Author and Inspired Writer

Greetings gentle readers!  Another long wait since my last post.  My apologies.  Seems I overextended myself of late and had to take a little down time to recover.  Haven’t quite gotten the hang of pacing myself yet, but the old bod certainly has a way of letting  me know when I’ve gone too far.

Anyhoo, I just sent off a letter to the editor of the Windsor Star about something that happened to me a couple days ago, and thought you might like to read it as well.  A disturbing incident that still makes me emotional every time I think about it.

Dear Editor:  On Sunday March 6th, my husband and I were driving down the Walker Road on-ramp when we spotted a young woman off to the side of the road holding a sign which read “Will Work for Food.”  My first thought was “This can’t be happening – not in this city, not in this country.”  I’ve lived in Essex County for thirty years and by times my citizenship in this prosperous community has made me proud beyond words and mad as hell, but this is the first time I’ve ever been embarrassed.

This woman didn’t want a hand-out but a job to give her back her self-respect and help secure a hopeful future for her children.  But today she is reduced to begging on a street corner.  If she’s still there tomorrow, where will we take our shame?

[Any comments?]

It was glorious! 

To start – jammed packed house, and who doesn’t love that?!  Every chair taken and people standing at the back.  That’s just soooo encouraging for any performer.  And didn’t we have a ton of performers – narrative poets (including moi), sound poets, rhyming poets, singers, musicians, and comedians.  One young singer/songwriter named Danielle Haslip brought the house down with her amazing voice and talent, and I’m delighted to learn she’s releasing her first CD soon.  Stay tuned for further details.

I read two pieces, a long one (st. irene) and a short one (st. edith stein).  The crowd was warm and enthusiastic and one dear lady, a fellow choir member, was so carried away she even got to her feet to give me a “standing O!”  Oh!  Wonderful!

It was nearly 10 o’clock when we finally dragged our tired bodies home, way past my bedtime, but I was so wired I couldn’t get to sleep.  Just a magical evening, and the organizers were so pleased with the turnout and reception, they promised to have another Beat Night.  As soon as I know the details, I’ll pass ’em on to you.

This was a great idea!

I was reminded last week by someone who shall remain unnamed that I hadn’t updated my blog in the last seven days.  True enough, but this same person failed to notice that in fact I had posted two new articles the week before, and I thought this should buy me a little time at least.  And that’s the story I’m sticking with.

See, the problem is I have an intense dislike of winter.  I don’t feel like doing anything in this barren season, even updating my blog.  The polar bears have got it right – hibernation is the way to go.  The cold and snow are not my friends.  The car looks like it rolled in a salt pit, walking is tricky at best (my dearly beloved says the way I negotiate the snowbanks makes him tense) and then there’s all those layers of clothing which I’ve noticed don’t really keep a body warm at all.  Lured down to the “balmy south” with promises of mild winters, I discovered only too late that the definition of “mild” ranges widely and is often based on a comparison to the winters of one’s childhood.  “Cold?  Why, this ain’t cold.  I remember when I was young, back in nineteen-ought-three it were.  Now that there was a cold winter.  Pipes froze solid, they did.  Got our water from the river, diggin’ down with a pickax.  And snow!  Had to tunnel up from the front door twenty feet before you could see over the bank.”

Yeah, OK.  But it’s funny how knowing there have been worse winters doesn’t make me feel one bit warmer, or one bit happier.  And then I find out the robins are wintering over in Essex County.

I saw it for myself a couple of years ago, just a few days before Christmas.  I looked out our kitchen window during a snowstorm to see what I thought was a robin sitting in the mulberry tree in our backyard.  I call my dearly beloved to have a look and he got out the binoculars to be sure.  “I don’t believe it,” he said, and handed them to me.  Praying that our neighbours wouldn’t misunderstand my actions, I aimed the binoculars and there it was, a robin without a doubt.  Someone said later that it must have been a late fledge or maybe a sick one that just wasn’t up for the migration that year.  But a few days ago someone else confirmed another sighting of robins and felt certain that they were indeed wintering over.

Amazing the effect that had on me. 

e. e. cummings wrote “i who have died am alive again today,/ and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth/ day of life and of love and wings”. 

The robins are wintering over.

Well, there sure was a hot time in the old town last night!

At the Writers’ Salon I presented my holy card of Katherine Drexel.  Daughter of a wealthy family, she founded an order of nuns to minister to the most disadvantaged in America at that time, the Native and Afro-Americans.  She and her sisters endured insults and intimidation, and my poem dealt with a threat from the KKK in Texas to blow up a church where the nuns were teaching Afro-American children.  The nuns prayed, and two days later a tornado smashed the Klan clubhouse to smithereens.  (Gotta love the timing there!) 

 But it was the use of one word in the poem that nearly led to an all-out brawl at the Salon, and when writers fight, it ain’t pretty.  We have to protect our hands you see, so there’s a lot of elbowing and head butting and knees to the groin.  Perhaps I exaggerate just a tad, but the discussion became very heated indeed.  The poem begins, “nigger nuns, they called us,” and my colleague was outraged at the use of the term, which I think did them great credit.  But when my colleague suggested I should have changed it to read “negro nuns, they called us,”  the group was loud in their disapproval and the room instantly polarized.  In the end, my friend would not agree that use of the term in context was appropriate, and then they added, “You’ll never get the poem published.”

There is no more ugly word in the English language than “nigger,”  freighted as it is with dehumanizing hatred and threat of violence, and it is one word that should never be taken lightly on the tongue.  But in fact the sisters were called “nigger nuns,” and to suggest they were called something else, to sanitize it into something more socially acceptable would be to do the nuns a grave injustice and to euphemize the suffering they endured.  My thought was not of publication when I wrote the piece, but of being true to their story.  On my home page you’ll find my favourite quote of Salman Rushdie – “A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” 

If I might add – “and tell the story, whatever the consequences.”