Good News for Me!

The good news is that I won the 2010 Hub City Award for Poetry. Click to read the article.
My youngest suggested that mine must have been the ONLY poetry entry this year. Oh, nay, nay, I said. There were prizes offered for 2nd and 3rd places as well. And the icing on the cake - I also took third place in fiction.

Blue Ridge Book Festival

It was Mother's Day weekend and my girls went with me to the book festival in Hendersonville held at the Blue Ridge Community College. I actually got to have a few impromptu reunions there in the halls of the college. Here is honorary chairman, Robert Morgan, one of the kudzu cousins, introducing keynote Sharyn McCrumb, who spoke on finding truth in fiction. She's a consummate researcher. I was using a new camera that I wasn't used to and my picture of McCrumb didn't turn out.

Louise Bailey spoke on the cultural and historical dimensions of Henderson County. I came in a little late for that one, but was delighted to hear the story about Carl Sandburg having supper at her father's home where he enjoyed the fresh pole beans cooked with salt pork so much, not only did he have three helpings, he turned the serving bowl up and drank the pot liquor. His way of saying Henderson County pole beans are the best in the world, I reckon.

Mountain balladeer and stroyteller, Sheila Kay Adams, entertained us with her story, Whatever Happened to John Parrish's Boy, one of my favorites in her collection, Come Go Home with Me. I was very sorry to hear about the recent passing of her husband and performance partner, Jim.

Gary Carden, spoke on Western North Carolina stroytelling and folklore. He told stories about growing up with his grandparents in the mountains and how he came to study drama at Western Carolina. This session was the girls' favorite. I was going to ask him to tell the story about the trout who learned to walk on land, but we ran out of time. His play,The Prince of Dark Corners, about the Carolina bootlegger outlaw, Lewis Redmond is on DVD. I have a copy which I used in Tech Prep Chemistry when we study distillation.

Rash at the Hub

Ron was at the HubBub Thursday night to do a reading of Serena. Of course he started with one of the best opening paragraphs of any novel ever (in medias res), where you know that blood is not far in coming.

Byrnes High faculty was well represented in the crowd that was treated to glimpses of training an eagle to hunt rattle snakes, and some other tidbits about how those golden eagles from Mongolia are bred and trained to hunt. He read the scene where Rachel plants her father’s headstone and remembers some loving moments with him which were few and far between.

Then there are the delightful continuing conversations of the loggers which remind me very much of some of the bird walks we take in my Tech Prep Chemistry class. Yesterday I got this from a girl out of the middle of nowhere, “Do you believe in the Big Bang Theory, Mrs. I? I don’t. I was taught creation.”

“Me neither. Jesus put me here. Hallelujah!” said the boy behind her, tongue-in-cheek and a dip in the other, which I’ve grown to ignore because apparently he needs one after lunch or he’ll be disruptive in class.

“I think it’s kinda both. Don’t you , Miz I? What if it was God that made the Big Bang to happen?” said another kid.

“I think you’re probably right. You know how I always say that chemistry is God's science. Now, look at calcium on the periodic table. I’ll use the laser pointer and let’s say the electron configuration together. Ready? 1s2..2s2…what comes next?”

Good News

One of my stories has been accepted to appear in Hub City's newest anthology, The Essential Fiction of Spartanburg, to come out in April 2009. It is edited by C. Michael Curtis, the senior editor of The Atlantic magazine. He is the John C. Cobb Professor of Humanities at Wofford College.

Serena's Coming!

I'm excited as a mill-hill kid during fair week and I got my free ticket from my school teacher. Hey! I am a mill-hill kid and it IS Piedmont Interstate Fair week. But the reason I'm excited is that my copy of Ron Rash's latest novel, Serena, is on it's way. Should get mine today or tomorrow. You can read the first chapter if you go find the Serena page on Amazon. There is also an interesting essay by Ron on the page.

The book actually springs from a short story published in Ron's anthology, Chemistry. The story, Pemberton's Bride, features evil Serena and her new husband, and is set in a Western North Carolina lumber camp in the 1930s.

I like how he writes a short story and then it grows up to be a novel. That also happened with the novel, The World Made Straight. Perhaps one of my stories will grow up to be a big book some day. Ha.

Our school was fortunate to host Ron last spring when he came to speak to our students about writing. I was honored when the librarians asked me and a few other teachers to join them and Ron for dinner the night before. You know, everytime I see that guy he ask me what I'm working on - I know Ron from the Wildacres workshops. And he did that for our students, too. You don't get that very often with famous writers. After dinner I just had to ask about training an eagle to hunt rattlesnakes - you'll know what I'm talking about if you read the short story or novel. A very lively discussion about how he learned about it and researching for fiction in general followed.

This one is going to be big, folks.

Talk Like a Pirate Weekend

Since it's Talk Like a Pirate Day, Sept. 19, I decided to visit the blog of my favorite pirate romance author, Darlene Marshall, and was happy to see that she has finished her latest novel, A Sea Change. I can hardly wait for that one.

Tomorrow the Byrnes Rebels will host Florida High School football powerhouse, the Lincoln Trojans. It should be a good one. A Florida team up in South Carolina on TLAP Day. How appropriate. Arrr.

Henderson County Genealogical Society 25th Anniversary

A crowd of nearly 100 celebrated the 25th anniversary of the HCGHS on August 16 at The Chariot in Hendersonville, NC along with guest speaker, poet, novelist, and Daniel Boone biographer, Robert Morgan. Ron Rash once told me he thinks Morgan is "the greatest". I have to concur.

Currently the society is working on transcribing the court records for the first thirty years or so of the county's existance. I have a huge folder of 1858 records sitting by my Lay-Z-Boy. It ain't easy, let me tell you. I've read these photocopied microfilms till my eyes cross, transfering into composition books before typing them. The going is lots slower than I thought it would be.

Got published

My essay, "Ray and Me", about my relationship with my cousin with cerebral palsy, and my poem, "When I Plant Corn" have been accepted for publication in the second issue of The Petigru Review, South Carolina Writers Workshop's literary journal. Readers will be able to see these pieces in print near the end of October.

You can read about the judges in the contest here. http://myscww.org/anthologyjudges.htm

Thank y'all for reading my stuff and commenting on them.

the inside flap of her birthday card

My first memory of you
is not your face or voice,
but rather your hands and
forearms, slick and soapy,
holding me for my bath
in the kitchen sink.
I clinked measuring spoons.
A Startex calendar
towel with roosters and
chickens hung on the wall
over the stove. White light
flowed through the one window,
warming the counter top.
Have you noticed how I
always stare at you hands?

Kudzu Cousins and Lye Soap

I’ve always said that my genealogy charts looked more like a laurel thicket than a family tree. And when I saw Robert Morgan’s poem, “Kudzu Cousins”, in the Fall 2007 issue of Southern Quarterly this week, I had to laugh. I like his images in Kudzu Cousins better. It’s interesting that the original relations that make us all kudzu cousins back in that neck of the woods were established way before there was ever any kudzu in the place (ca.1880).

I’ve read Morgan’s latest book, Boone: A Biography, twice and recommended it to everybody. Let me tell you, I read lots of biographies, mostly of scientists, but Boone is by far the best I’ve ever read.

The vignette about soap making was especially interesting to me since I’ve been a savonerie for over twenty years. It started one day when I wanted to make soap in the chemistry class. I thought it would be fun to make some for Mother’s Day presents, like the plaster of paris hand prints you do at Bible School. But when I looked through all the chemistry lab books I had for saponification labs, they all said to throw the soap away when finished since it would be too harsh. Most gave the amounts in volume measurements, not mass. That didn’t make sense to me because chemistry is all about stoichiometric relationships. I wanted my students to be able to carry home a chunk of lye soap to use. Back then, I could only find one book on making lye soap at home with lard or tallow and Red Devil Lye. Now there are dozens of books from the experts (will list my favorites in another post).

I started with my Chemistry II class. That first batch was plain lye and lard, measured to the nearest tenth of a gram, a perfectly balanced chemical reaction. We added about a half cup of olive oil for extra moisture. When it was stirred enough, the hot, lye-fat mixture resembled custard. One kid said it made him hungry for banana pudding. We poured it up in a Rubbermaid shoe box, wrapped it up in an old quilt to insulate the exothermic reaction, and left it on the lab bench till class met again on Monday. It was hard for me not to peek, but I promised them I wouldn’t. When the first of the students came into the classroom, I had to swat a few hands (you could do that back then) to keep them from peeling back the quilt before everyone got in the class.

I pulled the still-warm box from its covers and lifted the lid. The hardened block of soap had pulled from the sides of the mold like a cake pulls from the side of a pan. It looked and felt like greasy provolone cheese. We flipped it out of the box and cut it into bars with a butcher knife (something else I can’t have in school nowadays). The book said to let it cure for a couple of weeks before using, to dry and harden. We laid the bars out on borrowed, green plastic lunchroom trays and placed them on top of the storage cabinets to dry, out of sight out of mind. I did manage to sneak a bar and kept it under the big lab sink. I quickly learned that if you wash your hands with a good, balanced lye soap you don’t need hand lotion.

Well, that was the beginning of my obsession with lye soap making. Once I tried to make soap the old timey way, by leaching the potassium hydroxide from wood ashes. I saved our fireplace ashes all winter in metal buckets in the garage. A lady who did lye soap demonstrations at Walnut Grove Plantation and Musgrove Mill told me how to do it ,but didn’t tell me the amounts. My experiment was a mess. I was able to make an egg float in the ashes-water, but without the precise lye measurements, I wasn’t sure about how much fat to use. The soft soap was excessively greasy. And within a few months it smelled rancid.

Once I mastered formulating, I entered some of my recipes in a contest at the South Carolina Soap Makers Conference. In 2000, I came home with Best All Round Soap in SC for my multi-layered Oatmeal Apricot Scrub Bar and The Ugliest Soap for my unscented Goat’s Milk Castile, which was baby-poop yellow. The White Tyger Bath Soap got second or third in something, but I can’t remember what. However, I figured out that those contests are better left to the folks who do it for a living. It’s just a hobby for me. I do it more for the students. Soap making is a good culminating lab in chemistry.

It looks like I got off on a tangent here, but lye soap and kudzu cousins really are related in my mind. These days people who don’t know any better will crinkle their noses at the idea of either one. They just don’t understand what makes a high quality product.

Science Fiction Author Dies

Arthur C. Clark, the author of 2001: A Space Odyessy, died last week at the age of 90. You know, he’s kind of the reason I’m here today. I read his fiction when I was in high school and decided I wanted to study science. I know some people don’t read science fiction because it’s “not real”, but I can’t help but wonder how many “real scientists” there are out there because a fiction writer like Clark inspired them.

Rash is PEN/ Faulkner Finalist

With over 300 submissions, Chemistry and Other Stories, Carolina writer, Ron Rash's, short story collection was a runner-up for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. I read it when it first came out and loved the stories (especially Chemistry). And I love the cover. This collection is on the shelf in The Middle Tyger River Library. It will be well worth your time. Congrats to Ron.

One Foot in Eden

I read it for the second time last week because our faculty Chat-N-Chew group will be discussing Ron Rash’s work this month. I have all his works, been reading them ever since Eureka Mills was first published by Hub City Writers Project back in 2001. And on April 30, the author will come speak to our students.
One Foot in Eden is one of those rare books that raise chill bumps on me when I’ve finished the last page and let it sink in. Look, even now as I think about it and type this, the fine hairs on my arms are sticking straight out. I’ll not give you a synopsis here and just say go to Amazon.com for that. But I will tell you that One Foot in Eden, which is Ron’s first novel, can take you through the whole gamut of emotions in about 200 pages. It haunted my dreams. Dang, that man can write!

Take your kid to a conference.

Sara and I enjoyed a late October stroll on Myrtle Beach between working the BookNook and sessions with the faculty at the South Carolina Writers Workshop 2007 Conference. We belong at the beach in fall, don't you think? Her hair is the color of the sea oats and mine the sand's. ha.







During the Poetry and a Sense of Place session at the 2007 SC Writers Workshop at Myrtle Beach, Robert Morgan read his poem "Mowing", about his daddy mowing grass.







Selling books at the SCWW Book Nook was a pretty good gig.

Some good South Carolina writing

The winners of the 2007 South Carolina Fiction Project are here.

Gabaldon titles Book Seven

For someone like me who has recently discovered the joys of genealogy, I was pleased to read the title of Diana Gabaldon’s seventh book in the Outlander Series, An Echo in the Bone. How about it, folks-who-like-to-chase-dead-people, don’t you like that one? Read about how she came up with that title here.

Startex Tucapau Historical Society

I was happy to see how the society has grown by leaps and bounds when I visited the web site today. Here are the people and places that trigger so many memories that end up on a jump drive. Hopefully there will be a collection worth publication someday.
http://www.startex.org/index.htm

Morgan reads from his book, Boone: A Biography

http://www.hendersonvillenews.com/article/20070917/NEWS/70917005

Counting the days.

No, I'm not counting the days till school lets out in May. I'll start that after Spring break. I'm counting the days until I hit the highway for Myrtle Beach and the 2007 South Carolina Writers Workshop Conference on October 25. I've volunteered to help this time, attending half the sessions for free and working the other half. I just hope that my schedule allows me to attend most of Robert Morgan's workshops. Many of you know he is one of my favorites because he writes about my people. Well, Ron Rash does, too, but I found Morgan first.


That Boone book

Earlier this month I drove up to Hendersonville to hear Robert Morgan speak about his latest book, Boone: A Biography. The passages he chose to read were interesting and quite delightful. It will be published in a few weeks. I plan on getting a copy at the conference. There were a few advanced copies at the lecture at the Henderson County Library. A tall, thin, white-headed man sitting beside me had a copy in his hand. I asked him to let me look at it. The bulk of the thing surprised me – like a Gabaldon it was. I didn’t think that poets were so long-winded. But Daniel Boone is an awful big subject, just like the song says.

http://www.hendersonvillenews.com/article/20070914/NEWS/70914003

Poplar Legs

My papa, Charles P. Kuykendall, told me his daddy had “poplar legs.” I thought he meant “popular legs” – an awful weird thing to say about your daddy.

One spring day, Papa and I were walking through the woods to go trout fishing and came up on a yellow and orange, tulip-like blossom in the path. I picked it up and took a whiff. It smelled sweet. I thought about touching my tongue to it to see if it was sweet tasting, like honeysuckle, but it was loaded with little black bugs and I thought better of it.

“That came from this poplar tree,” he said and patted the rough, dark gray, straight trunk.
I just about fell backwards straining to see the blossoms silhouetted against the blue beyond the canopy way above my head.

“Oh! Legs like a poplar tree!” I said. “I get it now. Your daddy had very long legs, right?”

“Right.” Papa smiled, nodded, and we kept walking.

Robert Valentine Kuykendall lived in Hendersonville and was about 6-feet 5-inches tall. And that’s where I got my long legs, everybody tells me. Great Granddaddy’s parents were Henry Pinkney Kuykendall and Cynthia Carolyn Capps Kuykendall. He was from a long line of Kuykendalls who settled in Carolina backwoods when it was still wilderness, about twenty years before the American Revolution.

I had seen a couple of pictures of my great grandfather as an old man when I was little. In one, he was sitting on an apple crate with my then six-year-old Uncle Johnny in his lap. He could have gotten three more younguns in that lap. In the other picture, he was standing in front of my grandparents’ farmhouse in Greenville, near Parris Mountain, wearing overalls. His plow mule was behind him, all hitched up. I swear he made that mule look like a pony.

At one point, he delivered mail in the mountains. I recently acquired a picture of him sitting in his mail wagon. He really fills it up, too. I wonder if I got my wild imagination from him. Papa said he was a real storyteller, and he sang little songs he made up all the time. I wonder if the brain in that big Kuykendall head was just clicking away with stories, poems, and lyrics while he was riding those mountain roads. Mine goes into overload when I’m driving alone or on the tractor cutting the grass.

My uncles told me he once knocked out Jack Dempsey cold when Dempsey came to Hendersonville to train. It seems they needed a big fella for him to punch on. After that, they told Gramps to go home; they didn’t need him any more.

All those Kuykendalls are naturally strong, big size or not, even Momma. When we were almost grown, she could still scoop us up and throw us over her shoulder like we were small sacks of chicken scratch. She’s pushing eighty now and still strong.

My favorite of all the Kuykendall pictures is one I found in a box of genealogy stuff I inherited from Momma’s Aunt Helen. I calculate it to be about 110-years-old. Robert Valentine is sitting in a chair in a photographer’s studio with two toddlers in his lap. I think they are his first two tow-headed sons, Rufus and Roy, and I figure Robert is about twenty-six-years-old in this picture.

Knowing that back in those days you had to sit still a while to have your picture made, I’m absolutely fascinated by this picture. First of all, there are two toddler BOYS in his lap who had to sit still for about ten seconds. How the heck did he accomplish that? His lips are parted under a (I imagine copper and gold) handle-bar mustache. I bet he is whispering, “Be still. Be still,” to them. I think the older boy, Rufus, was able to comply, but not the least one — his little feet and face are blurry.

When I was making out the invitation list for my wedding, I sat in Papa’s kitchen going over it with him to see if I left anybody off. He was stirring his coffee with annoying clinks and staring at me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You know, you favor my daddy more than any of us.”

Well, that just threw me for a loop. I had only seen the pictures of him with the mule and the one with Uncle Johnny before then. He was a bald, pot-bellied old man. I teared-up a little. How could Papa say such a thing? And how can looks skip three generations, anyway? That hurt my feelings. But I didn’t let him know. Papa died of a stroke a couple of weeks after that. He never got the chance to show me the other pictures he had of his parents when they were young. My wedding day, one month later, was bitter-sweet.

I never saw those pictures till last year when I got the box of stuff that belonged to Aunt Helen, and there was the 110-year old picture. Those cheekbones, that nose, that forehead, and lips – all mine (and my brother’s) sans mustache. And I’ll be darned if looks can’t skip down three generations.


http://teachers.spart5.k12.sc.us/islercj/fam/images/RobvTwoBoysP.jpg