The poem I wrote about Richard's grandfather ("Will's Ridge") and sent to Floyd County Moonshine on his request was accepted. That is, they asked me for a biography, so I assume it was accepted. They didn't bother to say they were taking it, but I assumed so. I didn't tell them I went to Hollins, a relatively local school, though it passed through my mind. At 56, I figured it made more sense to talk about what I was doing NOW, as well as to say I was married to Richard, since has published in that journal too, and has a wide following among the locals for his poetry and his harmonica playing at the Jamboree when he blows into town. He's probably seen out on the golf course with his parents also.
I just sent that piece I wrote last winter, "The Tell," to an anthology of revenge writing. The blurb said they would take things that didn't necessary feature stories about revenge, but were written out of a sort of revenge, so that one qualified, I think. I hope they take it, but I'm sure they'll be flooded with spectacular pieces about revenge that will elbow it out.
I don't write poems about revenge because I don't even fantasize about it. I never wanted to go to my old high school, where I was told I was too stupid to go to college, and tell them I have a PhD and two Masters degrees. What's the use? They're too stupid to care anyhow.
4 comments:
Congrats!
Congratulations on the acceptance - that's great news.
My sixth-grade teacher thought me retarded because of my Southern accent. Memory is a kind of revenge because all I can remember about her is the way she would sit with her girdle showing and how she couldn't button the middle button at her back, poor unhappy woman. I can't even dredge up her name.
Good for you, sending out!
Thanks Lou, Reb, Marly!
Marly, Didn't you grow up in North Carolina (and weren't you born in Louisiana)? Didn't everyone there have an accent? In any case, that was a stupid prejudice! My dad told me that when he was in school, there was a class prejudice against Philadelphia accents in his school. His teachers were snooty Quakers, he said, and they were very anti-Semitic too! He probably had a Yiddish accent, since that was most likely the first language he had spoken to him, though I never knew him to speak or understand a word of it in my lifetime. I think he said the adults spoke to him in Yiddish, and he and his brothers and sister answered in English.
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