Valerie Nieman v. 3.0

Welcome, book bloggers! I'm just getting restarted in blogging, and will be doing reviews on mostly Southern poetry and fiction, as well as writing information and the occasion life lesson!

I am counting up my wealth - books piled like gold coins - watch for upcoming reviews of "Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls," "Living Above the Frost Line," "Whale Man," and more. Not "visible" but very much on my mind is the electronic ARC for Marjorie Hudson's "Accidental Birds of the Carolinas." We are muy sympatico and are hatching a dual book tour for later this year.

We had a great gathering April 9 in Winston-Salem at A Gathering of Poets - put it on your calendar for the first weekend in April 2012! It's a third of the way through National Poetry Month, and it seems the reminders are everywhere. This morning, with the air heavy from last night's rain, is also thick with the perfume of wisteria, iris, and from a neighbor's yard, old-fashioned lilacs. These don't grow so well here in the South, not like the magnificent tree that swelled at the back corner of my grandparents' house in Little Valley, but the perfume is the same. I never could decide the difference between Persian lilacs and French lilacs, but I know the ones I have in mind, a magnificent light purple fading toward blue, for me the color and scent of death, seductive and sad. These were heavy blooms, toppling the branches on wet days. We broke them from the trees and massed them in Mason jars for the gravesites in spring. And so in grief I hear Whitman’s “When L...

It could have been the story about handcuffs …. In 1994, I was a writer with a science fiction novel and assorted short stories and poems to my credit. The West Virginia Humanities Foundation, in honor of its 20 th anniversary, created the Circuit Writer program and dispatched a number of authors around the state. I was thrilled to be asked, and even happier to be assigned Weirton – home of my friend and mentor Timothy Russell. Over coffee, he talked about his experiences as a “visiting writer,” including the night he stayed at one host’s home and found a set of handcuffs fastened to the sturdy headboard of his guest room bed. I had a full day, speaking to classes at the high school and reading at the public library. After the reading we drove out of town, climbing from river level to a bluff overlooking the Ohio. It was dark early, so my visit must have been in winter, though I can’t place the date. I was to stay at the country club, which c...