twenties, when he was married to Hadley
Richardson, and then read the voice of Hadley as created by McClain, narrating
those same events from the fictionalized wife’s perspective. He said, she said.
She said, he said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">This
time, I read the “restored” edition of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Feast,
</i>which includes material omitted from the initial version. At the end, the
editor, Hemingway’s grandson </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Seán</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">, placed a number of manuscript fragments,
beginnings of the beginnings of the book, what would become the Preface. All
together, read against one another in what becomes a kind of impromptu word collage/prose
poem, they sound like Gertrude Stein, with her inversions and repetitions. The
first fragment begins: “This book is fiction. I have left out much and changed
and eliminated and I hope Hadley understands. She will see why I hope.” Another
version: “This book is all fiction and the fiction may throw some light on what
has been written as fact. Hadley is the heroine and I hope she will understand
and forgive me for writing fiction, some others never will.” And another, farther
down: “It was necessary to write as fiction rather than as fact and Hadley
would understand I hope why it was necessary to use certain materials or
fiction rightly or wrongly. All remembrance of things past is fiction and this
fiction has been cut ruthlessly and people cut away just as most of the voyages
are gone along with people that we cared for deeply.” In the end, what was
published was this: “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as
fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw
some light on what has been written as fact.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">So,
we can say, mostly true. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Paris Wife, </i>of
course, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is </i>labeled “a novel,” a work
of fiction with made-up dialogue and Hadley’s inner life imagined by the
author. I turned to McClain’s “Note on Sources” at the back of the book first, and
was happy to see that she had attempted “to render the particulars of their
lives as accurately as possible, and to follow the very well documented
historical record” as she further explored the emotional lives of these
characters through her fiction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">When
reading historically based novels, I now read the author’s note first, having
discovered <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">after </i>reading Joseph O’
Connor’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ghost Light, </i>based on
playwright J. M. Synge, that he had made up great parts of the story. O’Connor
writes in his “Acknowledgments and Caveat” at the end of the book, “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ghost Light </i>is a work of fiction,
frequently taking immense liberties with fact. … Chronologies, geographies and
portrayals appearing in this novel are not to be relied upon by the researcher.
…Most events in this book never happened at all. Certain biographers will want
to beat me with a turf shovel.” I had the awful feeling of not being able to go
back and unlearn the story I’d absorbed. It wasn’t so much that I minded what
he’d done, just that I didn’t know from the beginning to take it all with a
grain of salt.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Reading
the two voices, Ernest’s and Hadley’s, in a sense in dialogue with one another
in my reading mind, was an enriching experience, the two perspectives intertwining
to create the story of a marriage, of being young and hopeful and impetuous, of
thinking you have only good in your future, of walking down cold streets at
midnight, a little drunk, and being happy. It tied in with my current writing
project, a biography of Sara Mayfield, herself a biographer of Hemingway’s
contemporaries, the Fitzgeralds and the Menckens, Sara having been friends with
Zelda Sayre and Sara Haardt in Montgomery as girls before they grew up and married
their writer husbands.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Sara
was a copious journal keeper and letter writer. When she first visited Paris as a teenager in 1922, she wrote, “My darling Mother & Father, So this is
Paris!! It really is, I can’t believe it.” When she returned in 1926, at the
age of twenty, she wrote her parents, rapturously: “A lifetime isn’t long
enough to live in Paris. I have enjoyed this past week more than any other of
my life.” Two years later, drawn again to Paris, she did freelance work for the
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Paris Herald </i>and, after working, “frequently
idled along the quais in the late sunshine, watching the boats lower their
stacks as they passed under the Pont Neuf, the fishermen casting their lines
from the abutments of the bridge, and the artists at their easels painting the
narrow streets of the Ile de la Cité, which looked as if they might have been
stage sets done by Utrillo.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In
her book on the Fitzgeralds, Sara wrote “As far as I know, philosophers have
never decided what the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">summum bonum </i>of
life is; but Zelda and I once agreed that we would settle for being young and
in love in Paris in the springtime.” And Sara did fall in love there, with a
young newspaperman, writing to a friend “of swift, floating kisses, sweeter for
their swiftness, of days that were a song and nights that were a dream—a Paris
that shelters Beck and nurtures an old-fashioned romance!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">She
might well have had with her on her trips to Paris in the 1920s a guidebook
bound in blue cloth with gold lettering, published in 1924, with the sprightly
title <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">So You’re Going to Paris!</i> I
found my copy, serendipitously, in a used bookstore. The author, Clara E.
Laughlin, was a Chicago writer and editor, in age of Sara’s mother’s generation,
but more of Sara’s ilk, an independent woman who made her own way in the world.
She loved travel all her life but came to the writing of travel books around
age fifty, having founded Clara Laughlin Travel Services, specializing in foreign
travel advice and planning for women. In her autobiography, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Traveling Through Life, </i>published in
1934, she describes the writing of that first travel book, the one on Paris. A
good friend and the head of the book department at Marshall Field’s in Chicago,
Marcella Burns Hahner, asked Clara “to write a book on Paris . . . the kind of
book people seem to want when they’re going over. . . a book on Paris I can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sell.”</i> Clara protested that there were
already too many books on the city, but on the way home reflected “if I ever <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">did </i>write a book about Paris, there were
a lot of things I’d do quite differently from any travel book I’d ever seen. …I’d
write it somewhat as I wrote long letters of direction to friends who were
going there. I’d think of Paris from the viewpoint of one who is just beginning
to adventure among its inexhaustible delights. I’d help readers find their way
from one story-spot to another that was its sequence, just as I’d helped friends
when I was in Paris with them….”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Nearly
a hundred years later, while some of her material is dated, much is not. She
writes of having occasionally been burdened by traveling companions who wished
to stop at every statue, marker, or plaque and study it. “Now, I love to loiter
in front of the statues of Paris—they recall so many stories, and they are so
likely to be set up in places where the individual commemorated was a familiar
object when he was clothed in flesh and going about his business. But Paris
would not be so wonderful a Hall of Fame, to me, if it were not also so very
full of people who are being moved by their traditions to make beautiful
to-days and glorious to-morrows. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nothing </i>is
dead, here! Everything is going on and on, passed from hand to eager hand like
a torch making plain the way of truth and beauty.” Apart from a bit of stylistic
hyperbole, Laughlin’s sense of the life of the city, of the way Parisians value
their past (which includes their writers and artists as well as their
politicians and soldiers) while celebrating the pleasures of the present
moment, rang true.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I
had my own Paris moments—a walk with my own love along the Seine near the
Eiffel Tower on a warm evening amongst all the city dwellers seeking a cool
breeze off the river; the waiter who was willing to wink and joke with me
despite my nearly nonexistent French; hearing a French military band play the
American national anthem and then the French in a wooden lecture hall in the
Sorbonne, followed by the two different brilliances of Adam Gopnik and Terry Eagleton,
each celebrating the effect of Paris on writers who came there to find
themselves; the ride in the bateau-mouche at night, passing a jazz band playing </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">on a quay</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">,
amplified by the bridge they stood under, and watching the lights of the city
slide by like a time lapse photo; the afternoon I sat in the shady hotel
courtyard and ate an apple and cheese and read and wrote in my journal and was
perfectly content as pigeons fluttered in the bushes and the Eiffel Tower
peeked at me from over the garden wall.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Paris
is a generator of moments and of stories, and nobody leaves the city without
them. And while there were the few, like Ernest and Hadley, whom we still
remember, who wove their way into our cultural fabric, there were many more
Saras and Claras, lesser lights but lights nevertheless, whose stories I love
learning about, and which deserve to be saved as well.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-66618960189065407152018-04-05T06:38:00.000-07:002018-04-05T06:38:20.027-07:00<br />
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Poetry and Potato
Snacks, Shuttles and Sharing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Living and
teaching in Hickory, North Carolina for the Spring 2018 semester, I have commuted
home to Alabama every two or three weeks, mostly by car but a couple of times by
plane as well, flying out of Charlotte. Both times I’ve used the airport
shuttle, and on the last trip I chatted with my driver about how I came to be in
Hickory. I told her about teaching a poetry workshop, which led to our talking
about a reading at the college the night before with Seamus Heaney’s widow,
Marie, and daughter Catherine, which a friend of hers had attended. She told me
that her mother had written poetry, and we talked about her poems.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Also in the
shuttle was a middle-aged Japanese businessman, friendly but quiet, polite, on
his way home. He and I spoke briefly about the cherry blossoms blooming both in
Hickory and in Japan, and I told him that a friend had recently shared a poem
with me about how much he loved Kyoto. Mostly he just listened to our conversation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">After about an
hour, we arrived in Charlotte, and he was dropped off first. He got out, the van’s
sliding door closed with a thunk, and he and the driver went around to the back
to retrieve his luggage. And then the door opened again, and he was standing
there with a box of potato snacks with Japanese characters on it, handing the tan-and-red
box into the van to me. I thanked him, and he smiled. “I am very happy,” he
said. I could only conclude that it was poetry that had made him so. Something
about the conversation amongst the three of us had refreshed a jet-lagged
businessman, reminding him of the way poetry connects people from all over the
world. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The box had smiling
potato stick-figures, and was, he said, “last one!”—he had apparently brought
several to give away as small gifts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The driver and I
finished the trip, and she promised to send me her mother’s favorite poem, one she
always shared with friends. She told me of her mother and this poem that “<span style="background: white; color: #26282a;">Her only wish was to get it publicized
as widely as possible in order to raise awareness of forgotten people. </span>Up
until her death at age 93, she continued to recite it from memory
whenever/wherever she got the chance.” </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">She </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">gave me
permission to reproduce it, as long as her mother was credited as the author,
so in the spirit of sharing poetry, not knowing what it may bring, I’m doing
that here:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">SHE LIVES ALONE <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">an original poem by DORA PRINCE ROGERS<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Do you know someone who lives alone?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Do you take the time to call her on the phone?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Or do you say “If I call, she may be sleeping.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">When at the time, she may be weeping.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Since her health and her eyesight have failed<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">She can’t drive her car—can’t even read her mail.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">You think, “She’s OK; her groceries are delivered to her
door, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">And I told her to call if she needed anything more.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">She COULD call 911 if she was injured or dizzy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But she COULDN’T call a friend—they might be busy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Maybe you could take her for a ride in your car.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">She wouldn’t want to go very far.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Just up the street to see that brand-new store.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(The one that’s been there a year or more.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Perhaps you’d be surprised at the happiness you shared<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #26282a; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">By just letting someone know you cared. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-87654531387669654382017-01-26T11:45:00.002-08:002017-01-26T11:45:29.043-08:00A Far Cry from Cottondale<br /><div class="MsoNormal">
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One of my favorite reading habits is finding books related
to a travel destination. Reading in advance creates anticipation, and reading
while I’m there gives me the satisfying <i>frisson</i>
of recognizing landmarks “in real life” that I’ve just seen in a book.</div>
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On a recent trip to London, I took Muriel Spark’s <i>A Far Cry from Kensington</i> with me. The
neighborhood of Kensington is near that of Bayswater, where we were staying, so
I could imagine the main character of the book walking the same streets I was
walking, along the Broad Walk in Hyde Park, past the Victoria and Albert
Museum, or along Oxford Street or Notting Hill Gate. Even better, the narrator
of the book, Mrs. Hawkins, a war-widowed but still-young woman living in 1950s
London, works as an editor at several publishing houses and describes her neighbors,
co-workers, and various authors with both affection and humor. There’s only one
would-be author, an untalented <i>poseur</i>
and generally mean guy (he intentionally puts mustard on a sausage roll and
feeds it to a dog in a pub!) that she really dislikes, and she repeatedly calls
him, to his face, a “pisseur de copie,” that is, “a urinator of journalist
copy.” The book is full of wry observations and practical advice, which you can
read more about at The Awl, <a href="https://theawl.com/better-boundaries-with-muriel-spark-a71c5f0ca84c#.hzc9ekjjl" target="_blank">here</a>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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With an e-reader, it’s become easy to download
out-of-copyright books to read on your journey without carrying a suitcase full
of old books. They’re generally free or nearly so. I found the following to take with me electronically:
<i>Bohemia in London </i>(1912), by Arthur
Ransome, well before he became famous for his <i>Swallows and Amazons</i> series; <i>The
Fascination of London: Kensington </i>(1903) by G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton;
<i>The History of London </i>(1894) by
Walter Besant; <i>Dickens’ London</i> (1903)
by Francis Miltoun (also author of <i>Dumas’
Paris</i>); and two collections of fiction, by E.M. Delafield, who wrote <i>The Provincial Lady </i>collection, and E.
F. Benson, who wrote the <i>Queen Lucia</i>
books. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Of course I didn’t have time to read all of these—I’d never
have left the hotel!—but it was a treat to dip into them, sampling sections as
they caught my attention. For contemporary “travel reading” of a sort, it was
also informative and at times instructive to read the London papers provided
daily by the hotel, for news on matters domestic and international.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Of the older books, the one I most enjoyed was Ransome’s <i>Bohemia in London</i>, and I found myself
bookmarking page after page. Here are a few of my favorite quotations:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<ul>
<li>“I do not know quite what it is that leads artists and
writers and others whose lives are not cut to the regular pattern, to leave
their homes, or the existences arranged for them by their relations, for a life
that is seldom as comfortable, scarcely ever as healthy, and nearly always more
precarious.”</li>
<li>“It is odd to think of the days when a shilling dinner was
beyond achievement, when a sandwich and a couple of bananas seemed a supper for
a Shakespeare. Yet those were happy days, and had their luxuries.”</li>
<li>From the chapter “The Book-Shops of Bohemia”: “. . . the
people who buy in the ordinary shops are disheartening. There is no spirit
about them, no enthusiasm. You cannot sympathize with them over a
disappointment nor smile your congratulations over a prize—they need neither.
They are buying books for other people, not to read themselves. The books they
buy are doomed, Christmas or birthday presents, to lie about on drawing-room
tables. I am sorry for those people, but I am sorrier for the books. For a book
is of its essence a talkative, companionable thing, or a meditative and wise;
and think of the shackling monotony of life on a drawing-room table, unable to
be garrulous, being uncut, and unable to be contemplative in the din of all
that cackle.”</li>
</ul>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m still dipping into those books, even though I’m back
home in Alabama, enjoying the memories of the streets I walked and the places I
visited. London is indeed a far cry from Cottondale, but I can travel there any
time in these pages.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Susan Cushman talks about my own book of travel poems at <a href="http://susancushman.com/traveling-the-world-with-poet-jennifer-horne/">http://susancushman.com/traveling-the-world-with-poet-jennifer-horne/</a><o:p></o:p></div>
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Photo credit: The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, "In Kensington Gardens, London, England," 1901. <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11.016px; font-weight: bold;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 9.9144px;">http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2007675568/</span></div>
Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-83732393199471390872016-08-10T11:49:00.001-07:002016-08-10T11:49:06.578-07:00<div class="MsoPlainText">
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<b><span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif; font-size: 12pt;">YEATS INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL READING, July 27, 2016</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Thank you for being here. </span><span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Thanks especially to the Yeats Society, Ian Kennedy, and the Summer School, and
to director Geraldine Higgins for the
invitation to read. Thanks to Liber bookstore for stocking my book and to Margaret Raftery for handling sales. I’m delighted that my husband, Don, is here, and it’s
wonderful to see our friends the poet Joan McBreen and her husband, Joe, as
well as Mark Dawson, a poet and a friend of thirty years, all the way back to
graduate school in Alabama. I’m very happy to see friends from previous years
as well.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif; font-size: 12pt;">I first discovered the Yeats International Summer School when my
husband brought a group of students from the University of Alabama on a summer
program to Ireland, and we spent a weekend in Sligo. I was intrigued to learn
about the school, and came back a couple of years later for a whole week. I
guess I got hooked, and in a good way—this is my seventh time at the School!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif; font-size: 12pt;">So it’s a great pleasure to have the opportunity to read from this
brand-new book, <i>Little Wanderer,</i> from <a href="http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=395&a=286" target="_blank">Salmon Poetry</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif; font-size: 12pt;">My first book of poems, <i>Bottle Tree,</i> focused
heavily on the American South, while this one ranges across a number of
different countries. This second book, I believe, bears the influence of my
studies in the Yeats School, which has expanded my knowledge of poetry as well
as my vision of what poetry can do and be, as a result of the many fine
lectures I’ve heard and seminars I’ve attended, with Patrick Crotty, Jonathan
Allison, Bernard O’Donahue, Lauren Arrington, Helen Vendler, Lucy McDiarmid,
and, this year, Rand Brandes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Eudora Welty said that to comprehend one place is to understand
all places better, and I think you could also say that to comprehend one poet,
especially such a poet as Yeats, is to understand all poetry—including one’s
own—better. That’s certainly been true for me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif; font-size: 12pt;">So, on to my own.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Little Wanderer</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> is made up of four
sections, starting in southern Europe, going east to Romania and the Czech
Republic, working north to England and then Ireland, and finally returning
west, to home, which for me is the southern states of Arkansas and Alabama. I
thought I’d read a sampler of poems, some from each section. These are,
certainly, poems of travel, of adventures and encounters and surprises. I also
hope that they are poems that raise questions of how to <i>be</i> in
the world, of our responses and responsibilities. As an American writer I’m
acutely aware of the influence of the U.S. government on world events, and of
how I move around the world as an American citizen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif; font-size: 12pt;">But I’ll begin with a more interior poem, the first poem in the
book, “Principles of Flight.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Principles
of Flight<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You
ask what I know about it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I
gain momentum, am off<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">and
afloat on currents. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Birds
flip past on jaunty wings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I
have been practicing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">the
etiquette of the traveler,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">the
grace of the grateful guest<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">as
she takes her leave.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Our
backyard garden grows richly,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I
know. Have you seen <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">the
runway lights,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">how
they bud at dusk? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In
the middle of goodbyes,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I
still can see the blue hydrangeas,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">full
against the white brick porch <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">where
flight began.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Here
is the resolution<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">to
my headstrong departure:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Leaving,
I savor the thought <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">of
return to our soft bed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif; font-size: 12pt;">*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif; font-size: 12pt;">I closed with a poem written for my friend Gretchen McCullough
when she was leaving Tuscaloosa to go to the American University in Cairo,
where she still teaches:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">A Poem for Leaving<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";"> —for
Gretchen<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">The bright blue sky we woke to<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">proclaims: good weather for travelers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">Knowing you leave soon,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">I search for a charm,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">the stone/shell/bone/sign/word<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">to keep you safe under that other blue sky,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">the one you travel to as if<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">on some magic flying carpet,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">strong and wide enough to hold<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">your two hefty suitcases,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">travel bag, light reading,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">xeroxed grammar worksheets.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">Do you, can you, know<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">what else you take with you?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">We're under your fingernails,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">lodged in your throat,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">you've got this red dirt <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">running through your blood.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">We know you won't forget us—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">it's too late for that, even though<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">we're not on that massive yellow-pad list.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">Take us, take this moment,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">find a niche in the suitcase,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">pull us out for luck, or comfort,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">when you need it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">Travel’s coordinates are distance and time,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">little things, really, small matters,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";">next to love’s bright lines.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-45958257975298858072016-05-08T06:04:00.004-07:002016-05-08T06:04:52.264-07:00A Mother's Day Fable<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
A Mother’s Day Fable</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
by Jennifer Horne</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
A bunch of moms
were sitting around having cocktails at the Afterlife Lounge, watching a
beautiful sunset. They were fairly recent arrivals and still felt connected to
life on Earth and the human calendar. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
One mom said, “Did
you all know tomorrow is Mother’s Day on Earth?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
There was a
general sigh around the table. More drinks were ordered.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
One of the more
smart-mouthed moms said, “You know what I never liked about Mother’s Day? Burnt
toast and runny eggs in bed!” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="background: white;">"For me it was hard rolls you could
build a wall with,” said another. “Almost broke a tooth one Mother's
Day!"</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
“Ohhh,” said a
sweet mom. “But they were so adorable, bringing us breakfast in bed.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
“Yeah,” said the
smart-mouthed mom. “I’ll grant you that. But it got old, pretending to like
burnt toast and runny eggs.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
Yet another mom
said, reflectively, “What I don’t like about it is all the fine Sundays in May
I spent being sad about my <i>own</i> mother
not being there. Twenty years’ worth, days I can’t get back. What a waste!”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
The other mothers
sipped their drinks and listened.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
“I mean, now, with
all we know”—the other moms nodded—“I can see that I could have held a party in
her honor, or taken a hike, or handed out homemade chocolate chip cookies
(never raisin cookies, because they are just a disappointment) to random
strangers, or <i>something</i> to celebrate
being alive, the gift of having been brought into the world and fed and taken
care of, the gift of being loved.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
“Hey,” said
smart-mouth. “Not all mothers are so great. Not all mothers feel the love.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
“I know,” said the
mother, “and that is truly sad. But most of us muddled through all right, and I
just wish I could tell the kids it’s all going to be okay.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
“Really? Are you
sure of that?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
“Well, no, I’m
not. Epistemologically speaking, I’m not even sure we’re having this
conversation.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
Socrates, the
bartender, chimed in. “I’m pretty sure you are. It’s the same conversation all
you newly arrived moms have. But what do I know? I used to be a philosopher,
and now I’m just a guy who drank hemlock, as far as most people on Earth are
concerned.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
Warming up, he
continued: “All you know when you’re there is that you’re there. You savor the
moments as best you can, if you have any sense, and then something else
happens.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
A mother who had
not spoken yet said, “Something that used to help me when I missed my mother
was to look through her eyes for a few minutes, or even a whole hour. I’d just
imagine I was seeing what she’d see, and suddenly she’d be there with me, and
I’d have a different perspective on the whole thing, and I’d feel loved.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
The other mothers
smiled, imagining. Their own mothers
smiled, knowing. And all the mothers, back to the very beginning, smiled,
remembering.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;">
The End</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1MQGQtXBNQ-5rscNSKkGIjBWi_maIpkuDLDsk9I7YPgGOUBFCMQTCoRoHicD-GVf54y0gUHZRktx06iDbuIaXViDvJ3AS4ziPDlk7-oHLk0gCziebibRRtq6ntuGdkPLJK_QM5SQtQ1MU/s1600/Dodie+Walton+Horne+by+Jim+Few.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="184" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1MQGQtXBNQ-5rscNSKkGIjBWi_maIpkuDLDsk9I7YPgGOUBFCMQTCoRoHicD-GVf54y0gUHZRktx06iDbuIaXViDvJ3AS4ziPDlk7-oHLk0gCziebibRRtq6ntuGdkPLJK_QM5SQtQ1MU/s320/Dodie+Walton+Horne+by+Jim+Few.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">Dodie Walton Horne, 1934-1994. Photo by Jim Few.</span></div>
Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-22562946064026141512016-01-04T12:31:00.001-08:002016-05-05T12:46:18.843-07:00Elvis Sightings and Copyright Law<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh92CLCpX5_7ReCu3s0iK_X62OC8ZWCtsBY1wxWGd4rHXnVQoYhcha76Flefl0OI2YDVZmqOgiDCY8X1O-NenewlypDOcNFK53vZ4tMfS7L46oqfbjyhI59pmOTYOJazQwrr6CuLE-X7cFp/s1600/birthday+deer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh92CLCpX5_7ReCu3s0iK_X62OC8ZWCtsBY1wxWGd4rHXnVQoYhcha76Flefl0OI2YDVZmqOgiDCY8X1O-NenewlypDOcNFK53vZ4tMfS7L46oqfbjyhI59pmOTYOJazQwrr6CuLE-X7cFp/s320/birthday+deer.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My Elvis sighting: reincarnated as a deer . . .</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">One evening, my husband and I
were sitting around discussing copyright law. Maybe “wondering about” is the
better phrase—copyright law is complicated and you </span>probably <span style="font-family: inherit;">should be sitting
down when you try to figure it out. Our reason for even beginning
to tangle with its complexities was that we’d been talking about an author, now
gone, whose work we like, and we started getting curious about whether his
stories were in the public domain and could be collected and published.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The U.S. Copyright Office’s
information in the <a href="https://www.copyright.com/Services/copyrightoncampus/basics/law.html" target="_blank">“Copyright Basics”</a> section of the website was pretty clear
about public domain: “Essentially, all works
first published in the United States before 1923 are considered to be in the
public domain in the United States. The public domain also extends to works
published between 1923 and 1963 on which copyright registrations were not
renewed.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The law gets more
complicated in regard to later works, says the Copyright Office guide: <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“The term of
copyright protection depends upon the date of creation. A work created on or
after January 1, 1978, is ordinarily protected by copyright from the moment of
its creation until 70 years after the author's death.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">For works made for
hire, anonymous works and pseudonymous works (unless the author's identity is
revealed in Copyright Office records), the duration of copyright is 95 years
from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">For works created,
published or registered before January 1, 1978, or for more detailed
information, you may wish to refer to the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>public domain<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>section of this guide.”<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The <a href="https://www.copyright.com/Services/copyrightoncampus/basics/law_public.html" target="_blank">public domain</a>
section sends you to a great little chart. The law makes a distinction between
date of creation and date of publication and also takes into account when the
author died and a set period of time after that. We finally decided that it’s
possible we might be able to collect and publish at least some of that author’s
work, so that evening’s discussion was tabled (or couched, since we were now
sitting in the living room) until we wanted to look further into the project.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Looking at the
website though, had yielded a couple of unexpected gems in the Frequently Asked
Questions section. Among the standard questions you’d expect—“How do I protect
my idea?” and “How do I copyright a name, title, slogan or logo?”—was “Can I get a star named after me and
claim copyright to it?” Apparently this question, which had never occurred to
me, is common enough that it’s listed among the FAQs. I imagined the hundreds
(thousands? more?) Americans who are longing not only to have a star named
after them but to protect the naming of it with copyright. Maybe NASA could
make use of this apparent nascent desire among the populace to be celestially
recognized.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Better even than that, though, was question
number ten of twelve: “Can I protect my
sighting of Elvis?” Sadly, you cannot. But there’s a glimmer of hope: <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;">“Copyright
law does not protect sightings. However, copyright law will protect your photo
(or other depiction) of your sighting of Elvis. File your claim to copyright
online by means of the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span style="background: white; color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">electronic Copyright Office</span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;"> </span><span style="background: white;">(eCO).
Pay the fee online and attach a copy of your photo. For more information on
registering a copyright, see</span> </span><span style="background: white; color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">SL-35</span><span style="background: white;">. No one can lawfully use your photo of your
sighting, although someone else may file his own photo of his sighting.
Copyright law protects the original photograph, not the subject of the
photograph.”<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The intersection
of Elvis sightings and copyright law has got to be one of the great
juxtapositions of pop culture and legal language, and the wording of the answer
to the question bears a bit of explicating. Nowhere is there a hint of doubt or
condescension about the veracity of your Elvis sighting; for the purposes of
law, the answer doesn’t question the sighting. It even reassures you that you
have the right for “your photo (or other depiction)” to be protected from
unlawful use. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">If, however, your
grandmother experienced an Elvis sighting and you wish to reproduce her
photograph, you could run into trouble, as the plaintive question “<span style="background: white;"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">My local copying store will not make reproductions of old family photographs.
What can I do?</span>” s</span>uggests. The
answer to that question is found in a section with a catchy title that sounds like a country music song: “Can
I Use Someone Else’s Work? Can Someone Else Use Mine?” (I can’t copyright that
title, by the way, so if it inspires you, knock yourself out.)</span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span>Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-83867859516380205122015-10-11T12:29:00.000-07:002015-11-25T09:09:04.214-08:00The View from the Signing Table<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkwMwwvCh_vTg6O-T3n-i68CdERaBOvubXIKQP7z8nWtKAmJkV40o_VbI1018D_K2yUhfvQvQu5dy-fsHyzt72vmMAVoRZ4ozv4AQbgSm674EG_sNeNy2kJ3Nk-cpcWi-63mp6iCdokKvo/s1600/Southern+Festival+of+Books+2015_web.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkwMwwvCh_vTg6O-T3n-i68CdERaBOvubXIKQP7z8nWtKAmJkV40o_VbI1018D_K2yUhfvQvQu5dy-fsHyzt72vmMAVoRZ4ozv4AQbgSm674EG_sNeNy2kJ3Nk-cpcWi-63mp6iCdokKvo/s320/Southern+Festival+of+Books+2015_web.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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I’ve had four book events in the past four weekends, with
two<span style="font-size: large;"> </span>more to come in October. Pausing to reflect on where I’ve been before I go
forward, I’m thinking of the places I traveled to: Memphis & Little Rock,
Columbus, Georgia, Fairhope, Alabama, and Nashville. I feel so lucky to have
gotten to a point where I get to go places and talk about my books in
particular and writing in general: what a gift. As a budding writer, I wrote a
poem in which I described my hope of achieving “a place on the shelf,” and now
I have.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I’ve been publishing books since 2003 but I find I still get
excited about getting to wear an author badge and get up in front of people to
read and talk. When I’m nervous about my performance or afraid no one will show
up, I always remind myself that there will be at least one person who gets
something he or she needs, whether I hear about it or not, and that at least
one good thing will come out of my being there. I’ve never been wrong yet.</div>
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As I think about the past month, it’s details and moments that
stick in my mind: the woman at a salon in Memphis who choked up a little bit
talking about one of my stories and what the main character meant to her, and
how I choked up a little bit hearing her and responding. In Little Rock, at the
Farmers’ Market, I read my story “Sandra” about a young writer who develops a
kind of friendship with a homeless woman via the baked goods she buys her every
day, and as we sat around afterwards a man came up asking if we had any work he
could do because he was hungry, and no one did but I asked if he liked granola
bars and when he said yes gave him some. </div>
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In Columbus I met friends for a drink and then zipped off to
the public library to hear two poets read, poets whose work I hadn’t known
before but loved, and loved that pure sitting-and-listening feeling that
sometimes slips away in the conference buzz of arrangements and
acquaintanceships. An elderly, physically bent couple sat on the front row of
the reading, having gotten themselves there at night when it was probably not
easy for them to drive, or to walk from the parking lot to the auditorium, but
they were there to be fed by poetry, so it was worth it. I was having dinner in
the hotel lobby afterwards when another writer came in and I asked her to join
me, and over wine and flatbread pizza we discovered how much we had in common
and I knew I’d made a new friend. The next day I was asked to join a discussion
panel right before it started, and even though <i>I hadn’t prepared</i> I was still okay with it: I had things to say. In
fact I’ve been preparing all my life. </div>
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In Fairhope I sat in a friend’s cottage and listened to a
song that had been written from one of my stories for the Trio project. A song.
Written by Mary Gauthier from a story I wrote. I’m pretty much still tingling. (You
can listen to it at this link: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3WCZ_7EeDg">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3WCZ_7EeDg</a>).
At the Fairhope festival of art and books I wandered over into the birding
festival going on next door and saw a presentation on owls—the white-faced barn
owl named Luna, so unearthly looking, is going to find her way into a poem or
story, I’m sure. </div>
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And this past weekend in Nashville, I came full circle and
was on a panel with a writer who lives in Memphis and would’ve been at that
salon a month ago if she hadn’t been teaching that night. Our panel was at the
same time as Pat Conroy’s session—the second book festival at which this has
happened—so I was grateful anyone showed up at all. The great thing about being
on at the same time as Pat Conroy is that you then get to sit at the signing
table at the same time as him, and watch how he greets every single person
freshly, totally at ease and totally himself and enjoying being there, talking with
his readers and getting his picture taken with them, cracking a joke, hearing
the hard stories people bring him. When you’re sitting next to Pat Conroy at
the signing table and he takes money from his wallet and asks you to go buy your
book and sign it to him, and you’ve been admiring his work since you were
fourteen and saw <i>Conrack</i> at the
Heights Theatre in Little Rock and then read the book it was made from, <i>The Water Is Wide,</i> you don’t need
anything more. Nor do you need a better model for hard work and bigheartedness,
as you go forward with your writer’s life.</div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">(My thanks to Sonja Livingston for pointing out our
amusing view of the backside of the sculpture “Victory” at the Legislative
Plaza in Nashville.)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-6438871500313352442015-06-12T08:48:00.001-07:002016-05-10T07:33:56.437-07:00Found Photos, Monroeville, and Truman Capote<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_nnfU5IWHEw0JsrpaadQeVPVmKhSJ77XiWKjFuQQ1wjpU9ZMZW_5_p8OgCWjJg0tHAeCsSHmp-rHAVgHvVw2HLJetH7NMZZuvbJNMG6ZPemwpF86-DRXOHNoAAxu47BDXuj_M7MWx3HkC/s1600/Monroeville+photo+for+The+Other+Grandparents.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_nnfU5IWHEw0JsrpaadQeVPVmKhSJ77XiWKjFuQQ1wjpU9ZMZW_5_p8OgCWjJg0tHAeCsSHmp-rHAVgHvVw2HLJetH7NMZZuvbJNMG6ZPemwpF86-DRXOHNoAAxu47BDXuj_M7MWx3HkC/s320/Monroeville+photo+for+The+Other+Grandparents.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Photos can be great inspirations for stories. I found this one in the <a href="http://www.monroecountymuseum.org/#!gift-shop/c1d7m" target="_blank">Monroe County Museum Store</a> in the old courthouse (yes, the famous one) in Monroeville, Alabama, in a giant basket of photos tucked under a table. Standing there in the museum store looking at a picture of a party, I immediately thought of Truman Capote's story "Children on Their Birthdays," and my story, "The Other Grandparents," was born. Here's how my story, published in <i>Tell the World You're a Wildflower</i>, begins:<br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new"; line-height: 200%;">My
mother only this week told me the story of when Truman Capote came to her
seventh birthday party. He didn’t come to Arkansas where she grew up—not ever,
that I know of. She was visiting cousins in Monroeville, Alabama, and, as the
visit fell on her birthday, they threw her a party with the neighbor children
in attendance. In a picture from that day my mother showed me, the girls are in
frilly white dresses with anklet socks and sandals or patent-leather shoes. Mr.
Capote is in the picture as well, speaking to my grandmother, who at that time
of course was a pretty, still-young woman in a becoming dress. My mother’s first
cousin Jenny was a poised and precocious child, which makes me wonder whether
Truman Capote got his inspiration for “Children on Their Birthdays” from that
party. He, too, must have been visiting cousins in Monroeville. Thankfully,
unlike Miss Bobbitt in the story, no one was hit by the six o’clock bus that
day, but something did happen, something my mother both knows and does not
know. What she knows is that Mr. Capote said something extraordinary to her
mother, and that she was never quite the same afterwards. What she does not
know, because she never found the right moment to ask in the years before her
mother died, is what he said, or why he was moved to say it. It seems possible
to me that this black-and-white almost chiaroscuro photo was taken just as he
was speaking to her and that it captured her psychic state. Her head seems
light, fuzzy, almost immaterial, not a lack of focus or a flaw in the equipment
but a true picture of how she felt. She is half-turned, in profile, while he is
facing the camera, though with dark sunglasses that hide his eyes. He looks
annoyed at the photographer or perhaps just at the glare of the afternoon light
and the emptiness of his highball glass. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new"; line-height: 200%;">My
mother, Susanna, said that her mother, Lucy, had taken her down to Alabama on
the train, a long journey and not direct, to get away from her father for a
little while. “She would take these breaks periodically,” my mother told me,
“when his goodness just got to be too much for her.” My grandfather—named
Franklin, after FDR—was ever patient, kind, temperate, helpful, easygoing,
understanding, and loving. For a woman of my grandmother’s temperament who
needed to kick up her heels, kick off the traces, and in general just kick back
every once in a while, his saintliness made her feel shallow and selfish, so
when she felt a little evil coming on, she’d pack up a suitcase and take my
mother to visit some cousins, of whom she had plenty, and she would smoke and
drink and gossip and cackle until she got it out of her system and she could
once again appreciate the many fine qualities of my grandfather.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "courier new"; line-height: 200%;">After
this trip, though, after whatever Mr. Capote said to her, she began,
occasionally, to talk to herself in the morning while she made coffee, along
the lines, my mother said, of someone arguing with herself: “Well, why don’t
you? But what good would it do now? Well, you won’t ever know if you don’t try,
will you? Water under the bridge, my dear, water . . . under . . . bridge.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new"; line-height: 200%;">On
the day she died, many years later, she uttered a cryptic statement that made
my mother wonder further: “He was right—I wasn’t as bad as I thought I was.
That was true.” Or “Tru.” Of course it wasn’t possible to know. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-42648701152301560992015-04-13T09:07:00.000-07:002016-05-10T07:34:56.929-07:00Rhoda Ellison & Huntingdon College<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_Xi7RqH0Em0K_gSkztFeEgd4uMdScdZR3d_fquoXMFGFD2xsIlA8EcXDGb6G5wIBnnIy7wSNrYbcSLaeFFEukobZqyoCUVNXyxOKmZXa15kbONRFijLRzq6uRUrXZwYSoWQfhpOTXVCgK/s1600/rhoda+coleman+ellison+from+huntingdon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_Xi7RqH0Em0K_gSkztFeEgd4uMdScdZR3d_fquoXMFGFD2xsIlA8EcXDGb6G5wIBnnIy7wSNrYbcSLaeFFEukobZqyoCUVNXyxOKmZXa15kbONRFijLRzq6uRUrXZwYSoWQfhpOTXVCgK/s1600/rhoda+coleman+ellison+from+huntingdon.jpg" width="186" /></a></div>
<br />
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I recently gave the 2015 Rhoda
Coleman Ellison lecture at Huntingdon College, where I did a reading in Ligon
Chapel in Flowers Hall, met with two classes composed of very impressive students,
and got to talk about my work in progress on Sara Mayfield. I’m posting my
introductory comments for my reading because I was so impressed to learn about
Rhoda Ellison and what a remarkable person she was. (This photo of her is from
Huntingdon College’s Facebook page.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Here’s what I said:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Thank you so much for having me at Huntingdon. I’m
honored to be here and to read in this beautiful space.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>I want to thank, specifically, President West, the English
Department, especially chairperson Dr. Jennifer Fremlin, and professors Jim Hilgartner
and Mandy McMichael for inviting me into their classrooms. Thanks to Kristi
McDaniel for making everything run so smoothly.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Thanks also to Thomas and Cheryl Upchurch of Capitol
Book and News for handling the book table tonight.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>And finally, I’m grateful to Dr. Rhoda Ellison for
establishing this lecture series. From what I’ve been able to learn about her,
I wish I’d had the opportunity to know her.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>When I found out I would be giving the Rhoda Coleman Ellison
Lecture, I remembered that a friend in Tuscaloosa, Frances Tucker, had told me
that she was a student of Dr. Ellison’s. It seems like, so often, named
lectures, buildings, prizes become written in stone, and the human behind the
name disappears. So I wanted to learn more about who Rhoda Ellison was. Frances,
who was at Huntingdon in the 1950s, told me that in her first week of Freshman
English, Dr. Ellison had read aloud Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” Frances said
that Dr. Ellison’s reading was so powerful it made her hair stand on end! An
art major—and there were perks to being an art major in those days, as they
were the only ones allowed to wear jeans on campus—Frances was nevertheless
convinced by Dr. Ellison to become an English major, and also went to work for
her. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>I learned that Dr. Ellison was educated at Randolph-Macon,
in Virginia; at Columbia, in New York City; and at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill—quite a cultural stretch for a young woman from Centreville,
Alabama, in the 1920s. As late as the 1960s, many Ph.D. programs discouraged
women students—including the young Helen Vendler, who would become a celebrated
poetry critic –on the grounds that educating them would be simply a waste, as
they were destined for marriage and motherhood. For my friend, and I know for
many other young women, Dr. Ellison was a model of accomplishment and a
significant intellectual influence on their lives. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>I have also learned that Dr. Ellison was a scholar—a
historian, critic, and bibliographer. As many of you will know, among her seven
books, Dr. Ellison wrote a history of Huntingdon from 1854-1954, published by
the University of Alabama Press in 1954; a sesquicentennial edition was issued
by Montgomery’s own NewSouth Books in 2004. In a review of the Huntingdon book
published in the Journal of Southern History, Dr. Ellison was referred to as
“an able bibliographer of Alabama imprints and an accomplished member of the
English staff at Huntingdon” and the results of her work deemed “gratifying indeed.” (Vol. 2, No. 2, 1955)<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Another friend, as a young woman with a master’s
degree, was hired by Dr. Ellison to teach at Huntingdon, and remembers how
incredibly bright she was. That friend eventually got her Ph.D. in English and
became chair and then dean at the University of West Alabama.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Both friends agree that Dr. Rhoda Ellison was a
remarkable woman, a scholar, teacher, and world traveler, and that her
intelligence, curiosity, generosity, and engagement with life must have helped
her in passing the century mark. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>While Dr. Ellison was still living, Frances and other
students raised funds to dedicate a room to her in the library. At the
dedication, former students including well-known storyteller Kathryn Tucker
Windham told stories and made everyone laugh. One story of their time on campus,
in the late thirties, involved the rule that young ladies going downtown on the
bus must wear hats and gloves—but instead, said Kathryn, they would stash their
hats and gloves under a hedge near the bus stop, go to town hatless and
gloveless, and retrieve the required attire when they returned to campus.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Much about our attire has changed since the thirties
or the fifties, but many of our concerns have not. As I thought about what I’d
like to read tonight, I decided to focus on one of my main areas of interest,
southern women—as remembered in my poems, memorialized in my nonfiction, and
imagined in my stories. So I’m going to read a bit of each tonight, and I’ll be
happy to talk to you afterwards if you have any questions.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><br clear="all" style="mso-special-character: line-break; page-break-before: always;" />
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Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-77686024623659086202015-03-29T12:18:00.000-07:002015-04-03T10:38:47.290-07:00First Loves<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjusebRNbXWwtERSSCs4FSiNlJUgKq2o8AEou7xSGrlEjItoJCfA9SvvJ2pcwo1Q7G717yvlDwGqgTp8wtjme8pSeTDs9YJNykrhIilqKqaLq5BSJJuvMmRJnFt_K3wq8HiwXjgsk5vRPhB/s1600/Faith+of+a+Writer+Oates+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjusebRNbXWwtERSSCs4FSiNlJUgKq2o8AEou7xSGrlEjItoJCfA9SvvJ2pcwo1Q7G717yvlDwGqgTp8wtjme8pSeTDs9YJNykrhIilqKqaLq5BSJJuvMmRJnFt_K3wq8HiwXjgsk5vRPhB/s1600/Faith+of+a+Writer+Oates+cover.jpg" height="200" width="132" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In teaching a mini-course on Joyce Carol Oates’ book <i>The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art,</i>
I gave my students the assignment of writing about a “first love” in response
to their reading of Oates’ chapter on two of her first loves as a reader—<i>Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland</i> and Frost’s
poem “After Apple Picking.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As I read about a childhood gift from her grandmother, the 1946 “beautifully illustrated copy . . . with its handsome cloth cover embossed
with bizarre creatures and the perpetually astonished-looking Alice in their
midst . . . the great treasure of my childhood,” I realized that this very same
edition graces my bookshelves, and that this <i>Alice</i> and the companion <i>Through
the Looking Glass</i> were a gift to my own mother in her childhood. Opening
the cover I find a child’s handwriting, “To Dodie from Joan.” Later my mother
had written her name in a more grown-up cursive hand: <i>Dodie Walton.</i> So much of my love of books, from early trips to the
library to later conversations and sharing poems, comes from my mother, and
these books exemplify that connection for me.</div>
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As a writer, I tend to think first of books when it comes to
the things that influenced me, but I tried to give my students the latitude of
writing about whatever “first love”—song, work of art, IMAX theater production—inspired
them.</div>
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And then I remembered something I hadn’t thought of in
years, how hearing a song called “The Trumpeter’s Lullaby” had made me want to
learn to play the trumpet. In second or third grade my class at Jefferson
Elementary was taken to hear the Arkansas Symphony, and when the trumpet player
performed that song I was transported. It was the most beautiful thing I had
ever heard. From then on I thought that I would like to learn to play, and
though I suffered through piano lessons and found, as well, that I did not have
the knack for guitar or banjo, I did at least know how to read music when, in
ninth grade, I entered a new school, joined the band, and took up the trumpet.</div>
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At first we rented a clunky silver-ish trumpet from a music
store, where we met the jazz musician Sonny Land (Sonny is a story for another
day), but once I proved my dedication to the instrument, my parents bought me a
gleaming golden horn that I cleaned and polished and generally did right by. Oddly,
although I may have learned “The Trumpeter’s Lullaby,” I don’t recall it being
an important piece for me to play: I had fallen in love with the sound of it, with
what happened to me as I listened to it—a sense of calm, transcendence,
sweetness—and somehow didn’t need to play the song, it having done its work on
me already. Even as an adult when I no longer played, I kept the trumpet, sleeping
in its leather case with blue velvet interior, for sentimental reasons. A year
or so ago, when my grandson decided to take up the trumpet, I knew it would
have a new home with him.</div>
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Perhaps he’ll learn the lullaby—which, when I looked it up,
I was surprised to discover was a relatively new composition, written by Leroy
Anderson in 1949 and premiering with the Boston Pops in 1950, fewer than twenty
years before I first heard it, and which you can listen to here, played by
Wynton Marsalis: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORW7suyvPNk">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORW7suyvPNk</a></div>
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Reference:</div>
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trumpeter%27s_Lullaby">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trumpeter%27s_Lullaby</a></div>
Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-45123525483529598002015-03-06T10:58:00.000-08:002015-03-06T11:06:21.999-08:00Eugene Walter and "A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhLbhrQCQd60W-Ng7aFuDc447CVsNS8d0A1tBwSM5Nh5Rg4GpCcEzwkO4nCbYs7zGdrcis8WPnsp6nfkZVXTCmv-_qpw2YP58e0RL-_AzCX3sW8RjA2cjh1oFDge_Lu5FmBu2pmMKDdjNT/s1600/Eugene+Walter+Press+Register+photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhLbhrQCQd60W-Ng7aFuDc447CVsNS8d0A1tBwSM5Nh5Rg4GpCcEzwkO4nCbYs7zGdrcis8WPnsp6nfkZVXTCmv-_qpw2YP58e0RL-_AzCX3sW8RjA2cjh1oFDge_Lu5FmBu2pmMKDdjNT/s1600/Eugene+Walter+Press+Register+photo.jpg" height="320" width="222" /></a></div>
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In the “Southern Memoir and Southern Culture” class I teach
in the UA Honors College, we recently finished Katherine Clark’s “as told to”
autobiography of Eugene Walter, <i>Milking
the Moon</i>. Eugene, who referred to himself as “a thing let loose” and “an
educated provincial,” grew up in Mobile, joined the Civilian Conservation
Corps, was drafted into the Army for WWII and served as a cryptographer in
Alaska, and, after leaving the military, moved to New York City and then on to
Paris and Rome. He returned to Mobile for the last years of his life where he
livened up any occasion at which he was present.</div>
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I feel so fortunate to have known Eugene a little bit
through meeting him when my husband interviewed him for <i>Bookmark</i>, a literary interview show on public television. He called
me “Blondina,” possibly because he didn’t remember my name—and he may have
called any number of people that!—but it always makes me smile to think of it.
Perhaps he picked up the name in Italy, where he lived for many years. If it’s
the name of a bizarre character in an obscure Fellini film (he also worked
extensively in Italian film), just don’t tell me.</div>
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On the wall in my study is a framed print I made that
reminds me, daily, of one of Eugene’s favorite dicta: “Combat Dailiness!”</div>
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Rereading <i>Milking the Moon,
</i>I found myself marking a number of other “Eugeneisms” and thought I would
share some of them here. I couldn’t bring myself to leave any out, so skim and
enjoy as you will.</div>
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<u>On living:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“In those days, in Mobile, people weren’t as serious about
the eight-to-five world. In fact, there was no eight-to-five world. There was
only the twenty-four-hour, ‘live life on this planet’ world. And that’s why I
haven’t lasted very long in the eight-to-five world.” (29)</div>
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“It’s not true, you know, that we have only one life to
live. We are much more like cats than we know, and we have at least nine lives.
They say that every cell in our body is replaced within a seven-year period. We
shuffle off skin. The blood renews itself. Every seven years we are different.
We shed a skin; we start a new life. And I guess that’s how I look at it.”
(209)</div>
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“You can’t plan a life. So many people think they can, but
then, they don’t even see where they are. They don’t see a strange bird in the sky.
They just don’t see. It’s those blinders that the American educational system
and the big dollar value on everything have put on most people. . . . Somehow, by pure good luck, by a
combination of the nationalities meeting in me, by being triple Sagittarius, I
was spared blinders. I haven’t been smashed by the educational system, the
financial system, the political system. So many people have. I’m so glad I
never wanted to be an adult. I’ve stopped smiling on certain occasions, but I
don’t claim adulthood.” (268)</div>
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“Sometimes you just have to get up and go. Most people make
plans; they don’t understand the importance of impulse. If you have a strong
impulse, obviously there are some waves coming at you from way out there. . . . It may be that people who have not been
suppressed by education have some set of shadow instincts, so they just hear
something, smell something, feel something. I think everybody has it and they
don’t use it. . . .Most people don’t listen to their own bodies or their own
supraconscious. They just don’t listen.” (268)</div>
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<u>On religion:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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I do believe that there is some light, some blinding light,
or some deafening noise, or some inconceivable dimension, up, out, way up, way
out, way off, way down. We don’t begin to understand anything about it. So,
religion should be, for the intelligent person, a conscious seeking to
understand everything. Even to understand a little of everything. And I suppose
for me <i>RC</i> doesn’t stand so much for
Roman Catholic as it does for Rare Comprehension.” (35)</div>
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“God is so bored with people who pray to Him constantly for
nasty little favors. He just wants them to have a good time. Now occasionally I
have asked him to help in moments of crisis. You know, ‘Gee, bubba, I’m having
a rough time. Do what you can.’ I call him Skybubba. ‘Hey, Skybubba, if you’re not
too busy this weekend, see if the mail can get a check to my postbox.’ But He’s
grateful not to hear those stingy prayers all the time. Aristophanes did say
it: God is a comic poet.” (130)</div>
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<u>On certain teachers:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“We all, if we’re lucky, remember a teacher who ‘opened the
door’ for us. They’re not teachers. They don’t teach. The huff and they puff,
they squeal and they squeak, they grasp and they hasp, and they open doors and
windows, and they slam doors and windows, and they suddenly say, ‘Oh, dear,
next week is the last day of school. Write a paper.’ They’re the great teachers.
I call them lid lifters.” (47)</div>
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<u>On interior decorating:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“When I first moved to New York, I took only the bare
essentials: my Remington typewriter, my stuffed monkey in a bell jar, and a box
of gold paper stars to sprinkle on the stairways of my apartment building. The
place was gray walls with that sense of grime. I couldn’t stand it. After I got
there I found some place downtown where you could buy stuff for window
displays, so I just bought bales of gold stars. Every two or three days I’d
freshen them.” (75)</div>
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<u>On being a poet:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“When you say the word <i>poet,</i>
there are people who think of something pale, frail, or a college professor with
a bow tie writing sensitive verses. Or they think of something slightly mad.
But the old Greek word for poet, <i>poiētēs</i>,
means somebody who makes things or makes things happen. I make things happen.”
(97)</div>
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<u>On paying attention:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“These things don’t happen just to me; they happen to
everybody. But most people don’t notice. Once I saw George Balanchine hurrying
down Fifth Avenue, biting his nails. Nobody seemed to notice him; I noticed
him. . . . I think part of it is that I am observant, and most people aren’t.
Most people going from one point to another can’t tell you afterwards what they
might have seen. They’re in their head. They ain’t free. They just ain’t free.
They’re still resentful of something that happened at point A or nervous at
what’s going to happen at point B. And being a backwoods little ole Southern
boy going out into the wide, wide world, maybe I just kept my eyes open. . . .
And I suppose the people I really like are those who have their eyes open.”
(107)</div>
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<u>On behavior:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“I think it’s only the second-rate who take pleasure in
putting people down. I’ve found that the greater the talent, usually the
gentler, kinder, and especially the more humorous they are.” (113)</div>
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“[Anaïs Nin] was more often glitter than real gold. She was
not fun, and that’s the worst thing you can say about anybody, I guess.” (114)</div>
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“[Theodora Roosevelt] was genuinely a lady in the
old-fashioned sense. And what is that? you ask. Well, part of it is the
generous point of view. You give the benefit of the doubt to one and all until
you’re proven wrong, and then you retract your sympathy.” (147)</div>
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“I make a weekly shit list, and when it’s finished, I burn
it. I consign those names to oblivion.” (188)</div>
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<u>On parties:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“I don’t throw parties. I push parties gently forward.”
(121)</div>
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“When you’ve done something to banish the commonplace, it’s
a party.” (163)</div>
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“After all, fun is worth any amount of preparation.” (248)</div>
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“One night there were these dreary professors who were sent
to me from some university. They were brilliant and had published all kinds of
things, but they just weren’t party people. They didn’t realize that unserious
is much more serious than serious.” (249)</div>
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<u>On sex:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“In Europe, one of the first things you see is that sex is a
part of daily life. Like gardening and watching the sky, and gossip. It’s not a
secret suddenly. There is something about making it secret which the Puritans
and the Baptists have done that just has taken the pleasure out of it, I
suppose, and made it like something you have to do to prove you can beat the
system. It’s like cheating on taxes. It’s not living.” (122)</div>
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“I really don’t know all the details because I wasn’t in the
bedroom or the backseat or the barn or the beach or the thicket. And I always
prefer not to know too many details. I don’t mind prying into people’s minds,
but I’m very old-fashioned about some things, because as a poet and humorist, I
can imagine better things than they really do. I mean, my idea of the very best
sex is to be in a phone booth, naked, with a lot of butterflies.” (143)</div>
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<u>On the ship to Paris:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“They had every kind of Dutch gin. The brand that I’d never
heard of before that I really liked was called Wine and Fucking. Wynand
Fockink. It was nothing but Wine and Fucking for me all the way to Paris.”
(127)</div>
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<u>On academia:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“It’s dangerous to fall into the world of academe until you’ve
really thumbed your nose three times in all four directions. East, north,
south, and west. Three times you must thumb your nose in those directions. That’s
an old Gulf Coast charm. Keep you out of trouble.” (140)</div>
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<u>On work:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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At the <i>Paris Review: </i>“We
were doing something; we had a project. But we had no committees. We had no
bookkeepers. We had no timekeepers. And we had no business managers. . . . We
might have all committed suicide if we thought we were doing something of
global significance. Our whole point was the here and now. . . . Here we are making
sparks; that’s why it was fun. Who knows what significance something has when
they are doing it?” (151-153)</div>
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In Rome: “Of course, I stopped everything when the sun went
down to have a dinner party or go out to dinner. Because you can’t be a slave
to anything. You have to switch buttons. Turn something off, turn something else
on.” (228)</div>
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“I guess what I consider work is not what other people
consider work. And what I consider fun is not what other people consider fun.
It’s many a night I stayed up painting scenery or dyeing cloth for something in
the theater or writing something for a magazine. But that’s fun. I don’t think
that’s work.” (233) </div>
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<u>On being Eugene:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“I should have been Boswelling all these years. I’m sure I’ve
forgotten as many stories as I remember. I should have had endless Redbird
notebooks and number 2 pencils. I should have been Boswelling. But I wasn’t. I
was Eugene-ing, which is different.” (174)</div>
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<u>On marionettes:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“Only a fool would not like marionettes. The more
intelligent the person, the more they enjoy things that are miniature.
Everybody of intelligence has something that is miniature.” (210)</div>
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<u>On revolutions:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“Most genuine revolutions are quiet, like the radio, the
sewing machine, Mozart, Michelangelo, Edison, you know. Someone sitting up late
puzzling over things. Blood in the streets is so often not a real revolution.
It’s letting the lid off of built-up steam, an outburst of national hysteria
and irritation, but it ain’t a genuine turnabout.” (225)</div>
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<u>On animals:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“I’ve always had animals. One should never lose contact with
growing things or furry things. Never. Because they say, ‘Well, look here,’ you
know. ‘You are so busy with your problems and your thoughts, and it ain’t like
that. We live in a huge, varied world.’ When I’m feeling at my worst with some of the
disasters that have occurred, I only have to look at these darlings to be
reassured. Because they say: ‘You fool.’
They say: ‘You human fool.’” (247)</div>
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<u>On the past:<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“I’m always thinking much more about next week than I am
about last year.” (269)</div>
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If you’re inspired to learn more about Eugene, the Southern
Literary Trail has a “porch play” set for March 14<sup>th</sup> in Mobile<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="Eugene_Walter_Porch_Play">, “Eugene Walter at Large . . Plus Eugene Talks
Truman!”</a> You can scroll down on this page for the details, plus other trail
events: <a href="http://www.southernliterarytrail.org/events-al.html">http://www.southernliterarytrail.org/events-al.html</a></div>
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You can also do a search on YouTube for clips from the
documentary <i>Last of the Bohemians</i>.<i> </i>(The <i>Bookmark</i> interview isn’t online, but some clips from it were used
in the documentary.)</div>
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A list of Eugene Walter’s books is available on the Alabama
Literary Map at: <a href="http://alabamaliterarymap.lib.ua.edu/author?AuthorID=61">http://alabamaliterarymap.lib.ua.edu/author?AuthorID=61</a></div>
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And finally, a last and grateful thanks to Katherine Clark
for getting Eugene’s life on the page.<br />
<br />
(Photo courtesy Mobile Press-Register files.)</div>
Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-24074367625639624432015-01-21T11:55:00.002-08:002015-01-21T11:55:38.222-08:00Finding PoetrySometimes you find poetry, sometimes it finds you. I've long loved found poems--Maxine Kumin's "You Are In Bear Country" is a favorite--and I like the way keeping an eye out for them makes me more attentive to finding the unusual in the ordinary.<br />
<br />
Using an online dictionary recently I somehow stumbled onto a list of words that rhymed with drumroll. I don't remember how I got there but the rhythms caught my ear and I knew I had a found poem. Here, with a few modifications, originally from merriam-webster.com, is "Rhymes with Drumroll":<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: large;">Rhymes with DRUMROLL</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">airhole</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">armhole</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">bankroll</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">beadroll</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">bedroll</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: windowtext;">blackhole</span></span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">blackpoll</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">blowhole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">borehole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">bunghole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">catchpole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">charcoal</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">chuckhole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">console</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">Creole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">,</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">dipole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">dry
hole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">Dutch
roll</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">egg
roll</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">eyehole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">field
goal</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">fishbowl</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">flagpole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">foxhole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">funk
hole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">hard
coal</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">half
sole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">heart-whole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">hellhole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">insole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">in whole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">keyhole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">kneehole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">knothole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">leafroll</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">logroll</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">loophole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">lost soul, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">manhole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">maypole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">midsole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">Mongol</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">outsole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">payroll</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">peephole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">pesthole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">pinhole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: windowtext;">pitchpole</span></span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">porthole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">posthole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">pothole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">redpoll</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">ridgepole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: windowtext;">Sheol</span></span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">shot
hole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">sinkhole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">ski
pole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <span style="color: windowtext;">slipsole</span>, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">snap
roll</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">sound
hole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">spring
roll</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">tadpole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">taphole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">thumbhole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">top-hole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">touchhole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">washbowl</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">weep
hole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">white
hole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">,<u> </u></span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 12pt;">wormhole</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><u>,</u><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 15pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12pt;">drumroll drumroll drumroll.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA6Vj9Gtr3TnQ_RjUKLw1L8iI7aV8JASd3DlzGnVOevAleyVj6VKWh_b4NsHMmbzA5yXeJQm1SQBQJHhVM4dQPkFodN2yPiaxFdr6ESnEtw1Ssj0k8bdbXgelo0TLbidphSlAmRxybQ13Y/s1600/drumroll.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA6Vj9Gtr3TnQ_RjUKLw1L8iI7aV8JASd3DlzGnVOevAleyVj6VKWh_b4NsHMmbzA5yXeJQm1SQBQJHhVM4dQPkFodN2yPiaxFdr6ESnEtw1Ssj0k8bdbXgelo0TLbidphSlAmRxybQ13Y/s1600/drumroll.jpg" /></a></div>
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Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-88261765622987935762014-10-27T12:13:00.002-07:002016-05-10T07:36:33.110-07:00Two Banquets, One Lesson<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">In
the past two months, with the publication of my first book of short stories,
I’ve enjoyed the excitement and experienced a bit of anxiety as well:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">1.
Yea! My book is out!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">2.
Will anyone buy it or read it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">And
repeat.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Since
all my books are in some way about telling your story and listening for others’
stories,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Tell the World You’re
a Wildflower<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>is part of my
larger project, just in a new genre. I remind myself that I'm in this for the long haul, that, like investing, it doesn't pay to get too crazy over any one day's rise or fall. This literary path I've chosen has its ups and downs, and sometimes it has some enjoyable stops along the way, as well.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">I’ve
been thinking recently about two banquets I attended, one in June, one in
September, and the stories that converged on those nights. These banquets,
being singular events that I am unlikely to attend again, stand out in memory.
They put me in a different setting from my usual haunts, exposed me to new
people, and had the added frisson of public performance, something I like but have to
get my game face on for.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFKat3B7kCR6Pe6B-mxTr0Zho9y0Ekz6INEFpGyVXFMYr6sFloXeuIWujm_XrZs3bqNfMbPiRJH4Z81ke2isbeZUdfWWOwq4VgTUzNUNHHagtHDf_9_aG1pNTq1yX2Lkak_8M7NmLeV1ql/s1600/Banquet+scene+by+Arnold+Genthe+1911+LOC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="177" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFKat3B7kCR6Pe6B-mxTr0Zho9y0Ekz6INEFpGyVXFMYr6sFloXeuIWujm_XrZs3bqNfMbPiRJH4Z81ke2isbeZUdfWWOwq4VgTUzNUNHHagtHDf_9_aG1pNTq1yX2Lkak_8M7NmLeV1ql/s1600/Banquet+scene+by+Arnold+Genthe+1911+LOC.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div align="center" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">(<i>Photo by Arnold Genthe, 1911, Courtesy of the
Library of Congress)</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Part
I:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">The
first, at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, was the 50<sup>th</sup><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>annual Georgia Author of Year awards
banquet, now sponsored by the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/georgia-writers-association" target="_blank"><span style="color: windowtext;">Georgia Writers Association</span></a>.
I’d been asked by the University of Alabama Press, my publisher, to represent
the Press in accepting a posthumous award for the poet Robert Loveman, a Press
author with Alabama affiliations who lived from 1864 to 1923. In addition to
being glad to celebrate a poet’s life, I was happy with the coincidence: I was
married in the Battle-Friedman House, where Robert Loveman lived with his
sister and her family while attending law school at the University of Alabama,
and which he visited for extended periods of time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">I
was working at<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Alabama
Heritage<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>magazine at the
University of Alabama a number of years ago when an article on the
Battle-Friedman gardens being restored to historical accuracy was published,
and I recall the descriptions of Loveman writing poems in the gazebo in those
very gardens. One of his most famous and widely anthologized poems, “Rain
Song”—on which the Al Jolson song “April Showers” was based—was apparently
written in New York City, but Tuscaloosans like to think that the imagery was
inspired by the Battle-Friedman Gardens. Loveman’s niece, Helen Friedman
Blackshear, wrote her master’s thesis at the University of Alabama on her
famous uncle in 1931, eight years after his death. With that example before
her, she went on to become a published poet and fiction writer and served as
Alabama’s poet laureate. She published a wonderful collection of work by all the
laureates up to her time, titled<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>These
I Would Keep,</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>and at the time
of her death at age 92 had recently finished a biography of another famous
Georgia poet, Sidney Lanier.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">This
is how we writers encourage and serve as models for each other, passing along
the gift of our talents and time, one generation to the next.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Preparing to speak at the banquet, I learned that Robert
Loveman chose the path of writing despite family and societal pressures to take
up a more conventional career. He loved Nature with a capital N—Helen
Blackshear’s book on him was titled<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Robert
Loveman, Belated Romanticist</i>—and, were he alive in our times, his love of
beauty in nature might have led him to environmentalism, as with another fine
Georgia writer, Janisse Ray. Like William Butler Yeats, he may have stood on a
sidewalk, “or on the pavement gray,” but it was “lake water lapping” that he
heard in his “deep heart’s core.” Robert Loveman’s work reminds us that
cynicism and cleverness are ultimately less satisfying and powerful than the
full embrace of beauty and purpose, especially when joined with the poetic
skill to convey one’s impressions and ideas to others.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Part
II:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">The
second banquet was distinctly less writerly, although it did include a poetry
contest.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.edpa.org/" target="_blank"><span style="color: windowtext;">The
Economic Development Partnership Alliance</span></a><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>sponsored the contest, in partnership
with the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.cultural-alliance.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: windowtext;">Cultural Alliance of GreaterBirmingham</span></a>, as
part of their Alabama Launchpad conference. Entrants were asked “to submit an
original composition on the theme of innovation and creativity in Alabama.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">The
three finalists, Irene Latham, Douglas Ray, and I, read our poems to the
banquet attendees and then, immediately, everyone with a smart phone picked
their favorite poem. I felt a little like I might be voted off the island or
out of the house, but I also had a moment of reveling in getting to read a poem
in a distinctly nontraditional setting for poetry. It was hardly a poetry
illiterate crowd, however: one of my table mates was familiar with Billy
Collins’ work, even quoting from Collins’ “Litany” (It begins like a
traditional love poem—“You are the bread and the knife,/ the crystal goblet and
the wine”—and then gets more and more hilarious); I was duly impressed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Brandon
Byrne, Vice President of the gaming company Curse, which moved from California
to Huntsville, gave a talk on how north Alabama could become “Silicon Valley
South.” Dr. Gwen Fewell won the Outstanding Woman or Minority in Innovation
Award for her work in genomics as<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>co-founder
and chief commercial officer at TransOMIC<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>in
Huntsville. Dr. Emil Jovanov of UAH designed a “Smart Bottle” that reminds
people when to take their medicines. A company called BLOX in Bessemer produces modular
elements for hospital rooms. I hadn’t known about any of this and felt lucky to
have stumbled into it. It changed the way I think about this state.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">A
press release for the conference stated that Angela Wier of the EDPA “said the organization added
a poetry contest to the conference this year as a way to foster collaboration
across disciplines that support risk taking and even tolerate failure.” Wier
said: “We want the conference to exemplify a microcosm of an innovative
community, where one discipline inspires creativity in another.”<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>I was impressed with the EDPA and the
Cultural Alliance for including poetry and art in this conference on innovation
and creativity in science and entrepreneurship; I hope they continue in this
vein.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">We
got the results of the contest later that evening: Douglas Ray had won, and
would be named the “Poet Laureate” of the conference and read his poem the next
morning. I never like not winning, but the part of me that didn’t want to get
up at 5 a.m. to be in Birmingham at 7:30 a.m. was not the least bit
disappointed. My two sides declared a truce.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Two
banquets, one lesson: there are so many stories to be told, when our ears are
open. Having the chance to briefly step into a couple of other worlds reminded
me to pay attention to my own world and to remember what a rich and varied
place life can be.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<u1:p></u1:p>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</div>
Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-3597541820466978252014-05-21T08:33:00.001-07:002014-05-21T08:33:12.374-07:00Reading Madeleine L'Engle's "A Circle of Quiet"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyT_ORMlUQt77wEtNnOjhFJH9GO6LrLUwFUimM-zySSe3ojc3c1GTk4EGKIZY-M8CeTkt5Iy1Sc9kapOWpzuhTmZoZHub4Jv9SL30KlF4wZ92TH7PvAlsEgiq68W4J6U8Y5sLL8jT0CUWp/s1600/morningglory3_web.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyT_ORMlUQt77wEtNnOjhFJH9GO6LrLUwFUimM-zySSe3ojc3c1GTk4EGKIZY-M8CeTkt5Iy1Sc9kapOWpzuhTmZoZHub4Jv9SL30KlF4wZ92TH7PvAlsEgiq68W4J6U8Y5sLL8jT0CUWp/s1600/morningglory3_web.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I recently read <i>A
Circle of Quiet, </i>by Madeleine L’Engle, first published in 1972. I don’t
think I’d read it before, although I certainly saw it around the house growing
up, when my mother was reading L’Engle’s nonfiction. I was a devotee of her
fiction, <i>A Wrinkle in Time, </i>particularly,
and when I reread <i>Wrinkle</i> a couple of
years ago I was happy to find that it still held both the magic and the menace
I remembered from childhood reading.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This book seemed to call out for a lot of underlining, so I
decided to type up my underlined passages and share them here—some seemed true
for me as well, others less true but still thought-provoking. <i>Circle</i> meditates on the writing life, on
being a woman and a writer, on teaching, on faith, and on the times. Some of
the passages most tuned to the early seventies can sound a bit dated, but the
rest struck me as fresh and relevant. Skim through, and see if one strikes you.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
from <i>A Circle of
Quiet,</i> by Madeleine L’Engle:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“It’s all been said better before. If I thought I had to say
it better than anybody else, I’d never start. Better or worse is immaterial.
The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say
it, to say it our own way. Not of our own <i>will,</i>
but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn’t what
human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment,
or words, or musical notations, or we die.” (p. 28)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“I try to be careful whom I use as a mirror . . . . But we
aren’t always careful of our mirrors. . . . I’ve looked for an image in someone
else’s mirror, and so have avoided seeing myself.” (p. 30)</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers.”
(p. 30)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“And I think, too, and possibly most important, that there
is a faith simply in the validity of art; when we talk about ourselves as being
part of the company of such people as Mozart or van Gogh or Dostoevsky, it has
nothing to do with comparisons, or pitting talent against talent; it has
everything to do with a way of looking at the universe. . . . Dostoevsky is a
giant; I look up to him; I sit at his feet; perhaps I will be able to learn
something from him. But we do face the same direction, no matter how giant his
stride, how small mine.” (p. 38)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“We can no longer pretend that our children are growing up
into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. . . . Our responsibility to them
is not to pretend that if we don’t look, evil will go away, but to give them
weapons against it. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the greatest weapons of all is laughter, a gift for
fun, a sense of play which is sadly missing from the grownup world. . . . </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Paradox again: to take ourselves seriously enough to take
ourselves lightly.” (p. 99)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show
us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death,
and what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams,
will not burn.” (p. 120)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“I do not think that it is naïve to think that it is the
tiny, particular acts of love and joy which are going to swing the balance,
rather than general, impersonal charities. These acts are spontaneous,
unself-conscious, realized only late if at all.” (p. 124)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“And I was totally back in joy. I didn’t realize that I had
been out of it, caught in small problems and disappointments and frustrations,
until it came surging back.” (p. 125)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“We all need heroes, and here again we can learn from the
child’s acceptance of the fact that he needs someone beyond himself to look up
to.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
. . . mankind has
progressed only when an uncommon man has done the improbable, and often the
impossible, has had the courage to go into the darkness, and has been willing,
out of the nettle, danger, to pluck the flower, safety.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
. . . I can’t do it
myself. I need a hero. Sometimes I have chosen pretty shoddy ones, as I have
chosen faulty mirrors in which to see myself. But a hero I must have. A hero
shows me what fallible man, despite and even <i>with</i> his faults, can do: I cannot do it myself; and yet I can do
anything: not as much of a paradox as it might seem.” (pp. 179-180)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“All teachers must face the fact that they are potential
points of reference. The greatest challenge a teacher has to accept is the
courage to be; if we <i>are,</i> we make
mistakes; we say too much where we should have said nothing; we do not speak
where a word might have made all the difference. If we are, we will make
terrible errors. But we still have to have the courage to struggle on, trusting
in our own points of reference to show us the way.” (p. 181)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Compassion is nothing one feels with the intellect alone.
Compassion is particular; it is never general.” (p. 193)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“It is still taught in some seminaries that it is a heresy
to think that God can suffer with us. But what does the incarnation show us but
the ultimate act of particularity? This is what compassion is all about.” (p.
193)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“ . . . the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling,
moves from the imprisoned language of the provable into the freed language of
what I must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith. For me this
involves trust not in ‘the gods’ but in God. But if the word God has
understandably become offensive to many, then the language of poetry and story
involves faith in the unknown potential in the human being, faith in courage
and honor and nobility, faith in love, our love of each other, and our
dependence on each other. And it involves for me a constantly renewed awareness
of the fact that if I am a human being who writes, and who sends my stories out
into the world for people to read, then I must have the courage to make a
commitment to the unknown and unknowable (in the sense of intellectual proof),
the world of love and particularity which gives light to the darkness.” (p.
194) </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“To say that you won’t write for teenagers any more because
they have changed makes no more sense than to say that you won’t write for
adults any more, because today’s world is so different from the pre-bomb world.
It also implies that you write differently when you write for teenagers than
when you write for adults.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you are a responsible writer, you don’t.” (p. 196)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“When I am feeling unsure about my writing, it is not
because I am worried about the difference between adult and juvenile fiction,
but because I am worrying that I am neglecting other responsibilities, and so
misusing my freedom; I’ve gone through periods of confusion and downright
stupidity. It was our eldest child, with her remarkable ability to see and
accept what <i>is,</i> who said to me a good
many years ago, ‘Mother, you’ve been getting cross and edgy with us, and you
haven’t been doing much writing. We wish you’d get back to the typewriter.” (p.
199)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a
child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to
moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be. Because I
was once a rebellious college student, there is and always will be in me the
student crying out for reform.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in
any of these ages, the perpetual student, the delayed adolescent, the childish
adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide;
my past is part of what makes the present Madeleine and must not be denied or
rejected or forgotten.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
. . . if I can retain
a child’s awareness and joy, and <i>be</i>
fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be a grownup.” (pp. 199-200)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“There is a lovely Talmudic story that when the Children of
Israel reached the Red Sea, and Moses struck his staff on the shore, the waters
of the sea did not part to let them through. The Israelites stood there at the
edge of the water and nothing happened until one of the men plunged in. Then
the waters rolled back.” (p. 201)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“ . . . a great work of the imagination is one of the
highest forms of communication of truth that mankind has reached. But a great
piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or to agree with
it. A great piece of literature simply <i>is.”</i>
(p. 201)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“To balance the precarious triangle of wife-mother-writer:
it was, is, a problem.” (p. 220)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
“I wish we didn’t try to turn real lions into imaginary
ones. The lions are not imaginary. They are real. I have experienced a lot of
lions in my lifetime, and these encounters are what I write about, and why I
write as a storyteller: it’s the best way to make the lions visible. But the
lions must be those of my own experience. Our projecting from the tangible
present into the ‘what if’ of the imagination must be within the boundaries of
our own journeying.” (p. 232)</div>
Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-27882898646983468842014-04-08T14:21:00.002-07:002018-08-09T07:55:03.535-07:00My Grandfather, Bear Bryant, and Family Stories<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Ever since I moved to Alabama for graduate school in 1986,
I’ve joked that if I ever find myself in a scary backroads store or a hostile redneck
bar, identified as the bleeding heart liberal I am, with the door looking a
long way away and a crowd of suspicious faces surrounding me, I’ll pull out my
magic words, the words that will protect me like a powerful spell, and I’ll be
able to sashay right out of danger like I owned the place. Those words are: “My
granddaddy was Bear Bryant’s first coach.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXiIPzaewylnEnsiyzoWIKf-W_NcM5vSLR1fY-rJeHTV6uo3_TP5cux9xk_b7ebvlOJdKso-kooa8eFUc3_s6igmbVy7ufL0-MECtSNr7elJduhOAfoi42hmiDW2CjqFzuqODVeAmWLaRs/s1600/Coach+Bill+Walton_lowres.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXiIPzaewylnEnsiyzoWIKf-W_NcM5vSLR1fY-rJeHTV6uo3_TP5cux9xk_b7ebvlOJdKso-kooa8eFUc3_s6igmbVy7ufL0-MECtSNr7elJduhOAfoi42hmiDW2CjqFzuqODVeAmWLaRs/s1600/Coach+Bill+Walton_lowres.jpg" width="185" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="MsoNormal">
And I know those words are truth, although I really don’t
know a whole lot more. I grew up in Hog-happy Arkansas and loved game-day
Saturdays as much as the next kid. Going to Fayetteville to a game was like
making a pilgrimage, even if I forgot my suitcase and had to wear my mother’s
nightgown to sleep in and an outfit I didn’t like for the whole weekend.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But as a would-be college student, I deliberately chose a
school with no football team and no Greek system. I was going to be an
intellectual and live in New York and write poetry and read philosophy and go
to foreign films, and I had no time for football or social frivolities. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So when I heard the stories about my grandfather, Bill
Walton, I confess I didn’t really pay proper attention. There was a former player
of his who lived in the small town where I went to college. He and his wife invited
me to dinner once and told me about how Coach Walton and the Bear would talk on
the phone during World War II, both of them in the Navy, Coach Bryant calling
to discuss plays because after he came back from overseas he coached the
Pre-Flight team in North Carolina.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My grandfather had been a successful coach and athletic
director at Ouachita Baptist College in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. In his obituary
from 1963, the president of Ouachita told the story of how, if Coach Walton had
waited to be called up, he could have saved his position, but the coach decided
to enlist, knowing his job would not be there when he returned. He came back to
Arkadelphia with his family and became an insurance salesman and a huge booster
for the college, but his coaching days were over. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I barely remember him. In fact, I can say that I have a
feeling more than a visual memory, a sense of smiling, playful, gentle
kindness in this man who died just after I turned three, and just before my
sister was born. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I moved to Alabama, one of my cousins reminded
me—“you’ll be fine there. Your grandfather was Bear Bryant’s first coach in
Fordyce, Arkansas.” Eventually I thought to look things up on the internet. The
dates match up: Bill Walton was definitely a coach when Bear Bryant was in
junior high school. By the time Bear’s 1930 Fordyce Redbugs had a perfect
season and won the state championship, however, Bill Walton had been enticed to
coach at El Dorado high school. I’m pretty sure the presence of my
grandmother’s sister and her husband in El Dorado helped sway him. He’d had a
very good run for four years in Fordyce, with a 46-8-2 record; they named the
field after him there, as they’d later name the gymnasium after him at
Ouachita.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Back in 1973 when he was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall
of Fame, my mother accepted the award on his behalf. At the
ceremony she gave a short speech, in which she said of her father that he was a
“belligerent humanitarian” who wanted to help when there was a need but “heaven
help anyone who tried to praise him for it.” In a couple of weeks he’ll be honored again when he is inducted into the Dallas County Sports Hall of Fame in the Dallas County Museum
in Fordyce. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hearing about this prompted me to write another cousin, my
aunt’s daughter, who’s a few years older than me, and ask her to tell me what
she remembers of our grandfather. Among a host of wonderful stories, she wrote,
“At his funeral, people were smiling and loving to each other
but I caught glances of big well-dressed men looking down pretending they were
coughing or clearing their throats. Everyone was dressed beautifully and
smelled good. I was the only child there, and got lots of tight hugs and
encouragement, lots of affirmations that ‘Bill was in heaven with Jesus.’ (The
words my mom used to tell me were ‘Bill has gone to see Jesus.’) My father or
one of my uncles (all tall, dark-haired guys with balding heads) carefully
pointed out Frank Broyles, Bear Bryant and other premier gentlemen of<span style="background-color: white;"> S</span>outhern
football who had played for or with Bill, or had worked as assistant coaches
for him, or who simply held his work in high esteem. I was introduced to them
and they greeted me gravely and kindly like a princess of the realm—I was told
I looked a lot like him, that I was blessed to have had him as a grandfather,
that he was blessed to have had a granddaughter like me, hugged some more, and
reminded by these big legendary men that Bill was in heaven with Jesus. Never
had 812 Pine been more crowded with people and dishes of specially good food.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
I also asked one of the organizers of the Hall of Fame if he knew of
any sources that connect Bill Walton and Paul Bryant. He wrote back: "From our research of records we have on hand, we determined that Bill Walton did indeed coach Paul 'Bear' Bryant on the Fordyce Redbug football team. Bryant was rather large for his age, so as a ninth grader, he played on the senior high team, which was coached by Coach Walton." </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Bryant biographies I’ve seen don’t mention my
grandfather. I’m not sure why. Maybe there just wasn’t anybody around to tell
it. If there’s more to know, I’d like to know it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Finally, though, I suppose I’m more interested in uncovering
the history of this feisty little man who coached greats in football and
baseball and died too soon than I am in knowing more about Bear Bryant. Bryant
is my way in, a path leading back to the small towns of Arkansas where my
family members had lives I know only in fragments. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Hall of Fame organizers asked for some photos to use for
the program and the museum, and I sent four. My favorite, and the one they’ll
use for the gallery, is of Bill in his Ouachita uniform as an undergraduate, in
the early nineteen-twenties. I have one of him as an older man, in a suit, but my
mother always said she didn’t like it, that he looked tired and ill, and my
gift to her is to withhold that image, to have her father remembered
as a sturdy young man who once finished a game with a broken neck, who never
got weary and never quit and whose favorite saying was “If you don’t have time
to do it right the first time, how are you going to have time to do it right
later?”</div>
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</div>
Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-40674973282643073892014-02-03T07:36:00.001-08:002014-02-03T07:36:25.190-08:00Snuh-oh, or The South Will Ice Again<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Last Tuesday morning at about 9:30 I was sitting at my
computer looking out towards the woods when lo and behold the flakes began. I
leapt up and before I knew it my five-year-old self had appeared. “It’s
snowing! It’s snowing!” She hadn’t shown up in a while so it was good to feel
that exuberant enthusiasm coursing through me. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As everyone knows, what got dubbed “Snowmaggedon” slowed
things down significantly in the Deep South, causing no end of trouble and some
tragedy. Nobody was ready for the freezing roads that developed in a matter of
hours, and when everyone tried to get home at once, the roads were clogged
immediately with frustrated and frightened drivers slip-slidin’ away. The
nation took notice. From television to radio to social media, everyone outside
the South had something to say about how poorly we were coping, and many living
here responded defensively. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was reminded of literary critic and scholar Fred Hobson’s formulation
of southern self-consciousness in his 1983 book <i>Tell About the South,</i> subtitled <i>The
Southern Rage to Explain.</i> Says
Hobson, “The Southerner, more than other Americans, has felt he had something
to explain, to justify, to defend, or to affirm.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The defenses of the South’s inability to cope with what for
most seemed like a thin buttery spread of snow on a generally toasty region
mostly went like this: “We know you think it is funny that we can’t drive, that
our schools close for days, that we post way too many pictures of snow on
Facebook, and that we make a big deal of just a little white stuff. But please
keep in mind that we have almost no practice in snow- or ice-driving and that
our towns and cities have very little in the way of snow removal equipment. We
are doing the best we can here, so stop laughing at us!”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sociologist and writer John Shelton Reed observes in his
essay “The Three Souths,” in his book <i>Minding
the South,</i> “Southerners still do many things differently—and they keep
inventing new ways to do things differently.” I have no doubt that if the Deep
South were regularly to spend more time in the deep freeze, there’d be a lot of
adaptation going on. Cooks would come up with bourbon-flavored and
Karo-syrup-flavored and for that matter Tabasco-sauce-flavored snow ice cream.
Talladega would add an ice-driving event. Practitioners of noodling, the sport
of catching catfish by hand, would kick it up a notch by inventing frozen
noodling, or froodling. Every red-blooded southern male would lay in a supply
of sand to help with the neighborhood roads and invest in a 4 x 4 for rescues,
just as they head out with chain saws after tornadoes. And people would look
out for each other as they did during the last week, the old-fashioned way,
pushing stuck cars while still dressed in office clothes and thin shoes, and
the new way, setting up social media alerts for stranded drivers to find places
they could get warm and be fed.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I posted my fair share of snow pictures and took a little
ribbing for it. As the sun set on Thursday, most of it had melted, and the dock
looked like a postage stamp of white on the brown—but still frozen—lake. The South will ice again, I’m sure; I think
the next time we’ll be a little more ready.</div>
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Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-68399732704101697052014-01-12T09:31:00.003-08:002014-01-12T09:31:31.939-08:00Priming the Pump<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m recently back from a week in Cedar Key, Florida. It’s
become, over the course of five or so years, one of my favorite places. Driving
the last leg of the trip down the long straight highway that leads only to the
town of Cedar Key, poised like a diver on the end of a pier, everything in me
relaxes. It is a place to go to be quiet. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve been there enough times now to begin to imaginatively
interact with the place and its history. The collection of islands that used to
be called the Cedar Keys is located about halfway between Tallahassee and
Tampa, on the west coast of Florida. Cedar Key was a thriving town in the late nineteenth
century after a railroad was built linking its port to the east coast of
Florida. Ships from the west coast of the U.S and south and central America
docked there to offload and pick up goods.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The area itself was so rich in cedars that Eberhard Faber
set up a pencil factory there--in the process pretty much wiping out most of
the cedars the area was named for, although a few old ones still stand around
town.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
With a year-round population of under a thousand and an
economy now based on clam farming and tourism, including boating and birding,
Cedar Key has a back-in-time feel. You rarely get in the car because you can walk
from just about any place you’re staying to anywhere else in town. Bikes and golf carts are the primary modes of
transportation.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Arriving at night on the next to last day of the year, the
only sound was from the little tree frogs called peepers, up in the pines. In
the morning, at low tide, the sound was of some great beast sleeping, a filled
silence. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Perhaps this pregnant quietness is conducive to daydreaming,
to feeling oneself adrift in time. At the <a href="http://www.islandhotel-cedarkey.com/" target="_blank">Island Hotel</a>, which as a structure dates to 1859 (and which incidentally has a wonderful
bar), it’s not hard to imagine ghosts from the turn of the century brushing
past you in the dining room. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the Cedar Key State Museum, you can tour the home of St. Clair Whitman (1868-1959), a
naturalist and collector whose house was saved, moved, and restored by town
residents. I’d been there once before but wanted to go back to immerse myself
in the feel of the house: wide heart-pine planks throughout; an arched doorway
leading into the dining room and a place where the wood squeaks when you step through
that doorway; in St. Clair’s study and display room, hundreds, maybe thousands
of shells organized by type and stored in individual cigar boxes on shelves; family
photographs scattered throughout the house; a sense of simplicity and peace, a
clarity of light.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
The house once looked out over Goose Cove on land now named
Whitman Point and occupied by townhouses and condominiums, but you’d be hard
put to say the land’s been spoiled—nothing on Cedar Key is over three stories
high, and trees, pocket parks, benches, and seasonal plantings create a sense of welcome and of a place that people care
about. Artists come here to visit or stay. There’s a sense of privacy within
friendliness. The woman at the checkout counter in the town’s small grocery
store is reading a story by Lorrie Moore in <i>Harper’s.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The history of the place, as with the history of all places
I suppose, has its dark side. Settlement
of the area by whites was encouraged by the U.S. Congress as a way of removing
Seminoles from the area. In 1923 the majority African-American town of <a href="http://www.virtualrosewood.com/history.html" target="_blank">Rosewood</a> was destroyed in a massacre that began with the lynching of a black man being
questioned about a supposed attack on a white woman from nearby Sumner. The
African-American women and children of Rosewood eventually escaped on trains while
the men stayed behind to defend their homes, but the mob of Klan members from
Gainesville combined with local whites burned the town to the ground. It was
many years later that reporters and scholars began to tell the story of
Rosewood to the larger world. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Alabamian Bill Cobb has written of this area in his novel <a href="http://www.newsouthbooks.com/bkpgs/detailtitle.php?isbn_solid=1588382427" target="_blank"><i>The Last Queen of the Gypsies.</i> </a>Cobb’s
protagonist Minnie, abandoned by her family as a child, is for a time taken in
by an older black couple who survived the violence and returned to Rosewood. Minnie later works for a time as a prostitute in the "Coronado" Hotel in Cedar Key before going on to other adventures. </div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I have a feeling I’ll be writing something, too, although I’m
not sure yet what it will be, not even sure whether it will come out as poem or
story or nonfiction. To the degree that I understand the process, it’s often a
combination of strong sense impressions and intellectual engagement that makes
me want to write about a place or event. I begin to imagine what people thought and did—for
instance, what did St. Clair Whitman think about the events occurring down the
road in Rosewood?—and I follow the trail to see where my curiosity about places
and people and my own obsessions meet up.</div>
Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-58597248954983964152013-12-12T12:27:00.002-08:002013-12-12T12:27:45.173-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigkmgjP4ah4w8Oad9vIDdwLHJk4HLCj1X0SeWfS5hzoS8ujnqWfiTISUewCw4gNuJu9AXcK4kuIm2qmnxs2RtZpBU7h8QEpTVLdVJTPIFP4bWjcC3GRjxt02VPA3-r_0YR8gu2aGBhcE0A/s1600/postcards+from+the+edge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigkmgjP4ah4w8Oad9vIDdwLHJk4HLCj1X0SeWfS5hzoS8ujnqWfiTISUewCw4gNuJu9AXcK4kuIm2qmnxs2RtZpBU7h8QEpTVLdVJTPIFP4bWjcC3GRjxt02VPA3-r_0YR8gu2aGBhcE0A/s320/postcards+from+the+edge.jpg" width="236" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“We regret to inform you . . .”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve just submitted a chapbook of poems to a contest. I know
I probably won’t win. So, why bother?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It goes beyond the lottery ethos of “you can’t win if you
don’t play.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is, of course, the chance of winning. This particular
contest had fewer than 200 submissions last year, so the odds aren’t bad. The
contest winner is awarded a residency as well, making the investment of $25
seem more worth it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As I worked to put the chapbook together over the last week,
however, I saw that there were other benefits.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I drew the poems for the chapbook from a manuscript in
progress, one that’s taken a back seat to the happy task of preparing my
collection of short stories for publication next year by the University of
Alabama Press.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve been feeling that it’s time to get back to those poems,
and this was the nudge I needed to open the folder where I’ve stacked all the
poems I’m considering for this book. I started out by deciding to include what I
judged to be the fifteen or twenty strongest individual poems for the chapbook.
I like different poems on different days, but I found ten that I felt really
good about. Then I noticed that with a few additions I’d have some nice
groupings that would hold the chapbook together both structurally and
thematically.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
With my larger conceptual work done, I turned to the
individual poems, most of which needed minor revisions. I looked at the notes I’d
made on hard copies, sat at the computer, entered changes, removed a couple,
and made more decisions. Done, done, done.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I first finished a graduate program in creative
writing, I sent manuscripts out all the time because I thought that’s what you
were supposed to do. Among other contests, I occasionally submitted work to the
Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and then suddenly one day I was no longer
eligible, no longer a “younger poet.” I thought about all the money I’d spent
sending manuscripts to contests, to no avail. The SASE postcards acknowledging
receipt of manuscripts came, and then the “we regret to inform you” letters a
few months later. It was time for a new plan.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I decided to research individual presses that looked like a
good fit for my work, sent out some letters, and was able to connect with a
press based on that research. For this manuscript, which has different concerns
from the first, I have a dream press picked out, a publisher I’ve come to
admire over the last few years. When I send the query letter I’ll be able to explain
exactly why I want my book to be published by them. It may not work, but it
feels better than the randomness of contests.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Which brings me back to why I submitted to this one: the
deadline, Dec. 31<sup>st</sup>, came at a time when I needed a push to get back
to work I had set aside for a time. I was forced to think freshly about the
poems in this new manuscript, consider the audience for them (the judge was
named on the contest page), and, finally, engage in the act of faith of sending
poems off into the dark, hoping they find readers—a replication of the act of
writing in itself. Even if, as is likely, I don’t win, I’ve still gotten a lot
of good out of the process, which was worth the price of admission.</div>
Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-32803453641947024162013-11-16T11:06:00.002-08:002013-11-16T11:06:47.158-08:00The fruits of labor<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoe8z7YFO68v-wtQA5CnZufHYroJCkhNyPJFKPr13zliBWOn5sr-P2NCs_91kTN6IraMHfF-1-ihEn-4Xhklph_v5T70gev5opAo9g3myqYIhDIAPy-sGy_Qtl9OFiSW_7t8xYSQlrXMOg/s1600/Autumn+fruit_websmall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoe8z7YFO68v-wtQA5CnZufHYroJCkhNyPJFKPr13zliBWOn5sr-P2NCs_91kTN6IraMHfF-1-ihEn-4Xhklph_v5T70gev5opAo9g3myqYIhDIAPy-sGy_Qtl9OFiSW_7t8xYSQlrXMOg/s320/Autumn+fruit_websmall.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
This week a friend brought me some Japanese persimmons from
her tree. I’d never had any before and discovered they are delicious sliced
thin on spinach or arugula salad, with olive oil, red wine vinegar, salt, and
pepper. Their color alone is a welcome blast of brightness on a gray fall day. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Today at the Tuscaloosa farmers’ market I was able to buy
some Arkansas Blacks—a variety of apple I’d heard of, along with another, Ben
Davis, from my cousin Jim Few, but had never gotten to try. The skin is
reddish, but on the darker side of red, and the flesh is crispy and firm. It
reminded me most of a MacIntosh.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Despite not having tried one until now, I’ve already titled
a short story with the name: “Arkansas Blacks” will appear in the collection <i>Tell the World You’re a Wildflower,</i>
coming out from the University of Alabama Press in Fall 2014<i>. </i>Given my home state’s history with
school desegregation, a reader might initially assume that the plot will have
something to do with race. In the story, however, two sisters grow up on an
apple farm, and the Arkansas Black is one of the varieties they grow. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You find out the title’s meaning early on, right after the
first three introductory paragraphs, in the section titled “Fire”: </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>We came
around the corner of the house, our mouths purpled with berry juice, and in our
father’s excited state—he had seen the smoke and come in from the orchards—we
must have looked horrific, like ghouls. He screamed. Then he shouted at us:
“Where have you been? You’ve killed your mother!” We believed him. He himself
looked like a spaceman, garbed in protective gear and mask for spraying the
trees, which were under attack from worms. The Arkansas Blacks, with their
characteristic shiny, dark peels, were hit hard by the worms. Like everyone
else, we had Ben Davis trees too, but they were not much good for just eating.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yesterday I got the copyedited files of <i>Tell the World</i> by email to review. Just now, writing “copyedited,”
I debated whether a hyphen should go between “copy” and “edited.” I’m partial
to hyphens, but the <i>Chicago Manual of
Style,</i> which the Press uses, is not, and Webster’s, the standard dictionary,
tends to combine rather than separate words like “backseat,” so I’ll need to go
through and consider the closed up (closed-up?) words on a case-by-case (case
by case?) basis. I’m glad the editor flagged these things for me to think
about, and after a quick review of the document I’ve already seen at least one
instance of her saving me from an error that would have been distracting or
confusing to readers.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lots of details—but it’s exciting to be at this stage in the
book’s life. After the copyeditor is finished, the book will move on to design
and then production. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a
publisher—one with experience and expertise—to create a book.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9111293191658218574.post-79676012899057949582013-11-05T11:27:00.002-08:002013-11-05T11:27:54.750-08:00Where do you find community?<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8wexrlHANpfG_zF_I3xJlzfjwOnRRSIp6ejJLYjpXWyQAp5Upz35BjWdie3QKhVzdHmKnm9zUBCkwMwKhbUMy-SVnL3M9w3yqn2szjlScu2pUB72aMNToEebvtOJkqknt_N4Xlp-d_88t/s1600/Wendy,+Susan,+and+Barbara+at+Avid+in+Athens.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8wexrlHANpfG_zF_I3xJlzfjwOnRRSIp6ejJLYjpXWyQAp5Upz35BjWdie3QKhVzdHmKnm9zUBCkwMwKhbUMy-SVnL3M9w3yqn2szjlScu2pUB72aMNToEebvtOJkqknt_N4Xlp-d_88t/s320/Wendy,+Susan,+and+Barbara+at+Avid+in+Athens.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Having just returned from the Louisiana Book Festival in
Baton Rouge, home of Community Coffee, I thought this would be an appropriate
time to write about community, and how you find it. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve come to appreciate the literary community I have in
Alabama, what I imagine as a safety net of connections all across the state. We
meet at the symposium in Monroeville, the book festival in Montgomery, a book
signing here, a performance there. Sometimes we meet at a funeral for one of
us. I don’t see these people every day or even every month, but I know they’re
there, and not just through electronic media. I know because a book that
someone thought I’d enjoy shows up out of the blue, or the invitation arrives
to write something, or the phone call comes to catch up and share each other’s
news. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve sought out community at times, joining a church or
group or cause based on a need to feel more a part of my area, less isolated. I
appreciate these chosen communities as well, although the ones that have
occurred organically sometimes turn out to be a better fit. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For several years I was part of a summer program that took
University of Alabama students to Ireland, and there I learned about and began
to attend the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, Ireland. I’ve been
there five times now, and made friends with others who attend, and even had a
hand in bringing Irish poet and anthologist Joan McBreen to Alabama for
readings. I knew when I started going to the Yeats School that I was looking
for a connection to poetry outside of the U.S., beyond AWP and the MFA scene,
but I had no guarantee that it would lead to these friendships and to the
enrichment of my own writing. Ireland, roughly the same size and population as
Alabama, is a home away from home for me now. For various reasons, I skipped
the Yeats School this past summer and found myself immensely homesick for it. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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When I was invited to submit something—a poem, story, or
essay—to the collection that became known as <a href="http://www.riversedgemedia.com/the-shoe-burnin.html" target="_blank"><i>The Shoe Burnin’: Stories of Southern Soul</i>,</a> I was initially
trepidatious. I was going to go out in the country and burn shoes and spill my
guts? This did not sound like me. But I am committed to trying new things even
if they don’t always work out. I decided to go. I could always leave early. Turns out it wasn’t so
much about the collection as the group of people that gathered around to create
it: musicians and writers and organizers and editors first, publishers and designers
and promoters and readers and festival-goers next. What happens when everyone decides to make something happen no matter what? A group commitment developed, an
ethos of generosity and mutual respect—in a word, a community. I found myself
grateful to be a part of it, enriched by the new people I was meeting,
challenged to do more than I’d thought I could.</div>
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As a writer I’m often a loner—and I need to be to get to
that deep place that writing comes from—but the places I belong remind me that
we all need to be connected, whether you find community or it finds you.<br />
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A P.S.: They've been thinking about community at Poets.org as well. This link takes you to poems and essays for further reading:<br />
<a href="http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Community-as-Collaboration.html?soid=1110705357409&aid=5rManhqr11A">http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Community-as-Collaboration.html?soid=1110705357409&aid=5rManhqr11A</a><br />
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Photo: Wendy Reed, Susan Cushman, and Barbara Brown Taylor discuss "Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality" at Avid bookstore in Athens, Georgia.Jennifer Hornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11658409876946884213noreply@blogger.com0