Kentucky Writer’s Day, 2013

Kentucy Writer’s Day is held each year at Penn’s Store in Gravel Switch, Kentucky. A visit to Gravel Switch is a visit back in time, but there is something for everyone.

 

Little children play,

puppies snooze under the porch, lazy in the sun.

poets [C.A. Shelly pictured here] read original work,

fellow writers lend support and attentive ears [pictured Yolantha Harrison-Pace and Ed McClanahan]

Ruth Ann Johnson Fogle is an amazing story-teller with a powerful voice and original writer‘s voice.

 Inside the store you’ll find unique country gifts, souvenirs for back home.

 Photos of famous writers and musicians who have graced this country store line a shelf near the ceiling.

 Jeanne Penn Lane and her daughter, Dawn, carry on a legacy that has been part of her family since the 1800s.

 Take home a T-shirt.

Eulalie C. (‘Lalie) Dick‘s stories brought tears to eyes. They were that touching, that real.

 The only thing more breath-taking than the scenery is Dawn
Lane Osborn‘s voice.

 Teenage girls relax in the shade.

 The outhouse, for use and decorative, too!

 The porch welcomes all.

Eric “Rick” Lee honors veterans.  Richard Moore’s music is highly entertaining.

 

 

Yours truly with the youngest participant at KWD.

 Lunch time on the porch. Up here, in these hills, we celebrate writing and art and music. It’s still going on. Check out the schedule for tomorrow.http://www.pennsstore.com/

When Redbuds Bloom

Sara Elizabeth Burkey’s voice rises and falls like the hills that spawned her, “I’ll be home when redbuds bloom,” and I think about how this is a coming home to many of us writers, a coming home to Gravel Switch, Kentucky, to the third weekend in April when writers, artists and performers come from every direction the wind blows to spread out on the lawn in front of Jeanne Penn Lane’s family store, the oldest running country store in America. They spread blankets and scatter about in lawn chairs and they do it for one reason: love of the written word. Chet Atkins, the great guitarist once played here. Famous feet have tread the grounds, used the privy and petted the generations of golden retrievers that lie upon the country porch. The noses of famous poets and beginners alike have sniffed the gorgeous wild flowers that grow unhindered near the store. All are equal at Penn’s Store. That is just the spirit of the place, of the gathering.

Many notables have gathered around the old wood stove in Penn’s Store to tell stories and share poetry, to pick guitar, banjo and fiddle, to strum the dulcimer and sing what their hearts have written. They come from New York and Pennsylvania. They come from North Carolina and Georgia, from Japan and Indianna. They come from Alabama and Tennessee, Viriginia and West Virginia. They come from wherever there are people who long to experience a roots revival of the written word, from wherever people long to hear great music, great poetry, great novels.

And they come “when redbuds bloom” and today, I’m going. It’s a little chilly so I’m donning jeans,boots and a sweater. I’m packing my lawn chair and my books and forgetting the world. I’m going to a meadow by a stream at the foot of an Appalachian hill where like-minded spirits wander about in Bohemian spirit and everybody is free to be who they are. Kentucky Writers Day is a beautiful experience and any writer who has not discovered it yet, I’m sorry for you, but it’s not too late to drop everything and come.

Knowing Self

I made the mistake

 asking someone else

 who I am.

Doesn’t matter

who he says.

Doesn’t matter

what she thinks.

I return now,

to myself,

my own true knowing

of who I am.

I am earth,

rich and dark.

I am sky

wide and blue

and water,

clear and running,

sometimes still

and dark deep.

I am air

hot sultry in summer

cold crisp in winter.

I am fire

a rising phoenix

a swirling flame.

I am passion

and fury ablaze.

I am knowledge

handed down

four centuries

and hewn from

Appalachian wood.

I am magic

of long gone years

and herbs gathered

for sick curing.

I am a song, falling

and rising like these hills.

I am a people of the folk

a tale to be told

a word-weaver

as simple as cane

bottom chairs

complex as daisies.

 

 

Why I Won’t Make Potato Salad for You

It occurs to me that life can get overly busy. My neighbor, Kenny, was a kind-hearted man who lived across the road from me from the time I was a teenager. Kenny got cancer and I watched him whittle away within a few months. I’ll never forget his last words to me. I was weed-eating in the front yard. He was backing out of his drive in his red pick-up truck. He saw me out there and rolled down his window.. “Don’t work so hard, Darlene,” he said, then he smiled and drove away. It was just a simple statement that I would have written off as a neighborly formality had it been anyone else but Kenny. Coming from him, it had a profound impact upon me. Kenny and I had one thing in common. We were both conscientious, hard-workers. Coming from him, it made a chill go down my spine. It was like an epiphany. This man who had valued a perfect lawn, who worked harder than anybody I knew was aware that he only had a few months, at best, left on Earth, and he said to me, “Don’t work so hard.” It was as if in that simple statement he was saying, “It’s not worth it. There are so many more valuable things in life.” Now a few years down the road, I am constantly swamped by things to do, appointments to keep, etc., and suddenly, I’m remembering that day in the yard, the day Kenny told me not to work so hard. Maybe, there’s a time to write off the things that consume our time but amount to so little in the overall plan of our lives. There are some things that others can do well and for those things, I should let somebody else do them, but there are some things that only I can do and those things, I should do. So, if you ask me to make a potato salad and I tell you, “No,” don’t take it personally. I’m not that good at potato salads anyway.

The Turning

Winter Wind howls bitterly beyond
the glass barrier, separating me
from nature.

She threatens, she taunts,
“Spring will never find
her way here again.”

She lies. I know that.
Soon I will rake my hands through
clear water, scoop up tiny snails

and marvel at their form
before returning them to
tranquility.

Soon, Brother Sun will kiss
my dark head, even if Winter Wind
throws a tornadic fit, she is

always doomed to give way
to the turning, the forever
turning.

Standing On Top a Cumberland Mountain

Never am I more myself

than when surrounded by sky

by water, by greens, browns and blues

when wind touches my skin

burns my cheeks and sun warmth

bathes my hair, dark hair

like forest earth

and when I stand atop

this sacred mountain

I see–I see.

A few years ago, a woman attempted to cost me my job. She held a magnifying glass over my professional life and constantly pointed out all of my flaws, which were, and still are, many. She nitpicked at my inadequacies, pointing them out to my boss and to the people I worked with.  She repeatedly brought up the “sins of my past” and made me feel so small. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. My stomach churned. My heart ached and I grew bitter, at her, at those around me. Every time I saw her, I ached. I seethed with self-loathing. Why couldn’t I be good enough? My body was under control. I had sold myself to the cause, to the mission and had sacrificed a well-paying job to be where I was and now, on a daily basis, I was being raked over the coals for little things that didn’t even matter in the grand scheme of things, but these little things were monstrous to her and pretty soon, I started to doubt my self-worth.  I have a tendency to look at the overall plot of life and I may not get hung up on the typos of life. She was the type of person who zeroed in on the typos of life and overlooked the plot or the effect that constantly pointing out the typos was having on the characters. In fact, to her, the typos of life were life itself. They mattered most or so it seemed to me.

She was puffed up with pride over my downfalls, or that’s what I thought. And though I apologized a million times, nothing I said redeemed me in her eyes. Then one day, during my vacation time, I was hoeing my vegetable garden, trying to pray, trying to find peace within myself, tears sliding down my cheeks. Why did it matter so much that this woman was condescending to me? Yet, I could not find the peace I sought. Then a knowing, like a whisper from a far shore, came to me, “Forgive her.”

“What?” I said. “Forgive her? She’s the one who has found flaws with me and she won’t forgive me for not being perfect. She will say that I’m forgiven because she wants to look spiritual, but in her mind I’m still not good enough. What she really wants is for me to be fired or to just be totally broken as a person.”

The soul-whisper came again, “You can’t make another person forgive you. You can’t make her like you,” came the knowing in my knower. “You can only release the pain that her unwillingness to accept you for who you are has caused you and you must forgive her for making you dislike who you are, for picking your life apart, for fault-finding, for trying to get you fired.” I dropped my hoe and held my hands up in surrender, speaking to my maker. “I forgive her,” I said. “I don’t understand her, but I do forgive her.” A sense of peace swept over me and I when I went back to work, she had no power over me. I was free from her hold and strangely enough, I think she knew it.

Not long after that I learned that the woman was severely OCD, that she had such strong perfectionistic tendencies that she drove even herself crazy and it had come because nothing she did had ever been good enough for her mother and suddenly, I felt sad for her, that she had lived her entire life, trying to perform, to work her way into God’s grace and into social acceptance. I was glad for my “freedom”, the freedom to be imperfect, the freedom to just be me. The truth about her was that she had low self-esteem and made herself feel better by belittling those she deemed as “less perfect” and by that I mean that she obsessed over which way the canned food labels were turned and that when any little thing was out of order, she became an emotional basket-case and barged into the supervisor’s office in tears, that she called the board and insisted on getting what she wanted. Within two years she was gone and I kept my job until I was ready to leave on good terms.

My point in telling this is that there will always be those people’s whose expectations we can’t live up to, but we aren’t meant to live up to someone else’s expectations. We aren’t meant to be molded into someone else’s idea of perfection, but we are meant to forgive and until we forgive, we are letting someone else control our lives. Unforgiveness will make a person bitter and sick.