SUNSHINE

Author Margaret Simon knows the hearts and minds of young people, as is evidenced in her forthcoming book, Sunshine, to be released by Border Press Books. She demonstrates knowledge of their feelings and behavior in her middle-grade novels about Blessen LaFleur, the heroine of the Blessen series that features a spirited and caring child who lives near the rusty Bayou Teche in southwestern Louisiana. Simon, who has been an elementary school teacher for over thirty years and who now teaches gifted children in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, possesses unusual insight into the lives of those about whom she writes. Her first book about Blessen introduced readers to a heroine who struggles to find joy within the dysfunctional family into which she was born and who proves herself to be the supreme mistress of misadventure. Darrell Bourque, former poet laureate of Louisiana, praised the novel as a “cross between a fairy tale and wisdom literature.”

Simon’s second book, Sunshine, A Blessen Novel, again features Blessen, who has taken on the responsibility of raising a hen she calls Sunshine and, simultaneously, a homeless child named Harmony. Blessen feels she needs to save Harmony from a foster home where she has been placed and neglected. When Sunshine becomes a broody hen, Blessen is forced to get help from her teacher, Ms. Fullilove, to appease the hen, but the care needed for Harmony, an enchanting child Blessen encounters, eclipses her caretaking of this pet. Harmony is a twirling seven-year-old who talks in rhyme most of the time. Of course, the two girls, who call themselves “guardians of nature,” propel themselves into an adventure, running away from home and hiding near an abandoned convent alongside the Bayou Teche, but the unwise decision Blessen makes is resolved in a surprise ending, and young readers will find themselves wanting even more exciting chapters in the life of Blessen…and now, Harmony.

Simon features characters that resonate with authenticity; e.g., Blessen’s brief narration about herself: “All this time, in my life of eleven years, I thought I was white, and come to find out, my father was black as night. My tan skin and big wide nose come from my father’s side, along with my unruly nappy hair; Momma gave me her green eyes and strong will…” Her deceased grandfather: (Pawpee) “Even in his wheelchair, Pawpee was a handyman and master gardener. He saved enough money for Momma to make a down payment on a doublewide with central air. Thanks to my sweet grandpa, I now have my own room and my own bathroom…” And Mae-Mae, her grandmother: “Mae-Mae was the rock who held us all together. She told me then and there that God saved me for a purpose. I was reborn. I was fulfilling my name, Blessen, being a blessing to them all…”

However, Harmony emerges as the primary character in this new story about Blessen, “swirling off the porch, a young black girl [who] swoops like a hawk to my side. She wears a tattered pink dress that’s too short for her long skinny legs. Her skin is as dark as a moonless night, her hair plaited in braids close to her scalp.” Harmony speaks in rhymes that reminded me of the children’s story about the “churkendoose,” a creature who dismays fellow barnyard creatures with his rhyming speech but who becomes a hero because he chases a predatory fox out of the barnyard. Harmony introduces a nonsensical element in this novel; e.g., her wordplay: “You’re pretty as a daisy in Maysy!/Daisy, Mays,/won’t you look at me/twirling like a dancing girl/ready for a partee.”

Simon’s descriptive abilities are evident in each chapter and showcase her powers of observation: “I stop talking and look out across the fields of high sugar cane. Stalks of long, green leaves sway in the wind. We pull behind a cane truck with its yellow triangle ‘Slow’ sign shining on the huge metal basket filled to overflowing with burned stalks…” She tells of the makeshift quarters that Harmony calls home: “The window near the door is open wide, no screen or curtains. I peek inside. There’s no furniture in the room. The hardwood floors are dusty. Two makeshift beds, pallets of blankets and pillows lay in the corner. A small doll sits on one blanket, naked with frazzled plastic blond hair. The doll winks at me with only one eye open…” That vivid last line captures the unkemptness of Harmony’s quarters and underlines Simon’s talents as a writer who is master of concrete detail. 

Children’s literature is Simon’s forte. In Sunshine, as in Blessen, there are no “heavy, cluttery phrases,” as E. B. White says. The language is true and clear, the characters well developed, action consistently moving the readers through suspense with a balance of humor and serious intent, and wisdom is imparted without the writing impinging on didactic. Much of our adult morality in children’s books, White says, has “a stuffiness unworthy of childhood,” but Simon’s characters don’t overpower young readers with lessons in character building. Sunshine is a delightful, spirited work about an unusual family that, despite its dysfunction, manages to convey a message of faith and love, grace and whimsy. It’s Margaret Simon at her best.

"BENEATH THE SURFACE"*

This morning as I watch the flickering images of flooding in North Carolina and South Carolina on television, I remember the catastrophic storms that have inundated parts of my home town, New Iberia, Louisiana, throughout the years. Two years ago I published a book of poetry entitled A Slow Moving Stream (the Bayou Teche that flows through New Iberia and southwest Louisiana) and included a poem about the great flood of 1927 that inundated Acadiana. Since that time, New Iberia has endured many hurricanes and floods, but this 20th century storm caused incalculable deaths and damage in Teche country.

Karen Bourque, master glass artist in Church Point, Louisiana, captured in glass the cover for A Slow Moving Stream, the Bayou Teche near Arnaudville, Louisiana, which became a torrent of water during the flood of 1927. I acquired the glass piece entitled “Beneath the Surface,” and it now hangs in one of the dining room windows of our home in Sewanee, Tennessee. 

Karen always provides a text to accompany her glasswork, but rather than writing a text about the inundations of the Teche, Karen wrote that the glass piece for A Slow Moving Stream symbolizes Spring, “the dominant seasonal reference in the piece…and is symbolic of the time of renewal. Spring, either as time measure or metaphor, marks that time when the soul awakens inside the crossing of a water barrier, that time when unconscious mind and conscious mind surface and co-exist in the balance of renewed beginnings…”

Karen’s words constitute hope this morning. As I look up at the glass piece, her text helps to dispel my angst about the devastation due to storms and floods now battering the Carolinas, and I pray more fervently for those who are enduring this natural disaster.

In the last verse of “The Flood of 1927,” I describe the responses of those Acadians who migrated from Pisiguit, Nova Scotia, site of my ancestors who survived the great inundation of that century:

“They could not believe a levee had existed,

the land returning to a muddy geography

into which they climbed,

marveling at the ease of light,

declaring they’d never go back to Pisiguit

even if rocking tide caused the land to tilt

and the sky to become an ocean.

What had been green would be green again."

*Title of glass piece rendered by Karen Bourque, Church Point, Louisiana glass artist

Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan

A FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT HURRICANE HARVEY

Bayou Teche flooding bananas trees in yard near
Port Barre, Louisiana

I find it difficult to write this blog because here I sit, high and dry on The Mountain at Sewanee, Tennessee while people in New Iberia, Louisiana, my real home, are watching a heavy rain falling, apprehensive about threats of flooding and tornados. I felt proud when I read news stories about the “Cajun Navy” getting into their trucks and pulling their Jo boats and pirogues behind, rushing to help Houston victims of Hurricane Harvey. I also felt humble, remembering that in the lives of Cajuns, no one is left out, an ethic that embraces family and strangers.

I remember Hurricane Andrew and the devastation it caused; how we foolishly sat out the storm when the wind played with the house as if it were an accordion and venerable oaks in New Iberia parks and along city streets fell, roofs were blown away, and we suffered power outage for three weeks. The sun shone the day following the hurricane, and when I went outdoors to survey the damage, I discovered that a tall pine in the front yard had fallen a few feet away from my bedroom window, and the yard was strewn with branches from the tree-lined street. Within hours, a member of the Cajun Army had entered the yard — my neighbor across the way, armed with a chainsaw, sliced into the felled tree, cut it into movable pieces, carried it away, and waved goodbye without speaking a word. He proceeded to Darby Lane, a few blocks away and began clearing the lane so that vehicles could get through to the highway. No one had summoned him.

Later, another neighbor and his son came over and, without a word, picked up branches and began raking my yard. Both acts were performed in silent determination.The man with a chainsaw bore the Cajun name of Olivier; the man who raked the yard was named Viator (once Villatores, a name of Spanish derivation). Both of those men bore the names of early settlers of New Iberia. They represented a gregarious culture that has assimilated French, Spanish, African-Americans, Brits, Germans, Irish… a unique culture that has a strong work ethic and joie de vivre unlike any other diverse group in the U.S.

Cajuns know a lot about hurricanes and floods, and they’re undaunted by water — even those in the Cajun Navy whose boats broke down in Houston and people tried to steal their stalled boats… even though they have been shot at if they were unable to pick up everyone in their Jo boats. I’m not surprised at their tenacity and courage. (I understand that a Gator Squad has also been organized in Houston because alligators seeking higher ground have begun frequenting Houstonians’ yards).

In 2016, I wrote a book of poetry about Bayou Teche entitled A Slow Moving Stream* that documented stories of early Cajun survival in Teche country. I include the last verse of one poem about the flood of 1927 that embodies the spirit of early settlers whose descendants are probably members of the present-day Cajun Navy:

“…The land returned to a muddy geography
into which they climbed
marveling at the ease of light,
declaring they’d never go back to Pisiguit
even if a rocking tide caused the land to tilt
and the sky became an ocean.
What had been green would be green again.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY VICTORIA I. SULLIVAN

*I will lecture and read from this book about the Bayou Teche to the Louisiana Literature class taught by Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, professor of English at University of Louisiana, Lafayette, in November when I return to Louisiana.

THE MIND OF TREES

Early morning here in Teche country is cloudy, one of those somber gray mornings that signals the exodus of fall and the advent of winter (minus the cold temps). If we aren’t careful, we could feel oppressed by the tin color of the sky at 7 a.m. I’m sitting here, looking out at falling oak and pecan leaves and thinking of the winter of my childhood when doomsday talk and arguments at mealtimes were silenced by what I considered to be an inane bit of redirection my father made in the midst of cloudy atmospheres: “Hush now, look at the trees…” We were always puzzled by this cease fire phrase.

The trees in that scenario were tall, cheerful pines right outside the screen porch where we shared meals, and I remember how I looked out at the resinous trees and smelled the sharp, clean scent of pine needles. We’d put down our forks and knives (figuratively speaking), and silence would save the day. Today, I’m in New Iberia, Louisiana where I live near a coulee overhung by water oaks, live oaks, and swamp dogwood and remember my father’s little saying: “Look at the trees.” In retrospect, I figure my father meant for us to observe their wisdom in being silent observers of disagreeable scenes, or, rather, I choose to assign that meaning to his phrase this morning. We’ve had such a long siege of disagreeable political scenes, and psychiatrists have been busy handling victims of stress brought on by the country’s divisiveness for well over a year.

During a session of a self-help course I once took, we were advised to be careful about being a "guy in a diner," a person who often offers opinions just to hear himself talk, and we certainly have had our fill of guys in a diner this past year. However, my father’s words, “look at the trees,” now resound in a room where the television is turned off, and I view the wind ruffling the leaves on my cherished, silent oak and think: It's difficult to be uncivil when you're silent.

Trees peopled my writing when at the age of seven, I wrote my first story that featured a girl who disappeared into a large hole in an oak tree and took up residence. Inside was a room that held furniture similar to the furnishings within the homes of Beatrix Potter’s animals where a table was set for tea. People like Potter and our imminent Louisiana tree hugger, Caroline Dormon (Miss Carrie, now deceased) attributed human and creaturely qualities to trees, but they recognized that their dominant quality was one of being profoundly, wisely silent. The tree in that early story was, for me, a safe place to be. Later, I mutilated a page in my mother's Elbert Hubbard's Scrapbook, scissoring out the phrase: "Silence is a true thing and never betrays" and putting it in a notebook of quotations I liked. 

In A Slow Moving Stream, my most recent book of poetry, I penned a poem about trees inspired by my journey, traveling by car, the length of the Bayou Teche from Port Barre to Morgan City, Louisiana last year. It’s called “The Mind of Trees,” and last week I chose to read it at a poetry reading in Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

“The Mind of Trees”

They were drawn to trees

lining the banks of the Teche,

hanging over the brown water,

wide arms stretched out in welcome.

The live oaks, an enclosure

against a world that had exiled them,

palmetto and Spanish dagger growing close by,

cypress in the swamp becoming their homes.

They liked the sturdiness of lordly oaks

and the water meandering past,

sat under encompassing branches,

eating and drinking.

If the trees could talk, they said,

and made up stories

about what the oaks had heard.

The trees outlasted their language.

No matter who came

the language disappeared into English –

French, Spanish, German, Chitimacha.

English filled the horizon,

the patois of each clan,

buried under oaks, words waiting.

The trees absorbed all of it

and when hurricanes felled them

they were cut into logs,

loggers finding stories in their language

imbedded in the rings,

began to preserve what had been lost.

Word by word, they created

an articulation of arriving,

the sound of memory offering itself

from a distant longing. They heard

what they had been told not to hear—

testimonies for their being there.

And they praised the trees

for finding a way without them.

Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan appearing in A Slow Moving Stream

ALONG THE TECHE

Buttercup

Last week, we traveled to Arnaudville, searching for the cottages being renovated for use by artists and writers, who can apply and receive grants to complete their work in a bayou habitat, and found seven vari-colored cabins still under reconstruction hugging the Bayou Teche. When we turned to pass back along the street for another glimpse of the residences, we spied a beautiful, spreading sea of Ranunculus (buttercups) lining the bayou and stopped to photograph the bright yellow flowers. Ranunculus means “little frog” because the flowers inhabit the same waters as the frogs that are so abundant in south Louisiana.

Live oak along Bayou Teche

We were following Bayou Teche, the stream that Harnett Kane called “the most richly storied of the interior waters,” which snakes through 125 miles of south Louisiana. As it was once highly navigable, communities like Arnaudville sprang up along its banks. Four in ten people in this small community of less than 2000 speak Cajun French, and if you listen closely, you can hear the uncorrupted dialect of the Acadians who settled south Louisiana. The eight-mile stretch from Arnaudville to Leonville is known as the “Teche’s River Road” and is a journey into the heart of Acadiana. Arnaudville is the home of Bayou Teche Brewing, a company that makes a brew called “LA-31 Boucanee” made with cherry wood smoked wheat and is also the site of NuNu Arts and Culture Collective where artists from throughout Louisiana gather to showcase their art.

Scene of Teche at Arnaudville

In Arnaudville, we often have lunch or dinner at “The Little Big Cup,” a restaurant that serves some of the best cuisine in south Louisiana and features a “groaning board” on Saturdays and Sundays. We had been introduced to the town through Darrell and Karen Bourque. Darrell, a former poet laureate of Louisiana, once came up the bayou on a barge and climbed the steps leading to the deck of The Little Big Cup to deliver a reading from his book about the Cajun settlement of Louisiana entitled Megan’s Guitar. Poetry readings are not uncommon at this site.

Our recent visit to Arnaudville included brunch with the Bourques, and we sat on the deck of The Little Big Cup overlooking the bayou on a halcyon February day, talking about future glass work I’d like Karen (a consummate glass artist) to do for the cover of a new book of poetry and about Darrell’s chapbook, Where I Waited, to be published in the spring of this year by Yellow Flag Press whose editor is J. Bruce Fuller. Darrell’s work will focus on the paintings of Bill Gingles of Shreveport and I think it’s some of his best work. Just to titillate

Bayou Teche at Arnaudville

readers, I’m including one that I particularly liked entitled “Here and Here” that Darrell wrote and dedicated to Goldman Thibodeaux, notable Creole Cajun musician who was honored in 2014 with the Louisiana Folklife Heritage Award. The poem is after Bill Gingles’ painting Here and Here:

HERE AND HERE   

Sometimes my brother lives in a yellow temple inside here and here,

sometimes he lives in blue arches bent around those songs he’d keep

all his life if he could. I go to see him as often as I can, play Quoi faire

as many times as he asks me to. For him songs stay a while then seep

back into that almost imperceptible line here makes next to a place

not here. That line is the place we were boys together, pulling plows

through black gumbo dirt, picking the cotton the dirt made, his face,

then as now, darker than mine, bronzy color that favored blue, a vow

almost that beauty would always live in our house. He seemed a race

all to himself when I knew him then. He knew no other time than now

& he took me with him wherever he went. If he held something dear,

I did. If he climbed the sides of field wagons and burrowed in the heap

of white fluff we’d picked, I did too. He taught me how to lessen fear,

to live where he lived. Here is one leap; another here is another leap.

Darrell Bourque, December 21, 2015

Darrell and Karen Bourque at Little Big Cup

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan

EATING THE HEART FIRST

Strange, how poetry wells up out of small towns perched on the bayous of Louisiana, and fine poets seem to emerge from the mists, reading poems that reflect the watery landscape. Their works are almost organic, coming out of the soil and water of Acadiana, appearing at celebrations of the rural arts such as the Fire and Water Celebration I attended Saturday in Arnaudville, Louisiana. Arnaudville, population 1500, is a town near the muddy Bayou Teche, that body of water which has birthed a culture rich in the arts. The last time I visited Arnaudville in the 90’s, the town was just beginning to develop an artistic energy that has burgeoned and begun to attract new residents from throughout the U.S. Today it draws artists and musicians from around the world.



Darrell Bourque, former
Louisiana Poet Laureate

 I went to hear my friends, Darrell Bourque and Margaret Simon, read from their latest works and to reconnect with Clare Martin, a woman with whom I once worked on the executive staff of Bayou Girl Scout Council in Lafayette, Louisiana. During the 90’s, Clare worked as Public Relations Officer of the Council, and one day at coffee break, she showed me a few of her unpublished poems. After I had read the few poems that she handed to me, I could tell she had “voice,” and although the poems were dark, they were mysterious and filled with longing for a fulfilling work and life that touched me deeply. After both of us left the Council, I saw Clare a few times – on one occasion I wrote a letter of reference for her to work on her Master’s at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette; on another, I heard her read at a poetry celebration here in New Iberia. I lost touch with Clare but discovered Saturday that for the past eight years, she has found new life through her poetry, writing for the Avatar Review, Louisiana Literature, Poets and Artists, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and publishing in numerous literary journals and poetry anthologies. She has also been nominated for several awards that include Best New Poet, Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web (2011), and Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net (2008 and 2011).



Clare Martin, Author of
Eating the Heart First

 In Arnaudville, Clare read from her debut book of poetry, Eating the Heart First, published by Press 53 in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and I was stunned by the power of the poems she shared with us. They ranged from memories about her first child, Adam, who was born weighing only two pounds and maimed with cerebral palsy, to her bouts with mental darkness, and I kept thinking of two famous female poets, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, who gave us revelations of their darkest moments in stark and powerful language similar to that expressed in Eating the Heart First. I bought a copy of Clare’s book and spent Sat. evening reading the work of someone I had once divined would become a fine poet. Before I left the “Little Big Cup Restaurant,” site of the reading, Clare told me that she was going to send her book to Oprah, and I think she possesses just enough tenacity and talent to enlist Oprah’s endorsement of Eating the Heart First.



Authors: Diane Moore (L)
and Margaret Simon (R)

 Margaret Simon, author of Blessen, sat next to us at a front table, and was moved to tears by Clare’s reading, and Darrell Bourque, former poet laureate of Louisiana, whispered to me, “She is a good poet. Darrell endorsed the back cover of Eating the Heart First, praising Clare’s work as “an oneiric treatise guided by the powers she believes in: the power of memory, the power of water, the power of moons, the powers of longing, and the power of love.”







One of the shorter, lighter poems akin to Haiku that I favored in Eating the Heart First, is entitled “Tattoo:”

“She has a tattoo
on her hip of a painted
Chinese horse—the brushstroke
animal grazes at her waist.

Black ink struggles
as if locked in wind.
In muscular unison the horse
strides to her belly:
         a field of moons.

Copies of this impressive book of poetry can be purchased from Press 53, P.O. Box 30314, Winston-Salem, NC 27130. Cover design of Eating the Heart First by Kevin Morgan Watson, and cover art, “He Cometh Out of the Swamp,” by Pamela Womax. Author photo by Jo Depew.