19th Annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival - Saturday Morning, April 6

The last sessions of any festival are always bitter-sweet moments, the end of a communal gathering of old friends, new friends, leaving to catch flights, or to get home after a long drive before dark. And interestingly enough it was Ken Hada’s birthday, still another reason to shake his hand, get a big bear hug, thank him for another memorable Scissiortail Festival.

The first morning session was also the last of the choices between competing readings. I opted for the Estep Auditorium, more from a mental flip of a coin than any more conscious process.

The first reader was Paul Juhasz who is yet another graduate of the Red Earth MFA program. His stories & poems were lively, often funny. “Where the Wild Things Were” was a memoir of his youths pushing back at their suburban lives. Then went on to new poems, including the ironically titled “In a Children’s Museum,” then a poem titled  “My Last Moment” about a conversation with an ex reciting lines from Prince together (which he dedicated to me, since I continue to wear a customary beret, albeit not raspberry color, in this sea of cowboy hats & baseball caps). His “Buying Condoms at 51” was, of course, laugh-out-loud funny, & he ended appropriately enough with “Leaving Scissortail.”

Roseanna Alice Boswell is originally from upstate New York & currently is a Ph.D. student in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. The 1st poem she read, “Queen Anne’s Lace,” was about returning to the Adirondacks to visit her mother. Her poems were from a forthcoming book, many with running titles (i.e., too long for me to transcribe), such as “I Dream My Brother Tells Me He Was Wrong About…” & “Two Months After My Sisters Funeral…” & other poems about death, “Bereavement Rate” about her sister’s funeral, & “Unseeing Ghosts” about returning from a funeral with her mother, but all written in a descriptive, meditative manner without undo sentimentality. It sounded like an interesting work-in-progress.

Corbett Buchly is a writer based in Texas. He began with “Writing Backward on a Cave Wall,” as if the dead were speaking to us, then on to a couple poems about his deceased father. He also read on a variety of topics from the the natural world, such as a recent supernova, on “Peripheral Sight,” & an apocalyptic eco-poem “When the World Ends.” A number of his poems were in parts, such as his apology for his ancestors “Generic Cultural Identity." There was good advice, “Do Not Rent to Poets,” & he ended on Hope, “This Window Through.” Some fine poetic fun.

I had read with Molly Sizer in a session in Estep Auditorium in 2022. She is a retired rural sociologist, & began by noting that Oklahoma has “small mountains & big poets” — indeed! I felt a connection to her poem “Coyote’s Way” having written a few coyote poems myself, then a series of philosophical, meditative poems, I particularly liked one, “Hard Luck,” based on the quote by Woody Guthrie, “working man’s hands are the hardest hand to play.” Of course there were “sociological poems” including “District 32” about the confluence a union election in Southwest Oklahoma & the attack on Gaza, another, “Life Begins with a Scream.” She also ended with a leaving Scissortail poem, “Beignets & Bread Pudding.”

Continuing on to the last of the Scissortail readers in Estep, first reader was Paul Bowers who is the founder of Turning Plow Press, which if you’ve been paying attention has been mentioned frequently as the press of many of the Scissortail readers. He read from a piece titled “Tortuga Jorge,” about a clash of cultures between 2 women in a retirement community, & hibernating turtles, much of the humor from repetition & the way the story circles back on itself.

Denise Tolan was the judge of the Undergraduate Creative Writing Contest, as mentioned in the previous Blog entry, & is another of the graduates of the Red Earth MFA program mentioned so often in these Blogs. She read 3 prose pieces on the subject of childhood abuse the first, in which she has a talk with her mother, Part 1 from “A Very Short History of Abuse in 5 Parts.” Then a section from a long essay, “Things that Go Boom,” comparing her father to waiting for Mt. Vesuvius to erupt, then from an essay “Betrayal by Blood,” the story of her mother escaping with her & her brother. Difficult, but necessary, to listen to.

Christopher Murphy was also one of those I read with here in 2022, another prose writer, who, when introduced, received an enthusiastic ovation from his students in the audience. His working-class story was set in Boston, a tale of violence by rivals from high school, with a fierce fight & a car chase. A vivid piece of good writing.

Maria Polson Veves read selections from 2 of her 4 poetry books. From The Breaking Place (Stonecrop Press), COVID poems, she read the title poem, others on going to the dentist, or getting a mammogram, others. Her 2017 collection Church People was an Oklahoma Book Award finalist, poems about the very human conflicts that occur in any congregation. My favorite title was very telling, “Lutherans Behaving Badly.”

There was one more reading, the Grand Finale, this morning that will be covered in the next Blog.