Monday, noon
The English club was selling bag lunches for six bucks. I got one with turkey on wheat, an apple, two cookies, a bag of potato chips with its 10 grams of fat. I didn't eat the potato chips and warned my table-mates away from them - until they got sick of me talking about it.
Bill Holm and Jim Heynen did a tag-team event at noon, a kind of welcome, a summoning of the spirits of absent and dead writers who have attended past Writers Festivals. Publisher David Pichaske introduced the boys, promising they'd give us "a good voice and a take on place. Voice and geography and a larger dimension." We measure the home place by going someplace else, Pichaske said.
Round 1 - Bill Holm. "I'm gonna read you a little bit about the dead today. Now that's a cheerful subject."
Leo Dangel sends his greetings, Holm said. Dangel had taught at SMSU and was now retired to Yankton, South Dakota. Then Holm read some Dangel poems. And he talked. You know Bill Holm can talk, don't you?
"What will archeologists make of us?" he wondered.
"The dead get by with everything...."
"Charity wearing sidearms...."
He talked about "2000 years of Christian baggage," and noted that he once had an exchange with a proper old woman for whom "my baggage was her furniture."
"One more for a good ghost," Holm said, reading about Frederick Manfred. "His voice sounds like north wind through grass...."
"Paul Wellstone, if he had lived, he'd be a hero - our trumpet voice...."
"What we want," Holm suggested, "is that our writing will be useful for ordinary people - that we can be of use to the people around us."
Round 2 - Jim Heynen. "It's fun being a tag team with Bill," Heynen said. "He leaves a hot wand."
"I'd like to some a few words about the invisible life of Bill Holm," Heynen said. "He is one of the great promoters of midwestern writers."
Many of the themes we celebrate at this festival ar alive and well in other areas, Heynen noted, and he read some work by an under-appreciated writer from Washington State, Robert Sund, who also has a sense of humor:
"One zucchini is enough for any garden."
"Much of rural writing is the poetry and fiction and essay of memory," Heynen said. "We see what has been lost and worry of what can be done about it...."
Heynen read from Tom McGrath:
"It must be Friday, as the bread climbs out of itself...."
"Larkspur, tree toads continue their legislation...."
Leo Dangel has been a quadrapalegic since he was 19 as the result of a major spinal injury in a car accident, Heynen told us. Why has Dangel never written of the accident? Heynen asked him: "It's not very interesting...."
He read Dangel's poem, "The Farmer as Janitor" - "He maneuvers the floor polisher as if he were plowing...."
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