Writers Circle Around the Table again

I am excited because I have decided to start my writing classes again. I am looking at September and trying to decide whether to go virtual or teach in a classroom. 

I have heard from several writers who would like to teach for Writers Circle Around the Table again. Although I have only taught memoir writing for the past few years, I might think about doing a poetry workshop. 

I began learning to write poetry with a terrific teacher, the late poet, Nancy Simpson, and all of us who took her classes learned so very much from her. You can hear us talk about that in this video made when we honored her after her death. 

She taught us what makes a poem. She taught us how sound is so important in a poem, and that is something that you will find in my poetry. Also, metaphors are a part of poetry that many don't use enough. I have every handout she gave us and the lesson that went with it. 

I always loved poetry, but it was Nancy who taught me why.

Thanks to Raven Chiong, we have this photo of the poetry critique group she leads each month at the Moss Memorial Library in Hayesville, NC.

Netwest Bee City Poets facilitated by Raven Chiong - standing, far right first row

This group meets at the Moss Memorial Library in Hayesville, NC on the first Thursday. All who write poetry are welcome.  

If you are just beginning to write poetry and want some good feedback on your work, this group has many experienced poets, published and knowledgeable. The first row in this photo includes Brenda Kay Ledford, Glenda Barrett, Mary Ricketson and Joan Howard who all have published poetry books and their poems have graced the pages of many journals and reviews. 

I am proud and I know Nancy would be proud of so many of her students who became outstanding members of NCWN-West and whose books now live in homes not only in the mountains but all over the country. 

Yes, I am getting the itch to work with writers, especially those who are just putting their toes in the water and who need to know more about their opportunities. 

I will be getting out the word when I schedule my class in September. Meanwhile, if you live in Hayesville, Murphy, or Hiawassee, GA let me know if you prefer to meet in a room or online.  gcbmountaingirl@gmail.com 

Here is a prompt if you need something to get you writing:  Begin by writing, I will never forget the time when ...

Celebrating Southern Appalachian Food

If you are a fan of Tipper Pressley of the Blind Pig and the Acorn, her blog website, you will really enjoy the cookbook she and Jim Casada, another western NC native, have created. I ordered the book from City Lights Books in Sylva, NC, and immediately began reading it. The book is more than a cookbook. It is a history of southern Appalachia foodways. 

This is the blurb on the back of the book, Celebrating Southern Appalachian Food

High-country cooking fit to grace any table.

Southern Appalachia has a rich culinary tradition. Generations of passed-down recipes offer glimpses into a culture that has long been defined, in considerable measure, by its food. Take a journey of pure delight through this highland homeland with stories of celebrations, Sunday dinners, and ordinary suppers. The narrative material and scores of recipes offered here share a deep love of place and a devotion to this distinctive cuisine. The end result is a tempting invitation, in the vernacular of the region, to “pull up a chair and take nourishment.”

Excerpt from a review: Chicken and dumplings. Biscuits and gravy. Beans and fatback. To any list of wonderful culinary partnerships, add the duo of Casada and Pressley. In “Celebrating Southern Appalachian Food: Recipes & Stories from Mountain Kitchens,” Jim Casada and Tipper Pressley combine wide knowledge, hands-on experience, and a conversational approach into a sure-fire recipe for enjoyable reading and fine dining. 

You can order it on the Etsy Channel or find it on Amazon. It will also be available in big stores around the country. 

Although I don't cook big meals anymore since I don't have anyone to cook for now, my mouth watered when I read recipes for some of my favorite dishes my mother used to cook. Tipper and I met back in 2007 when one of her twin daughters, Katie, came to our Coffee with the Poets group and read some poems she had written. The girls were still in elementary school then, I think. 

Tipper used the downtime during the pandemic to create a very popular YouTube channel called Celebrating Appalachia. She has done so well with it that she quit her job and stays home to do what she loves, gardening, canning, and cooking meals for her family. She posts on her blog every day and does the same with the videos. She is a busy person who loves what she is doing now.

She has a huge following on her blog and her YouTube channel. Her followers say watching Celebrating Appalachia is like being home with Tipper, her husband, Matt, and Katie and Corie. She shares her life and the lives of her family with her viewers and I watch every new video she puts up. Even though I have cooked for more than 45 years, I still learn new things from watching Tipper prepare food in her kitchen. 

A bonus is watching the twins, in their twenties now, who make their YouTube videos and they are loved also. You will find them at the Pressley Girls. 

Tipper and Jim have been signing books every weekend and their fans love seeing them, talking to them, and giving them gifts. I told Chris at City Lights Books in Sylva to be prepared for a huge crowd when Tipper and Jim are there signing books. Chris didn't know what a following Tipper has and he emailed me after the book signing saying he was glad I gave him a heads up about the crowd that filled his store that Saturday. 

Hope you enjoy visiting the YouTube channels and the blog website that Tipper has maintained for many years.   Leave a comment if you do.

You can’t change the direction of the wind but you can adjust your sails.

This quote speaks to me daily now as I understand I can't go back, and I can't change the future. Life has stages, I think, and I am in a late stage of life, and I must adjust my sails.

I might live to be in my nineties as did two of my aunts and one of my brothers, but every day I see how life is changing for me. I must adjust my sails to deal with all the wind changes. 

I am angry at the health issues that make life harder for me, but anger does no good. There comes a time when the medical world seems to decide you are old and we can't do anything about it, so deal with it.

I get frustrated at the medical profession and the way older people are treated in many places. 

"You need a young person to be your advocate," I am told. If I had adult children, I suppose they would be in charge of my life now, but I would not like that.

Why? Why does the medical profession only want to deal with "young people."

Why do my phone calls and my questions have no weight with the staff but if I had a young adult call for me, why would that make a difference? 

I remember when my parents and my older sister reached their seventies, I or someone younger became their advocate with the doctors and their staff. I was there for my mother but she didn't drive and her short-term memory was gone. She needed me and I was glad to help.  But my mind is still working and I certainly can drive. 

When I complained to my cardiologist last year about the doctor and staff at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta because after several tests they would not return my calls or communicate with me for months, his answer was, "I can send you to another hospital, Mayo Clinic, Emory, wherever you want to go, but it will be the same. They are all the same now." He even had bad experiences of his own when dealing with an injury that sent him to the hospital. 

Another sad experience of a friend of mine, in her eighties, in a local hospital where she was in bed and told not to get up alone. She had no family with her so she called for a nurse to help her. No one came. She called and called and no one came or she was told they would be there in a few minutes. My friend said an hour or more passed and no one came. Finally, when someone arrived and my friend complained about having to wait so long, she was told, "Well, Mrs. Smith, you aren't the only patient in this hospital."

I hope I never have to go to the hospital with no family member or someone there with me. We always had someone with my mother and my father when they were hospitalized. 

I find myself amused when my sister, a couple of years younger than me, goes with me to my doctor's appointment. Her hair is not yet white, so they talk to her instead of me about my health. She notices it as well. 

So, young people, beware. Once your hair turns gray, take a younger person, or someone who looks younger, to the doctor's office with you. 

I think we all need an advocate to attend medical appointments with us if possible because another set of ears hears things you might not. Or another set of ears might hear differently but they could be wrong. If there is a controversy about medications or treatment, someone should contact the doctor's office and hope to get the correct information. But many, like me, do not have a family member or anyone to go with them where I live in the mountains. 

I have learned to make a list of questions before I go in for a doctor's appointment. With them only having fifteen minutes for me, I can't get answers unless I write them down and hurriedly ask them. After all, it seems the doctor can or must only take care of one issue in a visit. 

I should add here that my present primary care doctor seems to be thorough and helpful. My functional care doctor and her staff are always helpful and caring. 

I wish I could talk to senior adults from other countries about how their health conditions are handled. I know I am not the only one who has these problems and more because many of my friends say they also feel they are not important to their doctors or feel no one listens to them or cares about their health. 

Even caring doctors often have an uncaring staff or the staff is inefficient. I know we have a shortage of healthcare workers since the pandemic and that adds to the problems. In the past, I was usually happy with the nurse practitioners and found they took longer with me and followed up better. 

If you are older, I would like to hear your problems or frustrations with the American health care system for people over sixty-five, and your suggestions as to how to get the best care. Maybe we can help each other.

As always, I appreciate your reading and staying with me even when I get behind in my posting. 

Scott Owens read and taught a workshop in Hayesville, NC

I am tired but I have had a good week. The poet, Scott Owens, was here and stayed overnight at my house. It was so good to see him again and talk with him. He has published 19 poetry books and I have most of them. He always writes something sweet when he signs my books. He is a kind and gentle man. Almost young enough to be my son, Scott has been a good friend for the past 15 years.

He and I were on the schedule to read Thursday evening at the John C. Campbell Folk School. NC Writers' Network-West sponsors several writing events in our region and once a month The Literary Hour is sponsored by NCWN-West. We feature two writers, a poet, and a fiction or nonfiction writer. For this event, I was the prose writer. 

Scott decided he wanted to go first and I was glad. I wanted him to have plenty of time, and I would take what was left. We had a good size audience and almost ran out of chairs. Scott is well-loved by writers in this area. He has come over from Hickory, NC where he lives and owns a coffee shop Taste Full Beans tmany times to read his poetry and to teach poetry. Some years ago, he read at Writers Night Out on Thursday evening and spent the night so he could teach a workshop on Friday morning in my studio.

I wish everyone could have come to his workshop. He is an excellent teacher, so down to earth and casual, that we all felt we could ask questions. 

I hope we can have him back this fall. His workshop was on the subjects you have at your disposal and you should never run out of topics. He showed us how to discover the many people living and dead in our families that make good subjects. We can write about places. I find myself writing about the farm I grew up on. We can write about memories that are interesting. As Scott says, writing must be interesting. That is true for poetry as well as prose.

When I teach memoir classes, I urge my students to not only write the facts or truths but make it entertaining. No matter what you write, if it is not interesting or entertaining, you will lose your reader. 

I always pay for having a good time with friends. On Friday night, my allergies or sensitivities to fragrance, got the best of me. I felt like I had a bad sinus infection on the right side of my face. I am still dealing with it today. But I would do it again.

Thanks so much to Scott Owens. If you have a chance to hear him read and talk about his writing be sure you take it. And I highly recommend him for workshops on poetry. He is very knowledgeable about anything that relates to writing poems. 

I am motivated now to write poetry again. The Pandemic shut down my poetry writing for the past two years. But I got some ideas at Scott's workshop. I look forward to getting something written soon.

 

Life Changing Experiences

Over a decade ago, I took a class at the John C Campbell Folk School that changed my life. I have learned that my experience is not unique. The Folk School is a place that changes many lives. No matter whether you take wood carving, weaving, cooking, painting or writing, it is likely you will never be the same. 

In later years when I taught writing classes at the folk school, I found that my classes often changed lives. One of my students, a retired dentist, told me he had decided to go back to school and study creative writing after spending a week at Orchard House, the photography and writing studio, writing and sharing his work with seven other people and me. 

Rebecca is on the back row in red

A young woman in her thirties discovered she could write and enjoyed writing while taking my class. She went on to earn money while writing about her walk on The Camino in Europe. She said now she is her family's historian as she writes about her life and her family for her blog, Renaissance Rebecca. She might never have done these things if she had not taken my writing class and others at the John C. Campbell Folk School. Presently she is living with her husband in Spain and her writing is filled with life there and the places she goes and the people she meets. 

She enjoys meeting and talking with strangers just as I do. She has that curiosity like me to learn about others because we all have stories to tell and I find them interesting. 

Today I read an interview with a man who visited the Folk School in Brasstown, NC to attend a wedding. Now he works for the school.

You can find a catalog online for the Folk School. Just go to their website, www.folkschool.org  

If you have taken classes there, write to me and tell me how it affected your life. It is almost a magical place.

Successful Zoom writing events

We, (NCWN-West) are continuing to hold Writers' Night Out through June on Zoom. 

This event was begun about ten years ago by Karen Holmes, an outstanding poet who lives in Atlanta but also has a home in Towns County, Georgia on Lake Chatuge. 

Karen Paul Holmes

We met in various places during those ten years and just before the pandemic struck, we were planning to meet in a new venue near the lake. But once COVID-19 invaded our world, we could not hold face-to-face meetings, so I learned how to use Zoom and suggested to Karen that we hold WNO on Zoom.

I found it to be fun and exciting to meet new writers from distant places. 

Not many of our local writers felt comfortable using Zoom and some still have trouble signing in, but we always had a good number of participants at our once-a-month online event. We used the opportunity to invite guests from distant cities and states and found some who said they deeply appreciated our holding this meeting where they could be a part of it. Some regulars are Abbie Taylor, a fellow blogger, who lives in Wyoming, and Jill Jennings, a highly published writer, who lives in Florida. Karen invited poets who published with her publisher and they came from many different places. 

Although Writers' Night Out will be ending in June 2023, for several reasons, I will miss those evenings together with writers I will not likely see in person. I hope they will continue to visit us at Mountain Wordsmiths, a Zoom meeting facilitated by Carroll S. Taylor. That group meets once a month at 10:30 AM Eastern time. In May, Carroll will host the writer Bill Lightle, author of 

Race & Politics in the American South: A Personal History

Bill grew up in Albany, Georgia where I lived half my life. We both went to the same schools. I read this book and think he will be a very interesting person to listen to on May 25. I agree with his insight into race and politics in the deep south, especially in southwest Georgia. 

To attend this online program, you will have to be invited by Carroll Taylor. Contact me and I will put you in touch so you can receive a link. 

Carroll S. Taylor

I am trying to use a different desktop computer most of the time and the Internet still doesn't recognize it so I am having problems with WiFi and internet service. I am convinced that Internet Technology is trying to make us older folk completely crazy. At times I want to throw up my hands and say, "OK. I give up. I will not touch a keyboard again."

But I am a writer and I must continue to write.  I hope to see you soon on Zoom if not in person.

What Makes us Happy?

As I sit here on this beautiful Sunday afternoon, thoughts run through my mind and concerns slide in where they are unwanted. 

First, I think about my friend, Raven, and the book signing last Saturday. Several of us gave her a book party for her first published book, "Ode to the Still Small Voice, A Memoir of Listening."   This collection pays tribute to the still, small voice crying out to be heard and heeded. Raven's poems will inspire us to stop and listen.

Raven and her cake

It is said that people are happier in their sixties and above than at any other time in their lives.

I was in my fifties when Barry and I moved to North Carolina. The first year was exciting in many ways. I began taking writing classes with Nancy Simpson, but I was homesick for my home on the farm. My parents had died and leaving the home I had always known made me sad. But the fifteen years we spent here in the mountains were the happiest times of our lives together. Barry retired shortly after we settled in so we had lots of time to explore. We had a worn and rustic Jeep Wrangler and we often packed snacks and drinks and loaded Kodi, our Samoyed, on board and drove up as many roads as we liked exploring our new territory. We bought a pontoon boat and from a quiet cove, we watched sunsets over Lake Chatuge in spring, summer, and fall. 

We should all be happy that we have lived to be old enough to be retired, free of the responsibilities we had when we were younger. Once we accept that we have run our race and have no more mountains to climb, we can relax and do things we never had time to do when we were younger. Studies show that people in their forties are the most unhappy. That is when parents are sending their children to college or worrying about teenagers getting in trouble, wondering if they have done a good job with their own lives. 

It seems to me that stress is what makes people unhappy, the stress that keeps us up at night. But if your health begins to fail about the time you are ready to say goodbye to the nine-to-five schedule, another kind of stress hits. I remember how my brother, Ray, looked forward to finally having time to play golf, play tennis, and travel with his wife to faraway places. He planned to take long vacations and see the world. He had earned that pleasure, but too soon he was diagnosed with cancer. He was told he might have three years to live. He packed as much into those three years as he possibly could. 

I like to see men and women smell the roses while they still have a job or retire early if they can so they are young enough and healthy enough to relax and just enjoy their freedom and the fruits of their labor. 

One of my nephews is selling his house in the city and is buying a house with a pool a few blocks from the beach. He is still working but is not waiting for retirement. With his children grown and on their own, he and his wife can finally have time as Barry and I did to spend time together just having fun. 

When you are in your twenties, you feel like you have forever, but the years begin to fly by, and soon you can't believe you have your fortieth birthday. In our youth worshiping culture, we hate getting older as if it is the worst thing possible, but I look at some people in their seventies, eighties, and even nineties and see how content they are just being themselves. No need to try to be the prettiest girl at the party. It ain't going to happen at that age, but if you have a nice smile and share it, learn to listen to others and be truly interested in them, try to have meaningful conversations on subjects other than politics and religion, and laugh as much as you can, I think you can find that aging is not so bad after all. I find my happiness swells from having a good conversation with a good friend or my sister. 

Have a great week, my friends. Do something you enjoy every day. Laugh as often as you can. Remember those of us who socialize and spend time with others live longer. 

Write to me and tell me your thoughts on aging. 

Ode to the Still Small Voice, A Memoir of Listening  - order from Barnes and Noble

Six Months of Healing and Learning

                                  

  Here I am back on my blog and back home in the NC mountains. 

For the past six months, I have lived in Roswell, GA while taking care of some health issues.

This week, I moved back and tonight is the first time in many months that I am alone. Lexie is snuggled in my chair beside me and I just finished my supper.

My writing studio, Carol Crawford next to the flip chart, taught this class in 2018.

I completed a writing class in March with Carol Crawford who was teaching online through the John C. Campbell Folk School. The title of the four sessions was Plot Your Memoir. The most important thing I learned was that I don't have one memoir but I have two. One is the story of my family and the other is my story with Barry. We had forty-five years together and our lives evolved in many ways. We began on the family farm in south Georgia and ended in the mountains of western North Carolina. 

I had divided my life into major turning points which included childhood, school, college, and marriage, etc. but now I will include childhood, school, and college in my family story as I tell the story of all my family from 1942 when our family moved to a farm on Fleming Road in Dougherty County Georgia. 

I enjoy writing classes and have taken many with Carol Crawford over the years I have known her. I always learn something in her classes. The folk school online courses are through a company called Lessonface, a platform that shares the Folk School’s approach to learning and was founded by former Folk School work-study student Claire Cunningham.

My plans for the summer include teaching again and completing at least one of my projects. What do you plan for the coming months? I hope you have a happy summer. I intend to. 

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