Still

 
Boone, N.C., area, summer 2009, DeeLeisa-ous Travels.

In her garage apartment located on the land of a farmer woman, Marianne taught me how to make hot chicken salad. Another girl's weekend sleep over, just the two of us, she also taught me to make a baked chicken breast sandwich. These were exotic eatin's for a college student surviving on cafeteria fare. In our many conversations about our lives that had been and the vast ones that were to come, I sometimes recall her challenging my conservative familial, Baptist culture-infused belief that God had taken away my talent for playing the piano because I no longer used it. She practically yelled at me--in fact, I recall she did yell. A passionate woman she was. Short. Cute and a fiery red head--when I asserted my belief that there was only one mate for a person on this earth. That ONE special someone was out there somewhere for me....My college friendship with Marianne taught me a lot of things. She was a bit, no a great deal more worldly than I. She, already married and divorced. We met when I was a public relations intern and she was the secretary of the neighboring development department of our small East Tennessee Baptist college. My senior year, she went full time as a student, studying music and like me, communications.

The years passed. Nearly three decades of them. Pictures were exchanged back when we still exchanged letters. Her only child is grown now. Mine is now a teen. Last I saw her she was at the Southern Festival of Books sitting and listening to a wild woman poet rant on. She looked up at me as I smiled down at her. She, at first, not recognizing me.

My old college chum, Marianne Worthington's been a college professor for a couple decades now. More recently, she's written a book of poems and now edits a literary journal. She emails me each year and asks me to submit to a publication she edits. I never do. But I am sharing here the richness of what she and her co-editors wrote about their new literary journal's title: Still.

"And about our name:  1.  we believe that to be a writer is to learn how to be still, 2.  The moonshine still is one of the stereotypical images of Appalachia, 3. as a culture, Appalachian has been told for decades that it is disappearing, but we are still here, proud and strong as ever, and 4. James Still, author of River of Earth, The Wolfpen Poems, and many other great works, is the grandfather of modern Appalachian literature and has inspired us all."