Writer Carla Damron is More Than a Writer and a Social Worker - She Uses Her Art to Shine a Light on Some of Our Greatest Social Woes Including Homelessness and Human Trafficking

“I didn’t realize” were words I often heard in my work. They applied to me, too, back when everything I knew about human trafficking came from episodes of Law and Order. My first awakening occurred when asked to be a guest lecturer at a local college. I mentioned the beginnings of our anti-human trafficking advocacy when a student raised her hand and said, “You mean, like that girl they found in the trailer a few miles from here?”

Carla Damron, author of The Stone Necklace and the upcoming The Orchid Tattoo

I first met Carla Damron when I was working with the Richland Library and One Columbia to grow the One Book/One Community program in Columbia, SC. My personal goal for that project was to always choose a South Carolina writer for our community to read and I had lots of reasons why.

First, I believe it’s important for communities to recognize and support the truly talented among us in any way we can. But second, it’s incredibly important for us to see our friends and neighbors who accomplish major goals and be encouraged by them. Ride their mojo and use it to your own advantage!

The book we chose for our community to read, in conjunction with The State news which published the manuscript in part, was Carla’s 2016 novel, The Stone Necklace, set in Columbia, SC and published by the University of South Carolina Press’s Story River series, curated by the late Pat Conroy.

(I’m not sure what happened to the One Book/One community project since I’m not involved anymore, and neither is the Jasper Project. But, as an aside, I’d love to see it come back to Columbia and I’d love to see it adhere to the loose protocol developed by the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library when the project was initiated in 1998. Hit me up if you’d like to work on getting this beautiful community project back up and running and are willing to work on it yourself. It’s a relatively easy project if you have a few volunteer hours in your pocket that you are willing to share.)

I’ve written about Carla Damron a number of times since we first met, and we’ve worked on projects together. She is quite a specimen of humanity in her goals and priorities, and I’m fortunate to call her my friend, writing sister, and fellow Columbian.

Today I want to direct you to two (more) outstanding contributions to our culture that Carla has so generously shared with us.

The first example is a recent essay Carla wrote on the issue of human trafficking and posted on her website. The title is “I Didn’t Realize — The Story Behind the Orchid Tattoo.” You should know that the Orchid Tattoo is the title of Carla’s upcoming novel, releasing on September 6th, 2022 from Koehler Books. This essay is linked above.

But secondly, Carla shared a piece of prose writing that I was delighted to share in the most recent issue of Fall Lines - a literary convergence. For your reading pleasure we present, “Breaking the Surface.”

Breaking the Surface

by Carla Damron

The olive green 1967 Mercury Marquis station wagon bulged with suitcases, bedding, groceries, floats, and our family. My father drove, my mother beside him, a Virginia Slim squeezed between two pink-nailed fingers. Crammed in the back seat: my teenage sister Susan, engrossed in a Nancy Drew novel, me, age nine, in the middle, and my eight-year-old satanic younger brother Freddy to my right. It felt like the drive to Surfside Beach took centuries, though really it took less than three hours. I smiled as we passed the bright blue billboard with the cartoon dolphins leaping into the air. It advertised the best store on earth, known for its pet fiddler crabs and mammoth shark’s teeth that could be purchased for less than my allowance. Every vacation to Surfside included a day at the Myrtle Beach pavilion and a visit to the beloved “Gay Dolphin.”  

            Freddy squirmed like the worm that he was, a bony elbow catching me in the ribs. “Quit elbowing me. Mom, Freddy’s elbowing me again,” I complained, for all the good it did me. I had a permanent concave space under the right side of my ribs.

            “She’s hogging up too much space with her fat butt,” Satan said.

            “Y’all behave. We’re almost there.” Mom let out a loud sigh as she flicked on the radio.

            “You said that a half hour ago.” Susan peeked up from her book, eyebrows arched in criticism.

            Mom tipped the ashes of her cigarette out the partly opened window. Smoke circled the inside of the car and found its way into my nose. I coughed.  

            “Here comes a VW,” Dad said.

I struck first, a quick-knuckled punch on my brother’s arm. “Punch buggy! No take-backs!”

“MOM!” he bellowed, as if I’d hacked him with a machete.  

“Arnold, seriously?” Mom tsked Dad. “Why do you encourage them?”

I spotted Dad’s sly smile in the rearview mirror.

“I’m going swimming as soon as we get there,” I said.

“Not until we get everything unloaded. And that means all of you helping.” Mom flicked the cigarette out the car, a pale torpedo barely missing the back window.

            I settled back in my seat, gaze fixed out the window, and counted speed limit signs. How many until Surfside? Twenty? A hundred?  I had reached number seventeen when another smell filtered through the windows: the unmistakable odor that meant Georgetown.  

            “I smell an egg fart! It’s probably her!” Freddy elbowed me again.

            “I wish they’d do something about the paper mills,” Mom said, like she did every time we came.  I didn’t care about the stink. Because if I closed my eyes, the Sulphur odor faded, and the distinct fragrance of salt, tanning lotion, and sea air filled my mind. I almost tasted my ocean.

***

            Finally, blessedly, we pulled up to the yellow wooden beach house perched on stilts. The checkerboard linoleum-floored kitchen had the basics: single sink, stove, refrigerator, and oven. Susan helped Mom unload the groceries, while Dad did the heavy lifting and Freddy and I fought over bedrooms—simple rooms, with no air conditioning, and generic paintings of seashells over white-washed dressers. 

            Mom tasked me with putting linens on the beds while my brother stocked the bathroom with soap, toilet paper, and towels. We both moved with lightning speed so we could scurry into our swimsuits and flip-flops and head down to the beach. Dad halted us at the screened porch.

            “Nobody swims until your mom or I are ready. So plant your fannies in those chairs and wait.”

            Wait. The hardest word for a kid, and one we heard many times a day. I pushed back and forth in the squeaky rocker as I stared out at sea-oats rippling above sand dunes. The quiet pounding of waves and squawk of seagulls called to me, but I had to WAIT.

            Inside, voices swelled in an argument about missing extra towels. “Really, Arnold. I ask you do to ONE thing,” Mom said.

            “One thing? Who loaded the wagon? Who gassed it up? Who DROVE us here?” Dad didn’t yell, but sort of laughed it out, like Mom was being ridiculous, a tone that might infuriate her and further delay hitting the beach.

            Freddy and I both stopped rocking. No response from her. Good.

Finally, the rest of my family emerged, Susan in her new bikini, Mom in a black one-piece and floppy hat, and Dad in trunks and an unbuttoned shirt, with an embarrassing stripe of white stuff over his nose which was prone to sunburn.  We jumped from our chairs and banged through the screen door, all a-bundle with towels, chairs, rafts, suntan lotion, playing cards, plastic buckets, and a thermos of Kool-Aid. Another container peeked out of Dad’s pocket: silver, small, and shiny, something he rarely went without.

The narrow board walk carried us over the last sand dune and I saw it: a blue-green expanse, white froth in stuttered lines across it. The sky a bold blue that stretched forever. Freddy and I dumped our belongings, kicked off our flip-flops, and dashed to the water. Susan remained with our parents, stretching herself on the blanket and slicking on suntan oil.

Waves crashed over me, surprisingly cold. At our salty feet, the undertow signaled a waning tide. It didn’t matter. Satan splashed me, and I splashed back, and we laughed and dove into a cresting wave. 

When we emerged, sputtering, soaked, and sandy, Dad met us ankle-deep in water. He handed us an inflated raft. “Take turns with this one until the other one’s ready,” he said.

Take turns, he said, like sharing was remotely possible. Freddy grabbed the raft, held it over his head, and trudged out to where the waves were breaking. When a big one surged, he hurled himself on top of the canvas float and rode it to shore like a cowboy on a bucking stallion. “YEEESSSS!” he yelled, as he climbed off.

“My turn,” I said.

“In a minute!” He sneered at me and hurried back to where the waves were cresting, no easy feat with the smaller waves slapping against him.

Another spectacular ride, and my jealousy erupted. When would I get a turn? When Dad finished blowing up the other raft? I glanced at the beach to find him engrossed in a card game with Susan, as though my uninflated float had no importance AT ALL.

“MY TURN!” I bellowed.

Freddy wagged the float at me, and I would have jumped on his head and dunked him if he’d been close enough.

            His third ride was a letdown, a smallish wave that fizzled a few feet from where he started. He stood up and shook sand from his swim trunks.
            “Ha!” I laughed at him.

He tossed the raft at me. “See if you can do better.”

I would do better. I tugged the raft out beyond the foamy sea caps, determined to find the biggest, most powerful wave which I’d ride like a rodeo champion. As the first few rolled under me, I looked further out, and saw it. A giant, magnificent wave rolling in.

I hopped aboard the raft and paddled as hard as I could, hoping to be just ahead of where it broke.  I timed it perfectly. It peaked, white froth exploding against the backs of my legs.

The raft took off like a Thoroughbred. I held on with all my might, holding my breath against the salty water splashing my face. Maybe my family watched this courageous ride, but I all I saw was the roiling foam.

My mount betrayed me. The raft swiveled, the back end pushing forward so that I was lying parallel to the wave. I stroked against the current, desperate to straighten, but it flipped over.

The force of the water pulled me under. I had no air in my lungs. My feet felt for the bottom, but instead felt the unmistakable tug of undertow pulling me out to sea.

I sank as low as I could, touched sand, and pushed, my hands pointed above me. For just a second, my face felt air and I sucked in a deep, frantic breath before another wave pounded me down.

Underwater again, I did my best to swim in what I hoped was the direction of shore. The undertow was a hungry force. My arms and legs ached against its power, but I kept on. When I bobbed up for another gulp of air, another wave knocked me under. And once again, I swam.

When I surfaced again, I saw the shore. Almost there, but not quite, and I felt so tired. A hand gripped my arm. I almost fought it, but I had no fight left in me, and the hand pulled and guided me until I stood on sand, safe, chest-deep in water.

“The float came in without you,” Freddy said, releasing my arm.

I nodded, unable to speak, as my air-deprived lungs sucked in breath.  

On the blanket on the beach, my mom thumbed through a magazine. My sister dealt cards to Dad, who sipped from his little container. 

“Maybe we should go up?” Freddy asked.

I shook my head. I trudged through the water to the shallowest part and dropped, my heels sinking into the wet sand. My brother sat beside me. The abandoned raft rested on the beach behind us. Three pelicans flew by, skimming the surface of the water.

“Hey, look!” Freddy said.

I tried to see what he was pointing to in the endless green water. It was less friendly than before. “What?”
            “Wait just a second. There!” He grabbed my hand and aimed it towards the descending sun. 

            Two gray lumps emerged, breaching the surface and arcing high above the water before submerging again. Two dolphin.

            “Whoa,” I whispered, not wanting to my voice to scare them away.  They erupted twice more, magic silver beings in a synchronized water ballet, before vanishing into the horizon.

            “Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?” I asked.

            Freddy didn’t answer.

Voices cut through the sea air from behind us: an argument between Mom and Dad about dinner arrangements. I let the pounding of the waves drown them out. For the next six days, I had the sand, my ocean, and one of two inflated rafts.

I would keep steady vigil, in case the dolphins came back.   

~~~~~

 Carla Damron is a social worker, advocate, and author of the novel The Stone Necklace, the recipient of the 2017 WFWA Star Award for Best Novel. Damron also authored the Caleb Knowles mysteries as well as numerous essays, and short stories. Damron’s careers of social worker and writer are hopelessly intertwined; all of her novels explore social justice. Currently Damron volunteers with Mutual Aid Midlands, League of Women Voters, and is the president of a local Sisters-in-Crime chapter. She works for Communities in Schools and Rutgers University. 

http://carladamron.com/

Featured Fall Lines Contributor: ERIC MORRIS and his Short Fiction, THE GIFT BEFORE

Eric Morris - photo credit Susan DeLoach

Throughout the year we like to feature some of our literary artists whose work appears in the Jasper Project literary journal, Fall Lines - a literary convergence.. Today, we’re featuring a piece of short fiction from Eric Morris, author of Jacob Jump, USC Press, 2015.

A native of Augusta, Georgia, Eric Morris is a production designer for the stage and teaches at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Jacob Jump, a Story River Book selected for publication by USC Press editor-at-large, the late Pat Conroy. Morris holds an M.F.A. from Western Illinois University and a B.A from Augusta College. His professional work includes productions for dance, theatre, opera, live music stages, and trade shows. Morris writes and records as one half of the musical duo Classes of Dynamo. He lives with his wife and son in Columbia, South Carolina.

The Gift Before

By Eric Morris

 

            This child dances as she learns to walk, because dancing is the first thing. It is the first thing and it will be the last. This child taught no light of fire is needed to dance and neither speech.

            Her grandmother lay in bed silent and not opening her eyes. Her hair now loosed from her bun in tributary about her head as white as the heart of fire. She did not open her eyes or speak for two days, as if to tell, I am tired and it is time to rest now, and all of you can do this without me. The child stood alone in the room at her grandmother’s bedside, almost a teenager, becoming stronger every hour, tall and learning by legacy, fast within her growing body the unspeakable language of art. The third day when her grandmother wakened they looked upon each other viewing in brimming pools the same clear gray eyes they had been born into.

            “Take my hand, baby.”

            Their hands thin and elegant and of the same nature and intelligence, though two generations apart. Hands of a selfsame history and destiny, reaching one for the other, layered in embrace a last time.

            “Yes, Gran.”

            “You know y’all are going on without me.”

            “Yes, Gran.”

            “Baby, you know what to do, now. You know the gift, don’t you?”

            “Yes, Gran.”

            “I know you do. And you will always respect it, won’t you.”

            “Yes, Ma’am.”

            “I know you will. Because you know why.”

            “Cause--”

            “Ah.”

            “Because. You said it is what I have, and I will always give it, and it is my way of helping.”

            “That’s right baby. When they see the truth of it in you, they see something about themselves. And that is how we help one another along. I have seen you and I have watched you, and you are the one. It was taught to me and I taught it to your mother, and when she teaches it to you I can see you are the one. And that is a precious thing. And why.”

            “For within our gift resides all there ever was or will be.”

            “That’s right, baby. That’s right. Now, you can remember this, yes?”

            “Yes. I will remember this.”

            “I know you will. Alright, baby, you go get them now.

            “Ok, Gran.”

            This blooming child goes to her Grandmother’s walnut chest and kneels to open the third drawer. She knows these shoes and has held them many times. The rosin taken from a lightning struck yellow pine still staining the platforms, pleats and soles, the ribbons yet stitched to the bindings, sewn the morning of Mary’s final performance.

            “These are yours now. To keep right along.”

            “I love them.”

            “Yes, baby.”

            “Thank you, Gran.”

            “You knew they were already.”

            “I know.”

            “Alright, baby. Now I want you to go and get your mother and your father and any who want to come. This will be the end of it.”

            “Oh, Gran.”

            “Now, no. Don’t, baby. You know better than this, we talked about this.”

            “But can’t I cry.”

            “Yes, you can. But after, then you can cry, after. Like we said. Like we agreed. You cry then you stop crying. I don’t want to see that pretty face sad. I want to see your light. You do that for me. Now call them in.”

            When they returned to her grandmother’s room, the body of her family stopped and attended. Mary had risen from the bed and she was away from it in the center at the footboard. She stood without aid from human or device and she made a slow dance at the cheval mirror in her bedclothes and bare long feet with her hair spilling loose, white as the heart of tumbling fire. This elegant woman speaking a last time the unutterable language of truest art in the moment of its creation. She danced slowly turning with her arms aloft, and her aged body making a final figure, the same posture as statues and paintings from the ancient world cast in unknowable times, the form that is telling of things to come because a woman’s arc is the most beautiful thing made, then and now, and too is the most enduring, the truest, the most heartbreaking. The most unreachable.

            Her grandmother danced slowing, a final turn with her twin mirrored, her arms assuming en bas down by her side, the line of her core easing, giving to the end of her days.

            Alright,” she said softly. “You all can help me now.”

            And they took her and returned her to bed.

            “I’m closing my eyes now,” she said to all of them, taking each of them in, and finishing at her granddaughter. “I’m closing my eyes now, Maryanne baby, but I will see you. I will see you.”

Jasper Poetry Editor ED MADDEN Wins SC GOVERNORS AWARD FOR THE ARTS!

Congratulations Ed!

We’re delighted to report that Jasper Magazine’s own ED MADDEN is one of the recipients of the 2022 SC Governor’s Award for the Arts!

Ed has been Jasper Magazine’s POETRY EDITOR since the founding of the magazine in 2011. He has served as a major advisor to the Jasper Project as well as co-editor of Fall Lines - a literary convergence since its inception. Ed also serves as the poetry editor for our JASPER WRITES column in ONLINE JASPER.

Ed, who won in the Individual category, shares the spotlight with Darion McCloud, winner of the 2019 Jasper Project Theatre Artist of the Year, who won in the Artist category, and Carrie Ann Power who won in the Arts in Education category. One Columbia for Arts and Culture, the organization that grabbed and ran with the proposal that a City Poet Laureate position be created and that Ed Madden be seriously considered for the post, also won in the organization category.

Ed’s bio reads, “ED MADDEN (Individual Category) is a poet, activist, and a professor of English, with a focus on Irish literature, at the University of South Carolina. There, he is also director of the women’s and gender studies program. His academic areas of specialization include Irish culture; British and Irish poetry; LGBTQ literature, sexuality studies, and history of sexuality; and creative writing and poetry. In 2015, Madden was named Columbia’s first poet laureate, a post he maintains today. Madden has been a South Carolina Academy of Authors Fellow in poetry twice and was South Carolina Arts Commission Prose Fellow in 2011. He has been writer-in-residence at the Riverbanks Botanical Garden and at Fort Moultrie in Charleston as part of the state’s African American Heritage Corridor project. He also works with the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and was 2006 artist-in-residence for South Carolina State Parks. His numerous publishing and editing credits include four of his own: NestArk, and Signals and the chapbook My Father’s House, runner-up for the 2011 Robin Becker Chapbook Prize.”

While we are super proud of the accomplishments listed above we’re most proud of the talents and energy that Ed shares with the community on a voluntary basis, such as the work he contributes to the Jasper Project and as the Poet Laureate of of Columbia. It’s a lovely thing to honor a person or organization for doing well the work they are commissioned to do, and it is encouraging to those individuals and organizations to continue to do well the job they are paid to do. But when someone like Ed, who is already inordinately busy directing a university academic program, maintaining and growing his art, maintaining and growing his homelife, and more, chooses to take on more responsibilities because he believes his gifts should be shared FREELY with his community — then THAT is something to celebrate.

Cheers to our friend and colleague Ed Madden, as well as to the other honorees of this year’s SC Governor’s Awards for the Arts. And thank you for making our home a better place!

SC Philharmonic Celebrates American Composers and SC Poet Dr. Frank Clark in “American Memories”

South Carolina native, accomplished psychiatrist, and poet Dr. Frank Clark has the prestigious honor of having his poetry featured alongside the SC Philharmonic’s upcoming performance “American Memories.” While featuring familiar works by composers like Gershwin and Still, the ensemble will be performing the world premiere of pieces by Dick Goodwin, inspired by Clark’s poems “Partial Absence-Full Forgiveness” and “Foggy Brown Sugar.” We interviewed Dr. Clark in order to gain some insight on the creative processes behind his poetry, what inspires him, and the existing relationship he has with music.

JASPER: Have you always held a fondness for music? When did your interest first start?

CLARK: My relationship with music stems back to my childhood. My mother, a retired Chicago public school teacher and advocate for the arts provided an early exposure to music. I grew playing several instruments including the piano and flute. I have fond memories of attending various symphonies and performing in recital as child. These experiences allowed me to develop an appreciation for music.

JASPER: Did your love of music create an interest in poetry, or did that come up on its own?

CLARK: My love of poetry came later during a pivotal point in my life. I was diagnosed with clinical depression in medical school and experienced seasons of unrelenting despair.  One day I decided to start exploring more of me while sitting at my favorite tea shop. I needed to find another way of coping with the array of thoughts that had percolated through my mind. These were thoughts of feeling like a failure and questioning if I would ever succeed in medical school after experiencing multiple academic hurdles. In retrospect my academic struggles in medical school were a blessing in disguise. I don’t know if I would have taken the step of putting the pen to paper to explore humanity in all its glory and imperfections. Writing poetry along with Lexapro at that time were my antidepressant that had synergist effects for my mind, body, and soul. 

JASPER: With your poems being a key component in the upcoming SC Philharmonic performance, we were wondering if this is the first time your poetry has been featured in direct conversation with music, or do you consider this type of conversation whenever you write new poetry?

CLARK: I had never considered having my poems set to music until last year when I was blessed to meet University of South Carolina School of Music Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Dr. Gordon (Dick) Goodwin and his wife Winifred Goodwin. Dr. Goodwin and Winifred performed a virtual concert as part of the South Carolina Philharmonic Healing Harmonies program for the patients at Marshall Pickens Hospital and for our faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Prisma Health Upstate. I became aware of Dr. Goodwin’s composition skills and decided to take a leap of faith by asking him to consider setting several of my poems to music. He graciously accepted this offer. My providential encounter with Dr. Goodwin and Winifred Goodwin has created a snowball effect. Currently, I am working on several collaborations with composers nationally and internationally. These collaborations remind me of one of my favorite scriptures: Commit to the Lord whatever you do and your plans will succeed (Proverbs 16:3).

JASPER: The subject matter of the featured poems “Partial Absence” and “Foggy Brown Sugar” are quite personal; do you find that writing about your family comes the easiest to you?

CLARK: Poems such as “Foggy Brown Sugar” and “Partial Absence-Full Forgiveness” were not easy but necessary for me to write in order heal during the grieving process. The former is about my mother who was diagnosed with a neurocognitive disorder (dementia) several years ago. I wanted to find a way to capture the emotions that were evoked for me. As I psychiatrist I have provided care for individuals with neurocognitive disorders. The impact is different when it hits close to home. I still have days where I vacillate between acceptance, anger, bargaining. I am mindful of these feelings and am comforted by the fact that she is an environment where she is well cared for. I’m thankful that she is still able to recognize me, her daughter-in-law, and her granddaughter. We share the joy and love of music. These are all silver linings for me.

“Partial Absence-Full Forgiveness” is about my father, who was partially absent throughout my life. He passed away when I was in my early 20s. I wanted to find a way to express forgiveness given that for many years my heart was full of anger due to some of his decisions that impacted our family unit. I was able to process my feelings in therapy, which led to a sense of relief and peace. Writing this poem was difficult as it conveys my raw feelings, but it also allowed me to remember the important of grace, love, and mercy. 

JASPER: Are there any other major ideas or concepts you tend to explore through your poems?

CLARK: Other concepts and ideas I have explored through my poems revolve around diversity, equity, and inclusion; the importance of exploring humanity; world events; and my Christian faith.

The SC Philharmonic’s performance of “American Memories,” which additionally features guest tenor Johnnie Felder, is on February 5 at 7:30 PM. Tickets are available to purchase on their website.  

Read the poems that inspired the performance:

“Foggy Brown Sugar”

Foggy brown sugar reclines in her regal chair.
I wonder if she remembers the days we viewed movies starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.

Foggy brown sugar mourns the loss of her previous independent dwelling.
Confabulation is her new peer that welcomes whimsical story telling.

Foggy brown sugar crumbles at the site of multiple short acting injections.
The mirror reveals a storage shelf filled with a variety of sweet reflections.

Foggy brown sugar searches for the proverbial spice of life.
Heavenly angels recite familiar psalms to provide protection from any strife.

Foggy brown sugar gazes at the spirited hawk.
She relishes the sight of princess feet frolicking on the sidewalk.

Foggy brown sugar ingest acetylcholine to sweeten a cognitive taste bud. 
Her puzzled progeny still grieving the colorful substance that was once clear as mud.

“Partial Absence-Full Forgiveness”

I remember a childhood that left me partially love parched.
His routine became predictable and at times left my heart charred.
His mouth spewed messages that were entangled in my disorganized web, filled with mixed emotions.
His act sustained itself during the formative years of my life and left me in a state of delirium.

I remember a childhood that left me partially puzzled.
His adoration for Our Father was transparent like a glass ceiling.
His love for my faithful fan left my airway obstructed with questions that went unanswered.
His deceitful nature left my receptors feeling that his presence was indeed a placebo.

I remember a young adulthood that left me wandering into a bewildered wilderness.
Hatred, ambivalence, and regret disturbed my digestive system.
Love and father did not coexist in my world for many years.
Sanctuary became polluted with earthly pleasures.

I remember the moment in my life that left me fully transformed.
Molecules of love, peace, and forgiveness easily penetrated my once stubborn blood brain barrier.
My countenance lifted, thermostat reset, arms outstretched.
He offered prayers from heaven and his presence is more palpable than ever before.

Until we meet again.

Fall Lines - a literary convergence vols. VII & VIII Releases Sunday Jan. 23 with a 2 pm Reading at Drayton Hall

Attention Fall Lines Contributors and Readers: If you are unable to attend the reading and release of Fall Lines on Sunday, please visit the Jasper Project Facebook Page where the event will be live streamed.

After too many Covid-related postponements, the Jasper Project is delighted to release the combined Volume VII and VIII issues of Fall Lines- a literary convergence on Sunday, January 23rd at Drayton Hall on the campus of the University of South Carolina. The event will begin at 2 pm.

Strict Covid protocols will be in place. Masks are mandatory except when reading. Only vaccinated contributors and guests are invited to attend.

Contributors to the 2020 and 2021 issues of Fall Lines are invited to choose one piece of their own poetry or prose from the dual-volume journal to read to the public.

Drayton Hall is located at 1214 College Street. Street parking is available. The public is invited to attend.

~~~

The Jasper Project shines a light of appreciation Columbia-based photographer Crush Rush, whose powerful portrait of a Black Lives Matter demonstration graces our cover.

from the One Columbia site above …

Crush Rush is a photographer/photojournalist living and working in Columbia, South Carolina. His photographic eye is keen on identifying and capturing the critical finite moments of ever moving human emotion and the natural world. Rush is self taught but was extremely lucky in his opportunity to work and play along with some of Columbia’s greatest photo makers which helped him hone his skills and gain a deeper appreciation for the craft.

 Known as a social chameleon, Rush constantly engages different types of people from different walks of life to find a common denominator in the grand scheme of things, which he feels allows for him to draw inspiration from very non traditional sources.

Artist Statement:

I feel like the best display of emotion is one that can be felt or portrayed with no words involved. My camera grants me the ability to take a person back to a moment in time by simply showing them a picture. I almost feel as if I have the power to steal grains from the sands of time. For me the love of editing is just as exciting as making the photo and I strive everyday to be a better storyteller.

Crush Rush - artist Easel Cathedral

Fall Lines Volumes VII and VIII FINALLY Releasing on Sunday January 23rd, at 2 pm at Drayton Hall

After too many Covid-related postponements, the Jasper Project is delighted to release the combined Volume VII and VIII issues of Fall Lines- a literary convergence on Sunday, January 23rd at Drayton Hall on the campus of the University of South Carolina. The event will begin at 2 pm.

Strict Covid protocols will be in place. Masks are mandatory except when reading. Only vaccinated contributors and guests are invited to attend.

Contributors to the 2020 and 2021 issues of Fall Lines are invited to choose one piece of their own poetry or prose from the dual-volume journal to read to the public.

Drayton Hall is located at 1214 College Street. Street parking is available. The public is invited to attend.

~~~

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Tune in and Turn on to the Poetry Society of South Carolina on Walter Edgar's Journal

Jim Lundy, outgoing president of the Poetry Society of South Carolina, sat down for an interview with Walter Edgar for his popular, long-running public radio show, Walter Edgar’s Journal to talk about his new book, The History of the Poetry Society of South Carolina, 1920-2021. The show was broadcast today (Friday, 1/7/22) at noon but you can listen online at anytime.

According to Edgar’s notes,

James Lundy's book, The History of the Poetry Society of South Carolina: 1920 to 2021, is a chronicle of the first 100 years of the oldest state poetry society in America, the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Founded in Charleston in 1920 by DuBose Heyward, John Bennett, Josephine Pinckney, Hervey Allen, and Laura Bragg, the Society's first 101 seasons run from the Jazz Age to the COVID era, where everyone from Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Ogden Nash, Billy Collins, Sherwood Anderson, Jericho Brown, Thornton Wilder, Robert Pinsky, and hundreds of others appeared before the membership. Talking with Walter Edgar, Lundy, also currently the Society's president, gives us an insider's view, with insights into the inner workings and disfunctions of the organization and its slow progress from a Whites-only organization of the segregated South founded in the aftermath of World War I and the Spanish Flu Pandemic, through the Roaring Twenties, into the darkness of the Great Depression, World War II, a resurgence during the Atomic Age, the turbulent Sixties, the decline of Charleston, its rebound into a tourist mecca, and into the present day.

The 378 page book was published in August, 2021 and is available for purchase at Amazon.

Three Ways to Join the Jasper Family

The Lost Wiseman by Ed Madden

Editor’s Note: Every year since I have known him, my friend and Columbia, SC’s first ever city poet aureate, Ed Madden, has written a Christmas letter that, if you’re lucky enough, he shares with his friends. It is always a treat to read about what Ed and his husband Bert Easter, who is an antiques expert and a member of the Jasper Project board of directors, have been up to in the previous year and what Ed’s reaction to those experiences might be. Over the past few years Ed’s annual Christmas letter has taken on more of the qualities of an essay than a Christmas letter, which makes it an even better gift in my opinion. This year, Ed wrote about a lovely little wise man statuette that he found at one of Bert’s auctions. The wise man served as the catalyst for what would become Ed’s 2021 Christmas letter. Jasper appreciates Ed’s willingness to let us share this sweet missive with you, our readers.

The Lost Wiseman

Dec 2021

 

Friends, 

I found him at an estate sale Bert was running, a family so devoted to Christmas that one bedroom had to be set aside just to display the Christmas décor for sale. There were multiple artificial fold-out trees, boxes of ornaments and lights, each box lined with tinsel and glitter and broken glass. There were three nativities, complete, in good condition, and these sold, as did all the little Joseph-Mary-Jesus-in-the-hay trios. But this one was on his own, a wise guy separated from his two amigos. Whatever ensemble he had been part of was either long gone to someone else’s home, or more damaged even than he was and discarded. Chips on his back and arm, the knuckles of his left hand, a broken fold of cloak, all revealed the plaster, only sign of that greater disaster. Of everything in that room—the trees, the bells, figurines, strings of tiny lights—this was my favorite thing, an orphaned wiseman.  

I don’t know how old he is, how far he has come. He has earrings, a thin Van Dyke beard, brown skin. His dark eyes are tired and sad. He wears pointed blue shoes, each with a rough gold embellishment—a buckle, a fat tassel. His purple robe drags in the dirt, over that a knee-length tan tunic trimmed in gold, and over it all he has thrown a sand-brown cloak. The chips in the finish are mostly on the left, as if at some point he had fallen on his side against something hard, tipped over, or was stored unwrapped, banging about in a box as he ascended to the attic to wait in the darkness for another year. A turban is wound tight on his head and draped around his shoulders, topped by a flat gold crown the size of a quarter with ridges rather than points, like a worn-down reamer-juicer, a vintage cocktail muddler—or like a small star pressed onto his head, as if what he sought, what he followed, is who he is. 

To be clear, I’m not talking Artaban, the Other Wiseman, that contrived little Victorian fable about a fourth wiseman who sold all he had for jewels to give the new king, missed the boat (the caravan), got there too late, spent 33 years wandering the Holy Lands, selling off jewels and doing good deeds. When he finally made it back just in time for Golgotha (the symbolism is pretty heavy-handed), he got sidetracked, selling off his last big pearl to save a woman (“a daughter of the true religion”) from being taken into slavery, then got conked on the head by a falling roof tile and died. But not before Henry Van Dyke (a minister who believed slavery brought the Africans to Jesus) tied everything up in a sentimental Christian bow. No. Not that one. This wiseman is orphaned, left behind. He is lost, he is damaged. He has a gift, and wisdom. He has nowhere to go and nowhere he belongs.  

In first grade I was a wiseman in a blue bathrobe, carrying a box of wadded aluminum foil, the gift I would give the child, some classmate’s swaddled doll. I can see it in my head—that weird sense of seeing the past that could be a memory or a dream, or someone’s home movie I have seen. And I wonder now would my parents have allowed it. Growing up fundamentalist, we never had a nativity in our house. Maybe that’s a reason they fascinate me now. Churches in town—those denominations, a word we said with such contempt, since our church was the original, the primitive, the true—they had living nativities like roadside displays, cars driving by in the cold to honk their approval. But no, not us. We speak where the Bible speaks, we are silent where the Bible is silent. The Bible does not say Jesus was born in December. So, belligerent and right, we’d sing “Silent night” some midsummer Sunday just to make the point. Later I’d learn that the date had something to do with Constantine and effacing old faiths and Christianity linking arms with imperialism. That old story. But I knew none of that back then when I stood front of a class in a bath towel turban, holding jewels of crumpled foil. 

Our journeys this year were small. There was that window in the summer when it seemed like everything was going back to normal. People would get vaccinated. Things would turn around. We were, of course, so very wrong, but we were double-vaxxed and excited to see old friends and we drove up to North Carolina for a wedding outdoors, rows of chairs facing into a cathedral of trees. She did and he did and it was lovely and lovelier still to spend time with the parents of the groom—old friends from grad school and family trips to Kiawah Island. On the way back we only ever ate outside, pulled off for a couple of small-town antique shops, where we pulled our masks and caution back on. I taught online all spring. Afternoons we walked the small circuit of the neighborhood we’d rehearsed all year. Evenings we walked out to the new pond, fed the fish, watched the water falling. Then in August, it was with a weird joy I walked across campus into a class of masked students. A few weeks into the fall, we walked out to the main lawn. We pulled off our masks and saw each other’s faces as if for the first time. 

Almost two years ago, just before the pandemic hit, I sat in a hot room in an airless building at the end of dirt road, darkness filling the trees. The room was packed, we were all waiting for something to begin, an Afro-Brazilian religious ceremony. That night, two men were to come back from the dead. Their friends were there to celebrate their return. Macio, from Brasilia, who sat beside me on the men’s side and spoke some English, explained it to me. His friend, an initiate among the eguns, had died a few years before, and that night he would appear again. He explained that it was January 6, Epifania, the Epiphany, when the kings from Africa would come from over the ocean—such a long journey—and the dead would make themselves known. Macio and I were the only white men in the room; they had positioned us beneath the room’s only rattling fan—the guest, the tender visitor. Throughout the overnight ceremony—we were locked in, the heat and drumming intense, hallucinatory—the eguns, spirits of the dead, appeared in their beautiful garments, garments made to hide their human features, head and hands and feet. They were faceless beings, dancing, twirling, stopping only occasionally to address the congregated people in their thin, alien voices. The men in the room were terrified: if one touched you, you were sure to die. The women called to them, held children up for their blessing. The spirits of the recently dead, the aparacás, edged into the room along the back wall as the eguns danced. They looked like flags with men inside, their arms raised to hold up the corners. My friend Taylor compares them to the playing cards from Alice in Wonderland. The two new ones were black with strange faces painted on like masks—one looked like a radioactive Pac-Man, the other like a pirate flag. They moved sideways, always facing forward. Macio leaned over to say: this is my friend

That was my second time among the eguns. At the first, just before Christmas, before the ceremony could begin, my friends from the arts institute and I were summoned to the front of the room. There was a white bowl of water and oil with herbs. Beside it, to the right, there was a plate. Charles told us to take off our shoes. We took off our shoes. The women went first. My friend Laura quietly translated for me. I was far from home, nowhere to go and nowhere I belonged. We were to kneel at the bowl, we were to place our offering in the plate, and we were to wash our eyes three times. Only then, we were told, could we see the dead. I knelt on the floor. I put my donation in the plate. I dipped my fingers in the water and three times I wiped them across my eyelids and brows. I wanted to be able to see. I wanted to be open to what the night might bring. I watched the men around me and learned the ritual gestures. When the eguns fanned the lappets of their elaborate garments in front of you—a blessing, a spirit, the moving air—you were to scoop up the blessing with your cupped hands, pour it over your head. Together the rows of men, scooping, lifting up the blessing, pouring it out over our heads. 

The wiseman on my desk carries what looks like a gold funerary urn, left hand cupping the base, right holding the urn close to his chest, a thumb holding the top closed. What is inside? He leans forward as if tired, as if about to say something, as if leaning in to see. As if about to pour out all that he has carried for so long on the ground at his feet. He has nowhere to go and nowhere he belongs—other than here, on the desk, beside ET with his glow-in-the-dark finger, Saraswati with her swans, a wooden Jesus pointing at his heart. The wiseman is lost, he is damaged. He has a gift, and wisdom, and I start to wonder if these things are connected. The wisdom that comes from being damaged. The gift of being lost. Sometimes we carry things so very far. Sometimes we carry them for so very long. Sometimes we don’t know what it is we carry, ashes or something precious. Sometimes what we seek is who we are. Sometimes we take our masks off. Sometimes we pour ourselves out. Sometimes we lift up the blessings we are given, pour them over our heads.

Announcing a new Jasper Project Endeavor -- the Lizelia August Jenkins Moorer Poetry Chapbook Prize for SC BIPOC Poets

In honor of the 20th century poet, Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer, the Jasper Project is delighted to announce a new project, the Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer Poetry Chapbook Prize for SC BIPOC poets.

Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer (1868-1936) was a teacher and social activist in Orangeburg, SC. Born in Pickens, SC, she taught at the Normal and Grammar Schools at Claflin College for 40 years. Her published anthology of poems Prejudice Unveiled and Other Poems (1907) examined the Jim Crow South’s propensity for lynching, racism, and social injustice. Moorer was also an advocate for women’s suffrage in South Carolina, especially in the Methodist Church. 

The purpose of the Lizelia August Jenkins Moorer Prize, affectionately called the Lizelia Prize, is to offer a first-time BIPOC poet from SC a publishing contract with Muddy Ford Press to publish their debut chapbook under the guidance of an established poet. The vision of Dr. Len Lawson, who is a member of the Jasper Project board of directors and the author, editor, or co-editor of four books of poetry, Lawson will also serve as project manager as well as editor of the winner’s chapbook and will collaborate with the winner on the construction of the book.

SC BIPOC poets who have yet to publish a book of poetry are invited to submit 30-40 single spaced numbered pages in Times New Roman 12pt and include a cover sheet with your name and manuscript title. Your name should not appear on the manuscript. The winning submission will receive publication via Muddy Ford Press, a cash prize of $250, and ten author copies of the book. Submissions should be in the form of a Word doc and should be sent to lizeliapoetry@gmail.com no later than February 28th, 2022.

JIM CROW CARS.

by Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer

If within the cruel Southland you have chanced to take a ride,

You the Jim Crow cars have noticed, how they crush a Negro's pride,

How he pays a first class passage and a second class receives,

Gets the worst accommodations ev'ry friend of truth believes.

'Tis the rule that all conductors, in the service of the train,

Practice gross discriminations on the Negro—such is plain—

If a drunkard is a white man, at his mercy Negroes are,

Legalized humiliation is the Negro Jim Crow car.

'Tis a license given white men, they may go just where they please,

In the white man's car or Negro's will they move with perfect ease,

If complaint is made by Negroes the conductor will go out

Till the whites are through carousing, then he shows himself about.

 

They will often raise a riot, butcher up the Negroes there,

Unmolested will they quarrel, use their pistols,rant and swear,

They will smoke among the ladies though offensive the cigar;

'Tis the place to drink their whiskey, in the Negro Jim Crow car.

If a Negro shows resistance to his treatment by a tough,

At some station he's arrested for the same, though not enough,

He is thrashed or lynched or tortured as will please the demon's rage,

Mobbed, of course, by "unknown parties," thus is closed the darkened page.

If a lunatic is carried, white or black, it is the same,

Or a criminal is taken to the prison-house in shame,

In the Negro car he's ushered with the sheriff at his side,

Out of deference for white men in their car he scorns to ride.

 

We despise a Negro's manhood, says the Southland, and expect,

All supremacy for white men—black men's rights we'll not protect,

This the Negro bears with patience for the nation bows to might,

Wrong has borne aloft its colors disregarding what is right.

This is called a Christian nation, but we fail to understand,

How the teachings of the Bible can with such a system band;

Purest love that knows no evil can alone the story tell,

How to banish such abuses, how to treat a neighbor well.

Raena Shirali will be serving as the adjudicator for the Lizelia Prize.

Raena Shirali is a poet, editor, and educator from Charleston, South Carolina. Her first book, GILT (YesYes Books, 2017), won the 2018 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, and her forthcoming collection, summonings, won the 2021 Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize. Winner of a Pushcart Prize & a former Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University, Shirali is also the recipient of prizes and honors from VIDA, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, & Cosmonauts Avenue. She holds an MFA in Poetry from The Ohio State University Shirali and is an Assistant Professor of English at Holy Family University, where she serves as Faculty Advisor for Folio—a literary magazine dedicated to publishing works by undergraduate students at the national level. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, The Nation, The Rumpus, & elsewhere.

ESSAY: Thinking and Acting Radically About Climate and the Art World by Will South

“This is a real problem, with real consequences. The art world, as it turns out, is far from green.”

2017 Venice Biennale sculpture - SUPPORT - by Lorenzo Quinn reminds participants of rising sea levels that threaten Venice and all coastal cities around the world. The installation, first unveiled by Quinn at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and commissioned by Halcyon Art International, shows two gigantic hands of a child emerging from the Grand Canal in Venice to protect and support the historical building of the Ca’ Sagredo Hotel. "Venice, the floating city of art and culture that has inspired humanity for centuries, is threatened by climate change and time decay and is in need of the support of our generation and future ones”, said Quinn. “Let's join 'hands' and make a lasting change”. (United Nations Climate Change webpage)

Thinking and Acting Radically about Climate Change and the Art World

The positive effects of art on civilization would be difficult to list. Art and civilization are intimately entwined, each giving birth to the other in a continuous spiral of creative regeneration: that is, Leonardo produced the Renaissance at the moment it was producing him.

People all over this planet better understand now how tradition and innovation coexist, that tradition underscores identity and yet artistic innovations allow for inevitable changes. Art identifies what we value, and gives sound, narrative, movement, color, and shape to these values. As both process and product, we cannot remove art from the complexities of the human experience. It is fundamental to how we understand the world: To see a glorious sunset is one experience; to read exactly the right words to relive that experience is a minor miracle.

Readers of the present magazine will find no fault whatsoever with these two introductory paragraphs. This is a journal devoted to the support of art and artists in our community. Which may make the following statement a bit of a shocker:  The art world is a significant and unapologetic contributor to global warming.

No! you say, how can this be? Artists are the sensitive ones, the ones most open to change and action and to spreading the word (through art) that we all must act to create a sustainable, healthful world.

Relax. Of course, you, the artist/collector/reader of this journal are a proponent of mitigating the horrific symptoms of a heating planet—floods, fires, droughts, and virtually every other form of molecular mayhem.

Still, this holds: The art world is a bad actor when it comes to climate change. And here is why:            The art world is comprised of hundreds of thousands of galleries, museums, studios, art fairs, and private art collections worldwide. All of these entities ship art. Art is heavy, often, and needs to crating and boxing before it travels. To ship one two-hundred-pound crate by air from New York to London puts a thousand pounds of carbon into the air.

That is one shipment, one-way, a thousand pounds of carbon emitted.

One hundred such objects would result in fifty tons of carbon released into the air. The typical American car puts out about 4.5 tons of carbon, in a year. If those one hundred crates of art come back to New York (which they will, if they were on loan), then the emissions add up to a whopping one hundred tons of carbon requiring a mere eleven total hours of flight time to be released.

The art world thrives on shipping. Museums crate exhibitions and ship them not just to one venue, but to three or four before those crates return home. Now the math gets fuzzy, because there are so many museums, galleries, collectors, and art fairs shipping stuff and no one keeps track of it all vis-a-vis the climate. Someone should be, or a group of someones, as in a consortium of registrars.

There are 55,000 museums in the world. Not all are shipping monsters, but all of the big ones are—the Louvre, the Met, the Tate, etc. Let’s say, for sake of argument, that a mere .5 percent of all museums are “big.” That would be 225 museums. Further, let’s assume that each of the big museums hosts half a dozen traveling shows per year. That’s 1,350 shows, each with round trip shipping, let’s say, based on the New York to London numbers above—one hundred tons. That adds up to 135,000 tons of carbon in a single year. And let me assure you this: The actual art world number would be much higher—our example doesn’t include galleries, or projects from the other over 50,000 museums that are shipping more than a few things here and there all the time.

This is a real problem, with real consequences. The art world, as it turns out, is far from green. Like every other business, they are interested in green, a bit more it seems than the natural kind. Museums (and galleries, and art fairs) need cold, hard cash (or, warm, either way) to survive. The effects of non-visitation are instant and lethal. In 2020, worldwide museum attendance dropped a breathtaking 77%, from 230 million in 2019 to 54 million in 2020. Museums reduced hours, cancelled traveling shows, and laid off staff. Yes, many museums closed. Not any of our lovely little museums here in Columbia, but the pandemic isn’t over yet.

To get back to the vital, bustling businesses they were two years ago, museums will work to ramp up their schedules. Museums need money. It’s the fuel that drives their engines. But driving is the problem that is making the art world a carbon criminal. Getting all that art, all the time, from one place to another.

Is there a solution?

As with most enormous crises: Maybe.

For starters, museums can organize smaller, more lightweight exhibitions, which consume less energy to ship. Not all exhibitions need to be the theatrical behemoths they have become and to which museumgoers have become habituated. Most museum goers, however well intentioned, suffer fatigue after looking at 60 or 70 works and reading the labels and sharing comments with friends. Trying to experience 150 works of art is a job, not a treat. Museums, in their efforts to out-museum each other, have made shows ever bigger and ever more ponderous and, in many cases, a whole lot less fun. Get smaller. That’s the first and most obvious thing to do.

Build crates out of lighter material. Make use of crush-proof masterpacks when possible, as opposed to wood and steel. If an object requires tons of packaging, how about don’t send it anywhere. A tough choice, sure. But we’re in a crisis, and crises require sacrifices. Serious sacrifices.

Host fewer traveling shows. Yes, that will hurt any museum’s bottom line. On the other hand, it might inspire in-house innovation. What kinds of projects are possible with the permanent collection that are not boring collection surveys?

Some museums sponsor “close looking,” where a painting is set up to be looked at for over half an hour, up to an hour. Imagine what you could see, if you stared at an object that long, looking for every subtlety and nuance you could find. An hour won’t reveal them all. Close looking is just one idea. Be creative—that’s what the art world is good for.

Get people in the community to physically recreate their favorite paintings during a festival dedicated to just that—the tableau vivant, the living painting. Tableau vivants are fun to do, awards may be given out, and of course no art event is complete without booze, and that can be purchased locally.

And now, for the really radical idea: The big museums have way more art than they will ever be able to show. In America, the Met, MoMA the Art Institute of Chicago, all have collections numbering in the hundreds of thousands to the millions. If the largest collections gave away (not loaned, gave) a few thousand pictures each (which they wouldn’t even miss) they could greatly enrich the many small-to-midsized museums in the U.S. Point being, if the museums in South Carolina, Georgia, New Mexico, Utah, North Dakota, etc. etc. all had better art, they might increase visitation while reducing the number of traveling shows they, too, feel compelled to do.

That would be real change. The ridiculously enormous art collections are already teetering on unsustainability and would do themselves a spectacular favor by spreading their riches around.

Wait—what? This sounds like socialism. Well, yes, I suspect this idea does have a whiff of fairness, practicality, and sustainability about it. Mostly, though, it is a radical idea, submitted here in the spirit of let’s all be thinking radically.

Would such a proposal really “work”? Truthfully, I don’t know. But for an idea to be explored, it has to first be on the table. Sure, such an idea would be problematic. But the problems would be nothing compared to the devastating problem we are now facing.

At a distant point, and let’s hope there is one, future art lovers will be able to look back and say that early 21st-century art activists got radical in response to climate change, and the result was not just smart strategies to help cool the planet, but its radicality led to spreading art and its magic more equally throughout the world.

Not a bad legacy, however socialistic.

— Will South

Will South is an independent artist, curator and writer based in Columbia.

PRINT WORTHY! Coming back Around with Kasie Whitener

Kasie Whitener puts an unapologetic spin on nostalgia.

Whitener writes for Gen X, the forgotten generation: a generation of latch key kids who grew up in the ‘90s and now, according to Whitener, find themselves sandwiched and silenced between Millennials and Baby Boomers.

Her latest novel, Before Pittsburgh, was written during quarantine, but climaxes at the crisis of another generation: 9/11. Though Whitener originally tried to build the book around 9/11, “it didn’t work,” Whitener says.

For Gen X, 9/11 came at a pivotal time in their 20s, potentially changing the trajectory of their lives. After one event, their world was suddenly vastly different than the day before. Taking years to just survive after that kind of crisis, Whitener says that looking back today makes Gen X wonder if this is the same future that they had hoped for on September 10. As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 nears, Before Pittsburgh revisits how 9/11 was the turning point for everything for Whitener’s generation.

However, a large part of Whitener’s dedication to writing about Gen X is the recognition that most experiences aren’t unique to her generation. Whitener notes that the pandemic may be having a similar effect on the current generation of 20-year-olds that 9/11 had on hers.

Writing Before Pittsburgh during quarantine combined intentional nostalgia with current emotions of disconnection and uncertainty. “There’s a lot of emotion in there that might not feel like 2000, 2001— it might feel a whole lot like 2020,” Whitener says.

This notion of coming back around, perhaps lived in real time in the creation of Before Pittsburgh, is crucial to Whitener’s work as a writer. Whitener has used memory as a literary device consistently throughout her writing, now using more natural and meandering transitions than the snap flashbacks that her earlier work featured.

Whitener believes that the way the story is told is just as important as important as what is happening in the plot. “Those memories, when they come at you, they come at you for a specific reason …I wanna dive in. I wanna be back in that moment,” Whitener says.

Before Pittsburgh follows Whitener’s debut novel, After December, filling a three-year gap that was skipped over in the first novel. After December was decades in the making, as Whitener had been working with these characters since she was 13 years old. The novel was written, rewritten, put on hold, and edited again. “Those characters have always been there,” Whitener says.

After the time-intensive creation of After December, however, Whitener wrote Before Pittsburgh in just 18 months. Brian, the protagonist of Before Pittsburgh, navigates feelings of alienation from his friends, things that felt very relevant to Whitener’s experiences during quarantine. Using those feelings as guidance, the story came together very quickly for her.

While After December covered a period of just five days, Before Pittsburgh had to explain the years preceding the conclusion of After December. Instead of using chapters as markers, After December was divided by each day. With far more time to cover in Before Pittsburgh, Whitener used locations to section out the novel. This geographically based mode of storytelling allows the reader to see Brian’s compartmentalization of identities and ultimate growth into a more authentic version of himself.

Though Whitener has finally completed her work with the characters she’s been writing about since adolescence, she doesn’t imagine she’ll ever stop writing. After earning both undergraduate and graduate degrees in English, Whitener got her PhD in Organization and Management from Capella University. As her more full-time gig, Whitener teaches at the Darla Moore School of Business.

Whitener holds many different identities: Entrepreneur, educator, author, and radio show host, to name a few. On the side, she even visits book clubs that read her work. To Whitener, they’re all connected. “It all comes out of the writing,” Whitener says. “Everything I do is somehow related to writing. Always has been.”

Her radio show on 100.7 The Point serves as a weekly writing workshop and focuses on promoting South Carolina Writers. Her work as an entrepreneur goes hand in hand with her work as an author. Whitener notes that, while her writing career may look different from others, it’s common for authors to have multiple sources of revenue.

Whitener founded Clemson Road Creative in 2012, a business that functions as a for profit consultancy. Jodie Cain Smith, managing partner, firmly believes in Whitener’s role as an educator and a businessperson in addition to her work as a writer. “So much of being an author is being an entrepreneur,” Smith says.  

Ambition is a key word for Whitener. She wants more— not more money, fame, or, really, anything specific. “24 usable hours in the day, right? I just want all of them to be filled up with something meaningful.” Whitener says.

In addition to working with Whitener at Clemson Road Creative, Smith edited both After December and Before Pittsburgh, though she would never call herself Whitener’s editor. The two have been working together for years now; Whitener edits some of Smith’s work and the two share generational experiences.

“There are these generational truths in her writing that I struggle to find other places, so I really enjoy re-living my youth in her writing,” Smith says. She notes the detail with which Whitener remembers and writes the past, from fashion to music to even the cocktails characters drink. Though Smith was initially apprehensive about Whitener using 9/11 as a plot device in Before Pittsburgh, she changed her mind completely after reading the scene. Smith says Whitener captured the fear and grief of 9/11 and put it in real time. She had to read that section of the book several times, enjoying it as a reader, before she could edit it.

The story made Smith wonder what other stories should be created that address the shared terror of 9/11— something that, to her, Whitener proved could actually be done. Whitener carved out a space for generational representation, weaving in Gen X identity in a way that doesn’t feel exclusive.  “There’s a quality of almost numbness in lot of Gen Xers and we took independence and we stretched it to detachment almost,” Smith says. Before Pittsburg, in Smith’s opinion, explains that phenomena while maintaining a wide appeal.

However, this brand of “Unapologetically X,” as Whitener describes herself, didn’t always come naturally. Whitener noticed other creators from her generation being hesitant to identify as Gen X. Because so much of her work revolved around writing, even before the publication of her first novel, Whitener found that targeting people her age helped her establish an audience. By the time she turned 40, she felt no need to put on any kind of show or premise that wasn’t truly her— including any false professional identity.

While Whitener doesn’t expect that this authentic professional identity will ever be limited to just being an author, there’s certainly more coming. “One of my writing partners says that I’m like a popcorn maker,” Whitener says. “[I’ve] got all these kernels in the oil— at some point one’s gonna pop. And then they’re all gonna pop.”

Who knows what might pop next?

By Stephanie Allen

Celebrating 66 Years of Allen Ginsberg's HOWL

HOWL

by Allen Ginsberg

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,

who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

III
Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland

where you’re madder than I am

I’m with you in Rockland

where you must feel very strange

I’m with you in Rockland

where you imitate the shade of my mother

I’m with you in Rockland

where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries

I’m with you in Rockland

where you laugh at this invisible humor

I’m with you in Rockland

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I’m with you in Rockland

where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I’m with you in Rockland

where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I’m with you in Rockland

where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I’m with you in Rockland

where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

I’m with you in Rockland

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I’m with you in Rockland

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I’m with you in Rockland

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I’m with you in Rockland

where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I’m with you in Rockland

where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I’m with you in Rockland

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep

I’m with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free

I’m with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

First public reading, October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco

Future Fortune Artist Talk: Dogon Krigga interviewed by Michael Murray at Tapp's Outpost October 3rd, 2021

Tapp's Outpost is excited to host an intimate discussion between Artist Dogon Krigga and Co-host of the Podcast Cultivated Ignorance, Michael Murray, on October 3rd at 4pm. Unpacking the vision and inspiration of the exhibition Future Fortune: A visual treatise on perspective, Dogon and Michael will hone in on the experiences, characters, and world views that shaped the artists visual story line. The talk will also be streamed on Facebook live for those community members who can't participate in person. The show is currently on view at Tapp's Outpost, 715 Saluda Avenue, Columbia, SC 29205, and is free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday 10am to 6pm

Dogon Krigga expresses magick with the use of pixel and paper. Known as “the keeper of the crossroads between magick and mixed media”, Dogon incorporates divine mysteries, transcribed over time throughout their ancestors’ experiences to connect Black people to the future and the past.

Dogon immortalizes modern and ancient traditions, wisdom, and theory into majestic and whimsical digital and mixed media collages that venerate those that came before, those that will come, and those that exist outside of time. 

Dogon Krigga utilized over a decade of experiences, techniques, knowledge and training as a graphic designer and practitioner of Afrofuturism and other African diasporic traditional religions to illuminate the spiritual paths and possibilities for all whom receive their creations.

Dogon Krigga currently resides where they grew up, in Columbia, SC. Krigga is primarily a self-taught artist, with a creative lineage connected to legends like Romare Bearden and Tom feelings. Their background in creative writing, journalism, and music production also lends to their creative perspective.

Michael A. Murray is a local poet/author who has been writing stories and stanzas ever since his hand could hold a pen. He is also a photographer, filmmaker, podcast host, public speaker, mentor, and founder of the NU GRWTH Artist Collective: a premier conduit that gives black and brown artists of the south the resources, visibility, and appreciation needed to be as influential as their dreams aspire to be.

Since 2016 Michael has joined various creative circles and founded various artistic outlets with one objective constantly in mind: Do whatever it takes to help see both the world and all those who inhabit it reach their highest, truest potential. With this goal at the forefront, Michael founded Playlixt LLC, an event and multi-media based platform built to promote and celebrate artists of various backgrounds and disciplines looking for opportunities to showcase their talents to the masses.
 

The exhibition will be on view September 9th through October 30, 2021. The exhibition is free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday 12pm to 6pm. Masks and social distancing will be required. For questions about the works on view or Tapp's Outpost, please email caitlin@outpostartspace.org

Announcing the Accepted Contributions to 2021 Fall Lines - a literary convergence & Winners of the Broad River Prize for Prose and Saluda River Prize for Poetry

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The Jasper Project, in conjunction with Richland Library, One Columbia for Arts and Culture and Richland Library Friends & Family , is proud to announce the authors whose work has been accepted for publication in part II of the combined seventh and eighth edition of Fall Lines – a literary convergence, as well as the recipients of the 2021 Fall Lines Awards for the Saluda River Prize for Poetry and the Broad River Prize for Prose.

Congratulations to

Kasie Whitener whose short fiction, The Shower,

was selected from more than one hundred prose submissions as the winner of the Broad River Prize for Prose, and to

Angelo Geter, whose poem, Black Girl Fly,

was selected from more than 400 submissions as the winner of the Saluda River Prize for Poetry.

All additional contributors are listed below!

Judges for this year’s awards were

Randall David Cook for fiction and Nathalie Anderson for poetry. 

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Mark your calendar for Sunday October 17th at 3 pm for the 2020-2021 Fall Lines Release and Reading at the Main Branch of the Richland Library. All contributors are invited to read ONE piece from the combined issues. The event is free and open to the public!

All accepted contributors should send a 75-word bio to be included in the journal to editor@JasperColumbia.com

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE FOLLOWING!

Aida Rogers – From Proust to Gibbs

Hannah Pearson – Where the Fox and Hare Say Goodnight

Liesel Hamilton - Drifting

Susanne Kamata -  The Lump

Loli Molina Munoz - Distance(s)

Carla Damron - Breaking the Surface

Arthur McMaster - Connecting Flights

Kasie Whitener - The Shower

Tim Conroy - Pendleton Street

Debra Daniel - How to Make Peach Jam

 

Angelo Geter -  Black Girl Fly

Lisa Hase Jackson – Dead Birds of the Great Leap Forward

Ray McManus – When You Can’t Tell the Vine from the Branches

Landon Chapman – Odysseus

Ken McLaurin – Procrastination

Terri McCord – Sense Making

May O’Keefe Brady – Pandemic’s Box

Adam Corbett – The Keys and Gertrude Stein

Patricia Starek -  Glass Travels

Jenny Maxwell – My Father on Tap Dancing

Nicola Waldron – Peach Harvest

Ken Denk – Propitiating the Pulmonic Plague and After the Fight

Ruth Nicholson – At Congaree Swamp

Glenis Redmond – She Makes Me Think of Houses and For Dark-Skinned Black Women You Know it’s Not Just About the Red Lipstick

Judith Cumming Reese – Twilight Song

Eileen Scharenbroch – Sisters

Worthy Branson Evans – Blues For Want of a Blues Song

Kristine Hartvigsen – Journey

Roy Seeger – Alluvial Patterns

Randy Spencer – Invitation to the Plague and When it is Over

Betsy Thorne – Quarantined

Amanda Rachelle Warren – How Many Reasons for this Up and Gone

Jo Angela Edwins – The Lichtenberg Figure

Susan Craig – Tell Me it is Enough

Danielle Ann Verwers – When the Lights Go Out

Ann-Chadwell Humphries – Golden Boy

Austin Hehir – Human

Libby Bernardin – Dear October

Horace Mungin – Flip of the Two-Headed Coin

Melanie McClellan Hartnett – untitled

Al Black – Prayers in the Spectrum

John Lane – Two Rifts on Montale

Gil Allen – The Chosen

Jane Zenger – What I Will Do For You

Lisa Johnson-McVety – Sad Feet

 

Remembering Thorne Compton, with Thoughts of Peace and Love by Dale Bailes

photo courtesy of Chris Compton

photo courtesy of Chris Compton

Thorne Compton and I met at U of SC in the early sixties. We were on the Junior Varsity, of the Debate Team. We made a mutual friend of Bob Anderson, and did our best to make this first black male student at USC feel welcome. That was an uphill battle in those days. I lost track of Bob after I left grad school in 1965; Thorne kept track and even told me of being in touch with Bob’s widow and child in recent years. 

Thorne and I met again in the early seventies. He had done a stint in the Peace Corps with first wife Jo; I had been a hippie mail man in San Francisco, among other West Coast Adventures. 

Those adventures led to my pulling together a crew of artists, Viet Nam vets, and singers and seamstresses to open the Joyful Alternative. Thorne was a regular there at our original 2009 Green Street location, stopping in for a record or a book every week, and papers. THE VILLAGE VOICE and GREAT SPECKLED BIRD, that is. 

Thorne managed to function in the academic environs better than I had. He earned a doctorate and became an English professor. When I published my first book CHERRY STONES and went to work with the Arts Commission, he invited me to do poetry readings for his classes. He would go on to deanships and department chairs. 

I pursued other interests—running a music hall at Folly Beach, getting an MFA in Screenwriting at USC/West. I taught in prisons and on Navy ships, and a planned two-year gig as an adjunct at Moorpark College in California ending up being twenty-five or thirty years. 

At one point in the eighties, Thorne got in touch to make sure I got the scoop on Carolina’s big celebration of James Dickey.  He got me in, and I was privileged to see and hear such literati as Harold Bloom and John Simon hold forth. 

It must have been about that time I began to make an effort to find a full-time teaching job SOMEWHERE, and I made yet another request of the most stolid academic friend I knew for a letter of recommendation. 

He must have written a dozen letters, without complaint. 

Until I was visiting in Columbia from California in the early nineties and ran into him at the campus bar Hunter-Gatherer. After some catch-up conversation over a beer or three, he blurted out in faux exasperation—I think—“Please don’t ask me to write anymore ________________ letters of recommendation!” 

I didn’t. 

I spent a few more years adjuncting at Moorpark until I got tired of freeways, and retired to live with my best friend Jo Baker at Pawleys Island.  Thorne, having lost his Jo years earlier, was remarried, retired, and removed to Michigan for several years. 

The odds were long that two old friends would meet again at the top of the hill where Saluda meets Heyward , but it happened. About two years ago. 

I stopped at the sign and waited for a man and his dog, motioning them to go ahead. 

Thorne and his dog Bo weren’t taking any chances, so I rolled down the window when Thorne looked closer to check my plans. Two happy old codgers, I guess we seemed to any passersby. And although Bo tugged on the leash and whimpered about having more peemail to check, we caught up a bit. I was on my way home from  my work at U of SC School of Nursing, where I occasionally was a Standardized Patient.  

He didn’t know the term. I explained I portrayed scenarios of different illness situations, with student nurses.  The irony was thick as he managed a smile and said, “I’m the real thing.” He had months, or maybe a couple years, left. 

We ended our car window conversation with a promise to get together soon for a nice bottle of red, and lots of “telling lies.” 

My personal lethargy, isolation at Pawleys, the pandemic…it didn’t happen. Most of us have made the same mistake. 

Thorne’s son Chris Compton messaged me from Los Angeles that if I was going to see him again, it should be sooner rather than later.  Thorne’s wife Raven was kind enough to arrange a visit with him the week before Easter. 

Even without a good red, we had a very good hour. We talked about Bob Anderson, the early days of Joyful, those letters of recommendation. He smiled and mentioned a memory that surprised me. “Those parties on South Walker Street. Live music and a hundred of your closest friends. Some of the best times I ever had!” 

As usual, he asked what I was writing, I told him an artist named Janet Kozachek had provided two pieces of work that had inspired some ekphrastic poems. New as the term was to me, he remembered learning it a dozen years ago. I told him I would send the art and the poems.  

I don’t know if he was able to see the stuff before he passed. One of them, with the artwork that inspired it used with the artist’s permission, is printed below. The poem, “Obeisance,” has a puckish tone that I associate with Thorne Compton, and is dedicated to his memory. As is the next glass of red I wrap my hand around.

Artist - Janet Kozachek

Artist - Janet Kozachek

OBEISANCE

  by Dale Bailes

The posture is apotropaic.

To appease Thanatos, back when.

And now to fend off his vengeful

Sibling, Erinyes.

 

It is not a conscious thing.

It is brought forth by naked fear

As pandemic stalks the land.

The gesture is archaic, bold.

 

Bare haunches taunt our oldest

Dread.  They show contempt

For knowing time is never

Long enough, nor safety certain.

 

What I create may have

A longer span. A gesture, small,

To thwart some master plan.

A wrench in the machine.

 

So. Black-robed, grinning bearer

Of the scythe—or shrieking sister

Eris—bring forth your deadly kiss.

I here present, a target you can’t miss.

 

 

Retired English instructor Dale A. Bailes commutes from the ‘hood in Pawleys to the ‘wood in Columbia for his part-time work as a Standardized Patient at the U of SC School of Nursing. He has poems upcoming in Fall Lines and AMERICAN WRITERS REVIEW.

Columbia Poets Al Black and Randy Spencer Featured in Piccolo Spoleto’s Sundown Poetry Series

Al Black and Randy Spencer are effervescent poets, speakers who refuse to hold back or look away from what asks to be gazed upon. In their work, readers are taken on a journey of intertwining rivers where you learn about their histories, intimate parts of yourself, and the spaces and places in which we dwell. Keep reading to learn more about Piccolo Spoleto’s Sundown Poetry Series and Black and Spencer—and discover two poems from the artists. 

Former Charleston Mayor Joe Riley launched Piccolo Spoleto in 1979, two years after Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti founded Spoleto Festival USA. Piccolo, alluding to the smallest woodwind and thus the smaller festival within the larger Spoleto, has reflected the City of Charleston’s desire to showcase local art and artists. 

The Sundown Poetry Series is one of the oldest events in Piccolo history, with the goal of featuring a select number of local poets. The current selection committee consists of Ed Gold, Katherine Williams, and Curtis Derrick. According to Derrick, the application process for poets parallels the process for all Piccolo Spoleto artists and is based on a submission of work. At times, however, the selection committee directly invites applications from poets who have “achieved particular notoriety or had recent book publications.”  

The original venue for the Sundown Series was the courtyard at the Dock Street Theater—so drama patrons could enjoy poetry as an art “appetizer” before a performance—but this year Sundown is being held in the Lenhardt Garden of the Gibbes Museum of Art to accommodate more efficient social distancing. 

Eight poets are being featured this year, one per evening, in the following order: Al Black, Valerie Nieman, H.R. “Randy” Spencer, Lola Haskins, Dr. David B. Axelrod, Kwoya Fagin Maples, Grace C. Ocasio, and Ren Ruggiero—two of the poets, Black and Spencer, are Columbia-based. 

Al Black has published two poetry collections: I Only Left for Tea (2014) and Man with Two Shadows (2018), both with Muddy Ford Press. He co-edited Hand in Hand, Poets Respond to Race (2017) and has been published in several anthologies, journals, periodicals, and blogs. He hosts various arts events, co-founded the Poets Respond to Race Initiative, and was Jasper Project’s 2017 Literary Artist of the Year. 

Black expresses anticipation for the reading—while often not the type to seek out readings and more so the one to host them, he deeply enjoys being a part of them. Derrick reached out to Black in 2019 and asked if he would be interested in reading for Sundown, and Black accepted and was slated for 2020, but when the festival was cancelled due to COVID-19, the poets were moved to 2021. 

Spencer was also originally slated to read in 2020 and is looking forward to reading this week. H.R. “Randy” Spencer is the author of several chapbooks, and his first full collection, The Color After Green, was published in 2019 by Finishing Line Press. As stated on Piccolo Spoleto’s Facebook, “Recently featured on SCETV’s By the River, this collection of contemporary nature poems is both personal and reaches for larger concerns around climate and ecological changes, sometimes set in the South Carolina Lowcountry.”

Spencer previously read as part of the Sundown Series in 2012 and had such a positive experience that, after the required waiting period between reapplying, he immediately applied to read again. “I don’t do many readings, and my favorite are small groups where we can sit and talk,” he divulges, “I’m looking forward to sharing my work with whoever comes.”   

Spencer says that he will start off the reading with poems from his collection but will mix up what he reads to fit this event. “I change it up due to where I am,” he shares, “Since it’s in Charleston, I’ll do more poems that have to do with the coast and the low country and traveling.”  

He will also read outside the book, reading some books from a chapbook of poems about the COVID-19 pandemic. He also recently wrote a poem in the Gullah language as a means to preserve and honor the lyrical language, and he hopes to read it during the event as well. 

Black also likes to switch readings up based on where he is performing. He will have the time it takes to read a work at the top of each poem’s page to ensure he fits within the time limit—each reading is approximately 40-45 minutes with time for a Q&A after. 

“I never have a set list of poems to read—I’ll have 2-3 poems in my head that I might open the night with, but I’ll walk in and try to get a feel for the night,” Black intimates, “based on people’s reactions I may end up reading a poem I’ve never read before.” 

Black intends to start “edgy,” potentially touching on racism and/or women’s issues. He will likely start with his first book (I Only Left for Tea), then move to the book about his father (Man with Two Shadows), then various publications, then a book about his mother—which he is currently prepping for publication—before ending with new work. 

Both Spencer and Black look forward to sharing work new and old in a fresh space. In that vein, both poets have offered a poem for the audiences of this blog. Spencer’s poem is from The Color After Green, and he feels it is a companion piece to the Gullah poem he may read at the event. Black’s poem is a recent one he was compelled to write after watching an ad card fall from a magazine.

Al.png

Beatitudes

 

Blessed is the morning.

Blessed is the coffee.

Blessed is the sun before the rain.

Blessed are the birds

that dampen traffic noise.

Blessed is the train that wails

and the siren song that fades.

Blessed is the drone of the plane that stays aloft.

Blessed are the dog walkers, the couples,

the skateboarders, the bike riders,

the joggers, the mommies pushing strollers,

and the daddies carrying daughters on shoulders.

Blessed are the lonely.

Blessed is the greening tree.

Blessed are the flowers that grow wild.

Blessed is the broken fence rail

I step over to enter the park.

Blessed is the cat that chases the squirrel

and the dog that scares the cat.

Blessed is the silent leaf blower

when the neighbor takes a break.

Blessed is the moss that fills

the empty spaces with color.

Blessed is the blue recycling bin

that sits outside our kitchen door.

Blessed is the card stock magazine ad

that falls at my feet

for it shall become a bookmark.

 

—     Al Black, 2021

 

Randy Spencer.png

Wind

                        September 23, 1989:

 

I can still feel it. The wind last night

sucked the breath out of me, flung it screaming

over the live oak and limbless pine.

Then the water swelling, some deep voice

sliding up to us, a dark face, its white woolen beard

spilling over us, straining the ballast

that kept our house rooted like a stiff barnacle

to some tether in the sand

My ears still roar like a seashell.

 

The ominous calm coming next. That calm

without even the random rustle of life,

birds appearing, silent in the dead air.

When the eye came, I walked outside.

There was a hole straight up

through all that darkness, like a tunnel,

starlight like pinhole punctures in a black screen.

I could barely see the pines, stunted, still straight,

but snapped off midway up, all clipped

the same height, bodiless legs

left planted in clay boots. I could see

cuts opened up in hardwoods, limbs broken

from live oaks, shrubs uprooted, scattered, terrifying.

 

It came back worse than before,

blowing oppositely, humming its tune

differently over the stringed forest. Inside,

when I could fall sleep I dreamed my ankle

braceletted by a whirl of rope leaping overboard

after an anchor, dragging me after it,

dreams of fish flying, their silver pancaked scales

covering my eyes, cutting into me like razors.

 

Then, this morning. Coming out

seeing sailboats piled like cordwood,

battered and strewn over the marsh,

masts stepped vertically yesterday

laying over now, angled north

as if they were still carrying sail,

reduced to sundials marking shadows in the morning sun,

birds blown north, vagrants, wounded, dazed,

Shells everywhere, freshly gutted open,

still slick with gristle or beaten white

and smooth, broken on some rock,

then carried inland, a whelk settled in a cowshed,

a purplish clam in a seaside garden

where chrysanthemums should be in bloom,

with my neighbors empty house half lifted

from its foundation and nesting in spartina grass,

on an ordinary autumn day

               with bright sunshine, mild sea breezes, soft breakers.

 

—    H.R. Spencer, from The Color After Green (in reference to Hurricane Hugo)

If you’re interested in potentially hearing these poems out loud and in hearing more from these poets, both readings occur in the coming days in Charleston. Black opens the Sundown Series tomorrow, June 1st, and Spencer reads Thursday, June 3rd. Both events begin at 6:30pm.  

Spencer’s collection can be purchased at larger retailers or directly from the publishing house, Finishing Line Press: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-color-after-green-by-h-r-spencer/  

Black’s books can also be purchased at larger retailers or the publishing house, Muddy Ford Press: https://www.amazon.com/Man-Two-Shadows-Al-Black/dp/1942081162

-Christina Xan

FALL LINES 2021: CALL for SUBMISSIONS for the 2020-2021 DOUBLE ISSUE

Fall Lines image.png

 

Fall Lines – a literary convergence is a literary journal presented by The Jasper Project in partnership with Richland Library and One Columbia for Arts and Culture.

Fall Lines will accept submissions of previously unpublished poetry, essays, short fiction, and flash fiction from April 1, 2021 through June 30, 2021. While the editors of Fall Lines hope to attract the work of writers and poets from the Carolinas and the Southeastern US, acceptance of work is not dependent upon residence. 

Publication in Fall Lines will be determined by a panel of judges and accepted authors (ONLY) will be notified by September 30, 2021, with a publication date in October. Two $250 cash prizes, sponsored by the Richland Library Friends and Foundation, will be awarded: The Saluda River Prize for Poetry and the Broad River Prize for Prose.

DOUBLE ISSUE: Due to restrictions surrounding COVID-19, the 2020 issue of Fall Lines will be published in conjunction with the 2021 issue as a DOUBLE issue. Two unique sets of poetry and prose and two sets of winners will be bound together in ONE BOOK and celebrated with ONE Launch and Reading event at a TBD date in October. Both 2020 and 2021 prizes will be presented at the October 2021 launch event.

Ø  POETRY: Up to five poems may be submitted with each submitted as an individual WORD FILE.

Include one cover sheet for up to five poems. Submit poetry submissions and cover sheet to FallLines@JasperProject.org with the word POETRY in the subject line.

 

Ø  PROSE: Up to five prose entries may be submitted with each submitted as an individual WORD FILE.

Include one cover sheet for up to five prose submissions. Submit prose submissions and cover sheet to FallLines@JasperProject.org with the word PROSE in the subject line.

 

COVER SHEET should include your name, the titles of your submissions, your email address, and mailing address. Authors’ names should not appear on the submission. Do NOT send bios.

ALL ENTRIES SHOULD BE TITLED.

There is no fee to enter, but submissions that fail to follow the above instructions will be disqualified without review.

Simultaneous submissions will not be considered. Failure to disclose simultaneous submissions will result in a lack of eligibility in any future Jasper Project publications.

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 The Columbia Fall Line is a natural junction, along which the Congaree River falls and rapids form, running parallel to the east coast of the country between the resilient rocks of the Appalachians and the softer, more gentle coastal plain.

Spotlight on Writer Aliada Duncan

Aliada Duncan

Aliada Duncan

Aliada Duncan was born in Beaufort, SC in 1992 and relocated to Columbia in 2008. A graduate of Limestone College, she will be graduating this year with an MSW from Winthrop University.

Duncan says she began writing at the age of thirteen. “Writing was a way for me to express myself. My pre-teen and teen years were tough. I started off writing poems. I was most inspired by Langston Hughes.” 

Duncan says, “I’ve self-published six books thus far in total. My first book, Wordplay: A Potion Name Poetry was officially my introduction to the world of writing. It was composed of poems that I had written throughout the years.”  

Her other publications include Gumbo: A Potent Poetry and Parables, a novella titled Satan, You Can’t Have My Marriage, two books of erotica titled Secrets Under My tongue and Flames: Magic at Midnight; and her most recent book is, Tongues: Enter My Ethos. All have been self-published and are available from Amazon. 

Duncan started her own business in June of 2020, Anu Vision LLC and says, “I’ve been busy with getting that off the ground. I haven’t written in a while; however, you haven’t seen the last of me.”

 

 

And here’s a sample of Duncan’s work:

 

 

The G.O.A.T Chronicles

 

 I am God frequency energy

The inner-G in me is key to immortality

What I am relaying is a result of what I am displaying

Slaying the odds with my warmest regards

I am the essence of this message

I have opened a portal and undefeated by mortals

In totality and in total

Whether local or worldwide, my illumination, you just can’t hide

Fruitful and forbidden, my power cannot be hidden

With pride and stride, I conquered the battles presented to me

Now they realize that my presence is a present

I am King to the peasants

Power I devour, it’s what I represent

I ascend and send solutions for my revolution

I descend and suspend executions of my evolution

Consistency is infinitely embedded inside of me

My levels is hard to reach, hard to sustain

My reign on the throne is solidified

 My magnetism defies the isms

My prism holds the light—

It cannot be dimmed, try as you might

I have summoned my sanctuary

Building contrary to what was meant to bury, me

You’re not even worth my stardust

I am governed by the divine

This brilliance is my shrine

This is the rhythm, this is the rhyme

My potency should be a crime

The G.O.A.T— Greatest of all time