Sherry Chandler

The Kentucky Women Writers Conference calls for submissions for their 2008 prizes:

Each year, the Kentucky Women Writers Conference offers opportunities for both emerging and established voices to be singled out and cheered on by our community.

This year, we are pleased to again present the Betty Gabehart Prize and also the Gypsy Slam Poetry Prize.

The Gabehart Prize is our way of honoring our good friend, patron, and long-time director who took the decade of the 1980s to show us all how it’s done. Three prizes are awarded, in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Each winner receives $100, two 2-day passes, and the opportunity to read her winning manuscript at the conference.

Guidelines at the link.

I know a lot of you all reading here think I’m in the tank for Hillary Clinton, and it’s true that I prefer Hillary on the issues (Obama has apparently made it a policy not to have policies). But —

Oh just read Joan Walsh:

Throughout this long campaign the Clintons have been turned into a vile caricature: amoral, power-mad narcissists who are not beyond using racism and even worries about Obama’s safety to press their political cause. I’ve criticized both Clintons repeatedly in the pages of Salon for over 10 years, but it’s really time to say: Enough.

For several months I’ve found myself bothered by a double standard in both the behavior and the media coverage of the Obama campaign, as supposedly representing a new kind of clean, post-partisan politics, by contrast with the dirty old win-at-any-cost Clintons. Hardball Obama campaign tactics — David Axelrod partly blaming Clinton for Benazir Bhutto’s death; the intimidation of Clinton voters by a pro-Obama union in Nevada (to be fair, some Obama supporters claimed intimidation by Clinton forces, too); the campaign’s infamous South Carolina race memo (prepared before Bill Clinton made his dumb Jesse Jackson remark); the multiple “Harry and Louise” mailers distorting Clinton’s healthcare proposal; not to mention ties between Obama, Axelrod and the Exelon Corp., even as Obama is touting his lobbyist-free campaign. Nothing seems to stick to Obama; he’s Teflon.

This episode was worse than many but not entirely atypical: After his staff helped whip up a frenzy about Clinton’s remarks, Obama himself said he accepted Clinton’s statement that she had been misunderstood, and Axelrod tried to act gracious and insist that it’s time to move on. But the damage had been done. Obama has run a better campaign than Clinton, there’s no doubt about it, but he’s had a lot of help from a fawning media. (Here’s a great piece making a point I made months ago about how such coverage may ultimately hurt Obama.)*

*Hint: backlash.

And then read Redstar. I’m not sure that I agree with everything she says here, but I have come to respect her intellectual integrity and she makes me think we might all need to step back and take a deep breath (emphasis added):

Part of the reason for last night’s insomnia has been my growing frustration from the Clinton RFK remarks skirmish. It began in earnest when I read Kevin’s response at Slant Truth, in which he stated that regardless of her intent, it was his personal associations of the assassinations of black leaders that mattered to him. He added that he was further troubled by the racially segregated - and polarized - link networks he was seeing in response to her comments; i.e., whites were linking to other whites in support of their perspectives, and bloggers of color - including many African-Americans - were linking to one another in opinion solidarity. When I read this, I thought Duh! Obviously. Anyone following this election, especially since early ‘08, has seen this cultural fracturing around the blogosphere, as we all interpret the candidates’ actions, statements and alleged motivations and intent based on our personal and/or collective experiences and identities.

Then I read a compelling analysis from Latoya at Racialicious, which I found to be strongly undermined by her strident vocabulary that “hell no…there is no way Hillary was talking about herself when referencing the RFK campaign.” Latoya’s voice is one I really respect in the ’sphere, yet so is Pocochina’s, who just as convincingly argues that of course Clinton is thinking of herself in referencing RFK, because it’s a) a defining (generational) moment for her in her political development, b) she faces her own threats of assassination, and c) and this is my elaboration of Pocochina’s point - that she has arguably come to represent for millions of moderate- to low-income Americans (mostly white, but not exclusively) the underdog candidate fighting for them. Just because this vision of her is routinely derided in many pundit circles does not mean that it does not ring true for countless Clinton supporters (if those I read on-line are any indication).

So who’s right, here? Who’s interpretation is valid? Hopefully you realize these are trick questions - obviously all of them are, as they are grounded in experience, identity, and each blogger’s situated knowledge. …

I remember last fall at the Congressional Black Caucus Conference wearing a Clinton pin and an Obama button. I remember my cynical detachment about the two of them, centrists not remotely interested in challenging the status quo other than via their own historic candidacies and the legitimately new perspectives they would bring to the Oval Office: the first serious female contender with her gendered and generational whiteness, modern marriage and professional career working with women and children, and the first multi-racial, cosmopolitan, almost-not-a-Baby-Boomer, black-middle-class Presidential candidate. Yet, as the months have passed since Iowa, I’m getting more and more narrow-minded in my support of Clinton, mainly in response to her unparalleled opposition. My emotionalism is seriously challenging my more “rational” preferences for her policy positions, campaign platform and professional experience.

…

What I think has been the real issue in this campaign - in the politics waged from both sides that have employed or capitalized on systemic sexism and racism - is that both campaign[s] have condescended to the other. …

All of this is getting to my long-drawn-out conclusion: that for most of us this primary has ceased to be about the two candidates, and all about ourselves - in all our complicated beauty. Which of our multiple identities is elevated consciously or otherwise in feeling drawn to the candidates, what our biases or privileges really are, what our core personal networks really look like, what we feel we’re owed by society personally or collectively, and what we’re projecting onto these two figureheads who are similar triangulating centrists - one with most of her dirty laundry exposed, and the other with his soon to come out to dry.

I feel like I’ve lost a lot of virtual allies in this primary (hopefully temporarily), but gained a plethora of new ones. At my old blog I wrote I how I tended to identify with middle- and moderate-income white ethnics and women and men of color I meet because our life experiences are often quite similar. Who I have met in numbers on-line via supporting Clinton are many new young outspoken working-class and middle-class Asian-American and white ethnic feminists. I have purged many middle-class and upper-middle-class mostly white male and female bloggers who I felt marginally about to begin with. Good riddance. They don’t speak for me. I’m not sure who does these days…

And from the Online Etymology Dictionary, tribe:

from O.Fr. tribu, from L. tribus “one of the three political/ethnic divisions of the original Roman state” (Tites, Ramnes, and Luceres, corresponding, perhaps, to the Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans), later, one of the 30 political divisions instituted by Servius Tullius (increased to 35 in 241 B.C.E.), perhaps from tri- “three” + *bhu-, root of the verb be.

We are dividing ever more strongly into our tribes in this country. It’s dangerous.

The summer 2008 edition of Rattle devotes a special 60-page full-color section to visual poetry. Ruth Bavetta has written to announce that her three pieces from her series “Readings” will be featured in this issue.

Ruth works in a medium called altered books. The piece above is one she let me feature here back in 2005. It was done by altering an old yoga book. Here’s a newer example. This work is not that which is featured in Rattle.

For more examples of the art of altered books, try this site. I’ve been visiting for years.

The Kentucky State Poetry Society is now accepting entries for their 2008 contest.

Poets can compete in 25 categories this year, several of which pay as much as $100 for first place. I’m pleased to see the return of the Poet Laureate’s Prize, sponsored and judged this year by Jane Gentry. The Grand Prix pays $200, $100, and $50.

Submission deadline is June 30, 2008.

Entry fees for non-members are $2 per category (1 poem per category) and $5 for the Grand Prix.

You can get a full set of guidelines by downloading a pdf file here or by contacting the contest chairwoman, Irma Cooper, by e-mail at wordweaver313@adelphia.net.

Awards will be announced at the annual awards banquet, Pine Mountain State Resort Park, October 18. First prize winners will be published in the annual contest issue of Pegasus.

Well, I blew that. I wrote 38 consecutive 100 word posts and then I crashed. I plead illness. I was in a fog more than one way yesterday and Sunday, and last night’s troubled dream had hubby and me trapped in my parents’ house by some primitive manlike creatures with eviscerated bodies all around and no sign of my parents.

We really do need to impeach the Bushistas.

I’ll claim one of my two remaining lives and start over tomorrow. But first I have to restore my poor mangled poem. It is one of my favorite creations and I am chagrined that I mistreated it so. You can still read the full version where it was originally published, at the Other Voices International Project. While you’re over there, check them out. I was published in Volume 19. They’re up to volume 32 now with an international cast of poets writing in English from the big names to the small. Some I see that I recognize are Billy Collins, Ursula K. Le Guin, Dorianne Laux, but it’s among the names that I don’t recognize that I like to wander. Much treasure.

My poor poem in its intended state:

Behind the Blackberry Thicket

Crashing through, I find a grove,
sycamore, ash, a single maple.
The deer take refuge here unhampered
by the mass of blackberries
and goldenrod, monarchs and bees,
that excludes a thing my shape.

Between the trees
along the leaf-mold floor,
grapevines twine like Laocoön’s snakes,
binding all into slow silence.

Twenty years since the astonished dog
cornered a crawdad in what I’d thought
was just another hayfield,
this wet-weather streambed,
not a place to mow or plow.

Focused on the quick –
children, garden, livestock —
I did not see this wilderness of vines
and saplings transform itself into a woods.

What seems motionless is growth and what
seems still is motion. Even my house
moves westward half an inch a year.

I need to tell you that Wind Publications has just released You Can Go Anywhere: From the Crossroads of the World, a collection of newspaper columns and other essays by my friend of many years, Georgia Green Stamper.

Georgia and I started at the same crossroads more than a few years ago, though our journeys have taken us over a different set of highways and byways. We were both born and raised in rural Owen County, she in the south end and I on the east, and we both write out of that foundation.

In her introduction to the volume, Leatha Kendrick says:

All literature is local, and the more intimately it knows its locality, the more stunningly universal and enduring it can become. …Edward Abbey says in Desert Solitaire, ‘This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.’

Georgia and I write out of the same home and, as we have done since we were girls, we share our thoughts and our news and our writing. I can’t give you a review of this book. Although I can’t go so far as to say that I’ve served as midwife to any of these essays, I think it fair to say that I stand as godmother to many of them. I’ve seen them, to stretch my metaphor to the breaking, take their wobbly baby steps and I have had my say about the path they took.

Not that Georgia’s writing has ever needed much in the way of godmothering. As Leatha continues:

Only a few writers, however, can make us understand why we long for a place with the passion and precision of an Edward Abbey describing his desert or a Jane Austen reporting on the interior landscapes of her world. Georgia Stamper is one of those writers.

But every writer needs a few trusted readers and I have been privileged to be such a reader for Georgia.

Georgia is one of the kindest people I know. She sees the good in every soul she meets and in You Can Go Anywhere, she shares her compassionate insights into Owen County souls from the colonial period to the attacks of September 11. In her stories, a grandfather does his Christmas shopping in the local village after the tobacco is sold and he has a little cash money and a modern wife finds herself lost and disoriented in the overabundant material diversity of a modern mega-store, a high school basketball coach integrates a rural team peacefully, farmers hold their places together with baling wire, grandchildren test the limits of their courage, and a young girl learns how to be an adult woman with gentle guidance from a village (if I can steal a bit from Hillary Clinton) of grandparents, parents, teachers, and friends. Georgia laughs with them and cries with them. Not many writers can do both.

Many of these essays have appeared in the Owenton News-Herald, and Georgia has read many of them on WUKY. Her essays have received the Emma Bell Miles Award for Essay from Lincoln Memorial University’s Mountain Heritage Literary Festival, the Carole Pettit Creative Writing Medallion and Legacies Award from the Carnegie Center, the Leadingham Prose Award from the Frankfort (KY) Arts Foundation, and from The Appalachian Writers Association and Green River Writers.

Georgia will be promoting her book throughout the spring and summer. You can find her schedule here. Go and hear her read if you get a chance. You’ll be glad you did. And treat yourself to a copy of this book.

From an interview in Rattle (winter 2007):

…you really have to stay in the chair a long time to get stories. Ray[mond Carver] taught me not to begin to correct or second guess things when writing prose, just keep your pen on the page and don’t lift it until you get the whole draft, even if that draft is awkward. You can interrupt yourself, and it’s very productive to interrupt yourself, when writing poetry, but to get a story you really have to just stay with it, bulldog it right down and get that ending to just come right in that session. …Because it’s going to be read in one sitting. …And that flow is very important, and his feeling was that when you came to the end of that story, there should be some kind of hum, some kind of luminous hum that the story leaves with the reader. And I think you can feel that in his stories, and in many good stories, that’s a part of it.

The good news is this:

After years of withering in an unfriendly legislative committee, a bill that would stop coal mine operators from filling valleys and creek beds with toxic excess waste jolted to life Tuesday.

House budget committee chairman Harry Moberly, D-Richmond, inserted language from the so-called stream saver bill into a decoy measure that would have given tax breaks for camels and heard 90 minutes of testimony on the proposal from various proponents.

Believe it or not, there are a few camels in Kentucky and with the droughty summers we’ve been having they may become more popular.

Be that as it may, this “decoy measure” was necessary because Jim Gooch, the chair of the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee has refused to let HB 164 out of committee for three years. You remember Jim Gooch, the man who holds committee meetings on global warming and invites only the wing-nuttiest opponents, the man who wants political cartoonists declared lobbyists, the man who sells mining equipment to coal companies. No conflict of interest of course for such a man to be chair of the Natural Resources and Environment Committee.

Decimation of our mountains is bad enough, but as House testimony showed yesterday, the fallout of mountaintop removal mining effects water quality for a large part of the state:

Two university scientists testified in favor of the measure, saying the industry’s practice of pushing spoil and overburden over mountainsides and into the valleys below is harming water quality, increasing the potential for floods and destroying aquatic habitat.

“The increase in metal concentrations is particularly alarming because of their toxicity to humans and wildlife,” said Nathaniel Hitt, a research associate in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences at Virginia Tech University.

As a result, many of the small streams that now flow into tributaries of the Kentucky River, which supplies water to 800,000 Kentuckians, are “as colorful as a fall Oak tree,” said Democrat Don Pasley of Winchester, the sponsor of HB 164.

“While questions about Central Kentucky’s water supply have divided us in recent years, we should at least be able to agree that it should be clean,” Pasley said.

This bill may come to a committee vote today (March 5). Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and the Central Kentucky Council for Peace & Justice are urging us all to call House Appropriations and Revenue Committee members before 1:30 today in support of this bill.

***
In other good news, Dennis Kucinich won his Ohio primary bid yesterday.

AND

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. (AP) — Voters in two southern Vermont towns passed articles Tuesday calling for the indictment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney for violating the Constitution.

More symbolic than substantive, the items sought to have police arrest Bush and Cheney if they ever visit Brattleboro or nearby Marlboro or to extradite them for prosecution elsewhere — if they’re not impeached first.

via

Blogalicious offers a handy-dandy list of print magazines that accept e-mail submissions.

As Diane points out, postage is going up, so these magazines are doing us a considerable courtesy.

Thanks, Diane.

Well, your Senate just made the Bush unitary presidency stronger by passing a FISA bill that gives the executive branch the right to decide who they should spy on, without judicial review, and gives the telecommunications industry retroactive immunity from legal action for giving up your information.

You might call your Congress person and suggest that s/he support the RESTORE act. Otherwise, unfettered spying for six years.

Meanwhile Antonin Scalia continues his charm offensive, saying torture is just all right with him and you can’t call it “cruel and unusual” unless it’s punishment for a crime. Waterboarding equals a smack in the face? Guess we have a hint how the Supremes might decide on the question of admitting evidence obtained by torture.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, when everything is pink and rosey. Except in the coal-bearing Appalachians. Still time to consider joining the I Love Mountains Day Rally. Wendell Berry will be there. And it looks like the weather is gonna cooperate. Forecast calls for 45 and sunny.

Friday, February 15, is the postmark deadline for entries to The Heartland Review’s Joy Bale Boone poetry prize. Kathleen Driskell judges.

AND February 29^th, Leap Day, is deadline for the Green River Writers suite of contests. (Link is to PDF file.)