Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, Morning Sessions, March 31

This is the 17th Annual Festival held at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. I first attended it in 2011, going every-other year up to the last time it was held in 2019. For those of us who attend it regularly, it is like going home for Thanksgiving or a family reunion. It was particularly poignant this year because of the 2 year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But we were back & hugging.

This year there were 26 sessions spread out over 2 1/2 days, with 75 writers of poetry & prose reading their work. No workshops, no panel discussions, just readings. & in between, conversations, jokes, lunches, dinners, buying books, exchanging books, getting books signed.

I. (Estep Auditorium)

The guiding force/el jefe for all these years has been poet Professor Ken Hada, who back in 2016 made the trip to read here in the great Northeast. As he welcomed us back today to Ada & ECU he began to tear up, & he may not have been the only one.

The first reader of the event was Joey Brown who I’ve heard a number of times here before, & have gotten to hang out with her at lunches & the after-reading events. She teaches at Missouri Southern State University. Her newest book is Feral Love Poems (Hungry Buzzard Pres). The poems she read were mostly about returning to small towns in Oklahoma where she grew up, with titles like “All of the Places You Will Ever Live,” “You Can’t Get There from Here,” & “The Insider Outsider.” Ken Hada had asked her to read “Explaining Here to My Mother-in-Law” (who is from the East Coast), which I definitely remember hearing her read here before, & glad to hear it again.

Since this is a “Creative Writing Festival” all genres & styles are thrown into the pot & dished out in various courses. Rilla Askew is another writer I have seen here before & always look forward to seeing her & hearing her work. She teaches writing at the University of Oklahoma, but has lived in Woodstock, NY, & is married to the New York City actor Paul Austin. She is the author of four novels, including Fire in Beulah about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Today she read a short story titled “Right,” set in 1972 about a 16-year old girl sent to live with family in Oklahoma, & the trauma of her self-induced abortion, a timely story particularly in Oklahoma.

A festival such as this with so many readers will inevitably have its cancellations. The third reader for the opening session was unable to be here, but in many ways we were fortunate because Mark Walling filled in. He is a familiar face at this festival since he is a Professor in the Department of English and Language at ECU & serves as the judge of fiction in the annual Darryl Fisher State High School Writing Contest (which you will hear more about later). He read a section from a novel-in-progress, this excerpt narrated by a 10-year old girl in the car with her parents, told in dialect, filled with local jargon & homespun expression, funny & poignant.

II. (Estep Auditorium)

As I just said, sometimes there are fill-ins (“pinch hitters,” if you will). I had planned to be here, & had been a read in the past, but didn’t submit work to read this year, then last week Ken called me & asked me if I could read in this session. Who would say no? I began & ended with a couple of poems from my past visits here, “Red Bud” & “Oklahoma Sunday.” Then from the thin chapbook Baseball Poems that I had published back in 2019 in conjunction with my reading here then. I also read a few others, including one of my “poem cards” “Easter Sunday 2020.” I always have a good time here.

Chris Murphy read 2 pieces from his collection of flash fiction, Burning All the Time from the venerable Oklahoma-based Mongrel Empire Press. “Sister” a portrait of a girl running from her boy friend, & “Bill,” another portrait, but this more of a “happy-story.” He ended with a Ilya Kaminsky’s poem “We Lived Happily During the War” which has been getting a lot of traction since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Molly Sizer had been one of the readers here in 2019, which was her first time at Scissortail. She is a retired sociologist, & many of her pieces reflected this, beginning with “Fruits of Lorraine” about being at the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN (in the Lorraine Motel where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated), & a triptych of sorts, “Creating Conspiracy,” “Controlling Conspiracy,” & “Charades.” She also read some poems from her time hiking in the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge.

Lunch was in the Blue Moon Cafe in the North Hills Shopping Center, a local favorite (& mine too, particularly for the fried green tomatoes), at a big table of poets & writers, among Elvis kitsch & other 1950’s memorabilia.

[Biographies of each of the readers can be found at https://ecuscissortail.blogspot.com/2022/01/2022-scissortail-biographies.html]