Fellowship Winners Shine at Bookfest

On Friday, Oct. 20, I was emcee for two events at the Equality State Book Festival in Casper’s First United Methodist Church. The first was a reading of the 2007 creative writing fellowship winners along with fellowship judge Rosemary Daniell. About 50 people attended the event. I acknowledged the fellowship honorable mentions, Pat Frolander of Sundance and Chavawn Kelley of Laramie. I also named the winners and honorable mentions of the 2007 Blanchan/Doubleday writing awards: Bo Moore, Chavawn Kelley, Susan Marsh, Renee Carrier, Joan Puma Bennet, and Diane Wolverton.

Then it was time to hear a few comments about the judging process from Rosemary, poet and author of “Secrets of the Zona Rosa: How Writing (and Sisterhood) Can Change Women’s Lives.” She admitted to having a difficult time choosing the three recipients of the $3,000 awards. “Reading the poems has been a near-painful pleasure -- there were so many good ones, and so many of them moved me immensely,” she said. “What a repository of talent you have in Wyoming.”

Myra Peak of Green River was first up. One of her award-winning poems was “To Run a Dozer,” based on her time as a coal mine foreman in the 1980s. She mixes the hard-edged realities of earth-moving machines with images from home and the natural world. Here’s a few of my favorite lines:

Forget the pale blue sky and twilight chatter
of the two-way radio so you can hear
the dozer say, “This what I want.”
Keep lowering the blade until loose
cubic yards of dirt drift over its top
like thick fudge rolling into a buttered dish.

Jeffe Kennedy’s first nonfiction book, “Wyoming Trucks, True Love, and the Weather Channel,” was published by University of New Mexico Press in 2004. She read from her fellowship entry of five poems entitled “Grooming Lessons.” She ends “Make-up” with the realization that, as an adult, she repeats the grooming lessons she learned from her mother:

Then, like Grandmother,
Like I do today,
She added lipstick last.
Always last.
And tossed the tissue full of her painted kisses to the counter.

Jane Wohl was the last of the three fellowship recipients to read. Jane’s first book of poems, “Beasts in Snow,” was published last year by Glendo’s High Plains Press. Her entry was entitled “Iraq Poems,” written about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. She acknowledged that some of the poems are written in a persona other than her own. Here’s one of those poems in its entirety:

Baghdad III

After gunfire, it’s always hard to breathe.
Dust curtains ruined walls. Then for weeks
the sky never clears. Gray air settles, rises
settles again, and our lungs fill with it.

My children have never been asthmatic, but now
even on sunny days, they wheeze and gasp.
At night, we can no longer sleep on the roof, watching
great stars wheel above us, but the close air of the house
presents no real safety or relief. I wait for the sun,
for skies as blue as memory. But gunfire’s sharp

haze surrounds us. Some days, a white cloud grows
on the horizon, bringing perhaps the miracle of rain,
but then it’s just the dust of approaching trucks.
The palms’ deep green fades to shades of gray,
still, the mosque’s blue dome rises in the thickening air.

12/11/04





- posted by Michael Shay @ 4:43 PM