Sherry Chandler

Eclectic Living Room

The Eclectic Living Room meets at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning one week before every Kentucky Great Writers reading to discuss and “celebrate” the work. The discussion is led by Leatha Kendrick, who is a wonderful appreciator of other people’s work and who, as a friend just said to me, reads like a writer. Most of those who attend the discussion are also writers. So, participants have an opportunity not only to explore the work that they will soon be hearing but also to hone their own writing skills. Each session ends with a writing prompt or exercise.

The Morris Book Shop is there to give participants a chance to look at and buy the books in question.

And sometimes, as last night, the group is privileged to have the publisher present to add his insights to both the writers and the publishing process.

At last night’s session we discussed the work of Normandi Ellis, Dorothy Sutton, and J. Stephen Rhodes, all three of whom have books out from Wind Publications and all three of whom will be reading next Tuesday, February 9, at the Carnegie Center as part of the Kentucky Great Writers Series (funded by LexArts). The featured readers begin at 7:30; the open mic begins at 6:30. Local folk, mark it on your calendar.

That address is 251 West Second Street, Lexington.

I consider all three of these fine writers personal friends and I have featured work by Steve, Dorothy, and Normandi here on the blog. I can attest that they are all great readers. It will be a fine evening.

I guess this reads a little bit like an infomercial, and I guess that’s all right. Who can you praise if you can’t praise your friends?

Cool light from a soul at the white heat

Luminescence is cool light, an excitation of atoms not caused by heat, a physiologic or chemical glow. It is a light that does not consume.

Such a cold light, such luminescence, may seem an odd thing to associate with Emily Dickinson, who asked “Dare you see a soul at the white heat?”

In The Luminescence of All Things Emily (Wind Publications, 2009), Elizabeth Oakes looks at Emily Dickinson’s life but she looks at it slant, mostly from the perspective of the supporting players: Emily’s sister Vinnie, her brother Austin who lived next door and supported the sisters after their father died. Austin’s lover Mabel (who edited Emily’s poems) and his wife Sue (for whom many of the poems were written). Tom Kelly and Maggie Maher, the hired help.

The Dickinson household was an odd mix of cold and heat. The distant parents, the two unmarried sisters, the sexually estranged Sue balanced over against the affair between Austin and Mabel, who sometimes trysted in the parlor of The Homestead, with, one has to assume, the collusion of Emily and Vinnie. The once-popular notion of Emily Dickinson living a cloistered sort of life vanishes with any kind of close reading of her poems. Oakes, by shining the light a little wider, illuminates just what white heat lurked “Beneath the Amherst Calm:”

Conventionalism,
Austin wrote to Mabel,
is for those not strong
enough to be laws
unto themselves.

Oakes is obviously steeped in the Dickinson papers and she knows her stuff. She also knows how to find the poetry in the stuff. She writes a plain free verse style of poetry, no pyrotechnics of technique, but her way with an image is masterful, from the first poem, which defines agoraphobia as a snow globe:

There’s a medical name for it now,
but a snow globe will do as well.

Tell us how you know so much
in your quiet world . . .

We shake and shake that snow
globe, and the snow just falls
faster.

to the antepenultimate, “Emily’s Room”

Emily’s niece tells this story.
Emily stood before her bedroom
door, mimicked turning a key,
and said, “Freedom, Mattie.”

Going up the stairs was like leaving
the eye of a storm. . . .

In between, nuggets of delight, as in the ending lines of “Mabel in the 1920’s: from a Photograph:”

Only the memory
of Austin’s hands holds
her waist in now.

Or these lines from “Standing before a Copy of Emily’s white Dress”

Sometimes words are enough. Sometimes
they rub against each other like a hired
man warming his hands before a fire or
the thighs of a woman gone plump.

There’s a quatrain I wish I’d written.

One of the most arresting poems in the collection is the portrait of “Emily’s Hands.” Her hands “meant to . . . scrub clothes on a washboard, to shuck / corn in a cold barn” send my mind to Melverina Peppercorn and the other tough farm women of the 19^the century. Of course, that was not the life Emily led, but still

. . . the pens they used in those
days must have looked
so small in Emily’s hands

How that stands our mental picture of Emily on its head.

Father

At this year’s Appalachian Writers Workshop, I had the pleasure of meeting Jeff Daniel Marion, a man whom Appalachian writers hold in the same veneration as they hold Jim Wayne Miller and James Still.

Danny, as he is known to one and all, is a generous conversationalist and a fine story-teller, with a smile warm as a winter kitchen. One fellow conference participant said he’d look like Santa Claus, but he’s too short. Which statement left me to wonder just how tall Santa Claus might be. He is, after all, an elf, which would seem to imply diminutive (unless you’re J. R. R. Tolkien).

But that’s a diversion. Certainly Danny is a gentle man, a gentleman in the best sense of the word, tender.

Ron Rash says of Danny Marion,

For twenty-five years Jeff Daniel Marion has eschewed poetic fashion and poetic posturing, going his own way, making poems that are confident enough to speak quietly to us, even gently. Yet to call these poems modest is a mistake . . .

Danny shows his poetic confidence in titling what I think is his 13^th collection simply Father. It takes a lot of courage, in my opinion, to put so stark a name on a book, with no attempt to find a metaphor or a figure to tweak the curiosity of the reader. The volume is what it is: 40 poems in contemplation of his working class father, who died in 1990.
Read the rest of this entry »

Coal

This year’s Appalachian Writers Workshop featured many readings from good works on mountaintop removal.

MotesBooks has published We All Live Downstream: Writings about Mountaintop Removal, edited by Jason Howard with writings by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Wendell Berry, Earl Hamner, Ashley Judd, Silas House, Denise Giardina, Erik Reece, Bobbie Ann Mason, Bob Edwards, Penny Loeb, Hal Crowther, Jean Ritchie, Terry Tempest Williams, Jeff Biggers, Ann Pancake, George Ella Lyon, Ben Sollee, Maurice Manning, and many more.

Wind Publications has published Missing Mountains edited by Kristin Johannsen, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Mary Ann Taylor-Hall.

Ann Pancake read from her novel Strange as this Weather Has Been (Shoemaker and Hoard/Counterpoint). A detail from Jeff Chapman-Crane’s sculpture, The Agony of Gaia (pictured above), is featured on the cover of that novel, and on the night of Pancake’s reading, he brought the sculpture to the Great Room of the May Stone Building for all of us to see. (You can download a podcast of Ann Pancake reading from this novel at A River & Sound Review, episode 13.)

University Press of Kentucky has published Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal by Silas House and Jason Howard. The book is a collection of oral histories. Embedded below is a podcast from the University Press featuring Silas and Jason.

Unfortunately, the protests against mountaintop removal are being cast as a fight against jobs, and my friend Jeff Hess has drawn my attention to this article on confrontation between local residents and protestors: Violence Escalating Against Anti-Coal Activists. I am given to understand that some of these counter protestors are on the coal company payroll, though I can’t document that statement. The fact is, though, that mountaintop removal mining creates very few jobs. It doesn’t take many workers to blow the tops off the mountains and push the rubble into the valleys with bulldozers.

On Friday, we stopped for gas at the Mi-Dee Mart, which sits at the end of the Jethro Amburgey Bridge, just across Toublesome Creek from the Hindman Settlement School. Workshoppers stroll over to the Mi-Dee Mart to pick up forgotten toiletries or to buy a pop (forbidden inside Settlement School buildings). It’s about the only store within walking distance and Settlement School Director Mike Mullins has been known to say “If you can’t get it at Mi-Dee Mart, you don’t need it.”

As I stopped by to pay for my purchases, I was dismayed to see, prominently displayed by the register, leaflets advertising a rally in support of the coal industry.

Update: Coal Group Reveals 6 More Forged Lobbying Letters

Appalachian Studies

Anne Shelby makes me laugh.

Anne Shelby makes me think.

Anne Shelby makes me shake my power fist and cry out “Right on, Sister!”

And oh, how refreshing that is.

The poems in Appalachian Studies aren’t difficult. They are plain-spoken statements from a plain-spoken witty woman who is by nature a storyteller and a humorist.

Shelby is also clear-eyed, and though her poems, like her stories, tend to the folksy, there is nothing of the sentimental about them.

Appalachian Studies is a volume of poetry you can devour at a sitting.

And I did.

Nice review by Margaret Ricketts here. Says Margaret:

Like her fellow Southerners Flannery O’Connor and Molly Ivins, Shelby uses dialect to prick stereotypes like soap bubbles. You can’t have a grandbaby on this thing / without special arrangements. One spell / transformed my taters into tatters, served / me subpoenas when I ordered soupbeans.

The poem quoted is “Spell Check,” which begins

It’s handy but not much account for writing
hillbilly poems with.

If you’d like to see some sample poems see here and here. You’ll see that “hillbilly” isn’t the only stereotype she busts. She’s also hard on sexism. And ageism.

By the way, Anne has a new children’s book out: The Man Who Lived in a Hollow Tree.

And you can catch her this weekend at the Mountain Heritage Festival, along with a passel of other talented mountain writers, including Denise Giardina and Gwyn Hyman Rubio.

J. Stephen Rhodes

Beulaville, NC — 1969
          — For Suzanne Cleary

The time I didn’t know what to do next
I arranged my furniture in the little frame house

that sagged in the middle like an ark—
just three pieces really: a mattress, chair,

and desk made from a filing cabinet,
an old door, and some concrete blocks.

One stoplight town, diploma in hand, my bosses
instructed me to start the revolution, empower

the poor. I possessed no more than numbers
and facts, such as the pregnancy rate

for teenagers and median age, high, income,
low, for the place I now called home.

I knew no one. The neighbor who topped
and suckered tobacco for a dollar an hour

or his wife who made bologna bacon, bologna pie
and stew from surplus food, laughed in her kitchen,

This surplus cheese is good. Take some
peanut butter and mix the two together.

Her can-do cooking blew my must-do master
plans out the window—newspaper stories,

five year schemes, and charts and graphs,
the kind that lined our family business walls.

I called my father to say how helpless I felt,
he clicked his tongue, the sound of one hand clapping.

In the telephone booth, it was just the hiss of the line,
an encouraging “Goodbye,: then the sound of wind

across tobacco fields and nearer,
blowing through bean vines. I didn’t know

what to do next, so I did next to nothing
except sit in the kitchen and listen.

— J. Stephen Rhodes, originally published in The Time I Didn’t Know What To Do Next (Wind Publications)
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Steve Rhodes lives and writes on a small farm near Berea, Kentucky. Of his writing he says:

“I want to write in a way that offers hope for people like myself who are more than a little overwhelmed by modern life. I want to be honest about the brokenness that besets us, but I am also looking for beauty in the midst of that brokenness.”

Steve has an M. Div. from Columbia Theological Seminary and a Ph. D. in Theological Studies from Emory University. He is currently working on an MFA in creative writing at the Unversity of Southern Maine-Stonecoast. He’s one of the best readers I know, by which I mean he is a critic fully aware of the music of poetry and with an uncanny ability to home in on a poem’s strengths as well as its weaknesses, and also that he reads poetry out loud with skill and passion. If you get a chance to hear Steve read, don’t miss it. He’ll be reading at the First Presbyterian Church in Somerset (200 N Vine St) at 7:00 PM on Wednesday May 6th.

The Time I Didn’t Know What To Do Next is his first full-length collection of poetry. You can read my comments on Steve’s book here.

Anne Shelby

Homeplace

�Is it haunted?�
the fifth grade wants to know,
when I tell them I live in an old old house
where my family has lived for a hundred years.
The children are well versed in local haints.

They�s a woman gets in the car with you
if you stop on a foggy night in Hounchell�s Bend.
She�ll ride to the graveyard and then get out.
You can see straight through her.

Long time ago a Davidson hanged hisself
from a cliff up the Rocky Branch.
My uncle says if you�re up there drunk
you can see that feller swing.

No, I tell them.
I don�t believe in ghosts.
I don�t mention
the bacon I smell frying
winter mornings before daylight
when all I�ve got is oatmeal,
the blue-clad figure
at the edge of the field,
the smoke still rising
from long dead fires —
the crowd,
forever poorly dressed,
always crossing
the Atlantic in crowded boats,
forever with their dogs,
their children,
their baptizings,
funeral dinners,
their sickbeds,
always grubbing newgrounds
with dull little
hoes —

To tell the truth, sometimes
I wish they�d let me alone.
It�s hard to draw a good breath around here.
I entertain fantasies —
an apartment off in a city somewhere,
near theaters and a Greek restaurant,
or a small private cottage by the sea.

They�d follow.
I know they would —
wash their feet,
pack a cheap suitcase
and tag along.
I can see me now,
trying to negotiate
the New York subway
with this bunch in tow.
They never change:
Aaron always showing off
how he can name
every county in Kentucky,
Bernice telling you
her dreams every morning, Gene
with his childish pranks, and Mae
with her sad stories —
like somebody you never heard of
drowning in the river,
or a baby a hundred years ago
dying of a fever. Now what
am I supposed to do with that?

And the beach is out.
They have to have shuck beans
wherever they are, and redeye gravy.
We can�t even
run up to the county seat
without dragging an enormous
trunk of old pictures,
and all that slow, mournful singing
doesn�t go over with the beach crowd.

But nobody ever asks,
�Are you
haunted?�

— Anne Shelby, originally published in Appalachian Studies (Wind Publications).
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Anne Shelby is a Democrat in Clay County, Kentucky, which may give you some idea of her strength of character. Poet, essayist, storyteller, political activist, and singer, Anne is both a preserver of culture and a creator of art. She has taught creative writing at the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts and the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman Settlement School, has worked with the Kentucky Arts Council’s artist-in-the-schools program, and has been a contributor to many other workshops and conferences. She performs a one-woman show based on the life of folksinger and activist Aunt Molly Jackson. Anne is also a member of Public Outcry, a group of Kentucky writer/musicians fighting against mountaintop removal coal mining.

She is the grandmother of triplets.

In addition to Appalachian Studies, her books include The Adventures of Molly Whuppie and Other Appalachian Folktales (University of North Carolina Press) and Can A Democrat Get Into Heaven? Politics, Religion, and Other Things You Ain’t Supposed to Talk About (MotesBooks)

I lifted this photo of Anne’s homplace from her website:

__________
P.S. Gail Chandler is also from Clay County.