Welcome to where I am, where my kitchen's always messy, a pot's (or a poet) always about to boil over, a dog is always begging to be fed. Drafts of poems on the counter. Windows filled with leaves. Wind. Clouds moving over the mountains. If you like poetry, books, and music--especially dog howls when a siren unwinds down the hill-- you'll like it here.


MY NEW AUTHOR'S SITE, KATHRYNSTRIPLINGBYER.COM, THAT I MYSELF SET UP THROUGH WEEBLY.COM, IS NOW UP. I HAD FUN CREATING THIS SITE AND WOULD RECOMMEND WEEBLY.COM TO ANYONE INTERESTED IN SETTING UP A WEBSITE. I INVITE YOU TO VISIT MY NEW SITE TO KEEP UP WITH EVENTS RELATED TO MY NEW BOOK.


MY NC POET LAUREATE BLOG, MY LAUREATE'S LASSO, WILL REMAIN UP AS AN ARCHIVE OF NC POETS, GRADES K-INFINITY! I INVITE YOU TO VISIT WHEN YOU FEEL THE NEED TO READ SOME GOOD POEMS.

VISIT MY NEW BLOG, MOUNTAIN WOMAN, WHERE YOU WILL FIND UPDATES ON WHAT'S HAPPENING IN MY KITCHEN, IN THE ENVIRONMENT, IN MY IMAGINATION, IN MY GARDEN, AND AMONG MY MOUNTAIN WOMEN FRIENDS.




Sunday, January 1, 2012

OLD LETTERS FOR THE NEW YEAR




  


Here's a Language Matters Column from several years back.  It still speaks to me, and I hope to you, as well.
NEW YEAR'S EVE SUNSET
   
Happy New Year!

Old Letters for the New Year 
By Kathryn Stripling Byer 


Lately, my brother and I have been exploring the contents of the attic in the house where we 
grew up. We greeted this new year without my father’s presence, and perhaps that is why we 
have felt so drawn to what remains of our ancestors whose books, letters, journals, and articles of 
clothing rest in the attic like relics. 

We found century-old letters from our great-grandparents and one letter from a great-great- 
grandfather writing from County Clare, Ireland, in 1869, telling his son Will how proud he 
would always be of him. We found another from his daughter, Nell, speaking of our great- 
grandfather’s childhood and early manhood, written to his wife, my great-grandmother Ella 
Valentine Fry, after her husband’s death. My great-grandmother was quite a letter-writer herself, 
educated well enough to become a teacher at age 16 in the Lead City, South Dakota schools, the 
first female so “nominated” to that post. My brother and I unfolded each of these letters as if 
they were the most precious items in the house. Each one was written with care, the handwriting 
graceful, the language itself literate in both style and grammar. These letters obviously mattered 
a great deal to both the authors and the recipients. Now, more than a century later, they speak to 
us in ways we’ve only begun to appreciate. 

Who among us writes letters like this anymore, I wondered, as I read the words that flowed from 
those long-ago pens, the ink fading, but the language still vibrant? Whose handwriting could 
match theirs? Not mine. I type my letters, my handwriting increasingly unreadable and hurried. 
Or, like more and more of us, I email my correspondence. With the click of a mouse, I send my 
messages. I do not labor with a dip pen to put into durable words my love for a child gone to the 
new world to become a miner in South Dakota. My messages are nothing like the letters we 
found by a sister writing across the Atlantic about her dead brother’s love of tools and 
engineering. Like so many of us, I am in a hurry. My correspondence is fleeting, disposable. 
Most of it will be deleted. 

In his poem “Please Write: Don’t Phone,” Robert Watson, my former teacher in the UNC-G 
writing program, exhorts, “Let us write instead: surely our fingers spread out / With pen on paper 
touch more of the mind’s flesh.” He explains, “I can touch the paper you touch,” and “I can read 
you day after day.” His last lines continue to haunt me: “I hold the envelope that you addressed 
in my hand. / I hold the skin that covers you.” 

In this new year of email and instant-messaging, few seem to have time to sit down and put their 
lives onto paper that can be unfolded again and again, or placed in a drawer for safe-keeping. 
The flesh of my family’s past resides in those yellowing sheets of paper we found in the attic. I 
carry their words into the new year, resolved to write more letters in long-hand, letting the words 
rise slowly to the surface and take shape on the empty page like a gift to be cherished. 

FRY FAMILY GRAVESTONE, CORBALLY CHURCHYARD, IRELAND
  

2 comments:

Nancy said...

Kay, I'm such a fan of "real letters." I have in my possession a letter my great grandmother wrote to my great grandfather James when they were courting. She addresses it to Dear Jacobus. . . and it is so coyly, beautifully worded. I doubt any of us will have our lives remember via email, but those shoeboxes of letters we've squirreled away are so rich. Happy New Year, friend.

Granny Sue said...

Beautiful post. I came here from a link posted on Facebook by Dav Tabler, and I'll be back.

After my parents were gone we found treasure troves of letters. Oh, to have had those while they lived! Even so, I'm grateful. I know them better now than I did while they lived.