Sherry Chandler

Betty Gabehart Prizes from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference

Submission deadline July 31.

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. The Betty Gabehart Prize honors our good friend, patron, and former director who led the conference during its seminal decade in the 1980s.

Three prizes are awarded, in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Each winner receives $100, two 2-day passes, publication of the winning manuscript on this web site (if desired), and the opportunity to read her winning manuscript at the conference.

Guidelines at the link.

Nancy Fletcher Cassell

Nothingness (9/11)

�Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words.�
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The forest sings aloud in winter,
a host to sleep of the unnamed beautiful.
Musk and leaf compact under foot,
black with moist ages and ages of eyes.

I am chilled clean,
to the slick bone of the present.
A laugh turns to scent crush on my sleeve.
Weariness runs down inside the crayon of my flesh.

Watch us, as what is ours is taken.
Our moans are ravenous. They flail the stars.
Shadows uncelebrated erupt.
We rob one to one.
Our hearts unscrewed peer from loot-smeared eyes.

The joy of ignorance burns each word.
They tumble out and away from our lips,
into the knowledge of the world singing:
I want to hear and not take to heart the song.

— Nancy Fletcher Cassell, originally published in Poems and Drawings on Peace and Justice, 2005.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Nancy Fletcher Cassell, visual artist and writer, is currently a finalist for the Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize from Water-Stone Review. She has received the Legacies Award from the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning and was a finalist for the Second Annual Next Great Writers Award from the Carnegie. Nancy has also received an Honorable Mention for the The Kentucky Women Writers Conference’s Betty Gabehart Award.

Her poems and drawings were published in Poems and Drawings on Peace and Justice by Greater Cincinnati Artists. Her visual work has received fellowships from The Kentucky Arts Council (Al Smith Fellowships), The Kentucky Foundation for Women and The Southern Arts Federation/NEA. Her artwork has been featured in Wind Magazine, The Artist’s Magazine and New American Paintings. Nancy has been awarded residencies at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Yaddo.

She was selected as a featured artist from the state of Kentucky for The Southern Arts Federation website.

Nancy is currently represented by the Ann Tower Gallery in Lexington.

Learn more about Nancy at her individual website is www.nancyfletchercassell.com .

5 Writers to Know for the Women Writers Conference

5 Writers to Know for the Women Writers Conference:

Nikky Finney.

Jan Oaks, Senior Lecturer in Gender and Women�s Studies and English at the University of Kentucky, leads a discussion of Nikky Finney�s 2003 collection of poetry and prose, <em>The World Is Round.

Tuesday, April 7, 12 noon, Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, 251 W. Second Street, Lexington, tel 859-254-4175

Also this week, Nikky herself is giving a reading and craft talk at nearby Morehead State University on Wednesday, April 8 at 7:00 p.m.

HOLLY GODDARD JONES.

Julie Wrinn, Conference director, leads a discussion of selected stories from Girl Trouble, forthcoming in September from Harper Perennial. Photocopies of selected stories will be available at the April 7 discussion (see above) or by contacting Julie Wrinn at wwk.info@gmail.com.

Friday, May 8, 12 noon, Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, 251 W. Second Street, Lexington, tel 859-254-4175

The 2009 Women Writers Conference will be held September 10-12. Elizabeth Alexander will be the keynote speaker. Pre-registration for the September conference begins May 1. More information at the link.

Balance

One of the highlights — there were many — of the 29^th Kentucky Women Writers Conference was a panel discussion at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Lisa Williams, and Crystal Wilkinson. Subject: Poem or Story: Finding Your Subject’s Form.

I got a real impression that Oates had a prejudice for narrative. From my hastily jotted notes, I quote her as saying something on the order of (and not necessarily all at one time):

I’m sure many of you are poets. There are more people writing poetry than reading it. There are 40 million people writing poetry right now…outbursts of emotion…divorced from narrative…having little weight. …Prose fiction has to have something to say.

I don’t want to give the impression here that Joyce Carol Oates was completely negative about poetry. After all, it was she who picked Lisa Williams’s volume Woman Reading to the Sea (Norton, 2008) for the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Oates was witty, charming, and very intelligent on this panel. Still, such statements, which are not rare, make me want to burn my papers and break my pens. What point in adding to this glut of lightweight emotional indulgence?

As happens, however, this afternoon I picked up the winter 2007 issue of Rattle and opened it to Alan Fox’s interview with Arthur Sze and read the passage below, which restores the balance a little bit for me:

I think poetry has a crucial role to play in our society. We’re in such a hurry; we live in such a consumer culture. Yes, it’s a common complaint to say that the readership of poetry is small and to lament that. I can’t change much about the numbers; all I can say is, we as poets feel this is worth doing—we’re committing our lives to it. It’s not about making money; it’s about nourishing the human spirit.

If, like the monks who pray at Gethsemane to restore balance to the world, I choose to spend my life as an obscure poet, nourishing my own human spirit and with luck a few readers’, then who is to say that is not a worthy thing to do, whether or not I leave an individual mark on the world at large.

Added: This from William Stafford from Writing the Australian Crawl (Univ Michigan, 1979), an essay called “Writing:”

One doesn’t learn how to do art, but one learns that it is possible by a certain adjustment of the consciousness to participate in art—it’s a natural activity for one not corrupted by mechanical ways.

preceded by:

In my area, the coyotes are still the best poets.

KWWC prizes

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.

Raccoons in the Attic

I must rather shamefacedly admit that I only managed to attend one day of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. I had been having my Ishmael moments for about a week, “growing grim about the mouth…a damp, drizzly November in my soul.” Abetted no doubt by this damp, drizzly March. I make a blanket apology here to anyone whose (I hope metaphorical) hat I may have knocked off. Last Friday night Thursday night (sheesh!), I came home and crashed and am still crashing even today. I’m not sure what has thrown me into such a state of deep exhaustion – Sideshow took a lot of work but not that much – so I think I’ll blame the raccoon.

For most of March we’ve been trying to dissuade this mother raccoon from whelping in our attic, but she turns out to have a much higher tolerance than I do for talk radio blaring all night. She didn’t even seem to mind the pans of ammonia and she wasn’t turned by my husband’s plywood barriers. In fact, she seemed able to slither through holes that would have frustrated a cat. So I have had several weeks of uneasy, Rush-Limbaugh-haunted (shudder) sleep and still, on Saturday evening, when we went up to check on the status of things, we found mother and babies chirring away.

TR, my husband, rescued a baby raccoon a couple of years ago and she followed him around like a puppy for several days before he could find a rehabilitator over in Lexington to take her in and return her to the wild. He is convinced that our new mother is Ursula, like Lassie, come home. But I’m not so sure. Raccoons seem to have an affinity for attics, though we have lived here for over twenty years without having had one before. Gin Petty, on whose shoulder we’ve been crying has this to say about coons nesting in attics:

As for coons not making nests, I’ll agree with you, TR. They most certainly do, along with messes of other types. When we bought a house in Versailles, one of the first things we did was check the attic. It was a mess. Coons had piled up insulation and staked out potty areas. When I asked a neighbor if he had coon problems, he looked at me like I was from outer space. “We don’t have coons around here. They live out in the country!”

Of course, we are out in the country, so I guess we have no complaint. Now that we’ve lost the battle, I hope I’ll be able to get some sleep. At least until the babies are up and around. The same websites that assured TR that talk radio and ammonia would run the raccoon off assure us that mother and babies will move on in a few weeks. Unless, of course, this is Ursula…

Meanwhile, I’ll take comfort from my conversation with Leatha Kendrick at the KyWWC. When I introduced Leatha to Cathy Essinger, I mentioned that Leatha’s father was a veterinarian and Leatha began to talk about all the animals they had rescued and lived with when she was a child. Among them was a raccoon who made a nest in the sofa and used to climb her mother’s legs. “My mother was a very tolerant woman,” said Leatha. For myself, I hope I don’t have to have my tolerance tested much further.

from “Translating Daddy”

Whistling ministrant to wounds,
you bent above the morphine doze of each cat tied
spread-eagle on the steel, her belly shaved. While
your hands moved across the void, the empty eyes of animal sleep,
she lay limp as my loose-stuffed toys, but breathing, bleeding.
Father, you let us in that sterile room
and spoke the tongue we’d come to understand:
“scalpel” “scissors” (we knew which one when) “sponge”
Two girls, eight and ten, we drank our colas,
orange crush, crunching peanuts,
casually taking in your knife’s precise incision,
the hairline beads of red that spread into a gaping
mouth you entered with two fingertips.
…
Father, we knew you were a savior,
healer of illnesses your patients had no language
to describe. Work took you up.
Something happened through you—
we watched it carefully as we had learned to hold
your words, sheathed and definite as blades.

–Leatha Kendrick, Heart Cake (The Sow’s Ear Press, 2000)

The Sideshow

The Sideshow collaboration is being hung today at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning here in Lexington. I have written my poem on glass, as have the other Mosaic poets, and we’ve faced the cosmic question: to mat or not to mat? The programs are designed, printed, folded. The ads are in the paper. We are all very tired.

Although Sideshow is its official name, for those of us involved it has been more of a WAMO, the acronym one clever member invented for the merging of our two groups, WAG and Mosaic. We have been working on this project since late last summer, meeting, retreating, potlucking, sharing work, writing grants. Grants that don’t get funded take as much time and energy as grants that do, but I rather suspect a funded grant adds energy to a project. I know for sure rejection truncates. Questions are reduced from “what can we do?” to “what can we afford?” Fortunately we found some creative answers.

Yesterday, driving home from my Sunday visit with Mom, I switched on All Things Considered. Ruth Levy Guyer was Noting the Synchronicity of Life. Was this in itself synchronicity? I am still more inclined to think it is coincidence. But that is probably because my brain chemistry is so pedestrian. Odd brain chemistry was Guyer’s explanation for synesthesia, the conflation of two senses that allowed Virginia Woolf to see words in color.

Ah, am I rescued then? Is this why some people can see poems while other people hear them? Perhaps after all it’s not a failure of imagination or intelligence that has kept me from being able to conceive of poetry as a visual art through all these months of trying. My brain is wired like Camille Paglia’s. I just need to accept that, struggle over.

Somehow I doubt it.

The opening is Wednesday night at 7:30, on the eve of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, a major happening in the area that I’ve been remiss in ignoring. But more on that later.

Sideshow opens Wednesday night as part of the Writers Block Party. We’ll see the culmination of all our work. Some of it really is brilliant. All of it is fun. We’ll have a clown and balloons and animal crackers and we’ll see our poems on the wall with the wonderful paintings and we’ll read our poems and we’ll put weariness behind us and celebrate.

If you’re in the area, come celebrate with us.