New Year's Eve 2024

Glenda

It is New Year's Eve in Roswell, GA and I am having a quiet time at home. 

I will be preparing Lexie for the fireworks that will begin soon. It terrifies her. She usually hides under my bed, but I am going to make her hiding place more comfortable tonight. I will put her bed and her cozy blanket there. I will play quiet music that I hope will drown out some explosions and shrill sounds. 

I am excited about the coming year. As I recover from the past two years, I hope for more interesting things in my "city" life. Over the holidays, I was included with Gay and Stu for a couple of parties where I met women who told great stories about their lives and the lives of their ancestors. Everyone has a story, and a unique story, to tell. I hope to do some readings and programs in this area.

Beginning in February, I plan to schedule writing workshop classes again, on Zoom. This year I want to include my writer friends as instructors for Writers Circle Around the Table. For ten years I had a writing studio, with that title, in my house in Hayesville, NC. Almost every week, we held a workshop in poetry or prose. We had outstanding writers come and teach at my studio. I had a guest room in the studio with a private bathroom. There were some kitchen necessities. The visiting men and women said they enjoyed staying overnight and sitting on my deck in the morning listening to the sounds of nature as they wrote down their thoughts.

Joseph Bathanti, NC Poet Laureate from Boone was a favorite. Robert Lee Brewer of Writers' Digest publications was another welcome instructor. Scott Owens, a good friend, came over from Hickory NC to do a reading and teach a class once or twice each year. 

Poet Scott Owens

I feel sure more writers and poets of their caliber will take part in an online class. I will share a portion of the profit of these classes with the NC Writers Network-West.

Remember, with Zoom, it doesn't matter where you live. You can participate from your own home or school or anywhere you have access to a computer and WiFI. 

If you want to be on my mailing list for announcements of classes, please send an email to me using this info: gcbmountaingirl(AT)gmail.com. Write Classes in the subject line.

Wishing all of you a healthy and happy New Year. Be grateful you have another year in which you can reach out to others, share your time and talents, and maybe change a life for the better.

Busy but Better than I Was

From Left: Joan Howard, Janice Moore, Carroll Taylor, Glenda Beall, Marcia Barnes

I am behind in my goal to post each week and especially on the weekends. The past few weeks have been very busy, for me personally and for NCWN-West.

Last week we held the first Coffee with the Poets and Writers since everything closed two years ago. We met at the Moss Library in Hayesville, NC. We all tried to get the word out and we were happy to see about twenty people show up. Many of them were new. But many of our steadfast writers came and were happy to be together again.

Marcia Barnes and Joan Howard, facilitators of CWPW, honored me with a large vase filled with roses and an inscription on the vase, Glenda Council Beall, founder and keeper of Coffee with the Poets and Writers, 2007 - 2022. I was surprised and touched.

In 2007 I became the Program Coordinator for NCWN-West with about 50 members in nine counties of NC and bordering counties of South Carolina and Tennessee. Today we have over 100 members in our mountains. The pandemic shut down most of our meetings, but we continued with some on Zoom. Now we are trying to open up again, but we were sorry to hear that someone who was at the CWPW meeting came down with COVID  a few days after. We plan to continue to meet once a month at the library as we did before COVID hit our area.

Thursday evening, Mary Ricketson and Janice Moore held the Netwest Critique group meeting at an outdoor facility in Hayesville. It went well and that will be continued as long as poets want to participate. 

Marcia Barnes, Janice Moore, and I were published in a beautiful literary journal Mise en Place from Negative Capability this past year. The theme is food.

Marcia read my poem that was in the publication and I will share it with you.

Two Buttermilks for Pamela

I knock but know she can’t hear me.
The TV blasts through the door. I turn the knob,
walk into the kitchen calling Meals on Wheels.

I set her institutional lunch on the counter.
In the other room, like a gray mourning dove,
she’s perched before the screen.

I approach gingerly, afraid I’ll startle her.
She looks up with a wide smile. Don’t get up,
I say. I brought your lunch.

Ninety-four years old she lives alone,
in a mobile home on a twisting mountain trail,
her son a stone’s throw down the road.

Struggling to her feet, she pushes her walker toward me.
Oh, thank you. A hundred times thank you. I enjoy it
so much, especially the buttermilk. I get two, you know.

It keeps me going. We inch our way to the back door.
Hope you enjoy it, Mrs. Livingston. She takes my hand,
speaks to me as if I’m an old friend, Call me Pamela.


If you like poetry and if you write poetry, you might like to visit Mountain Wordsmiths on Zoom when Joseph Bathanti, poet and author, will be the featured guest.  Contact Carroll Taylor at vibiaperpetua@gmail.com for the link to the program.

Dr. Newton Smith memorialized

I  attended the memorial service of Dr. Newton Smith, the last person who looked like he would have Ph.D. behind his name, the man who was once a professor at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC. The service was at St. David's Episcopal Church, and although we were not late after driving nearly two hours, the church was completely filled. We were told we could sit in the Parish Hall and watch on a TV screen. A fellow writer and member of NCWN-West, Carroll Taylor, author,  accompanied me. The hall was filled and we had some difficulty finding two seats together. Although I knew Newt and had met June, his wife of over fifty years, I did not know his children and grandchildren who took part in the service.

Dr. Newton Smith 1939 - 2018

Newt had a son, Zack,  and Courtney, a daughter, who gave the perfect eulogy for her father. She helped me see the older man I knew as a young father, playing with his baby girl, kissing her toes and smiling down at her. She told us that she knew she was the most special to him, but later she admitted he made everyone feel that way. His grandchildren read poems and Newt's own poems graced the front and back of the bulletin for the service. Newt was a person who had many talents and many interests. It seems to me that he lived life according to his own wishes and needs. He had beside him a lovely and talented helpmate in his wife, June.

Among the many people attending were faculty and students from Western who had their memories of the smiling man I saw on the screen. One young man, an engineer, said Newt was a mentor for him when he was a freshman in college.

Newt's  family was grieving, shedding tears as they heard the words said about this man who was so dear to them. As Newt would have wanted there was also plenty of laughter in the stories of life shared with him by his sister and his daughter.

He became treasurer for NCWN-West in 2009 when he was asked by Kathryn Stripling Byer, who was then program coordinator. Although we had several program coordinators over the past decade, Newt continued to take care of our money, pay our bills and report to NC Writers' Network each month. When he became ill from cancer a few years ago, I asked if he would like me to find someone to take over as treasurer, but he said no. "I like having something to do," he told me.

We held a one day writing conference in 2016 in Sylva, NC. Newt handled all the registrations and  fees paid. I was deeply appreciative of this because I had all I could handle already.

When, a few months later, Kathryn Byer passed away, Newt volunteered to help me again by emceeing the tribute program NCWN-West gave for her. It seemed he could handle whatever was on his plate and he did it with panache.

I am grateful that I knew Dr. Newton Smith and that he was a member of NCWN-West. We all will miss him and never forget him.