Bravo OCAC

Talking to Myself: 18 Feb 2012  The Owen County Arts Council. should take a moment this morning to pat itself on the back. On a February Friday night, their 2nd Annual Poetry & Prose Reading packed The Wild Goose Café with a diverse and appreciative audience. The crowd did not leave disappointed.  From the music of Brittany Gilstrap and the performances of the guest writers, to the ambience of the old building (forever the Dime Store to me) filled with abundant desserts, it was a superb event.

Ernie Stamper

The Wild Goose Cafe was packed for the OCAC Poetry & Prose Reading.

Buy this photo

Four writers, each with significant ties to Owen County, took a turn reading from their work.  Jim Gash and Leslie Shane are longtime Owen County residents.  Jim is a poet, a former Lexington Herald – Leader columnist, and a farmer. I had not met him until last night, but he is a performer extraordinaire, one not to be missed. His humorous observations on the life of a farmer brought the house down.

Leslie, I’m proud to say, has been a friend for over a decade. We’re in a writing group together, and not only is she an excellent poet and fiction writer - she read a wonderful short story last night -  but she has one of the most astute critical minds I’m privileged to know. Her advice has been a great help to me in my I-wanna-be-a-writer journey. A retired Montessori teacher, she works for Owen County’s acclaimed Larkspur Press and is the author of the highly praised Point of Rock.  http://www.larkspurpress.com/

Michael Moran, who now resides on a farm near Grafenburg, formerly lived in Owen County.  Though we have mutual friends, I had not met him previously, and, as with Jim, I was soon impressed.  Mike is a retired psychiatrist, a farmer, and a respected poet.  Among other fine poems, he read “The Night I Made My Father Proud” which aired nationally on Public Radio’s Writer’s Almanac in 2010. You can hear Garrison Keillor reading it here: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2010/11/15 . For further introduction to Mike’s work  view his video on writing here:  http://tutto-buono.com/sing-the-day/  He is the author of The Fallen World.

Sherry Chandler and I, of course, are natives of Owen County, she growing up in the Sweet Owen community, and I in the Natlee/New Columbus area.  Our DNA probably intersects at some point in history given that her people and mine both settled in Owen County before 1800. And so, though she now lives on a farm in Bourbon County near Paris, and I in Lexington, we will always be “of” Owen County.

I may not be objective about Sherry’s poetry since she and I have been encouraging each others’ writing since we met in the 9th grade at OCHS. I believe her latest book of verse Weaving a New Eden will take a rightful place in academic circles as a literary history of Kentucky’s agrarian women. (See my review here: http://georgiagreenstamper.com/page10/page10.html ) But to hear what the likes of Maurice Manning (Kentucky’s short list finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and others say about her writing see here: http://windpub.com/books/weaving.htm . Oh -- Sherry also blogs  http://sherrychandler.com and twitters http://identi.ca/bluegrasspoet and works as a medical editor at the University of Kentucky.

And last night she brought the Owen County Arts Council’s 2nd Annual Poetry and Prose Reading to a rousing conclusion with a powerful reading that held the audience spellbound despite the late hour on the clock.

The only thing that would have made the evening better would have been Eileen Morgan, our high school English teacher, sitting on the front row, clapping and laughing and nodding. Perhaps, though, she was.