Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, Friday Afternoon, April 5

Lunch was expanding tables at the Blue Moon with lively conversations crossing over each other & the best fried green tomatoes I've had, a chance to talk to some of the poets I'd missed earlier. Then back to the ECU campus for one last test of our abilities to make choices, North Lounge or Estep.

At North Lounge Tom Murphy read a piece from American History (Slough Press, 2017) “A Waltz with Death” set in San Francisco during the 1970s AIDS crises, detailed descriptions of the scene & the characters there. His second piece was titled “Pearl” & was also set in California, this in Berwin Park, a 1960s memoir/portrait of a next-door neighbor.

This was Molly Sizer’s first time at Scissortail. Most of the poems she read were about/addressed to her parents, including “Sam & Louie” in which they (Sam is her father) call down a curse on a whites-only church “You Tricked Us,” & the prose poem “Care-Giving.” She ended with a piece about wild turkeys, cicadas & a coyote, whose title sounds like a good practice for poets “Be Still & Listen.”

Roy Beckemeyer read poems from his latest book Stage Whispers (Meadowlark Books, 2018), the poems introduced with epigraphs about acting, including “Above the Rocky Run” (for his wife Pat & the rivers they shared), “Jack 1941-1959” for a high school friend, “The Couple Who Once Lived on this Farm” imagining the tenants of an abandoned farm, & “Bird Song.” He brought out his copy of Moby Dick to quote lines from for his poem “Reading Moby Dick,” & ended with a poem on death & living in the now “Breathe.”

This also was Wayne Lee Gay’s first time at Scissortail & he a read short story that although sounded like a memoir he said was “not autobiographical,” & is “set in a fictional place not far from here.” Titled “Hustler Remembers Stanley” the character, Hustler, is a high-school football player & bully who sustains a head injury in a game, later another concussion while serving in Desert Storm; the un-named narrator locates him later on Facebook & they have an awkward meeting in a bar, during which Hustler can’t remember high school, or his military experience, but does remember Stanley, a nuanced ending raising more questions.

Then back to Estep for an un-conflicted session of 4 readers. Ron Wallace was first up, another of my favorites here, his latest book is The Last Blue Sky. He read poems about Geronimo’s last buffalo hunt, his father & grandfather, one titled “I Am Not a Cowboy Poet” (because rhyme & meter “eludes” him, but he does write poems about cowboys). The poem “New Boots” was after a heart attack. “Doc” was a memoir piece about his father’s horse, sold during the Depression, his father in his old age can’t remember the name of his step-father, but does remember the name of the horse. He ended with a poem about mortality “Comes Winter to the Night.”

Carol Coffee Reposa is also a poet whose work I’ve enjoyed hearing over the years here. She began with what she described as a love poem for Oklahoma, how the native people survive in nature & in the names of places. The rest of her poems were tributes to big events, bad & good, in her life, including the Vietnam War (“New Fridge”), the mass shooting in Austin, Texas by Charles Whitman in 1966 (she was there), on 9/11 (“Villanelle from the World Trade Center”) & “Song for New Orleans.” She ended with a tribute poem to Willie Nelson.

Brady Peterson, another regular here, read poems on a series of topics, ranging from death, to memoirs (“Grey Morning”), love poems, a political poem (“Passing”), a number of dream poems (one titled “Some Dream of Shoes” which he said means death), even a poem he admitted he doesn’t know what it means “Only the Rain.” But all good, as usual.

Simon Han was the only one of the 4 I hadn’t heard before. He read from the beginning of his novel, The Sleepwalkers, forthcoming from Riverhead Books, about about a boy who lived with his grandparents in China, then is sent to America where his parents were living, his thought on the airplane, then in an English class in Texas. It sounded autobiographical, but then someone once said, “all writing is autobiographical…”

All that was left of this day was the evening reading & performance & a party. Check back soon for that.