Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, Friday Evening, April 5

The evening reading & recognition of Undergraduate Writers was held in Estep auditorium. Alan Berecka had served as judge of the multi-genre contest. In response to what he had read he read his own funny poem titled “Hard Drive” about an old college notebook he found that was full of, as he put it, “whiney poetry.”

Rilla Askew, who is a welcome perennial read here, read what she described as a piece of “creative non-fiction,” titled “Dear Tulsa.” It was a tale set in the early 1970s, a memoir of going to music clubs with her sister, then hitchhiking at Thanksgiving time to Shawnee with a friend, a trip that turns brutal, the driver, who pulls a gun, rapes her, drives around back to Tulsa, then she manages to escape. A chilling story, all too-contemporary, made more direct by Rilla's crisp writing.

The other piece tonight was a stunning collaboration between poet Alan Berecka & cellist Susan Sturman, who had approached Alan about writing poetry to accompany three short studies for solo cello, “The Fall of the Leaf,” by British composer Imogen Holst (1907 - 1984) (yes, the daughter of Gustav Holst). The music was not something I was not familiar with, but was quickly drawn into, while Alan’s poems were so much of what I love about his work — intelligently conversational, yet spiritual, with a pinch of humor. Alan’s poems were published in a crisp letterpress edition, The Fall of the Leaf Suite, by poet Clarence Wolfshohl (El Grito del Lobo Press, 2017), which I am grateful to have now because of the Scissortail book sales.

From there we gathered at The Grandview on Ada’s Main St., a spacious, open community center, with jazz music, beer, wine, snacks, a student open mic & more conversation with poets. I was pleased to have some time to talk with Susan Sturman about Imogen Holst & the classical music biz in general. Returning to my hotel room I realized I was so over-whelmed by these 2 days of incredible poetry, prose, even music, that I couldn’t bring myself to read, even from the stack of books I’d purchased, not even my own poems.

There was one more morning of Scissortail left.