Some readers and writers are intimidated by poetry or think they don’t like poetry because of the poems they were made to read in school. Metrical poetry can also be intimidating because of the time we spent in high school English class scanning the poems in our literature text books. While I love to read Shelley and Yeats and Blake and Dickenson and TS Elliot, I would hate to think my impression of poetry was limited to that experience.

My collection of poems, for instance, is in some ways a collection of teeny tiny stories. Yet many of those poems have a formal structure: sestina, pantoum, cinquain, tanka-senru-haiku combinations, and so on. I wanted to portray spoken language of a place and still use form. For me, in that book, if my form shows in the reading of a poem, it is like my slip is showing. Continue Reading »

For several days I have been listening to and singing theKyrieas performed by Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin, arranged by Father Guido Haazen. You may remember it from the end of the movie The Singing Nunstaring Sally Field. I’ve posted it on Facebook and Twitter. Kyrie eleison, a pre-Christian plea, is part of the Catholic Mass. Continue Reading »

Last night I watched Coco Chanel, the movie starring Barbora Bobulova and Shirley MacLaine, and tonight I’m watching Amelia, the movie starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere. These women were unconventional. They challenged the status quo.

Exercise: Write about a character who makes an unconventional choice, bucks the status quo.

There is a strong and  textured women’s  tradition in contemporary Southern Appalachian literature. One of the best-known women authors from the region is Lee Smith, whose new book Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger (Algonquin, 2010) hits bookstore shelves this month. Some other contemporary Appalachian writers are Pamela Duncan, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Crystal Wilkerson, Marilou Awiacta, Doris Davenport, Isabel Zuber, George Ella Lyon, Continue Reading »

Call me crazy, but serendipitous messages sometimes bombard me through repetition. Every where I turn for a given number of days or weeks, the same word or idea comes up over and over in different ways. Once I was assaulted by the word “clutter.” I heard mention of it in conversation, on the radio, books about it caught my eye in the library and bookshop, a friend told me about www.Flylady.com and Fly Lady’s hot spot theory and  her fifteen-minutes-a-day declutter approach. Then, the final blow came one morning in Paris, TN, when I was clicking a TV remote, flipping through the channels on the hotel television. I heard the word “clutter.” I clicked back to the source and sat on the edge of the bed while a woman minister, who looked like a Barbie Doll and whose name I can’t remember, preached Continue Reading »

It’s that time of year—time for New Year’s resolutions.  I’m a very goal oriented person, and I believe in goal setting on a regular basis. If I fall short of the goal, it doesn’t prevent me from resetting that goal and trying again. Sometimes determination is the only thing that gets you to the finish line, and sometimes you must be determined to rededicate yourself in order to accomplish a long-term goal. Writing goals often fit into this category.

New Year’s resolutions are a special category of goals in my book, and I believe there’s success in numbers. The more resolutions I make, the more of them I’m likely to keep. More importantly, the act of making the list gives me a way to take stock of life in large and small ways. Continue Reading »

Today I’m writing about two mentors because, as you will see, Isabel Zuber and Kathryn Stripling Byer are so intertwined in my experience, it’s hard to write about them separately.

 Izabel Zuber’s poetry collections include Oriflamb and Winter’s Exile. Her novel, so beautifully crafted that it reads like poetry, is Salt, a novel of Appalachia. Continue Reading »

My mother graduated from 11^th grade and went on to beauty college, then became the proprietor of Nita’s Beauty Shop. She said to me once, “There’s education, and then there’s education.” My mother often made profound statements. She was saying that even though she didn’t have the formal education I had, she still had an education from life, work, survival. Sometimes your education comes to you while you’re busy doing something else. We can get educated everyday if we’re open to it. Continue Reading »

When I conjure up my ideal teacher, that teacher I strive to be, it’s a combination of Lee Smith and Dr. Lucinda MacKethan. As teachers, they determine a student’s strengths and interests and bring their extensive resources to the table to help that student achieve and succeed in, and beyond, their classrooms.  

 I met MacKethan socially through Lee; they have been friends since college. I really got to know MacKethan when she became my advisor and teacher at North Carolina State University, where I received my MA in English and Creative Writing in 2000. When I think of Dr. MacKethan—university professor, I think of movement, long strides back and Continue Reading »

I heard Lee Smith say she titled one of her novels “The Last Girls” because it was about the last generation of women who called themselves “girls” no matter what their age. Now that I’m 53, I don’t mind someone referring to me as a girl, or one of the girls–as long as they say it with respect. As the Virginian said to Trampus in Owen Wister’s The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, “Smile when you say that.” (I did read this novel years ago,due to my overwhelming crush on James Drury. Even though Gary Cooper didn’t say that, exactly, in the movie, I think the Virginian might have said it in Wister’s dialogue. This gives me a good reason to go read about a cowboy.)

 I start with girls today (and I hope I don’t offend anyone by giving them that loving moniker) because I’ve been giving a lot of time to boys in this blog, and it’s about time the girls got some time on the field. I wrote about apprenticeship Continue Reading »