Animal Hospital late at night

Wednesday, July 27 

I sat on plastic covered benches waiting for word on my sister's little dog, Smokie, who had quickly become very, very sick that afternoon. When her regular vet's receptionist told me they could not see her until the next afternoon, I rushed her to  the emergency animal hospital. (Just a  word of warning. If you have to do this, bring lots and lots of money.)

After the doctor had spent an hour examining Smokie, he came out and told me it would take a while to do lab work and diagnose her.

I sat and listened to Bill Clinton speak on TV. A noisy family arrived with their dog that had been bitten by a copperhead snake. They had just moved to the area and were immigrants from the far east. The children spoke English fluently,  but the father spoke with a heavy accent. 

While he cut tall grass that afternoon, he disturbed a snake, and the dog attacked it. Bad idea. The father did not see the bite, but heard the dog yelp. He killed the snake and identified it. 

The vet said he would keep the pet and watch it over night to see if he needed to give anti-venom. I  thought if anyone was bitten by a snake, the cure was to give anti-venom. 

The father spoke loud to be heard above the five kids who were jabbering like magpies. "I never saw where the snake bit him, but I heard him yelp.

The doctor said a copperhead bite was painful and not as deadly as a rattlesnake or some other snakes." 

I never thought I'd get a lesson in snake bites while sitting in an animal hospital at 10 o'clock at night. 

The receptionist, an older woman smiled and spoke in a gentle voice, understanding of my situation. We talked for a time. She didn't need to tell me she enjoyed her job.  She had quit work a couple of years ago, but could not handle retirement. She came back to the pet hospital and works all night, from 6:00 p.m. until 8:00 a.m.. As I  listened to  her on the telephone and with people who came in with their pets, I wished our young people who work in a situation where they must communicate with the public could take lessons from this lovely woman. 

 I heard that her husband died when he was 49 years old and left her with two small children. She said she thought she was going to die, and without help from her family, she was not sure she would have made it. My heart hurt for her. 

I picked up Smokie at 7:30 a.m. this morning. She still had bloody feces and I was given a bag full of fluids for her regular doctor to continue her care. I was told to take her directly there where her records are in their files. The Emergency Hospital FAXED a  report.  

I arrived at the vet's office before it opened. I stood there holding the little Schnauzer in a  blanket in my arms. When the doors opened at 8:00 the young woman behind the desk told me the veterinarian would not see her until later because I didn't have an appointment for the morning.

"Would you like to leave her with us?" She asked.

"I was told by the people at the emergency hospital to bring her here now and they would FAX her records over. Do you have her records?"

"Oh, let me see." She  pulled some papers off a machine and read them as if  she wasn't sure what they were.

"Is this  Smokie?" 

"Yes," I said, tired from having climbed a long ramp carrying Smokie to get to the door. No one offered to  help. 

I was  shown to a room and after talking to another young woman who put notes into her computer, Smokie was taken from me. I asked to speak to the doctor, but was told she was not available. I was told that I would be called later.

I wish the older woman at the ER could take the first young woman and give her some lessons in how to behave to a client, how to communicate with a caring attitude, and how to recognize when an older person is in distress. 

I would hire a receptionist with people skills to represent the face of the business. I never met the veterinarian, but her staff did not make a good impression. I pray that she is a good doctor and that Smokie will get all the help she needs. 

Later:
I was called by one of the techs to pick up Smokie that afternoon. I still did not see the veterinarian or even get a call from her. Thankfully, by the time my sister and brother-in-law got home from their vacation, Smokie was doing fine. After they heard my story, Gay and Stu sought another doctor for their dogs, one  they feel is caring and understands the owners as well as the pets. And - they like the staff.

What do you look for in a doctor's office staff, for you or for your pet?

Teaching Adults to Write about their Lives - fascinating and fun

Dana Wildsmith, excellent writer, poet and teacher, writes about her week at the John C. Campbell Folk School, and for a few minutes I long for those times when I taught there, when I ate at the family-style dining tables and talked with strangers I would likely never see after the week ended. The folk school is a magical place, and if there are ghosts, I know they live in those buildings and walk those grounds so lovely in the evening and early morning fog.

At the end of this post by Dana she tells us what her students say about taking her class and writing personal essays. Like me, Dana teaches students to write about themselves, tell their stories and put words to paper on subjects they would never have thought to write about had they not registered for her writing class.

Tonight my group at Tri-County Community College was thin as one student had to drop out and another was absent. But the writing by those present was thick and heavy with family stories and happenings from their youth.

“I would never have thought of this if it hadn’t been for you,” Roger said as he explained how he came to write the story, The Smell from Hell. He was a stock boy in a store, just a teenager, and worked for $1.00 an hour in south Florida. In a short page of writing he entertained us, made us laugh, informed us of what life was like back then, and enlightened his readers with knowledge and history of gender specific jobs and how in today’s world a stock boy has a new politically correct title – inventory engineer- or some such thing. Roger has written serious, thought-provoking articles as well as hilarious stories of his youth. He submits opinion pieces regularly to the Graham Star, his local newspaper, and he is a political news junkie.  

Diane also wrote a humorous piece for tonight. She chose the prompt, Write about stories that are told and re-told in your family. She took us on a trip across country in an old VW Bus loaded with a bunch of kids and her Aunt Elaine who confronted a bear in the campground one morning. The trip changed Aunt Elaine’s life forever. Diane has writing experience, but in this class she has learned to take her skills further and deeper as she explores the use of the five senses and includes details as well as dialogue in her creative nonfiction. In another story she wrote, we all fell in love with her Irish Grandmother.

Kathy brought one of her children’s stories – What if?  Kathy is a dedicated writer who will one day be well-published. I can see this manuscript illustrated by a good artist and in the hands of children who will love it. Kathy has also brought us to tears when writing about her pet squirrel.

Like my mother and my sister, June, I delight in hearing the unique stories about the lives of others. I think June enjoyed her life at Assisted Living because she met so many people and heard their personal stories. I liked for her to tell me about them and often I had the chance to meet them as well. 

I thrive on seeing my students’ work improve each week. I will miss these creative writers over the winter. My next class at the college is scheduled for Fall, 2017. But I hope to teach at my home studio next summer.

A Memorable Trip Brought Back by a Blogger's photographs

 Today I was reminded of when Barry and I and Gay and Stu went to Alaska in 1985. A vacation I will never forget. 

The four of us took many trips together, and our cruise to Alaska will forever live in my mind and heart. Not only the scenery of Alaska, but our few days in San Francisco before we boarded the Princess ship, made me feel I had left this world and gone on to a magnificent setting where I might never want to return. We toured the coast of California south of San Francisco, ate our lunch perched on a cliff above the Pacific, and listened to the surf pounding the rocks below us.
I wrote a poem about that experience.

 We Celebrate our 25th at Big Sur

High above the scene,

we picnicked on cheese and wine.

The wind swept up the cliff

and kissed my face with droplets

from the great Pacific which crashed

on rocks one hundred feet below.

Wind tossed our words up to the gulls

who shrieked them back at us.

The day, dazzling in its brilliance,

refreshed our love, not young, now renewed.

We dreamed, made promises,

that perfect day - a perfect place,

away from all the world. ---- by Glenda Council Beall

 

I stumbled upon an Internet site today where my memories of those days in Alaska, seeing the Mendenhall Glacier and rafting on the Mendenhall River popped back into my mind. I could hear us laughing, the water splashing all over us, Barry in his red down jacket, his arm around me, assuring my safety should I have any trouble staying on the bumpy raft.

We stopped somewhere along the way and our guides brought out champagne which we drank from paper cups. They served us smoked salmon on crackers, and my sister says she has never had any smoked salmon as good as that we had standing on a sandbar on a cold damp day in Alaska with tall evergreens towering over us. Our young guides pointed out an eagle's nest way up in the top of a tree, then we saw the eagles soaring in the gray sky.

The writer and photographer here: https://kwethluk.wordpress.com/ posts photos and then writes about them as he walks and explores with his dog, Aki. What a place to live. I know it must be extremely cold in winter, but even then, there is this unspoiled beauty as far as the eye can see. I plan to return to this website often to see his photo essays and remember.

Do you have a favorite vacation that sticks in your mind? Tell us about it.

Bill Elliott's poem is about the record-breaking heat and what we have done to our world.

After one of the hottest summers ever, I am concerned about what is to come. William Elliott wrote about this today.

"In the midst of all the shouted lies that fog our public life these days, there is an unassailable fact, an “inconvenient truth.” The planet is heating up at an unprecedented rate. This is the third straight year of record-breaking heat."   

Read the poem and  more.

MEMOIR - where do we start and what do we include?

As I teach my memoir class at the junior college in Murphy, NC each week, I am delighted to see how much my students improve in their writing and in seeing what is good and what needs work in the writing of their fellow students.

In this advanced class we are discussing finding the theme of our memoir. It is easy to write just the facts of our lives. "I was born June 5, 1970 at 2:30 a.m. in Austin, Texas. I attended Marlin Elementary School. My mother was a nurse. My father worked for a moving company."

We can tell where we were born, the date and time and we can tell where we lived when we were in elementary school. It is easy to tell how many siblings we have and where they went to school. 

But the reader will quickly become bored if all we give are the facts. We want the stories of our lives, the truth as we remember it, and why the stories are important to us. In memoir we have the opportunity to reflect on our memories, our lives and write about our thoughts then and today. We ask ourselves why did this happen or why do I still remember this?

We write our true stories with elements of fiction such as plot, setting, characterization, action and dialogue. Dialogue is the part of a story that no one skips. We can't make dialogue carry the entire scene in our personal narrative, but we can use it to move the story along. 

Writing about my family, it is easy to use dialogue because I know each of my characters so well, I hear their voices in my ear. 

My story is unique as my family and my life are unique. No one else can tell my story like I can. Your story is also unique and you can tell it best. Begin now to leave the story of your life for the next generation and the next and the next. 

This is a prompt to start you writing your story: Think about a house where you lived when you were a child and draw that house showing rooms, porches, and yard on your paper. Imagine walking through that house and stopping in each room. What do you see? What do you hear or smell in that room? What would you touch or taste? Try to remember something that happened in that room or something you remember when you think about being in that room. Write about it. Get all your thoughts on the paper or on the screen and don't stop to correct anything. Corrections can be made after the entire story has flowed from your memory to your finger tips. 

Book Fairs at Franklin and Waynesville in November

We have been told that the libraries in Franklin NC and in Waynesville, NC will be holding book fairs on November 5. Franklin in the morning and Waynesville in the afternoon. Authors can contact the libraries and sign up for a free table and the opportunity to sell your books at no charge!  How good is that?

So many times we find that we have to pay more for a venue table than we make selling our books. 

I applaud these libraries for their generosity and support of local writers. I hope I can attend one of these events. Years ago when I went to Waynesville for a book fair at the old courthouse there, I must have spent over 100 dollars on books and I had a great time meeting and talking with so many writers. 

It was there I first met Fred Chappell who was so cute and fun. He let me make a photo with him. Thanks Wally Avett for letting me know about the book fairs. 

Network News is full of it - News that is.

I received my NC Writers' Network News today. This newsletter is excellent with information about writers and writing events all over the state. Charles Fiore, the Communications Director for the Network does a fabulous job of editing this 49 page booklet that goes out to all of the members of NCWN. I like getting the paper edition as I can keep it handy and read parts of it at my leisure.

Once again, I wish I could go to the Fall Conference held in Raleigh at the Raleigh Marriott Crabtree Valley on November 4 - 6. I would especially like to attend the Art of Memory: Creative Nonfiction Master Class with Haven Kimmel. I have long been a fan of her writing. I often recommend her memoirs to my students. A Girl Named Zippy, her best selling memoir, is one of my favorite books. 

I wish all of my students who dread the idea of promoting their writing could attend the session by Alice Osborn. She will teach How to be Rock Star at PR. Alice is a good example. I remember when she first came on the literary scene in North Carolina ten years ago. She says this workshop is useful for all writers across all genres and publication achievements. 

The Problem of Plot (Creative Nonfiction) with Brook Wilensky-Lanford is another session I would love for my memoir students to attend. We all want to start at the beginning of our story and often use pages of description to "set up our story" when it might be better to start at another point. Some of the best books start at the end. Knowing where to begin your book is important and this workshop seems to be one where structure of the story, emphasis and possibly changing the order it is written will be explored. 

Salem Dockery, Membership Coordinator for the Network wrote a column in this newsletter on dealing with rejection. She is young and she almost gave up on her poetry because of rejections, but some wise person who has been writing a long time told her that if you submit fifty times in a year, you might only get one or two acceptances. 

That is so true for all of us, poets and prose writers alike. Salem learned that a rejection is only one person's opinion of your poem. Continue to submit your work and read at Open Mic nights or Coffee with the Poets and Writers here in Hayesville each month. Join a writers group and make friends of other writers. Share your work with them.  

The NCWN Fall Conference is always a good place to meet other writers, editors and publishers. Maybe you will meet an agent who likes your book. Get your elevator speech ready and be able to pitch your book in a few sentences. I don't care what anyone says about good writing is all it takes to get published. It helps to meet the right people at conferences. NCWN even offers a registration fee for those who only go to visit with old friends, make new friends and to sit in on the open sessions with no instructors. For members that is only $200. 

The schedule allows those NCWN members who can only attend one day, Saturday, to have a discounted fee of  210 dollars with meals.  If I thought the environment of the hotel would not make me sick, I would go for the Saturday events and stay one night. But most large hotels use automatic "air fresheners" throughout the entire building and those chemicals are poison to me. They are also poison to anyone who breathes them, but most people don't have the drastic reaction I have. 

On May 6, 2017, NCWN-West will hold a one day conference in Sylva, NC in the library which was once the old courthouse, and, I am happy to say, we won't have the problem of air fresheners polluting our meetings.                                                                                                                                                           

An Interview by Glenda C. Beall with Steven Harvey, essayist and author of The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, a memoir

Steve Harvey, author 

Steven Harvey is the author of three books of personal essays. A Geometry of Lilies, Lost in Translation, and Bound for Shady Grove. He has also edited an anthology of essays written by men on middle age called In a Dark Wood. His memoir The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, was recently published by Ovenbird Books. I appreciate him giving his time to answer a few questions for this interview. 

GCB: Steve, I’ve known you for more than twenty years and always admired your writing and your teaching. You were a poet and you are an essayist. How was writing a memoir different from writing your other books?

STEVE: All of my writing has a personal component, but the memoir required a different kind of digging. Armed with only a few vivid memories of my childhood, I was asking myself to reconstruct a past. I did have more than four hundred letters that covered all but the last year of the book, but they served primarily as a mnemonic evoking images, thoughts, memories, and events that I had not thought about in years.

It was intense, all this remembering. As usual, I wrote in the mornings and taught in the afternoons, but this was the only book of the many I’ve written that I could not leave back at the writer’s desk when I drove in to teach my students.

GCB: The story in this book is that of a little boy and his mother, and then it is the story of a man who discovers his mother many years after her suicide.

STEVE: Yes, and I think that is why the Peter Pan Story—of the lost boys in Never Never Land—was so important. The only time I became overtly emotional in the actual writing of the book is when I recreated the scene of Mary Martin as Peter Pan singing “Distant Melody” as a lullaby to the Lost Boys. There, the Lost Boy Peter, played by a woman, sings a lullaby that his mother sang to him. When I watched the clip on the screen of my computer the intertwined stories of boy and mother united in one actress seemed to recapitulate my attempt to collaborate with my mother in our story. When it was over my hand was on the screen.

Steven Harvey and his mother in 1952

GCB: Adults tend to keep children in the dark when a family tragedy happens. Do you think your father and grandparents did not talk about your mother’s death in an effort to protect you, to keep you from feeling the pain they suffered?

STEVE: I think that they were protecting me, but maybe trying to get some distance themselves from what had happened. It is awfully hard to carry that kind of thing around with you. I also think they were waiting for me to ask about it, but I was too busy putting the events behind me to do that. Part of the discovery of the last section of the book is how much of my time I spent shoving the memory away through withdrawal into solitary artistic activities such as playing guitar until my past was all but forgotten.

GCB: I felt your pain as a child who had to figure out how to suddenly handle the fact that your mother was gone and would not ever return even though you write about it with no self-pity. Do you think that all the years that have passed helped you deal with the pain you felt then? Was this pain buried so deeply inside you that it was difficult to open it up and feel it all again?

Steven with the Book of Knowledge, ten volumes beautifully bound, given to him by his parents.

STEVE: The experience of writing the book was intense, but not painful. My problem was that I had repressed almost everything. So writing the book was more about making discoveries—knowing and wondering as the title says—than about agonizing over the discoveries. When the emotions did come they were actually feelings of affection and love. I was grateful to feel anything for my mother and the boy I was. The emotions were the victory of the book.


GCB: I find it interesting that your grandmother talked openly with your wife, Barbara, about your mother’s death and gave her the letters on which you based much of your research for the book, but she did not talk to you even when you were an adult. Why do you think she did that?

STEVE: I don’t know. I suspect my grandmother was baffled that I did not ask. Barbara is easy to talk to. She’s curious and asks questions and is a great listener with a prodigious memory. She also writes wonderful, newsy letters and like my mother wrote regularly to my grandmother. In the end she was my grandmother’s closest confidante, I think.

GCB: Our audience is made up primarily of writers. I will try to ask the questions they would ask. How did you handle parts of your story that involved family members still living – your brother, for instance? Did you feel you had to leave out or change anything?

STEVE: There is no easy answer to this one. I wrote the book as honestly as I could, but when I was done I showed the manuscript to my brother. It was hard for him, he told me, but in the end he said he was glad that I wrote it all down and did not ask for any part to be changed. My stepmother is in her 80’s and I planned to show her the book, but she is having a rough time with her health now so I decided not to. These are just hard decisions that each writer has to make. There is no formula.

GCB: We know that my memory of an incident could be very different from the way another person would remember it. In memoir, we can only write what we remember or what we find to be true in our research. You had the letters your mother wrote to her mother and they paint a detailed picture of what she thought at the time. Did you enjoy reading the letters and did they bring back the past that you had forgotten?

STEVE: The letters were one half of a conversation I needed to have. I am extremely grateful that I had them. I found myself moved, delighted, sad, furious, and joyous by turns as I read them, but they were so direct and frank and detailed that they simply invited me in. My mother and I talked every day for nearly two years as she and I wrote the book together. Collaborators. They were an amazing gift.

Steve's most honest critic 

GCB: How much influence did Barbara have on your writing this book?

STEVE: Barbara is my source of information and the protector of my morning writing time. (She sleeps late in the morning which helps!) She is one of the most well-read people I know. I once heard her go book by book against Phillip Lopate when my writing friends and I had dropped out of the conversation. She held her own against one of America’s greatest readers. She is also my first reader and my most honest critic.

GCB: You have been a teacher and a writer for as long as I have known you. You have written a number of books, A Geometry of Lilies, Lost in Translation, and Bound for Shady Grove, edited a book of essays and published in other ways. How did you manage to be a participating father, husband and professor of English and find time to write?

STEVE: I don’t know! I write every morning because I can’t help myself.

GCB: Did you wait until you had retired from Young Harris College to write this memoir because you knew it would be taxing psychologically and physically with traveling back to the places you lived as a child and going to the place where she actually shot herself?

STEVE: No, I wrote the book during my last two years at the college--which was a pretty intense time since I also taught in an MFA program. The traveling happened to coincide with the AWP writer’s conference which was in Chicago that year, a lucky break.

GCB: We are told that we have to be honest and not be afraid to bleed on the page if we want to successfully reach our readers. We want them to feel something. What do you want your readers to feel when they read this book?

STEVE: I want them to register the sadness of the loss, yes, but also to feel the victory of the collaboration in a story that was almost miraculously reclaimed.

GCB: Your other books are different from this one even though the subjects are still personal. In what way was writing this book different for you? Did you have to reach deeper inside yourself or did you worry about protecting yourself from exposing too much emotion?

STEVE: My essays are more thematic than the memoir—they are personal, yes, but they use my life to explore an idea I care about. Since the memoir, I have happily returned to the essay, the most congenial of forms for me.

GCB: Finally, I know the late Judith Kitchens of Ovenbird Books was your publisher, a wonderful essayist herself. Did she have any input as to what was included and if so, how did she help you?

STEVE: I did get help on the book from writers who are friends of mine: Joe Mackall, Bob Root, and Tom Larson. Judith and I have been friends for a long time, but I had not worked with her in many years. We reunited at the Ashland MFA, where I teach, after I finished the book. She read and accepted my manuscript soon after that, and completed the forward, days before she died. She is a great spirit. We all miss her.

GCB: I read memoirs more than I read fiction these days and I think The Book of Knowledge and Wonder is one of the best I’ve read in many years. Thank you for this interview and I look forward to your teaching a class at Writers Circle in September.

STEVE: Thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk about the book. I look forward to the class as well.

Steven Harvey, his mother, and his little brother watching Peter Pan

See more photos from the book here