Sherry Chandler

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.

Poet Diane Lockward reports from the AWP meeting in New York City where she has been minding the shared table for Wind Publications and Steel Toe Books, both Kentucky enterprises

I have now attended my first AWP Conference. My spouse drove me in Wednesday afternoon and deposited me at the Hilton Hotel where I would spend an absurd amount of money for a rather small room, nice but smallish. That night I had a BLT for dinner—$17.50! Then I discovered that the hotel charges $15 per day for use of their wireless. That was another first. That’s usually an amenity that comes with the room rate. But I had my new laptop with me and was determined to put it to use.

The next day I reported for duty at the book table my publisher, Wind Publications, was sharing with Steel Toe Books. Tom Hunley, the Steel Toe publisher as well as a Wind poet, had the table already set up. Our location was a nice corner spot, but on the second floor of the Bookfair. As that area required one to go up an escalator and there was no sign indicating the second level, there was much less traffic in that area. I sold a decent number of books, but I heard a lot of grousing about diminished sales this year in spite of the dramatic increase in the number of registrants. My guess is that with the exorbitant hotel costs people were less inclined to shell out for books.

Diane also attended the launch of the Wom-Po anthology Letters to the World, published by Red Hen Press:

My favorite event was the Wompo panel Friday morning. This was a celebration of the just-released Wompo anthology, Letters to the World, which contains over 200 poems by members of the Wompo listserv. It was an amazing and time-consuming and international endeavor. The result is a gorgeous anthology.

Several local poets have poems in this anthology, including me, Joanie DiMartino, Ann Lederer, and Margaret Ricketts. More about it later.

Addendum: Meredith Sue Willis also has an AWP experience to report:

I suppose, especially in New York, so many people go! 7,000 participants, and they had to close registration– at once a wonderful feeling, all those people who care about books and writing– that what we do is serious, and at the same time the horror, the horror: they all want to be writers? And who will be reading what they write? Young people from the programs, fragrant with ambition, old people with twisted mouths, self-involved, not having achieved all they wanted, ready to talk about themselves, not others. Double and tripling of exhilaration and dismay.

Finishing Line Press has announced their tenth annual New Women’s Voices chapbook competition. Deadline is February 15. Click here for guidelines.

The Heartland Review has announced its third annual short-short fiction contest. Deadline is January 1. Click here for guidelines.

In response to some recent posts here on the blog, our intrepid poet/publisher Charlie Hughes has run some numbers of his own:

This morning I’m reading about Google who has announced that it will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop renewable energy as part of a plan to help clean the environment and reduce the company’s own electric bill. “Solar isn’t currently cheaper than coal,” Google co-founder Larry Page said. “That’s the point of this — to get it there.” Google named the project RE<C, short for Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal, and hopes to benefit from cheaper electricity by reducing the costs of running its vast electricity-hungry data centers.

I realize that just moments ago I turned up my thermostat a couple of degrees, and now I’m wondering how this translates into harm to the environment. What if everyone in the country turned up their thermostats two degrees. How much coal would that consume? How much environmental harm would that do? I’m sure somebody somewhere has done that calculation in regard to CO₂ emissions, or global warming, or mercury emissions, etc. Not having the necessary facts, I can’t do the calculations. I’m not willing to say though, that my two measly degrees will produce no effect.

Many people, including many of Kentucky’s legislators, are evidently of the opinion that puny little man is incapable of altering the environment of the Earth, as gigantic as it is. I think the reason is that we humans are incapable of grasping the enormity of the situation. We can’t, for example, grasp the enormity of the national debt. Likewise, are incapable of doing the proper mental gymnastics to understand our effect on the environment. To that end, and since we Kentuckians know pickup trucks, here are a couple of calculations I’ve done, based on readily verifiable facts, which will be enlightening:

1. Each day year-round in Kentucky more than 1000 tons of explosives are used in coal mining. If this quantity of explosives were loaded into pickup trucks it would produce a convoy more than 10 miles long every day of the year.

2. In 2005 Kentucky coal production was 125 million tons. This rate of coal production would fill about 685,000 pickup trucks each day, and would produce a pickup truck convoy about 3,000 miles in length every day of the year. (If proper spacing for moving vehicles is allowed, the covoy would reach from New York City to SanFrancisco, every day.)

And these calculations apply only to Kentucky. West Virginia and Wyoming each produce more coal than Kentucky, not to mention other coal-producing states. Who among us is willing to say that burning this much coal has no effect on the environment? Not me.

With a P.S.:

If a baby is born every 8 seconds in the US, that’s 10,800 babies each day. This corresponds to a convoy of baby buggies with mothers more than 10 miles long each day.

And a P.P.S.:

29,569, the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004

Lay these bodies end-to-end. 32 miles. Lexington to Frankfort.

1. What differences do you find reading this poem aloud from reading it silently? How does Chandler use sound and meter to reinforce meaning?

Discussion questions! For my poems! What a treat.

And that one’s a pretty good question, too. Somebody noticed!

The questions are found in New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writings, a new anthology of fiction, poetry, and essay edited by Charlie Sweet and Hal Blythe.

The book is published by the Jesse Stuart Foundation, which states its primary goal as “to produce books which supplement the educational system at all levels.” It sells for $19.

About New Growth, the editors say, in part:

In the 19th century Kentucky was at the crossroads of western migration and expansion. We believe this collection will demonstrate, along with earlier anthologies, that the Commonwealth is once again becoming the epicenter of literary output. Too often the media paint a picture of American as a bi-coastal country with little in between. One message from New Growth is that there are other important voices that will be heard.

The collection contains 11 short stories chosen by Silas House (Silas has a Wikipedia page, too), 15 poets chosen by Frank X. Walker, and 11 essays chosen by George Brosi. Each section editor writes an introduction, there are “genesis statements” for each piece, and discussion questions both for the sections and for the entirety of the collection.

Among the poets are many I include among my friends and know to be excellent poets: Joanie DiMartino, Leatha Kendrick, Charlie Hughes, Erin Keane, Sam Martin, and Andrea O’Brien. Others I know through their excellent work: Bianca Spriggs, Tom Hunley, and Libby Falk Jones. The others I’m looking forward to discovering: Tammy Ramsey, Karen George, Howard Wang, Graham Thomas Shelby, and Linda Caldwell. Several are graduates of the Governor’s School for the Arts.

There’s a poet among the essayists, too — Steven Cope, an excellent poet and songwriter. The essayists also include my old friend Georgia Green Stamper, who some of you have met through her comments here and others through her commentary on WUKY. Kentucky legend Bob Sloan also contributes an essay.

The fiction writers are all new to me but Silas House is one of the state’s great mentors of fiction writers, so I know I have much to discover.

Jonathan Greene, a Kentucky poet of small fame* and great prestige and owner of Gnomon Press, voices some intriguing opinions about Amazon.com, small presses, and independent bookstores on the issue #99 of Meredith Sue Willis’s Books for Readers newsletter. As a matter of background, the newsletter has been hosting an ongoing conversation about shopping at Amazon.com, which is a non-union shop:

Just back from the [Kentucky] State House chambers and the uphill useless fight against legislation to give Peabody Coal millions in incentives which may very well result in more mountaintop removal devastation in the eastern coalfields.

But back to Amazon, this from the view of a small publisher (with over 40 years experience): The way the book world is set up is less than ideal for a small publisher. Amazon is not Evil in that in many instances it gives access to readers who want small press books that are not otherwise easily available. Certainly I agree with my friend Gordon Simmons: first support your local independent bookstore if you are lucky enough to have a good one in your neighborhood; they are a dying breed.

But not all such bookstores will go to the trouble to order a book that is not distributed by the near-monopoly of Ingram Book Co. Ingram takes the same deep discount (55% off of list price) that Amazon takes, but (unlike Amazon) Ingram often returns much of what it buys in beat-up condition which the publisher has to eat plus pay the UPS cost back to its door. I once got a hardback book returned by Ingram with a razor cut the length of its spine through both the jacket and the cloth. And had to pay for its trip back to my warehouse. As far as Amazon being non-union, I doubt many bookstores are union or pay what many would consider decent wages. Not right, but friends who work in stores complain to me about this fact without telling me their specific salaries.

Readers can also try to support publishers directly if their local store will not bother to order a book that Ingram does not carry.

I highly recommend that anyone the least interested in the publishing biz read the rest of this intelligent comment.

The telephone number for Gnomon Press, located at Gnomon Press, 329 W Broadway in Frankfort, is 502-223-1858.

As for Amazon, my own experience is that one can order Finishing Line Press chapbooks through their site; bookstores don’t like chapbooks because they don’t have a spine and so tend to disappear on the shelves. But work for Amazon is very mechanized and quota driven.

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*Fama was the Roman goddess of rumor, and so it might be said that there’s a certain down-side to fame.

I have added a new page to the blog site: Links to Kentucky Small Magazines and Presses. You’ll find it in the sidebar. I’ve had this page in the making for some time and have just now got round to finalizing it.

At least, it’s as final as I can make it.

If you know of a Kentucky small magazine or publisher I missed, please let me know.

Please also check the Links to Kentucky Writers, and if you know of any Kentucky writer with a web page that I’ve left out, let me know.

Also let me know about any outdated links.

And, last but not least, I need to tell you that former Kentucky Poet Laureate Lee Pennington and his wife Jo have a new page for their JoLe Productions. Be sure to stop by and take a look at their heritage documentaries.

Wind Publications of Nicholasville, Kentucky has announced the publication of two new books:

NICHOLASVILLE, KY — Billy C. Clark, noted author and poet, is the author of two books released by Wind Publications in August.

To Find A Birdsong is an American Indian myth which will be enjoyed by grade-school youth as well as adults. It tells the story of how Nanabozho, a god who was given dominion over the land of the Algonquin by the Great Spirit, saved the muskrats from a great flood, and how a wise old muskrat at last found his land of birdsong. The story is enhanced by the illustrations of the internationally known watercolorist Elizabeth Ellison.

In section two of the book, “Notes on To Find a Birdsong,” Clark tells the fascinating story of his early life along the river and how it affected the genesis of this book. To Find a Birdsong first began to form in the mind of a boy of less than ten years of age as he ran his trap lines along the Big Sandy near Catlettsburg. The story neared its final form while Billy Clark was a student at the University of Kentucky in the 1950’s. Now, after years of honing, as one might a long narrative poem, the story is ready for telling. This part of the book will be of considerable interest to teachers and students of literature and creative writing. Seldom, if ever, do students and teachers have the opportunity to read, study, and discuss the making of a book using the author’s own words.

To Catch an Autumn is a collection of poems that reveal the author’s knowledge of, and love for, the land and waters of his home. Born into poverty, Clark spent his boyhood fishing and trapping in the waters near the confluence of the Big Sandy and Ohio rivers. In the winter mornings before school he ran a trapline for muskrat and mink. In the summers he ran trotlines and sold fish and bait for meager earnings. He slept under the stars, in fodder shocks, or in the city building in downtown Catlettsburg where he held a part-time job. His parents had attended grade school for only a couple of years—his abiding dream was to obtain an education.

To Catch an Autumn tells of a boy listening for the ghosts of miners, their wails in the night and the rattling of bones. Trotlines, joe boats, moon-eyed hounds, double-bottom plows, rocky hillsides, and Big Sandy baptizings—Clark has known them all. In these poems Clark expresses his gratitude and sorrow at having known a time when the sky held no vapor trails, a time before the river sand was flecked with coal, when no film of oil colored the water’s surface and the mountainsides were green with virgin timber. In To Catch an Autumn we are privileged to see the land and water through the eyes and words of Billy Clark.

To Find a Birdsong, ISBN 978-1-893239-60-9, hardcover, 97 ppg, $20.00. http://windpub.com/books/birdsong.htm

To Catch an Autumn, ISBN 978-1-893239-61-6, softcover, 76 ppg, $15.00. http://windpub.com/books/catchautumn.htm

I found this announcement at Eyewear:

Nthposition’s global headquarters is a minuscule eyrie in North London, and now that In The Criminal’s Cabinet has been in print for nearly three years, publisher and chief editor Val Stevenson is keen to get a few boxes of unsold copies out of her bedroom, though not nearly as keen as her long-suffering husband… If you would like one, please email Val.

Copies will be sent out on a ‘first come, first served’ basis, and when they are gone, ITCC will be officially out-of-print.

Copies will be a staggeringly reasonable £2.00 plus postage and packing (for airmail outside the UK) per copy

As a matter of full disclosure, I’m a contributor to In the Criminal’s Cabinet, and I must say that I’m impressed with myself to be included among so much lucid and edgy work by an international cast from the e-pages of nthposition.

I’ve been reading my way through the anthology again this summer, and I’m pleased with what I find. It’s a very attractively produced volume with 215 pages of poetry and fiction from Robert Allen to Harriet Zinnes. To quote the introduction by edtors Val Stevenson and Todd Swift:

Since 2002, London-based nthposition has featured several hundred poets, from almost every place where people write poetry in English, especially America, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and South Africa. …we have tried to offer a full-spectrum report on the state of poetry of the start of the 21st century, to suggest the various ways — from linguistically innovative to mainstream — a poem can be imagined and created. Good poems occur at all points of the writing compass, from political to just plain weird.

Within these pages, you will find, quite simply, indelible poets and poems to reckon with — from India’s Ranjit Hoskote to Ireland’s Kevin Higgins; from Canada’s Stephanie Bolster to UK’s Jen Hadfield; from American’s Charles Bernstein to South Africa’s Isobel Dixon…

And this, of course, is just the poets, in whom I am most interested.

The prose, too, is all “tight, vivid.” Nine short pieces from the UK, America, Canada, Ireland, Bulgaria, and Japan. I took time to read it this summer, which I had not done before, and I was blown away by works like Kieran D”Angelo’s “The Internal Life of a Brick” and amused and touched by Kenneth J. Harvey’s “No Better a House.”

Invest a few dollars and get hours, years, of enjoyment in return.

H. G. Wells to the side, for humans the calendar allows no do-overs. Still, I’d like to take a quick glance back at the summer solstice, which I allowed to pass with just a nod, in the form of this observation from Michael Czarnecki’s Wheeler Hill Journal for June 21:

I know that such days like today, the Summer Solstice, are only days like any others. But we do mark time in our lives by noting significant events, meaningful days. For me, the days that are more significant are the ones connected with the natural world. The personal days, like birthdays, anniversaries, etc. are meaningful, but in a narrow, self-centered way – not that they aren’t important, but they are only important in how they relate to a particular person and others close to them. For me, generally not a big deal. I remember and honor them in some way, significant marking points certainly, but still mostly personal in nature.

As far as the “holidays” go, they seem to be mostly so much contrivance. Too much commercialization that takes away any meaning so that I rarely look forward to any of them other than for the fact we always have family get-togethers. My parents, sisters and their families gather at someone’s house and they are always an enjoyable time. We gather at other times throughout the year too, so it’s not just a “holiday” event. But whenever we gather it is good and the holidays just make for more of that to happen. It seems quite special that we all like each other and everyone looks forward to being together. Not all families are like that.

The “natural” days of significance though seem to have a deeper relevance for me. So much of my inspiration, my creativity, my spiritual connection to something other comes through the natural world. Today is the Summer Solstice, the sun reaching its apparent northern limit and now begins the retreat south. The maximum amount of daylight, the shortest period of dark. A turning point. Rather, it’s a stopping point, solstice referring to the sun standing still. A pause along the path.

From this point on until the Winter Solstice daylight decreases, the nights grow longer. Significant, especially when so much of what informs my life is related to the natural world. Another turning point, one more solstice in my life. How many more will there be?

My one regret, frustration, is that as my life becomes richer and more absorbed in poetry groups, meetings, conferences, retreats, readings, art fairs, job, new and old generations of family, even this blog, what I sometimes lose, yearn for, is long slow days and a connection to the changes going on in my yard, on the farm. I run and run and suddenly it’s mid-summer and the days are growing shorter. Where did the long days go?

I am not what anyone would describe as an “outdoor type.” Aside from hiking, of which I get to do little, outdoor sports aren’t much interest to me and I am only a sporadic gardener. I love a book or a notebook and a pen. But most of my consolation in life comes from the earth — a sunset, finding an unexpected patch of Dutchman’s britches, the mockingbird’s song, rain after drought.

Yesterday, Jeff Hess featured an article from the BBC, Surviving Boredom:

“People assume that the opposite of boredom is excitement, so parents take their children to a theme park. …But quite obviously what humans want is social interactivity — so parents would be better off taking their children on a picnic than to a theme park…”

Too much stimulation, as any mother knows, is as difficult for children as too little. Same for adults, especially introverts like me.

Hard, though, to give anything up. I love it all.

If you would like some stimulation of the slow and thoughtful kind this weekend, Michael is featuring summer poems on his blogtalk radio cast Vital and Vibrant Life. Tune it in live at 9 p.m. Sunday — it’s talk radio, so you can call in and read one of your own summer poems — or listen to archived programs at any time.