Betty Adcock's 'Widow Poems' -- 'conversations shredding in the wind'

Almost four years ago, Raleigh poet Betty Adcock lost her long-time husband, Don, a jazz musician. His death has changed her life, of course, and over the ensuing months, the poems began to come. Poems, she says, that were "hard to write, hard to live through," and the book, she says, "has changed her, too. I care much less for some things and much more for other things than I used to."
 
Now her chapbook "Widow Poems" (Jacar Press), $12.95) from which the following is taken.

The Widow's House

seems to be coming apart -- pieces
of wall, snatches of a rug, chair-rungs,
shingles, plumbing, lamps and doorknobs.
Glass shatters from rows of still-framed 
faces. The mirrors are dusking over,
no longer disclosing.

                              Everything floats
as if gravity has left the place. It's not
violent; it is a loosening, a soundless
disengagement. Even her body has become 
otherwise, flesh that can no longer
recognize itself.

Perhaps it is she who has gone to ash,
gone to ground and the dark.
She has asked so hard for him,
crying out in the night, weeping into
pots on the stove, roses in the yard.

Perhaps she is the ghost 
in the house they built dissolving,
turning now as if in the grip of a slowed
tornado, air full of what could be
confetti in some kind of decelerating
celebration: music, books, conversations
shredding in the wind that memory
always becomes -- unfastened, recasting,
disheveling as the end of lovemaking.
She sits on a splintered floor
surrounded by the done-for.

Betty Adcock is the author of six collections of poetry from LSU Press. She has taught for many years at Meredith College in Raleigh and most recently at the low-residency Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers in Swannanoa, N.C. To order the book: Jacarpress.com

Recognition, Prize Money and More for Area Writers

Susan Ludvigson

Jennifer Hubbard

Susan Ludvigson, professor emerita at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, is this year's winner of the prestigious James Dickey Award from Five Points magazine in Atlanta. Her winning poems,"Divigations," "Mythologies" and "Sharing the Territory," will be published in the fall issue of Five Points and are included in her new manuscript, as yet untitled. The award carries a $1,000 prize. Ludvigson has nine poetry collections from Louisiana State University Press and has received many honors over the years, including Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, as well as fellowships from the NEA and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is the widow of fiction writer Scott Ely, who also taught for many years at Winthrop.

Kathryn Schwille's short-short story, "FM104," which appeared in Issue 20 of the literary journal Memorious, has won a spot on the 2014 Wigleaf Top Very Short Fiction List (under 1,000 words), selected from about 200 nominations of stories that appeared online last year. The judge says Schwille's story "...speaks in a hybrid language of beautiful lunacy and keen prophecy." Schwille's fiction has appeared previously in such literary  journals as Crazyhorse, West Branch and Sycamore Review. She is a recipient of a 2014 North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship. "FM04" is the opening to her manuscript of short stories, "24 Seconds," set against the backdrop the Columbia shuttle disaster in East Texas. Schwille lives in Charlotte and earned her MFA at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa.

The young adult novel, "And We Stay" (Random House), by former Charlotte Country Day English teacher Jennifer Hubbard, now of Salisbury, is on the summer reading list for students at Woodberry Forest boarding school in Madison County, Va. Also on the list -- students can select three and no fair listening to audio books -- John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars," Nick Hornby's "Slam," and Pat Conroy's "My Losing Season." Hubbard's novel, set on the campus of a girls' Massachusetts boarding school, is "quite a page-turner," says the blurb. "Part mystery, part bildungsroman, this intelligent novel brings us into contact with a complex, conflicted heroine who doesn't care much about following the rules." Hubbard is a former English teacher at Woodberry Forest and is 100 pages into her third novel for young adults, modeled on five girls she taught at Country Day.
 

Actor James Franco's N.C.connection

If you keep up with such things, you may know that actor James Franco, in addition to starring in movies, including "127 Hours" and "Howl," writing a book of short stories ("Palo Alto") and preparing to co-host the Oscars, is a graduate student. In six programs. Really.

He's studying fiction writing at Brooklyn College and Columbia and filmmaking at New York University. He enrolled this fall at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Yale, where he's pursuing at PhD in English. And, finally, he's studying poetry. Guess where? Warren Wilson College, just outside Asheville. (Let's pause here to sigh and vow to stop watching reality TV and start being more like James Franco.)

Why would a New York-to-LA guy like Franco choose a small MFA program in the N.C. mountains? Probably because it's so good. When Poets & Writers Magazine recently rated MFA programs, Warren Wilson ranked No. 1, tying with Vermont College of Fine Arts, among 46 low-residency programs.Folks at Warren Wilson try to keep quiet about their famous student.

Deb Allbery, MFA program director, would only tell me that Franco enrolled in 2009 and is on track to graduate in 2012. He'll likely return to Warren Wilson for a 10-day session in January.

How does he do it all? Writer Sam Anderson explored that question recently in New York magazine: "According to everyone I spoke with, Franco has an unusually high metabolism for productivity. He seems to suffer, or to benefit, from the opposite of ADHD: a superhuman ability to focus that allows him to shuttle quickly between projects and to read happily in the midst of chaos.

"He hates wasting time -- a category that includes, for him, sleeping. (He'll get a few hours a night, then survive on catnaps, which he can fall into at any second, sometimes even in the middle of a conversation.) He doesn't drink or smoke or -- despite his convincing performance in 'Pineapple Express' -- do drugs. He's engineered his life so he can spend all his time either making or learning about art. When I asked people if Franco actually does all of his own homework, some of them literally laughed right out loud at me, because apparently homework is all James Franco ever really wants to do."