The Full Moon of February ( 2010) is Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You

February's full moon will reach fullness on February 28th, but why wait until then to look?

Native Americans named the full moon of February THE FULL SNOW MOON. Some called it Full Hunger Moon, even Famine Moon, especially when winter was harsh and hunting halted.

The Cherokee named it FULL BONY MOON.

Celts called February's moon-- Moon of Ice.

The Last of the Melting Snow

Nancy Simpson Chooses Her Number One Favorite Love Poem on Valentines Day --"The Greeting" by James Haba

The Greeting by James Haba

You have been traveling.

I can see it in your eyes--

the unknown roads demanding new belief.

The light of your will in submission

to the pattern bringing us together.

I have been busy waiting.

putting fresh flowers on the table

filling the lamps with kerosene,

arranging ( as well as I could)

everything, so that you might feel

that you had arrived

at the right place

at the right time.

Hello

I am so glad that you could come.

And in honor of our being here together

Let us make a scratch on the wall of the cave.

We could talk.

We could begin with idle chatter.

I'll start

I'll say, "I love you."

Believed to be James Haba's first published poem,

from Ten Love Poems Anthologized by

Robet Bly ( 1981)

Snow in the Southern Appalachian Mountains Feb. 12, 2010

POETS INVITED: Dr. Jane Goodall Will Speak at Young Harris College in Young Harris, Georgia on Feb. 18, 2010

JANE GOODALL, PH.D., DBE

FOUNDER, THE JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE &

UN MESSENGER OF PEACE

COMING TO YOUNG HARRIS COLLEGE

The Art and Assemblies Committee and Math/Science Division have exciting news!! YHC presents “An Evening Lecture with Jane Goodall” on February 18^th, at 7:00 pm in Glenn Auditorium. Jane Goodall, Ph.D., DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace, began her landmark study of chimpanzees in Tanzania in 1960 under the mentorship of famed anthropologist and paleontologist Dr. Louis Leakey. Her work in Gombe Tanzania helped redefine the relationship between humans and animals. Dr. Goodall is the recipient of many awards and honors, among them, the UN Messenger of Peace, Medal of Tanzania, National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal, Japan’s Kyoto Prize and UNESCO’s 60^th Anniversary Medal. In 2004, Dr. Goodall received England’s highest honor, Dame of the British Empire, and in 2006, she received France’s highest honor, the Legion of Honor.

Tickets will be sold to the general public at $10 each (reserved seating) and are on sale now at www.yhc.edu/tickets .

Teresa Hobbs

Office of the President

Young Harris College

706/379-5137

COFFEE WITH THE POETS at Phillips an Lloyd Bookstore on the square in Hayesville, NC

Poet Ellen Andrews will read her poems on Feb. 10, 2011.

When: Wednesday, February 10, 10:30 (second Wednesday of every month)

Where: Phillips and Lloyd Book Shop on the square

There is a featured poet each month followed by an open mike. This month, Dr. Ellen Andrews will read her poetry.

Poets within driving distance are welcome to come and read at open mike or come and listen, meet friends, and discuss writing.

Crumpets Dessertery will serve coffee, tea, and sweets for a small charge. Join us for a morning of poets reading their words in a warm and friendly environment.

At Coffee With the Poet, here is poet Janice Townley Moore, NC Writers' Network West's Monthly Poetry Critique Group Leader. Want to know more about NC Writers Network West (Netwest)? It is a ninteen year old professional writing group, serving the writers in the far western corner of the Western North Carolina mountains.

Dana Wildsmith, Rising Star in the Southern Literature Realm

Maybe you already know Dana Wildsmith, but if you do not, I want to introduce you to one of the rising stars in the southern realm of literature.

Dana Wildsmith is the author of an environmental memoir, Back to Abnormal: Surviving with an Old Farm in the New South (MotesBooks), four collections of poetry: One Good Hand Iris Press, 2005), Our Bodies Remember (The Sow’s Ear Press, 2000), Annie (Palanquin Press, 1999), Alchemy (The Sow’s Ear Press, 1995), and an audio collection, Choices ( Iris Press). One Good Hand was a SIBA Poetry Book of the Year nominee and Garrison Keiller chose the poem “Making a Living” from this collection to read on NPR’S Writer’s Almanac. She has served as Artist-in-Residence for the Grand Canyon National Park and as Writer-in-Residence for The Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, and has been a Poetry Fellow with the South Carolina Academy Of Authors. Her work is widely published in journals and anthologies, including most recently: Writing By ear (MotesBooks), Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia (University Press of Kentucky), The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press, 2007), and Women, Period (Spinsters Ink). Wildsmith lives in Bethlehem, Georgia. She is employed as an English Literacy Instructor through Lanier Technical College and teaches writing classes at John C. Campbell Folk School.

Excerpt from Dana Wildsmith's newly published Memoir Back to Abnormal: Surviving with an Old Farm in the New South, (Mote Books 2010)

Springtime in the Country

“In Spring, at the end of the day you should smell like dirt.” -Margaret Atwood

It’s not the crocuses by Mama’s side porch, or grape hyacinths under the big cedar or yellow jonquils flagging Georgia’s roadsides which announce the coming of spring to me- it’s the southern wood violet and how its arrival affects the way we walk around Grace Farm. Some early morning in March or even late February, one of us will glance down to watch for ankle-twisting stump holes, stop in our tracks, and moan, “Oh, no. Look!” There it is: the first teeny patch of violets. Lovely they may be in their miniscule daintiness, but we know their power. Our violets have won the queen’s heart and her protection. Mama can’t bear to lose a single tiny blossom. She would as soon stomp on kittens’ heads as crush these miniature wildflowers, and we are all shamed into compliance through her example. For six weeks or more to come, we won’t so much walk our forty acres as lurch, leap and sidestep inch-high clusters of violets.

When our yard grass grows tall enough to warrant the season’s first cutting, we mow it not in soldierly lines, but patchily, shearing only those sections where no violets bloom. Passersby must think us a family of springtime drunks. They imagine us so enraptured by March’s lushness that we take to our woods for hidden bacchanalia, culminating in a rite of clan-wide disfigurement of the turf. Here a cut, there a tuft, everywhere a really weird cut. It can’t be helped. By Mama’s decree, her side yard remains off limits so long as one violet blooms. The horse pasture? Off limits. The path up the right-of-way? Verbotten. The crape myrtle row? Don’t even go there. And we don’t. Like all good enablers, we avert our eyes from uncontrolled grass growth and try to focus on the positive.

The positive side of being thwarted in any designs we may have had on Bethlehem, Georgia’s Lawn-of-the-Month award is that my family is doing our small part to uphold the southern tradition of each community having its oddball characters. That’s a good thing, because I don’t want small-town Georgia to lose its character- either of the human sort or in our landscapes. I can’t remember any of the towns I’ve lived in not having an old man who covered his fence posts with Nehi Orange bottle caps, or a woman who wore a heavy wool coat through Savannah summers, or her daughter who never married but carried a dog tucked under her arm every waking moment, or a grove of falling-down cracker houses with three generations of sofas on the front porch. The southern right to inter a worn-out sofa onto your porch was recently challenged in nearby Athens, to great uproar and protestation against loss of personal freedom.

I’ve been thinking a lot about personal freedom since I came back to the farm to live, partly because of my ongoing battle against ATV”s. These fat-tired motorized rhinos have claimed our dirt road as their weekend race track. Or, rather, their drivers have. It gets worse every month as more and more subdivisions pop up around us. People who used to live in one of the counties immediately surrounding Atlanta proper are abandoning paved-over, congested Gwinnett County and Dekalb County in favor of Barrow County. I can only assume these new Barrow Countians consider a dirt road walled by woods as public green space. “It’s just an old dirt road. Why shouldn’t I play on it with my dirt bike or ATV?” Because it’s illegal to ride any off-road vehicle on a public road, that’s why. “Nobody’s living in these woods. Why shouldn’t I ride my ATV through them?” Because they’re not your woods, that’s why. And because the weight of your machine is killing my Queen Anne’s Lace, my Fleabane, my Pipsissewa, even my southern wood violets.

Not that I would ever present that last listing as argument to any of the cami-garbed guys I stop mid-road. You can’t ride that ATV here. “Why not, lady?” Because you’re crushing the violets. “Oh, God, sorry! I didn’t know. I’ll call my buddy to bring his pickup to get me.” Nope, what I do is stand in the middle of the road with Fred-the-big-red-dog on his leash and my cell phone in my other hand. Fred hates anything with tires. When he sees an ATV (or motorcycle or F-150 or tricycle) he lunges and slathers (always an effective combination of deterrents) while I call the sheriff with my free hand. Dogs, sheriffs and an angry landowner—the great southern trinity of law enforcement. Make that one crazy-haired lady landowner who is rapidly gaining a reputation as a weirdo, and I can usually put the skids on ATV play, at least for right then.

But do I have the right? Legally, yes. In Georgia, in Barrow County, it is illegal to drive or ride any off-road vehicle on a public road. This comes as a rude surprise to many new arrivals. They have moved to the country to get away from urban sprawl, to have a little ease from restrictions. Isn’t that sort of freedom also my desire and aim? Yes, but I prefer to gain ease from life’s restrictions by blending into the quiet of my woods, by letting nature take the upper hand. So far as I can tell, ATV-ers want access to undeveloped land in order to destroy it. They want into my woods so they can kill all the small life growing on the floor of my woods, so they can kill the stillness, so they can kill the smells of reindeer moss and pine needle beds and wet white clay. They would disavow this, of course, and with actual sincerity. After all, how can someone be held accountable for setting out to kill what they don’t know is there? You can’t see reindeer moss when you’re sitting atop several tons of fiberglass and steel. You can’t hear a forest’s various modes of silence over a gas engine’s howl. Wet clay’s cleanly sharp odor is smothered by gas emissions as thoroughly as new puppies drowned in a sack.

Who in a motorized world notices the small and the silent? I do, as Emily Dickinson did:

“A little bread- a crust- a crumb-

A little trust- a demijohn-

Can keep the soul alive-“

I need a dose of wildness to keep my soul alive. We all do. Any head-butting which goes on between me and ATV owners has its origin in our differing ideas of what “wildness’ is. ATV wildness comes at the world from the outside, in the form of a deafening gas engine carried along by eco-system-flattening tires entering undeveloped areas in order to enjoy by destroying. This is pleasure through conquest. I am of the pleasure-through-conjuncture school. Conjuncture: “a combination; as of events or circumstances”. Have you ever had a relationship in which strong love spilled over into strong desire, and vice-versa? Then you know what I mean by conjuncture- you submerse yourself in someone or something outside of yourself and find not that you lose yourself but that you emerge as more than you were before.

I find all too many people lately believing in the progression to a stronger, more assured self through accumulation of goods. It’s like that cold weather advice our TV announcers always give before the harshest day of winter: dress in layers because layers give greatest protection from the cold. Our popular culture wants to assure us that our greatest protection from anomie will be gained through the layering on of possessions. If those possessions in some way mimic sentience- if beeps and roars and whistles make them sound alive; if response to some signal on our part makes them act alive; if movement and heat and breath-like exhalations make them look alike- we are even more disposed to accept Blackberries and I-Pods and ATV’s as indicators not only of self-worth, but of character affirmation.

The truth is that our individual character becomes most evident when we are most stripped of our accoutrements, when we are what we are, and not what we possess. As a child of World War II-era parents, I wonder from time to time how I would have fared had I been a victim of the Holocaust. Perhaps never in history have humans been so robbed of everything as were those souls transported to concentration camps. How did they do it? I wonder not so much how their bodies survived—that was usually a luck of physiology and circumstance—as how their spirits kept from calling it quits. I would not have made it. I would have destroyed myself with anger at the injustice of it all. But someone like the writer Corrie Ten Boom possessed the sort of temperament which allowed her to set aside anger as irrelevant, to focus on the positive. Finding something positive about life in Auschwitz seems to me like trying to teach opera to a chorus of tone-deaf illiterates, but Ten Boom managed. Once when her sister (a person obviously with leanings more like my own) challenged Corrie to find something- anything- good to say about body lice, Ten Boom replied that their infestations of lice kept sadistic camp guards from bothering them! Corrie Ten Boom had character of the sort which needs no ornamentation or supplementing.

This morning when I stepped out into early spring’s frosty world, I wondered how even Ten Boom could bear the cold of a European winter with no way to fight against it. A detail which always strikes me first when I look at photos from concentration camps is the flimsiness of those cotton pajama-like outfits the internees wore, with almost never a coat or hat in sight. How could they come to terms with constant cold? How could anyone live that way? Georgians did, to a lesser degree, until very recently. There was little nostalgia-inducing about spending winter in an old cracker farmhouse. Those high-ceilinged boxes were cold. Cold. I can tell you first-hand how unheated bedroom air grows so heavy with cold during the dark hours that you wake to feel the temperature as a physical weight, heavier even than the seven or eight quilts mounded over you like dirt over a new grave. And I have come to believe many cases of failing bladders among folks my age and older can be traced back to early morning hours spent carefully motionless in a farmhouse bed, arguing against an obvious call of nature, so great was the bladder-owner’s unwillingness to step out of bed into that black lake of icy air.

Passing the night in a frigid bedroom under quilts piled on and tucked in by a grandmother or mother most likely never killed anyone, though, and it gave the added benefit of Building Character. I’ve written those last words with capitals because that’s how my mind’s ear hears them after a lifetime of being informed any odious situation will “build character”. Dry the dishes; it builds character. Finish your calculus homework; it builds character. Admit to your sister she was right and you were wrong; it builds character. First baby has colic for three months? It builds character. The Navy gives your husband back-to-back deployments the same year your daughter turns fourteen and begins to wear all black (clothes. lipstick, attitude)? Builds character. You receive a $500 windfall on Tuesday and on Wednesday your radiator needs replacing to the tune of $500, exactly?

Yep: Character.

What do you do with all that accumulated character? Each spring, I use it to hold my anger gauge at steady when yet another clump of abandoned puppies blossoms on the side of the road where some bubba left them to their own devices. The point here, of course, is that three-week-old pups don’t have devices. Someone takes care of them or they die. There are no other options, so my family takes up the slack. Fred and Max know the drill by now: I come home with an armful of wormy babies and dump them in the sink for a flea bath; each pup gets handed off to Mama who is sitting by with thick towels on her lap. Rubbed dry, they go into the pen with warm milk and dog food mush. Max and Fred always seem delighted by the whole process, maybe because it’s like watching a home movie of their own beginnings. In Max’s case, enjoyment of the proceedings certainly isn’t due to his great love of puppies because he considers any furry creature under five pounds to be a rat, and rats, to Max’s way of thinking, have been put on earth to have their necks snapped. We keep puppies at safe viewing distance from Max.

During the most recent puppy residency, Mama admitted to secretly loving being called on to house homeless pups in the unused dog pen behind her house. It’s the perfect way to have all the perks of puppy possession—their infant sweetness, how funny they are when they play together, their puppy smell – without having to commit to lifetime care. Mama steps out her back door and they all come tumbling to the side of the pen to assure her she is goddess incarnate. I should pause here to paint a picture of this pen, lest you have in your head the image of an eight-by-eight chain link box. No, no. This enclosure encompasses a fifteen by twenty foot swath of hilly yard with a huge gnarly apple tree as centerpiece. There are three dog houses therein, two insulated winter residences and an open-sided, roofed sun porch for our dog guests’ warm weather pleasure. We keep a store of dog blankets to pad the houses and a basket of toys and bones. They lead a well-deserved happy life while we search for homes for them.

Not every litter can be saved. Once we found a family of nine siblings in the falling-down barn which edges the far western corner of Mr. Edgar’s land. Just about the only thing holding that barn up is a thick growth of privet and sassafras and cat brier hiding his old cotton barn so nearly completely you have to know it’s there to know it’s there. We know it’s there, so we fought our way back that day through bramble and hedge to where we could hear small rustlings and whimpers. No mama, just nine brindled babies so feral, so starved, they had to be caught and “put down”, as the euphemism goes. They could never have been domesticated. We still wince over having had to order their death. At least we gave them a quick death, as opposed to slow death by starvation and disease, which had been their first lot. And at least they had had Mr. Edgar’s barn as some sort of shelter against the world while they lived. Where will such orphans go when all old barns and rock-footed farmhouses have been leveled in favor of Home Depots?

And should it matter? Do all things weak and vulnerable forfeit their right of proper care by reason of their weakness and vulnerability? If this seems reasonable, if we as a society are hurtling in the direction of respecting only what is new and foursquare, we are also moving toward misapprehending maintenance for care. The greater chunk of our discretionary time is spent maintaining those belongings we believe define us. We maintain, then we discard, then we replace. This is not care. Care involves an expenditure of thought directed solely toward the good of the receiver. The manner of care I have in mind is not precipitated by hope of eventual payoff. It is not virus protection for your laptop or oil changes for your Honda; that’s maintenance. I’m talking about a warm flea bath and soft food and soft words for a puppy who will the following Wednesday be euthanized by the county because he’s too puny and homely to be adoptable. I’m talking about Mama choosing to preserve and live in her old cracker farmhouse, with its one bathroom and gaps around the doors big enough to throw a cat through, rather than level one hundred years of character in favor of a ticky-tacky house with attached two-car garage. And I’m absolutely talking about us in the family adjusting our walking gait to drunk mode during the month or so each spring when wood violets are blooming in fat nose gays all across our yards.

Why does care of the tiny and valueless matter? Because it takes us out of ourselves. Any time we leave the accustomed confines of our outlook, we are required to incorporate new information about ourselves into our brain’s plush folds. Should we leave those puppies to die on their own, or risk briar-ripped arms and puppy bites and ticks and an afternoon’s plans gone to bust? The harder choice forces you into a series of compromises with yourself, with society, with the world at large. You come out on the other side of that process of compromise having Built Character. And the rewarding thing about character is that it is attractive. Local horse owners plan their Sunday afternoon rides to include our road because it’s pleasing to see Mama’s old house, grey and unassuming, standing just where it has stood for one hundred years, teeny patches of deep purple violets scattered at its feet.

http://www.motesbooks.com/

MOTES BOOKS Order Back to Abnormal Coming Off the Press February 2010

http://www.danawildsmith.com/

POETRY NEWS OUT OF THE CAROLINAS

NC Governor Bev Perdue named the new NC Poet Laureate: Cathy Smith Bowers. She will be crowned with laurels in Raleigh at The Capitol on February 10, 2010 and will serve for two years.

Photo credit: The Charlotte Observer at time of the announced of the Governor's appointment.

Cathy Smith Bowers, a native of South Carolina, lives in Tyron, and she teaches in the M.F.A. Writing Program at Queens University in Charlotte and at U.N.C. at Asheville.

"Cathy's powerful poems open new avenues of thought," said Gov. Perdue, "and her poems are a reflection of the love of words and learning. She believes poetry inspires and instructs North Carolinians of all ages."

As poet Laureate, Cathy Smith Bowers follows the tenure of Kathryn Stripling Byer. Much of Bower's poetry career path follows the steps of Kathryn Stripling Byer also in that she has published widely in literary publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review and Southern Poetry Review. Bowers first poetry collection The Love that Ended Yesterday in Texas was published at Texas Tech University Press as the winner of their first book competition, as was Kathryn Stripling Byer's first book, The Girl In The Midst Of The Harvest, published at Texas Tech Press in cooperation with the Association Writing Programs Award Series in 1986.

The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas was republished by Iris Press in 1997. Cathy Smith Bower's second book, Traveling in Time of Danger (1999) and her third, A Book of Minutes (2004) were also published at Iris. Her poetry craft essay "A moment of Intensity" was published in The Poet's Market (2007.) Bower's most recent book publication is The Candle I Hold Up To See You (2009 Iris.)

Kathryn Stripling Byer, who be ending her tenure as NC Poet Laureate, will attend the "crowning" celebration in Raleigh. She has praised Cathy Smith Bowers as "one of the finest poets writing today," saying that "her work fuses narrative with exquisite lyricism, as well as wit and vulnerability."

Deep in the Southern Appalachian Mountains on January 30, 2010

Why would anyone want to live deep in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, on roads with dangerous conditions? In my best observation, this is the coldest January, the January with the most snow, being snowbound, the list of days with "cabin fever", and not the best of health, the worst ever January.

On the phone last night, I told one son it is the most beautiful sight. I do fully believe he would find it breathtaking. I did not tell him if his father and I had experienced this January in our first year here in the sixties, we would have tuned back. There would be no "back to the land" and none of our family history on this mountain, I am certain.

This morning I told a friend that this bitter weather reminds me of the January in the seventies when my father died, my husband left, my oldest son graduated from school and went to college, another son left the following year. The friend said, "Your father died and your husband left the same January?" We've been friends for many years. She did not know this. Yes, I admitted, and I told her, "My life as I knew it ended." That one time has been brutalized with January memories for me to dread. I now cannot even remember when I recovered from it, but I did.

It is different now. I made a new life for myself. I went to college. I became a certified teacher with 26 years as a NC State Board of Education educator. I became a practicing poet, an M.F.A. graduate, an instructor of writing, an author of three books of poetry, became a N.C. Arts Fellow, became a worker for NC Writers' Network and cofounder of NCWN West.

I am a woman who found happiness, with my full sun garden in the middle of a forest, on the northside of the same mountain. This morning when I saw my rhododendron bent to the ground, encased in ice, it troubled me. I know some of the perennials will come back. Some will not make it. All day today as ice breaks branches, I cringe.

Although in a lifetime, this is one of the worst Januarys for me, I will stay here on the mountain.

A Message from the Habitual Writer - Susan Woodring

This is the path at John C. CampbellFolk School where Mrs. Gladdys Young walked.

Thank You, Mrs. Young posted by

Susan Woodring

When I was in high school, I had this crazy teacher who used to ride her bike to school every morning. We were her first class. She came to us with helmet-smooshed hair. Ah, the fresh air. She loved it. She was sixty-something, seemed ancient to us. Once her helmet was off and she'd changed shoes, she would rub the cold out her palms, perch on her little stool, and off and away we went.

This was a humanities class. We studied everything from the druids to the Egyptians to the Renaissance to the Vietnam War. We read Chaucer, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Kafka, and Arthur Miller. We dressed at Canterbury characters and told our tales to a group of 1st graders. We studied art, listened to classical music, and learned the fundamentals of ancient Chinese architecture.

Of course, we were high school kids, so we also did our share of complaining. We hated Kafka, couldn't quit giggling over dung beetle. We had no sympathy for Willy Loman whatsoever. Miss Havisham was beyond pathetic in our view.

And, I'll tell the truth: we laughed at our teacher's helmet hair.

But we loved her. Gladys Young. She passed away while I was in college. My mother called me at the off-campus trailer I was living and read me the obituary. At the time, I was studying to be a teacher myself and was just beginning to realize what teachers like Mrs. Young had given me.

She couldn't get enough learning, and it wasn't just academic pursuits. That woman loved her bike, she loved sunshine and trees and color. In the spring, she headed up to the John C. Campbell Folk School in the mountains and learned how to spin and dye her own yarn. We heard about that trip all year, how excited she was.

I've kept that name, John C. Campbell Folk School, in my mind all these years, always hoping for a chance to go. I would love to learn how to throw pottery or how to knit something really amazing. Spend a week writing. Mostly, I just long to soak up the atmosphere, this place Mrs. Young loved so much, the music, the mountains, a week of being with people just like me: people who want to learn things, who appreciate craft for its own sake.

Finally, this spring, I'm going. I'll be leading a writing workshop, and I'm excited about that, but mostly, I'm just thrilled to visit one of Mrs. Young's favorite places. To visit the school where she was the student. To wander about the campus where she played.

The Habitual Writer

Writing

April 4-9, 2010 (Sunday-Friday Session)

Instructor: Susan Woodring

Tuition: $474.00

Inspiration is fleeting, and self-discipline only takes you so far. Creating good work habits is essential to every writer. We will discuss how to create beneficial writing habits, how these habits help free us to create, and how to maintain good habits once established. Participate in exercises designed to inspire, motivate, and guide you in establishing individualized routines and exercises to take home. Writers of all genres and levels are welcome.

1-800.FOLK.SCH (365.5724) 828.837.2775 • (fax) 828.837.8637 Contact us by email John C. Campbell Folk School One Folk School Road Brasstown, NC 28902 Office Hours: Mon.-Fri. 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. EST Craft Shop and History Center Hours: Mon. - Sat. 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. EST Sun. 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. EST John C. Campbell Folk School is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization. Read our Privacy Policy. © 2010 John C. Campbell Folk School

FULL WOLF MOON TONIGHT JANUARY 28, 2010

This full moon will appear larger and brighter than at any other time during 2010. It will be be seen as larger than at any other time since December 2008. Why? Because the full moon will be at perigee, which is its closest point to Earth. The closeness of the moon to the Earth will bring higher tides, so it has been said.

The FULL WOLF MOON, got its name from Native Americans, probably because of the cold January weather, zero temperatures, deep snow and howling wolves. The January Full Wolf Moon is also known as Old Moon and Moon After Yule.

Your chance to see the Full Wolf Moon has come. Clouds may block your view, but go out tonight, tomorrow night too, and take a look.

This amazing photo of the full moon at perigee was taken in December, 2008, by photographer Eric Ingmundson of Sparta, Wisconsin.

Spend a Week at John C. Campbell Folk School Feb.21-27, 2010

Write what you know. What do we know better than our own stories, our own lives?
writes Glenda Beall below.

Recently, I overheard two little boys sitting on a bench outside a market. “I don’t think Mama and Daddy had video games when they were little,” one said to the other.

Kids wonder about what life was like for parents and grandparents. If your children or your grandchildren were gathered around you waiting to hear about what life was like when you were a child, what would you tell them?

Spend a week at Orchard House on the John C. Campbell Folk Schoolcampus in Brasstown, NC writing the stories of your life.

In 1998, I published a family history chronicling the lives of my grandfather and each of my ten aunts and uncles. They were not famous people. Just simple men and women who lived in the early twentieth century, who endured hardships and triumphs, and who will be forever remembered by future generations because their stories have been recorded in this book.

Since then, I’ve been writing and collecting incidents and stories about my own life. An example is Tar, Tallow and Prayer, which tells how a home remedy saved my baby sister’s life. My Mother’s Reunion is a humorous story of the time we crashed another family’s reunion.

In my writing classes students aren’t expected to be experienced writers.

Besides exploring our lives for stories, we learn to use the five senses to draw the reader into our work. We learn to use strong verbs, to avoid overused adjectives. We help cut out the fat, the extra verbiage, and show how to use historical events to place a story in time. We learn how to entertain and enlighten our audience, to tell true stories using the same components as good fiction.

A former student said this: What was so special about your class is that you created a harmony among strangers that evolved almost immediately into a group connection of respect, joy and genuine warmth and understanding. I believe every one of my classmates is a beautiful and courageous writer. … as you had us read our stories we were able to glimpse and appreciate the depth and the diverse culture of their fascinating lives.

We have openings for Leave a Written Legacy, February 21 – 27, at John C. Campbell Folk School, but registration must be made byFebruary 1.

Anyone living in Clay, Cherokee, or Graham counties in NC or Towns, Union, and Fannin counties in Georgia, receive half price tuition. Call 1-800-365-5724 or click on http://www.folkschool.org/ and register online.

Local number is 828-837-2775.

Contact Glenda Beall, writerlady21@yahoo.com for more information.