A VISIT TO CROSS CREEK

On the return trip to New Iberia, Louisiana from Frostproof, Florida, we veered off course and stopped in Cross Creek to lunch with Jo Ann Lordahl, a long-time friend and author who has again settled in north central Florida after living fourteen years in Hawaii. We passed through scrub country, marshes and oak hammocks, and met Jo Ann at “The Yearling,” a large restaurant named after the book of that name written by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Jo Ann has settled a mile or so down the road from the home site of Rawlings (now a national park) and has chosen to “woodshed” and work on her memoir in the environment that inspired Rawlings to write The Yearling.

Jo Ann’s last book, A Secret Kept in Hawaii is a novel based in Kauai, a Hawaiian island where she lived and wrote about the threats to the good life of the postmodern world – GMOs, aggressive global corporations, military and governmental misdemeanors. She also captured the magic of this garden island and continued the story of how Samantha, a haole newcomer, settled into Hawaiian life permeated with the memory of High Chiefess Ruth. When Jo Ann read and dreamed about this native woman who was filled with mana power, she became inspired to probe into and relate the history, spirit, and culture of Hawaii.

Jo Ann returned to Florida last year and says she has moved her writing base approximately 100 times. She’s a “romantic, nomadic writer,” having published 23 books based in different locales. She lived briefly in Louisiana, and her books about the Pelican State can be found on a website bearing her name that lists her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry books. In addition to being an author, Jo Ann has a PhD in Psychology and presents workshops on self-improvement and writing. She has coordinated Women’s Voices, a performance-based poetry group in Florida, a lyric play entitled Four Women Speak, and her fellowships and residencies include the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida, and the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, California; Ucross, Wyoming.

We talked about Jo Ann’s latest, the memoir she is writing entitled My Unveiled Face: A Free Woman, in which she draws on material in 93 journals that she has kept during her lifetime, some of which have provided fodder for the stories and novels listed on her site. She plans to complete the memoir by April of this year, alternately writing and leading a poetry group in Gainesville, Florida.

We had to travel fast to reach Crestview, Florida, where we had booked lodging, before dark. We were treated to one of the wonderful sunsets prevalent on the Florida landscape just as we reached our destination, happy to have stopped for a reunion with a close friend we’ve known 38 years and who always inspires us to remain committed to the writing craft.

Photographs by Victoria I Sullivan

   

WEATHERING HEIGHTS

Fallen white pine, Sewanee

This will probably be the shortest blog I’ve done during seven years of blogging. The picture on the left indicates my whereabouts during an unusual winter visit to our second home at Sewanee. What you’re viewing is an accidentally-felled pine tree (!) at the end of our drive that will join the graveyard of trees we purposely felled in our front yard in New Iberia, Louisiana last month.

Foot prints in snow

As you can see, at least three inches of snow and the felled tree impede our progress out of here. It also impedes the mobility of six students whose cars are under the trunk of the felled pine. Why are we here? We came up from Louisiana to a meeting at St. Mary’s Convent and found our home had been

entered, keys and the remote to our electronic door stolen, a smoking parlor set up in my study, and the culprits were brazen enough to return to our property (supposedly protected against public invasions) the night we arrived and sat out on our porch, smoking and chatting it up. We rattled a door knob and they scattered, but we’ve been forced to install security in a cottage set between two dormitories and one fraternity house on the campus of the University of the South. We live in a community that touted having zero crime when we thought about moving to the university campus at Sewanee eight years ago. I hope this brief entry sets the record straight about that much-advertised propaganda.

Tree smashed six cars

Not to worry – we have two eggs, a half loaf of gluten-free bread, blueberries, rice and salsa, grits, ghee, and coffee, and we are hoping to get out of here within the next day or so for a trip to Florida. We have cell service, heat, water, and Sister Elizabeth says “a sense of humor.” But as Ma Kettle once commented, “some days it don’t pay to put on your clothes” (except that she must have lived in a warmer clime because I have on two layers)…

65 Fairbanks after snow storm

Mind you, I’m not grousing or boodaying or saying that I won’t return to this community one day (if I ever leave), but I’m having second thoughts about the wisdom of owning a place at “Weathering Heights.” Meanwhile, here are some pictures of the “disaster area” (minus a snap of the desk in my study that held a quilt borrowed from one bedroom and spread with tobacco leavings – I might add this campus is advertised as a “no smoking campus” – more propaganda)! Mischief is afoot in the world.

RETURN OF THE KAJUN KWEEN??

While packing up papers in anticipation of returning to Tennessee for a short visit to my home on The Mountain, I came across an old book entitled Of Other Worlds by C.S. Lewis. It includes an essay concerning his speculations about the famous Narnia stories for children, as well as those about his science fiction trilogy. The short essay that interested me, “It All Began With A Picture,” focused on how Lewis came to write The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which he explains that all of his seven Narnia books and three science fiction books began with seeing pictures in his head; e.g., the Lion began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood.

I experienced a sudden “aha” in my own head when I read this line, remembering how Kajun Kween, a young adult book I wrote several years ago, originated with a picture in my head of a six-foot, two-inches tall, 13-year old girl with feet that required size 12 shoes. The entire story, in comic book form, unfolded in my head. It featured this giraffe-like girl who interviewed for an actual comic strip publisher and beat out more ordinary jolie catins in a contest for a character who would become the heroine of this comic strip. Her job was to provide true adventures about her native Cajun French Louisiana; e.g., an encounter with a mama ‘gator protecting her egg nest; a stand-off with a giant snapping turtle; and an experience with a loup-garou late at night in a cypress swamp. The pictures in my head were described for and beautiful executed by Paul Schexnayder, New Iberia artist, for Kajun Kween.

Sketch by Paul
Schexnayder for Kajun
Kween

The picture that came into my mind as I planned the trip back to Tennessee was one of Petite Marie Melancon fulfilling the last line of Kajun Kween – she would be exploring new kingdoms. Thus, she might consider The Mountain at Sewanee in Tennessee. Pictures of adventures flashed in my head: ghosts appearing to Petite at Rugby, Tennessee where a Brit once tried to establish a Utopian colony; Petite attempting to hike to Fiery Gizzard;  a “See Rock City” trip to Chattanooga where she plunges off a cliff; an experience in which she becomes Queen of the Moon Pie Festival at Bell Buckle, Tennessee…

Since I’ve just completed a book of poetry, Street Sketches, which should appear in a few weeks, the pictures that appeared in my head about Petite Marie seem like they want to tell a story in 2016. Like Lewis, “I don’t know where the pictures came from, and I don’t believe anyone knows exactly how he/she makes thing up. Making up is a mysterious thing…” All I know is that the pictures will persist until the story is told. In Petite Marie’s case, four or five years passed before she was birthed. We’ll see how she responds when I return to the winter cold on The Mountain next week; that is, before we move on to Florida for a few days. Pictures of her exploring Florida may become cut lines for a comic strip based there -- elusive crocodiles in the Everglades, Disney World experiences, glass-bottomed boat rides, explorations of coral reefs… Petite has begun to travel a lot.

As Lewis notes, “the right sort [of stories] work from the common, universally human ground the stories share with the children, and indeed with countless adults.” Meanwhile, I’ll just enjoy the pictures forming in my head.