I was already excited about attending the 2010 South Coast Writers Conference.
John Daniel, author of Rogue River Journal: a Winter Alone (which won a 2006 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award), Looking After: a Son’s Memoir (winner of the 1997 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction), and the new and highly-praised The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature, is going to be the keynote speaker at Friday night's Author's Night readings. In addition, I will be taking a workshop from him on Saturday.
Another Oregon writer (Daniel lives in Oregon's Coast Range), Dennis Powers, a resident of Ashland, who wrote the suspenseful, but factual account of the 1964 Crescent City tsunami The Raging Sea: The Powerful Account of the Worst Tsunami in U.S. History, and has written a number of nautically-themed books including Sentinel of the Seas: Life and Death at the Most Dangerous Lighthouse Ever Built, about the building of St. George's Reef Lighthouse off the northern California Coast, is also going to be a presenter. I am signed up for his Saturday workshop as well. Being able to meet and take workshops from not one, but two authors whose work I already know and enjoy was exciting enough, or so I thought.
But things started getting even more exciting on Friday, when I received an e-mail that I was the winner of the 2010 Bob Simon Scholarship Award for my submission "Paper Ephemera," a poem I wrote in early January. Winning the scholarship pays for my Saturday workshops and a ticket to the Saturday fish fry. It's worth about $71, but what's really exciting is how validated I feel as a writer that my poem was chosen as the best of the submissions, particularly because I have not really looked at myself as a poet.
The poem was actually a quick write, but required a number of revisions until I was truly happy with it. The prompt given was “quiet victories, silent joys,” which I incorporated into the poem itself. The inspiration came from the fact that lately I have been working on two projects - my postcard collection and re-organizing all my 35 mm negatives from something like the last 30 years. (I've had a digital camera for the last couple of years.) The title was the last thing I chose. (See below to read “Paper Ephemera.”)
I was still excited about the win when I got another e-mail on Saturday from the conference organizers saying that two of the poems I had submitted last summer were going to be published in the 2009 Rogue River Echoes, the conference's journal.
While I had submitted essays to the scholarship award competition in the past – this was only my third try, however - I had never submitted anything for publication in Rogue River Echoes, so I was especially pleased to have two of my poems published on my initial attempt.
Those two poems - "Longing" and "Cliff" - were written after the conference and during the Writer's Digest's "Poetic Asides" website during their 2009 April Poem-a-Day Challenge in celebration of National Poetry Month. And the only reason I was participating in that was because of having met and taken workshops from poet (also memoirist and novelist) Floyd Skloot at the 2009 South Coast Writers Workshop. (See my posting on the 2009 SCWW and Floyd Skloot. See below to read “Longing” and “Cliff.”)
Skloot, whose poetry is very accessible, and who describes himself as a lyric poet, made me feel that there was a place for the kind of poetry I wanted to write and that perhaps I should attempt the Poem-a-Day Challenge. I certainly can see the improvement I’ve made as a result of the practice of writing from prompts for 30 days straight.
This is the first validation I’ve received that my poetry has merit, and I am gratified, encouraged, and, yes – excited!
Paper Ephemera
It is all there in the photo albums
and the postcard books:
the people, places, and things
that have made up my life.
If they could, each picture,
each card, would tell
its story in more depth,
but they cannot speak,
cannot reveal what lies behind
the surface of their silence.
No one but I
can tell those stories.
They will die with me,
taking with them the love,
the laughter, the beauty,
the excitement, discovery, and hope,
along with the all challenges,
changes, and choices of
one woman’s lifetime -
the quiet victories, the silent joys,
and moments of peace
that only I could recount.
Gone, too, will be the fears,
the failures, the heartbreaks,
the confusions, betrayals, and
disappointments – the quiet losses,
the silent sorrows of a life
that was not always so well-lived
as those photos and postcards
would suggest.
Though the artifacts remain,
the memories will be gone,
and these painstakingly
preserved records of my life
will become nothing more
than meaningless scraps
of glossy paper.
by Carol Berger
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