Postcards from Peru
Written by Thomas Rain Crowe
As readers of this column know, I am a big fan of Tuckasegee writer Thomas Rain Crowe.
A man of indefatigable energy and many accomplishments, he’s authored 30-some books—poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, including his extraordinary memoir, Zoro’s Field, about his four years living alone in a cabin in the woods. He’s an editor, a translator, a publisher, an environmental activist and a musician. Last month he was awarded the prestigious George Scarborough Prize for Poetry at the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee.
Crowe’s latest work has a unique history—it’s a partnership with another high-achieving North Carolinian—visual artist Robert Johnson, who lives in Celo and Asheville. Their publication is the result of collaboration between two unlikely entities—a Brazilian publisher—and the North Carolina Arts Council.
Postcards from Peru is a surprisingly short book, only 63 pages. A cursory glance might indicate that it’s a collection of poetic memories from Crowe’s spring-time trip to Peru in 2003. And that it is, but it’s much more. The book has four distinct parts. There are the poems, of course, 13 of them—pulsating and deceptively simple like all Crowe’s poetry, brief and brilliant contemplations that only a poet of his keen observation skills and depth would discover. Secondly, there are 11 “postcards,” pithy prose pieces that Crowe wrote to artist and writer friends in the U.S. and abroad.
Like real postcards, these are written specifically to one person, with reference to that person’s history and individual passions. Unlike real postcards, they weren’t dashed off in haste, but exquisitely polished later to bring out Crowe’s inimitable detailed lyricism. Thirdly, is the appendix, which consists of short bios of the 11 people who received these “postcards.” The list is as inspiring as the poetry. These people, widely flung and wildly interesting, leads me to wonder—how does one person acquire so many fascinating friends? Subject for another book, I hope.
Lastly, and most apparent, is the art on the front and back covers by Robert Johnson, whose own trip to Peru in 2011, inspired these images. He traveled the country making sketches and then came home to North Carolina to create a series of Peru paintings. On the front cover, framed by a stone arch and vibrant plants and birds, is a high, moody view of Machu Picchu. On the back is a child-like surrealistic vision of Peru’s night sky, peopled by starry-birds and other Inca creatures. Johnson’s work, like Crowe’s, is happy and effervescent, always steeped in reverence for Nature
At the Blue Spiral 1 Gallery in downtown Asheville, in a specially prepared upstairs gallery, on August 24, Crowe and Johnson will be giving brief talks about their collaboration. Many of Johnson’s other paintings, including covers for other books, will be on display.
Many years ago, I was going to move to Peru with a journalist friend who planned to cover the Shining Path revolutionary movement for the American press. I extensively researched Machu Picchu, but I’d never read anything as moving as Crowe’s description of it. This is from his “postcard” to Michael Davitt (1950-2005), the Irish poet.
“Dear Michael, You wanted me to write to you from great heights and from someplace with a view of God. I have found this place for you and I must write….at the highest point in this small Inca city …there is a piece of sculptured stone they called the ‘hitching post of the sun.’ The curanderos priests were in charge of hitching the sun with a spiritual rope to insure the dawn and dusk, each day, until another solstice, and its constant orbit of the Earth…when I place my hands just above the surface of the sacred stone, I can feel the heat – a wave of kinetic pulse coming from the rock. This heat is not something that has collected here from the cloud-covered sun, but is born in the earth…The Quechua guide took me aside to tell me this… after I had taken my tingling hands away from the hitching stone…here there is much alive that we can’t see. It’s alive in the rocks and in the air. It’s alive in me.”
To Will Harlan, editor of Blue Ridge Outdoors, published in Asheville, Crowe writes about the treeless Ballestas Islands, off the coast of Peru, that are home to thousands of exotic birds and other wildlife and includes a huge “maternity beach” for sea lions that is a “bacchanal for bawling babes.” “Dear Will,” Crowe writes, “…It is wonderful to be here. To witness the fierce and momentary arc of life’s splendor. The verve!”
One of my favorite quotes is in Crowe’s “postcard” to Barbara Ann Carver-Hunt, a visual artist world-known for her goddess images, who lives now in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. “Dear Barbara Ann, All those archetypal goddess totem animals you put in your paintings— they are living here in Peru! The mythic birds, the half-horse-half-camels, the sea creatures with fur and silk, and the multi-colored snakes—all here!”
Postcards from Peru by Thomas Rain Crowe. Art by Robert Johnson. Published by Sol Negro Edições, Brasil (2013), 63 pp.
If You Go: Book Launch and Art Opening for Postcards from Peru, Saturday, August 24, beginning at 2 p.m. at the Blue Spiral 1 Gallery, 38 Biltmore Ave., Asheville. For more details call (828) 251-0202, or visit www.bluespiral1.com.
Chimes from A Cracked Southern Belle
Written by Susan Reinhardt
Susan Reinhardt is not your average Southern belle. Oh, yes, she’s gorgeous all right, though she sometimes whines about her butt which really is not that big. And of course she peppers all her hilarious put-downs with “Bless your hearts.”
She’s had enough real-life heartache to make Scarlett O’Hara look like Pollyanna, but with true belledom, she applies an extra dab of pink frosted lip gloss, pushes up her Wonder bra, twists a fly-away highlighted tress back in place and marches bravely into tomorrow.
Photo: Randy Whittington
In addition to being a full-time belle, Reinhardt is also a widely popular newspaper columnist, working for more than 25 years with the Asheville Citizen-Times where she makes fun of the secrets of her own life, along with the antics of her loopy family. She’s the author of three side-splitting non-fiction works including Not Tonight Honey, Wait Until I’m a Size 6, active in many charities, mother of two (one in high school, another in college), and happy wife to husband #2. Did I mention the nicest gal on the planet, too?
And now, after 9-1/2 years of off-again/on-again toil, she’s published her first full-length work of fiction—a riveting, brilliant, charming, wicked, and hilarious, I mean hilarious novel, appropriately titled, Chimes from A Cracked Southern Belle. Am I jealous of this woman? Of course not, my Yankee transplant butt, swear to Mother Mary, is teeny-tiny—Lawsy, I’m not jealous—Susan Reinhardt is my role model!
Reinhardt swears only 20% of the novel is autobiographical. No doubt, Lucinda Manning, the proverb-spouting, sweet-natured mother who insists on believing that her two grown daughters are still virgins, is based on her beloved real-life mother, Peggy. And then there’s Aunt Weepie, surely based on Aunt Betty whose antics have enlivened years of the newspaper columns. (Reinhardt insists that Aunt Betty, unlike Aunt Weepie, does not go to funerals and bawl up a storm graveside to get free meals afterwards.)
Two years ago, in Asheville, Dee Manning’s extraordinarily handsome preacher husband, Bryce Jeter, revealed to the world the monstrous side that he heretofore showed only to her—he tried to stab her to death and run her over with the church van in the Bi-Lo parking lot. Her daughter Miranda was too young to remember the incident. But son, Jay, does remember and has more nightmares than any 7-year-old genius should have.
Now age 38, Dee walks with a painful limp and uses extra foundation to cover up her 15 scars. To be near her mother, she’s settled into hometown Spartanburg, SC, and moved into an affordable apartment that her mother refers to as a white trash hovel. She gets a job helping out at the local old-folks home (which is full of unforgettable lovably goofy characters), and another job cleaning toilets at the local radio station, which eventually leads to another job as a radio host talking about what it means to be a mother these days.
Dee’s desire is to get her nursing degree and work with newborns and the dying, people at the extremities of life. In the meantime, she keeps trying to do what the older belles insist is the only way a woman can get on with recovery—get herself a new man. But Dee feels like she’s walking through molasses.
No matter how many times her therapists insist that she remember the details of her near-death experience she can’t. Nor can she bear to tell anyone about the nightmare of her honeymoon–why oh why, did she choose virtue over lust and not sleep ahead of time with the one man she said “I do,” to? What a Woman of Bad Choices! Dee must get it all together–and right soon—because there are threats her psychotic ex-husband is going to get out of prison early–and kill her for good.
Sounds funny, huh? But it is. When you’re not weeping at an incident on one of the pages of Chimes— let’s face it, there are many abused women in real life and they do find one another and share tales—you are laughing out loud.
Reinhardt doesn’t spare anyone in this novel, not Baptists, or single men, or therapists, or 104-year-old ladies trying to get their driver’s license renewed, or radio audiences, or prisons that don’t do their jobs, not even well-meaning mothers.
The only thing more funny than reading Reinhardt’s writing is seeing her in person. This month you’ll have two chances. Gossip says there might be special guests at each book signing. And there will be belle-treats for everyone who’s smart enough to buy a book. Knowing how entertaining Susan Reinhardt is, I’d plan on being at both events!
Chimes from A Cracked Southern Belle, written by Susan Reinhardt. Grateful Steps Publishing (2013, 374 pp.)
www.susanreinhardt.com
www.gratefulsteps.org
If You Go: Friday, August 2, at 7:30 p.m., before Steel Magnolias. Asheville Community Theatre 35 E. Walnut, downtown Asheville. For information: (828) 254-1320, www.ashevilletheatre.org.
Saturday, August 10 at 7 p.m. Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café. For information: (828) 254-6734, www.malaprops.com