NOVEMBER DAYS IN THE SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS Nov. 5, 2010

No frost, no hard freeze, lovely days only, with bright autumn leaves and flowers still blooming.

SCOTT OWENS, EDITOR OF WILD GOOSE POETRY REVIEW Writes About Our Writing Community Here in the Southern Appalachian Mountains

WILD GOOSE POETRY REVIEW , FALL 2010

Editor Scott Owens writes:

Writing Way Out West

Most people who pay any attention to writing in NC are aware of vibrant writing communities in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area (thanks to multiple universities and the NC Writers’ Network), in Wilmington (thanks to UNCW), in Greensboro (thanks to UNCG), in Charlotte (thanks to Main Street Rag), in Asheville (thanks to Malaprops), and even here in Hickory (thanks to Poetry Hickory, Poetry Lincolnton, and Lenoir Rhyne’s In Their Own Words series), 
but farther out even than Asheville there is another vibrant writing community spearheaded by the NC Writers’ Network NetWest.

This group includes writers from the 8 NC counties west of Asheville, but also draws participants from bordering counties in GA, TN, and SC. Key figures in the group include writing fixtures, such as Coffee with the Poets and Writers Circle Founder Glenda Beall, John C. Campbell Folk School Writing Coordinator Nancy Simpson, former NC Poet Laureate Kay Byer, Young Harris College Instructor Janice Townley Moore, and Your Daily Poem blogger Jayne Jaudon Ferrer, as well as “up and coming” writers like Rosemary Royster and Karen Holmes, among others.

Just a few highlights of the group’s activities would include Coffee with the Poets at Phillips and Lloyd Bookshop in Hayesville and City Lights Books in Sylva; Mountain Writers meetings at Blue Ridge Books in Waynesville; the Netwest Poetry Group meetings at Tri-County College in Murphy; Writers Night Out at Young Harris College; the Writers Circle Workshops in Hayesville; and regular weekly creative writing workshops at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown.

Now, under the capable editorship of Nancy Simpson, the group has gathered forces in an anthology of stories, essays, and poems by writers living in and inspired by the Southern Appalachian Mountains. The anthology is called Echoes Across the Blue Ridge and has been published by Winding Path Publishing.

I am honored to include in this issue of Wild Goose Poetry Review a special section dedicated to and featuring new work by poets from Echoes Across the Blue Ridge. That section begins with a review of the anthology, which is followed by poems from 10 of the writers included in its pages. I hope you enjoy this special section and all of the poems and reviews in the Fall 2010 issue of Wild Goose Poetry Review, and please never underestimate how much the writers enjoy the discussions you begin by leaving a comment after their poems.

SPECIAL SECTION: WRITERS FROM ECHOES ACROSS THE BLUE RIDGE

Book Review By Scott Owens.

Imbued with the Spirit: A Review of Echoes Across the Blue Ridge

Echoes Across the Blue Ridge (Winding Path 2010)
Edited by Nancy Simpson
238 pages, $16
ISBN: 9781450701525

What makes the Appalachian Mountains so special? Certainly one distinctive quality is age. Where else can you see stone so old it crumbles, trees left alone to grow as big around as houses, houses bent on one knee but still lived in, and traditions as old as . . . well, as old as the hills?

Things, even people, are allowed to grow old here without someone knocking them down in the name of progress or shuffling them off to a nursing home. And that’s how the real magic of the place happens, because, in one respect, nothing dies here — not really. Sure, physical presence may come and go, but the essential character of things is retained in stories, poems, songs, artifacts, traditions, and, most of all, memory.

The word “haunted” has a negative connotation in most places, but one can hardly read about the southern Appalachians without that word or a synonym being, if not named, then at least implied. Robert Morgan uses it in his Introduction to Echoes Across the Blue Ridge: “The deep valleys seem haunted by the natives who once lived there.” Kay Byer uses it in a comment quoted by Nancy Simpson in her “Note from the Editor:” “our most haunting artifacts.” The first poem, “Beyond the Clearing” by James Cox, certainly suggests it by referring to “a place sublime / where spirits sing invisibly.” And the first two stories, “Rendezvous” by Charlotte Wolf and “The Third Floor Bedroom” by Lana Hendershott, are, to some degree about the sensation of being haunted. And despite the usual expectation that non-fiction wouldn’t involve such fanciful ideas as spirits and haunting, even the first essay, “The Oldest Answer” by Steven Harvey quotes Bettie Sellers saying, “My bent was to espouse the unseen that’s in the woods at night.” To which, Harvey adds, “It is the need to fill all this haunted otherness with something human.”

All of this repetition of the word “haunting” or the sense of being haunted reminds the reader that the implication of the word is in fact not limited to an unpleasant habitual visitation but rather to a persistent presence of spirit, a presence that may be desired, embraced, just as I, a flatlander, have been haunted by images of Cade’s Cove, Caesars Head, Graveyard Fields, and the Devil’s Courthouse since visiting them as a child and returning to them as often as I can manage. This usually pleasant but sometimes unsettling lingering of spirit is closer to the type of haunting the writers in Echoes Across the Blue Ridge have discovered in these mountains and expressed in these pages.

Not that every piece in this anthology deals with the past or memory or spirit. Some of the selections deal with other reasons people are attracted to these mountains. Ellen Andrews comments on the beauty and sense of community in the mountains in “Homing:” “We are connected not by school uniforms / but by a raging lust for these purple mountains.” And in poems like Gene Hirsch’s “Where It Comes From,” we see even more closely the intimate relationship between the human and the natural: “Love / sprouts from lichen, / in the shade, by the lily pond . . . / in the thicket / of a chapter of floating / leaves / beneath the silky / hairs of a willow.”

Even the descriptions of nature are, however, frequently haunting, as in Janice Townley Moore’s “Photos from Another State,” where she describes the sound of a creek as “lyrics from the unseen.” Similarly, Jennifer McGaha’s reverie in “Looking Glass” is punctuated by images from the past: “You see your great-grandmother, her long, gray hair pinned in a bun, stooping over the quilting loom by the black wood stove in her cabin, and you see her strolling in her garden, her brown, crinkled hands pulling a green bean fresh from the vine.” And Susan Lefler’s harrowing story “The Spirit Tree” tells of one little girl’s attempt to use the spirits of nature and tradition to fend off the hazards of her mother’s emotional disorder.

Whether spirits of joy or grief, familiarity or strangeness, there is no doubt that the southern Appalachians are possessed by a presence that transcends the physical and temporal. In the same way, the poems, stories, and essays in Echoes Across the Blue Ridge are possessed by the various spirits of these mountains, leaving us standing, in the words of Janet Sloane Benway’s poem “Sugarloaf Mountain,” “in awe, / even in the face of sorrow.”

Want more Wild Goose Poetry Review Nov. 2010 issue

click here http://wildgoosepoetryreview.wordpress.com/

ANOTHER CELEBRATION FOR POET NANCY SIMPSON, AUTHOR OF LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE

RECEPTION for Nancy Simpson, November 4, 2010 - 4:45 p.m. at

John C. Campbell Folk School. 

You are invited.

Living Above the Frost Line

by ANNA SHEAROUSE, ARCHIVIST on OCTOBER 13, 2010

in FOLK SCHOOL FOLKS,NEW & NOTEWORTHY

Living Above the Frost Line: New and Selected Poems 
by Nancy Simpson

We are excited that our very own Resident Writer, Nancy Simpson, has written a new book of poetry!  Living Above the Frost Line: New and Selected Poems was published by Carolina Wren Press in July 2010 as the first work in their Carolina Laureate Series.  Simpson is the founder of North Carolina Writer’s Network West, and her poems have been published in Southern Poetry Review, the Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and other literary magazines.  Through her position as the Folk School’s Resident Writer, Simpson has bolstered our writing program by recruiting some of the finest writing instructors in the region.

A reading and reception will take place in the living room of the Keith House on November 4, 2010 at 4:45.  Those attending will have the opportunity to purchase the new book, which is also available for purchase through our Craft Shop.  

A VOTE FOR WELL-VERSED POLITICIANS

OP-ED PIECE by Kathryn Stripling Byer

NEWS-OBSERVER, RALEIGH, NC 

Published Sat, Oct 30, 2010 02:00 AM

A vote for well-versed politicians

CULLOWHEE The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley declared poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." These days we snicker at such an inflated claim for poets, or for any other voices claiming that language used well and with poetic intensity matters at all.

And yet, what can we say of the real "legislators" of our world? Their world of spin and double-talk, distortions and lies?

Now that the mid-term elections are upon us, the relentless TV ads, the daily prognostications, the vast sums spent by candidates and corporations, I'm left, yet again, wondering what qualities a leader worthy of the name should embody.

This is a difficult question to address nowadays. We exist surrounded by static: television, texting and Internet. We watch the images of men and women on the screen professing this or that value or policy. How can we tell if any of them are worthy of our respect, not to mention our vote?

I think I have found a way, thanks to a recent speech by former University of Chicago President Don Randel. He begins by quoting noted poet Richard Wilbur, whose poem "Clearness" contains these lines: "There is a poignancy in all things clear,/In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning./Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water/We fall to imagining prodigious honesties."

Randel then laments that we live in an age of "prodigious dishonesties," but his solution does not require more classes with "ethics" in the title. "Perhaps," he declares, "we should require everyone to study poetry."

He concludes his speech with a revolutionary idea. One that might help us focus our attention more accurately on the men and women whose faces we see in the media: "The next time you see a face on the front page of the newspaper ... you might ask yourself whether the subject reads much poetry."

I don't think it's asking too much that our leaders read poetry, that they be able to speak our language clearly and precisely, nor do I think it is asking too much of them to be well-read in the texts that our canon of great literature has given us.

After all, these texts contribute, as Randel observes, to our understanding of what it means to be a human being and how we ought to behave in relation to one another.

When we have leaders who proclaim that they read nothing much at all, what does that say about them? And about us?

I suggest that as another Election Day approaches, we apply Randel's litmus test to all the candidates begging for our votes. Or dare we? Might we come away disappointed that no one, not a single solitary one, would pass muster?

If so, we face a future worse than any of us could imagine, one in which language is used not to draw our attention back to those "prodigious honesties" that the poet expresses, but to deceive, confuse and seduce us into supporting policies that will undermine and ultimately silence our voices. When that happens, the word "democracy" will have been robbed of all meaning.

Kathryn Stripling Byer is a former poet laureate of North Carolina.

LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE (BLOG) CELEBRATED ITS 2ND ANNIVERSARY

This Blog - LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE did celebrate on October 26,2010, its 2nd Year Anniversary. Living above the Frost Line is the cyber home of owner, poet  Nancy Simpson. A celebration of the blog is first of all, a celebration of all who have visited.  

WHAT IS THE FOCUS OF THE BLOG?  Poetry, Writing  and life in the Southern Appalachian Mountains.

As stated: “Living Above the Frost Line is a dwelling place for practicing poets. Here we give ourselves some extra time. Yes, we know the hard freeze will come, but until it arrives, we shall grow and share our poems.”

We’re sunrise watchers, moonrise watchers, sunset and moonset watchers. We’re obsessed with flowers and especially enjoy a full sun perennial garden growing on a mountain in the middle of a deciduous forest. The goal here always has been to see something blooming, even in the dead of winter, and that is sometimes possible. 

WHAT ARE THE HIGHLIGHTS OF THE PAST YEAR?  Some amazing things happened, but basically this site featured Appalachian or Southern Poets regularly:  Brenda Kay Ledford, Eric Nelson, Rachel Bronnum, Rosemary Royston, Maren O. Mitchell,  Ruth Moose, Dana Wildsmith, Mary Ricketson, Barbara Groce, and others. You can still read their poems by going to the archives.  Nancy Simpson’s all time favorite love poem was featured on Valentine’s Day:  “The Gathering” by James Haba.

All of the John C. Campbell Folk School Writing classes and most of the Institute for Continued Learning Writing Classes at Young Harris College were announced. Many poetry and other writing classes were posted with a class descriptions. Where to publish was discussed.

News of interest to writers living in the NC Writers’ Network West area south and west of Asheville was posted regularly. Many NCWriters’Network West events were announced.

WHAT IS THE MOST RECENT TALK ABOVE THE FROST LINE?   ECHOES ACROSS THE BLUE RIDGE -  Stories, Essays, and Poems by Writers Living in and Inspired By the Southern Appalachian Mountains, edited by Nancy Simpson,with a forward by major poet and writer Robert Morgan was published by Winding Path Publishing.  This anthology sold out fast and is now being reprinted. Discussion about using the anthology in Appalachian Studies has been heard behind the scenes. Book reviews have been reprinted on this site.  

and in the same month, same year...talk, talk talk,   the book LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE, New and Selected Poems by Nancy Simpson, a collection spanning 32 years of her poetry career, was published at Carolina Wren Press. The book LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE is the first book in Carolina Wren’s new Laureate Series. The manuscript was nominated by NC Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer and was launched at City Lights Book Store in Sylva, NC on Sunday, Oct. 17th. In that week it was named Appalachian Book of the Week. 

WHO READS THIS LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE BLOG?  There have been 16,397 visits to the site with the total of 31,395 pages viewed.  Visitors are from throughout the United States, from the southeast and into Colorado and California, with an average 4 minutes reading time spent on an average of 41 pages a day.  There are 34 Followers. Most inquiries come from writers searching for poems to read, for writing tips and for recent news of writing, especially Appalachian writing, southern writing, and poetry news. 

The biggest number of inquiries came in January 2010, by readers interested in winter in the southern Appalachian Mountains and The Full Wolf Moon.  February 2010 was also a big hit month with interest in NC Poet laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer 

and a post about southern writer Dana Wildsmith with  a reprint from her new book BACK TO ABNORMAL, Surviving With An Old Farm in the New South.  In March 2010, readers were interested in reading poems by MaryRicketson and Ruth Moose.

Over all, during the past two years, other than inquiring about poet Nancy Simpson, readers have been searching for any and all information about physician poet John Stone and Georgia poet Bettie M. Sellers.

For more info, search the archives 

or contact Nancy Simpson

nancy.simpson38@yahoo.com

GOOD -BYE TO THE SETTING FULL HUNTER'S MOON. GOOD MORNING NEW DAY OCTOBER 24, 2010

MOON SET ON THE MOUNTAIN OCT. 23, 2010

The Full Hunter's Moon

Full Moon "Above the Frost Line" and Full setting moon.  All except the last photo in this post were taken just before sunrise.

FULL HUNTER'S MOON RISES IN ITS FULLNESS ON OCTOBER 22, 2010

The Full Hunter's Moon shines brightly.

Menotomy Indian Hunter by sculptor Cyrus E. Dalton. This 1911 sculpture is located in Robbing Park, between Robbins Library and Town Hall in Arlington, Massachusetts.  Wikipedia July 17, 2005



According to Native American legend, the Full Hunter's Moon is the full moon for which they planned their big autumn hunt parties, to hunt food in preparation for winter. This full moon always follows The Full Harvest Moon. This moon rises sooner after sunset, and it shines almost all night long. It gave the hunters a greater advantage over their prey and gave them light to hunt by day and into the night.

Celebrating the Book Launch of Nancy Simpson's book LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE - NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

AT CITY LIGHTS BOOKSTORE IN SYLVA, NC OCTOBER 17, 2010

SHARING THE DAY 

Andrea Selch the Director of Carolina Wren Press, NC Poet Laureate Emerta Kathryn Stripling Byer who nominated the manuscript for the new Laureate Series and Nancy Simpson author of Living Above the Frost Line  - New and Selected Poems.

Nancy Simpson signs a copy of Living Above the Frost Line for novelist Sue Ellen Bridgers.

Director of Carolina Wren Press Andrea Selch meets poet Rosemary Royston.

And it's food, glorious food prepared by Spring Street Cafe. 

BOOK REVIEW - Asheville Citizen-Times says Major WNC Poet, from Hayesville ...

Major WNC poet, from Hayesville, makes her book debut

ROB NEUFELD • SEPTEMBER 26, 2010

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Lovers of Robert Frost might take note of Nancy Simpson, a Hayesville poet, whose new book, “Living above the Frost Line,” refers to her wintry habitat, and not his name. Yet she shares with Frost a conversational tone, musically shaped because well-honed.

For instance, there are these lines from “Storm,” included in her section of new poems: “Back in my dark hovel, I hover / near a kerosene heater that can / only knock the chill off one room ./ It can only heat coffee to lukewarm.”

“Hovel … hover … heater,” Simpson knows how to play with words in a way that feels like song although the lines don’t rhyme.

In her poem “At the Gates,” she breaks into an anthem’s refrain to record departed travelers’ plaints: “I fell from the roof / said an addict. I froze on the mountain / said the Kurd.”

The years 1977-2009 are covered by “Above the Frost Line: New and Selected Poems by Nancy Simpson,” published by Carolina Wren Press.

Simpson has plied her craft while helping others: Students in her writing classes and writers in Netwest, the mountain writers’ group that she helped establish.

Copies of LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE can be bought at: 

The Book Nook, Blairsville, Georgia

Carolina Wren Press, Durham, NC

City Lights Book Store,  Sylva, NC

Malaprops Book Store,  Asheville, NC

Phillips and lloyd Book Shop, Hayesville, NC

Craft Shop at John C Campbell Folk School, 
Brasstown, NC

City Lights Bookstore announces Appalachian Book of the Week

Appalachian Book of the Week

Submitted by more@citylights... on Tue, 10/12/2010 - 11:39pm. 

Our featured book for the week of October 10 is Living Above the Frost Line: 

New and Selected Poems by Nancy Simpson. 

Join us Sunday, October 17th at 2:00 p.m. when we welcome Nancy 

back to Sylva for a celebration of her book, and Carolina Wren Press'

Laureate Series.

Visual Artist, Painter Clark Roberson Visits his former teacher Nancy Simpson

Clark stands by two of his paintings.

Autumn Leaves in the Southern Appalachain Mountains

Yes, to the leaf lookers. It is time to drive into the Southern Appalachian Mountains.  I'm thinking peak may come as soon as October 13th but no later than October 20th. The vistas in the far western North Carolina and north Georgia Mountains will be lovely through the end of the month.  

Great Smoky Mountains

National Park Service

Great Smoky Mountains, North Carolina and Tennessee

The Great Smoky Mountains are a breathtaking sight, especially in fall when the mountain foliage turns to radiant shades of crimson, orange, and purple. Nestled between North Carolina and Tennessee, the most-visited national park in the United States is home to 100 species of native trees with an awesome display of turning leaves. Peak fall foliage travel is predicted for early October through early November; the most memorable colors coming courtesy of sugar maples, scarlet oaks, sweetgums, red maples, and hickories.

Nancy Simpson will read poems from Living Above the Frost Line New and Selected Poems,  Oct.13, 2010 - 10:30 a.m. at  Coffee With the Poets, Phillips and Lloyd Book Shop on the square in Hayesville. 

Oct. 17, 2010 - 2:00 p.m. City Lights Book Store in Sylva, NC will host a reception for Nancy Simpson to celebrate the publication of Living Above the Frost Line with food and drink, reading and book signing.