Rita Sims Quillen's Blog, page 2
April 25, 2017
PHOTO-ESSAY of my LIFE
OK, this wonderful photo-essay about my life and writing, which is featured on Christal Cooper's excellent book blog is worthy of its very own post. I hope you'll take a look.
Bookbloggers are now the lifeblood of book promotion. Traditional print publications like newspapers and magazines hardly review books at all, and if they do, it certainly isn't poetry books!
I'm proud and grateful to see this made available for readers!
Check it out:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2...
Thanks, as always!
Bookbloggers are now the lifeblood of book promotion. Traditional print publications like newspapers and magazines hardly review books at all, and if they do, it certainly isn't poetry books!
I'm proud and grateful to see this made available for readers!
Check it out:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2...
Thanks, as always!
March 21, 2017
The Origin of THE MAD FARMER'S WIFE
FOREWORD to THE MAD FARMER’S WIFE
by Rita Sims Quillen
(Texas Review Press, 2016)
In the early 1980’s my husband and I were living on a rocky hillside farm in southwestern Virginia with some cattle, goats, chickens, and two babies while I finished my M.A. at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee. That time in my life is a blur of stress and exhaustion. One thing I remember vividly is discovering the poetry of Kentucky author Wendell Berry. We had studied Berry’s essays on farming, the environment, and the economy in my graduate classes, but I was delighted to discover a whole new side of him revealed in his poetry. He had created a brilliant, funny, clear-eyed critic of the modern world called “The Mad Farmer,” and the voice in those poems from that persona’s perspective was immediately familiar and beloved. Within days of first reading them, I found myself writing a poem from the perspective of the Mad Farmer’s Wife—a companion, partner, sounding board, a counterpoint.
As I wrote more poems from her perspective, I realized she was now a permanent character who had taken up residence in my head. Unsure how Mr. Berry would feel about another poet drawing so heavily from his own poetic efforts, I wrote a letter of introduction and enclosed a couple of the poems, asking how he felt about what I was doing and would it be okay if I published some of the poems. He wrote back a very kind and gracious reply, assuring me that he, too, loved the Mad Farmer and was “very glad to finally meet his wife.”
Author Ed McClanahan, Berry’s long-time friend and neighbor, explains in his introduction to The Mad Farmer Poems that we would be mistaken if we misinterpret the character of the Mad Farmer as Berry himself, or even as a spokesperson for him. He is simply one of many characters Berry has assembled over the years for his novels and short stories. Whatever he is, it is clear to me that the Mad Farmer functions effectively as Everyman Farmer of his generation.
The Mad Farmer’s Wife and I have a similar relationship. Of course, she speaks out of my head, heart, and experiences. However, in my mind, she is about twelve to fifteen years older than I, has lived a much harder life, has done way more hard labor and farm work, and has seen more change and loss. In short, she’s been both luckier and unluckier. She is me and definitely not me.
The Mad Farmer speaks often of his wife, his partner, his love. She is, in fact, central to his life there on the farm, fitting in a most traditional role. Some modern readers may find the Mad Farmer a bit out-of-touch, and he himself says as much in Berry’s poem “Some Further Words” when he tells us that he’s an “old-fashioned man.” As The Mad Farmer goes on to explain in the same poem, modern readers may have no frame of reference for the type of marriage that two people shared on the land in those earlier times, which was both a business partnership and a deep bond of love, trust, and cooperation that is uncommon today. They both fell into very traditional roles on the farm and thought nothing of it. Berry writes:
And just as tenderly to be known
are the affections that make a woman and a man
their household and the homeland one.
These too, though known, cannot be told
to those who do not know them and fewer
of us learn them, year by year
loves that are leaving the world
like the colors of extinct birds
like the songs of a dead language. (*34)
The traditional roles and division of labor do not bother the Mad Farmer or his wife. They would be somewhat puzzled to be questioned about gender roles or stereotypes. They go with the flow of nature and time, having no agenda or making no political statement at all beyond a good harvest and doing right by the land, their animals, their neighbors, themselves, their work and their life, doing whatever work there is and, as Berry writes in “The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer,” seeing that it is “…done with more than enough knowledge/ and more than enough love/ by those who do not have to be told. (*16)”
The Mad Farmer’s Wife has a story to tell, some small wisdom she wants to offer the world before she goes, as someone who has lived life at its most elemental level. In these poems she wants us to think about the price of that life, but even more about the price of not living that life. Young women today certainly could teach her a great deal about many things, the practical and the ideological, but they could also learn from her. If nothing else, maybe she can help everyone understand there’s only one thing that really matters when it’s all said and done and over: love, especially the love between a man and a woman raising a family and working the land together. As the poem “The Mad Farmer Dances” tries to explain, everyone should consider: “The grandest of mysteries—love and its stubbornness---/that wide velvet ribbon holding a marriage/Made of things so tiny you could breathe them.”
Rita Sims Quillen
Berry, Wendell. The Mad Farmer Poems. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008.
by Rita Sims Quillen
(Texas Review Press, 2016)
In the early 1980’s my husband and I were living on a rocky hillside farm in southwestern Virginia with some cattle, goats, chickens, and two babies while I finished my M.A. at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee. That time in my life is a blur of stress and exhaustion. One thing I remember vividly is discovering the poetry of Kentucky author Wendell Berry. We had studied Berry’s essays on farming, the environment, and the economy in my graduate classes, but I was delighted to discover a whole new side of him revealed in his poetry. He had created a brilliant, funny, clear-eyed critic of the modern world called “The Mad Farmer,” and the voice in those poems from that persona’s perspective was immediately familiar and beloved. Within days of first reading them, I found myself writing a poem from the perspective of the Mad Farmer’s Wife—a companion, partner, sounding board, a counterpoint.
As I wrote more poems from her perspective, I realized she was now a permanent character who had taken up residence in my head. Unsure how Mr. Berry would feel about another poet drawing so heavily from his own poetic efforts, I wrote a letter of introduction and enclosed a couple of the poems, asking how he felt about what I was doing and would it be okay if I published some of the poems. He wrote back a very kind and gracious reply, assuring me that he, too, loved the Mad Farmer and was “very glad to finally meet his wife.”
Author Ed McClanahan, Berry’s long-time friend and neighbor, explains in his introduction to The Mad Farmer Poems that we would be mistaken if we misinterpret the character of the Mad Farmer as Berry himself, or even as a spokesperson for him. He is simply one of many characters Berry has assembled over the years for his novels and short stories. Whatever he is, it is clear to me that the Mad Farmer functions effectively as Everyman Farmer of his generation.
The Mad Farmer’s Wife and I have a similar relationship. Of course, she speaks out of my head, heart, and experiences. However, in my mind, she is about twelve to fifteen years older than I, has lived a much harder life, has done way more hard labor and farm work, and has seen more change and loss. In short, she’s been both luckier and unluckier. She is me and definitely not me.
The Mad Farmer speaks often of his wife, his partner, his love. She is, in fact, central to his life there on the farm, fitting in a most traditional role. Some modern readers may find the Mad Farmer a bit out-of-touch, and he himself says as much in Berry’s poem “Some Further Words” when he tells us that he’s an “old-fashioned man.” As The Mad Farmer goes on to explain in the same poem, modern readers may have no frame of reference for the type of marriage that two people shared on the land in those earlier times, which was both a business partnership and a deep bond of love, trust, and cooperation that is uncommon today. They both fell into very traditional roles on the farm and thought nothing of it. Berry writes:
And just as tenderly to be known
are the affections that make a woman and a man
their household and the homeland one.
These too, though known, cannot be told
to those who do not know them and fewer
of us learn them, year by year
loves that are leaving the world
like the colors of extinct birds
like the songs of a dead language. (*34)
The traditional roles and division of labor do not bother the Mad Farmer or his wife. They would be somewhat puzzled to be questioned about gender roles or stereotypes. They go with the flow of nature and time, having no agenda or making no political statement at all beyond a good harvest and doing right by the land, their animals, their neighbors, themselves, their work and their life, doing whatever work there is and, as Berry writes in “The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer,” seeing that it is “…done with more than enough knowledge/ and more than enough love/ by those who do not have to be told. (*16)”
The Mad Farmer’s Wife has a story to tell, some small wisdom she wants to offer the world before she goes, as someone who has lived life at its most elemental level. In these poems she wants us to think about the price of that life, but even more about the price of not living that life. Young women today certainly could teach her a great deal about many things, the practical and the ideological, but they could also learn from her. If nothing else, maybe she can help everyone understand there’s only one thing that really matters when it’s all said and done and over: love, especially the love between a man and a woman raising a family and working the land together. As the poem “The Mad Farmer Dances” tries to explain, everyone should consider: “The grandest of mysteries—love and its stubbornness---/that wide velvet ribbon holding a marriage/Made of things so tiny you could breathe them.”
Rita Sims Quillen
Berry, Wendell. The Mad Farmer Poems. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008.
March 9, 2017
Weatherford Award finalist!
I was thrilled to learn last weekend that my new poetry book THE MAD FARMER'S WIFE was a finalist for Berea College's annual Weatherford Award for Appalachian Literature in poetry for this year. I'm grateful and honored!
You write because you can't stop yourself, and if you're a poet, with no expectation of any financial gain, that's for sure. But to at least get a nod from fellow poets certainly makes you feel good.
I'm so grateful to Texas Review Press and all the good folks who read, commented on, cheered on, and believed. Thank you. Thank you. The Mad Farmer's Wife is happy, too, that people wanted to hear what she had to say. Many would ignore her as just an old country woman with nothing to teach us, but that would be a mistake. She represents an important of our past, present, and most importantly, our future.
Read all about my work and the Mad Farmer's Wife at my website www.ritasimsquillen.com. Thank you for stopping by!
You write because you can't stop yourself, and if you're a poet, with no expectation of any financial gain, that's for sure. But to at least get a nod from fellow poets certainly makes you feel good.
I'm so grateful to Texas Review Press and all the good folks who read, commented on, cheered on, and believed. Thank you. Thank you. The Mad Farmer's Wife is happy, too, that people wanted to hear what she had to say. Many would ignore her as just an old country woman with nothing to teach us, but that would be a mistake. She represents an important of our past, present, and most importantly, our future.
Read all about my work and the Mad Farmer's Wife at my website www.ritasimsquillen.com. Thank you for stopping by!
November 11, 2016
Please Review Books
The very best thing you can do if you love literature, love to read, is review/rate books. Now that there's the explosion of self-publishing, e-books, etc., coupled with the almost total collapse of book-reviewing in most newspapers and magazines, the reader is overwhelmed and confused!
I hope you'll take a moment to post your evaluations of what you read here on Goodreads and Amazon-those are the main sources these days of recommendations!
Maybe some of you who have read any/all of my books-- WAYLAND, SOME NOTES YOU HOLD, THE MAD FARMER'S WIFE, HER SECRET DREAM or SOMETHING SOLID TO ANCHOR TO (poetry) and HIDING EZRA (novel)-- will consider giving at least a rating--I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
There's certainly no money in writing for someone like me, but at least I get the thrill of connecting with readers and the satisfaction of creating art. Reviews are the only "pay" I get really, and they're as good as gold to me.
I hope you'll take a moment to post your evaluations of what you read here on Goodreads and Amazon-those are the main sources these days of recommendations!
Maybe some of you who have read any/all of my books-- WAYLAND, SOME NOTES YOU HOLD, THE MAD FARMER'S WIFE, HER SECRET DREAM or SOMETHING SOLID TO ANCHOR TO (poetry) and HIDING EZRA (novel)-- will consider giving at least a rating--I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
There's certainly no money in writing for someone like me, but at least I get the thrill of connecting with readers and the satisfaction of creating art. Reviews are the only "pay" I get really, and they're as good as gold to me.
September 27, 2016
Help Small Presses Survive
Friends- I have nothing against Amazon or Barnes&Noble. They provide good service and good jobs to employees. But I want to champion the cause of small presses like the ones I've always published with and encourage you to shop directly with them whenever possible. They operate on really small margins, but publish good work that is read every day by thousands of readers. Without them, many wonderful books would never see the light of day in the increasingly small world of "bigtime publishers."
That's why I want to post a link to the Texas A&M Press Consortium Press website so you can go there directly and order my book THE MAD FARMER'S WIFE from Texas Review Press if you're interested.
http://www.tamupress.com/product/The-...
Even if you don't normally read poetry, I hope you'll give this book a look. You can Google my name and find samples of the poems from the book on several online magazine websites: the opening poem was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the Potomac Review, and I'm thrilled with that.
I've devoted the last year or so to writing a sequel to my novel HIDING EZRA, and I love writing fiction, too. But poetry is a cause so near and dear to my heart as a writer. It presents a freedom and a challenge that is different from fiction-writing, and I relish it!
The Mad Farmer's Wife will be making her way out into the world in a few days, and I can't wait for you to meet her!
That's why I want to post a link to the Texas A&M Press Consortium Press website so you can go there directly and order my book THE MAD FARMER'S WIFE from Texas Review Press if you're interested.
http://www.tamupress.com/product/The-...
Even if you don't normally read poetry, I hope you'll give this book a look. You can Google my name and find samples of the poems from the book on several online magazine websites: the opening poem was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the Potomac Review, and I'm thrilled with that.
I've devoted the last year or so to writing a sequel to my novel HIDING EZRA, and I love writing fiction, too. But poetry is a cause so near and dear to my heart as a writer. It presents a freedom and a challenge that is different from fiction-writing, and I relish it!
The Mad Farmer's Wife will be making her way out into the world in a few days, and I can't wait for you to meet her!
August 22, 2016
Inoculation
I don't know what the subject of this blog will be. Like every writer, I want to tell the world something, but what?
Everything I want to say is forbidden, taboo: I want to whine and wail about things great and small. I want people to be kind and wish me well, to be honest and sincere. I want to see karma descend on some people like a psychotic buzzard. I want to stop replaying the tape of awful days I can't change and lives I can't lead. I want to practice what I preach. I want to live happy and grateful.
But I find myself unable to do any of that some days, make anything happen in the real world or the virtual one.
So I create a new world.
When I was a young child, I learned you could go wherever you wanted in a book, and if you didn't like where you were, all you had to do is close the book and open another. As an adult, I found out I could create those new worlds, those alternate realities. I didn't have to search and try somebody else's life on for size; I could be anywhere my mind could take me. On paper, life could be any way I wanted.
In recent years, I've somehow lived through the most awful times of my life; some of the pain was the universal variety--illness and care-giving and losing people. But some of the other stuff, while it may be just as universal, isn't something you share with others, and certainly not in a public way. There are problems and heartbreaks and mistakes and struggles that must be yours and yours alone.
We hear about the famous mid-life crisis: if I had one, I was too busy and stressed to notice. I think I just skipped that and went straight to a nearing-the-end-of-life crisis.
So I'm writing/running for my life. I've almost finished the third book in three years--a creative frenzy unlike anything I've ever experienced in the 30+ years I've been writing and publishing. Maybe if I can put enough words on the page, if I can write enough words to fully "unpack my heart" as Shakespeare famously put it, I can lift this burden and dream happier dreams. I suspect that none of the things that would need to happen to make me feel truly better and relieved and at peace are ever going to happen. But writing can be my spiritual and psychological EpiPen and stop the negative reaction!
If you need a balm for your spirit and you can't find it anywhere else, there's always a book in need of a reader. Or a blog that needs a writer.
Everything I want to say is forbidden, taboo: I want to whine and wail about things great and small. I want people to be kind and wish me well, to be honest and sincere. I want to see karma descend on some people like a psychotic buzzard. I want to stop replaying the tape of awful days I can't change and lives I can't lead. I want to practice what I preach. I want to live happy and grateful.
But I find myself unable to do any of that some days, make anything happen in the real world or the virtual one.
So I create a new world.
When I was a young child, I learned you could go wherever you wanted in a book, and if you didn't like where you were, all you had to do is close the book and open another. As an adult, I found out I could create those new worlds, those alternate realities. I didn't have to search and try somebody else's life on for size; I could be anywhere my mind could take me. On paper, life could be any way I wanted.
In recent years, I've somehow lived through the most awful times of my life; some of the pain was the universal variety--illness and care-giving and losing people. But some of the other stuff, while it may be just as universal, isn't something you share with others, and certainly not in a public way. There are problems and heartbreaks and mistakes and struggles that must be yours and yours alone.
We hear about the famous mid-life crisis: if I had one, I was too busy and stressed to notice. I think I just skipped that and went straight to a nearing-the-end-of-life crisis.
So I'm writing/running for my life. I've almost finished the third book in three years--a creative frenzy unlike anything I've ever experienced in the 30+ years I've been writing and publishing. Maybe if I can put enough words on the page, if I can write enough words to fully "unpack my heart" as Shakespeare famously put it, I can lift this burden and dream happier dreams. I suspect that none of the things that would need to happen to make me feel truly better and relieved and at peace are ever going to happen. But writing can be my spiritual and psychological EpiPen and stop the negative reaction!
If you need a balm for your spirit and you can't find it anywhere else, there's always a book in need of a reader. Or a blog that needs a writer.
July 27, 2016
THE MAD FARMER'S WIFE
THE MAD FARMER'S WIFE, my latest book, is poetry based on my life on a small cattle farm, and also on the work of Kentucky poet Wendell Berry, who created an unforgettable voice known to his readers as "the Mad Farmer." I've been writing poems from the Mad Farmer's Wife for many years, and finally had enough poems to make a book of her observations about life, love, marriage, parenting, and living the farm life. I hope the world is kind to her.
I know one thing for sure: some fellow poets have been awfully kind to her, as evidenced by these generous book jacket blurbs about the book!
"In this collection Rita Quillen reveals the distinctiveness and depth of her poetry. Here the mountains speak, and the poet speaks to and of the mountains. These poems are an homage and complement to Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer poems, bringing a rural time and place vividly alive. They are poems of history and memory, the bonds of family and land, motherhood and loss. Quillen celebrates the poetry of work and prayer, honoring a woman’s loneliness, and kinship with wildlife, and moments of surprising humor, moments of intense connection, fierce love.
----Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek
This book has a strong heart, sharp eyes, a clear mind, a lively and honest tongue, a singing voice, and a passionate soul. It mourns the world we’ve lost at the same it deeply relishes the life we still have on this earth. Read Rita Quillen’s The Mad Farmer’s Wife as an act of thanking your lucky stars.
--David Huddle, author of Glory River, Blacksnake at the Family Reunion, and Dream Sender
All good poetry offers up a haunting line that begs to be pulled out of its narrative, in order to redeem innumerable personal narratives. Rita Quillen’s collection The Mad Farmer’s Wife is rich in memorable verses that compel us to look deeply into our own plowed and unplowed lives. “There is a reason I am ritual,” we read, “Every kind of metaphor,/ The only balm for every kind of sore.” Quillen exposes, often to heal, the tender spots of our own lives through poems that parallel, brilliantly, the balance between acceptance and resistance that characterize the poet and the farmer (Quillen is both), a shared indebtedness to a richly worded land. How fortunate we are—page after page, metaphor in hand—to be partakers of such bounty.
--Sofia M. Starnes, Poet Laureate of Virginia 2012-14"
Even if you don't usually read poetry, I hope you'll add this one to your shelf and give it a look. The Mad Farmer's Wife has much to say that we all need to hear.
I know one thing for sure: some fellow poets have been awfully kind to her, as evidenced by these generous book jacket blurbs about the book!
"In this collection Rita Quillen reveals the distinctiveness and depth of her poetry. Here the mountains speak, and the poet speaks to and of the mountains. These poems are an homage and complement to Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer poems, bringing a rural time and place vividly alive. They are poems of history and memory, the bonds of family and land, motherhood and loss. Quillen celebrates the poetry of work and prayer, honoring a woman’s loneliness, and kinship with wildlife, and moments of surprising humor, moments of intense connection, fierce love.
----Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek
This book has a strong heart, sharp eyes, a clear mind, a lively and honest tongue, a singing voice, and a passionate soul. It mourns the world we’ve lost at the same it deeply relishes the life we still have on this earth. Read Rita Quillen’s The Mad Farmer’s Wife as an act of thanking your lucky stars.
--David Huddle, author of Glory River, Blacksnake at the Family Reunion, and Dream Sender
All good poetry offers up a haunting line that begs to be pulled out of its narrative, in order to redeem innumerable personal narratives. Rita Quillen’s collection The Mad Farmer’s Wife is rich in memorable verses that compel us to look deeply into our own plowed and unplowed lives. “There is a reason I am ritual,” we read, “Every kind of metaphor,/ The only balm for every kind of sore.” Quillen exposes, often to heal, the tender spots of our own lives through poems that parallel, brilliantly, the balance between acceptance and resistance that characterize the poet and the farmer (Quillen is both), a shared indebtedness to a richly worded land. How fortunate we are—page after page, metaphor in hand—to be partakers of such bounty.
--Sofia M. Starnes, Poet Laureate of Virginia 2012-14"
Even if you don't usually read poetry, I hope you'll add this one to your shelf and give it a look. The Mad Farmer's Wife has much to say that we all need to hear.
December 17, 2015
Merry Christmas
Here's a favorite Christmas song, one you probably haven't heard, from here in the Appalachian mountains. Wishing you and yours the most wonderful holiday season ever!
https://youtu.be/oXmhLA--NIE
Rita Quillen
HIDING EZRA, a true WWI story you haven't heard before....
https://youtu.be/oXmhLA--NIE
Rita Quillen
HIDING EZRA, a true WWI story you haven't heard before....
September 22, 2015
I'm Back, and I'm the Mad Farmer's Wife
So I have been quiet for a long time.MY novel HIDING EZRA has been out for about a year and a half and has been well-received. People keep asking if I'm working on a sequel. Not yet. It's because something magical happened: I was overcome by poetry.
In defiance of all common sense and practicality, right after I'd just published my first novel, when I should have been writing the sequel or just anything as long as it was more fiction or non-fiction that would appeal to the same audience, I was overtaken by a poetic voice unlike anything I'd ever experienced.
So here I am, with a full-length poetry collection all finished, and it seems to be good work, and certainly something new for me. It's called THE MAD FARMER'S WIFE and it plays off the persona created by Kentucky poet and essayist Wendell Berry, a character called the Mad Farmer, who has been informing and enriching Mr. Berry's poetry for at least 25 years. My poems give voice to a woman working and living on the land, giving us her perspective on the life of the farm family in these strange times when agriculture is dying out as a way of life, a family venture, a culture all its own, and being replaced by a strictly industrial machine.
If I were trying to have a "career," or if I had an agent, I'm sure we'd be worried and I'd be promising to get back to "real work" and write some prose.
But I've never been more excited, exhilarated, more liberated, more proud to tell you that the book was accepted by the first press I submitted it to: Texas Review Press, affiliated with Sam Houston University and the Texas A & M publishing consortium, and will be published in the fall of 2016.
Oh, I am committed to getting back to working on another novel this fall. I've got some ideas percolating. But what I am first and foremost is just an artist. I'm not a business or an industry or something commercial. I know my presses are, and I'll do everything I can to help them make money. But I'm only interested in making art. Which means I sometimes have to do things like write poems about the world of the Mad Farmer's Wife.
In defiance of all common sense and practicality, right after I'd just published my first novel, when I should have been writing the sequel or just anything as long as it was more fiction or non-fiction that would appeal to the same audience, I was overtaken by a poetic voice unlike anything I'd ever experienced.
So here I am, with a full-length poetry collection all finished, and it seems to be good work, and certainly something new for me. It's called THE MAD FARMER'S WIFE and it plays off the persona created by Kentucky poet and essayist Wendell Berry, a character called the Mad Farmer, who has been informing and enriching Mr. Berry's poetry for at least 25 years. My poems give voice to a woman working and living on the land, giving us her perspective on the life of the farm family in these strange times when agriculture is dying out as a way of life, a family venture, a culture all its own, and being replaced by a strictly industrial machine.
If I were trying to have a "career," or if I had an agent, I'm sure we'd be worried and I'd be promising to get back to "real work" and write some prose.
But I've never been more excited, exhilarated, more liberated, more proud to tell you that the book was accepted by the first press I submitted it to: Texas Review Press, affiliated with Sam Houston University and the Texas A & M publishing consortium, and will be published in the fall of 2016.
Oh, I am committed to getting back to working on another novel this fall. I've got some ideas percolating. But what I am first and foremost is just an artist. I'm not a business or an industry or something commercial. I know my presses are, and I'll do everything I can to help them make money. But I'm only interested in making art. Which means I sometimes have to do things like write poems about the world of the Mad Farmer's Wife.
May 4, 2015
Beware the OUTRAGE MACHINE!
Here's a tale of bandwagons and prisons, personal history and Scott County, Virginia history, and dark days....I hope it encourages some reflection.
BEWARE THE BANDWAGON
It seems that not a week passes these days without somebody getting all worked up and outraged about something, some new horrible thing that’s going to end” Life As We Know It”-it’s all over the mainstream media and social media. Everybody is urged to jump on that bandwagon and share and post and tweet and email and march and protest and petition.
In recent months, for example, a photographer who took an innocent picture of a soldier holding his baby in an American flag had her life turned upside down by a vicious e-mob reaction. In another case, a professor who accidentally sent her students a link to a disgusting pornographic site almost lost her job after the mob demanded her head. It’s a really disturbing phenomenon, because I learned a long time ago that no mob is moral or responsible, even if their ideas are correct or cause is just. Often times mobs form based on wrong or incomplete information. Either way, it’s just not something I want to be a part of. That’s because I’ve been where these targets have found themselves, but thank goodness, it was before the days of Twitter and Facebook and email. I shudder to think what would have happened if those had been available. It’s a real possibility we’d have been the target of physical violence or property damage because of social media’s ability to intensify emotion and de-humanize people.
Let me tell you a little story, with a little Scott County history thrown in, to illustrate why. Twenty years ago, I saw hysteria in action. My husband decided he wanted to do something for the community, so he volunteered to serve on the county Industrial Development Authority, charged with bringing jobs to our county. At that time it was an unpaid volunteer job, subject to appointment by the Board of Supervisors, and their charge was to find ways to bring new jobs. About that time, the state of VA decided it had to increase its prison capacity and set out to build prisons, both public and private.
While nobody likes prisons and it’s clearly questionable as to whether our current philosophy of incarcerating everybody instead of treating addictions and mental illness is a good idea, it is, nevertheless, an undeniable fact that we have to have prisons somewhere. (And I know all about why private prisons are controversial; the state of VA evidently came to the conclusion not to go that route, after all, and I think that was a good decision.) Anyway,after a year of exhaustive research, including traveling to other communities where prisons were located, etc. , the Board of Supervisors decided to try to get those good-paying jobs here, and they would try to get one of the new prisons located in our county. The IDA started the process of making it happen. You’d have thought the world was ending.
Some in Scott County wanted nothing to do with prisons. People wrote letters to the local papers accusing my husband (he was the chairman) and others of benefiting somehow financially from the proposed prisons-complete nonsense. He was called a “crooked politician” when he was no kind of politician at all, only a volunteer. Our phone rang off the hook day and night with people railing at us, making wild claims that had already been thoroughly researched and debunked by the board and other officials. Law enforcement had to walk board members and county officials to cars after public meetings because of the violent rhetoric that took over. We received anonymous threatening calls, even at work. People who had known us all our lives, practically, and should have known my husband’s heart and his integrity called to tell him they were no longer his friends and they’d never speak to him again.
It was a truly depressing experience.
Eventually, the two new prisons were built in neighboring Lee and Wise counties where, twenty years in, absolutely none of the horror stories opponents promoted have come true, and most of the good benefits the IDA tried to explain to people have also come true. (By the way, the almost identical scenario had played out about a generation before when VA decided to build a community college in Scott County. Mountain Empire Community College wound up being built in Wise County, too. People in Scott County said a college would bring drugs and social unrest to our county back in the 60s. Seriously.)
All I’m saying is this-fear is often out of the gate first and facts are slow to catch up. Beware: all forms of media, anyone seeking to increase their own power, and fear itself- all thrive on mobs. Ascribing the worst of motives to people, slandering, believing every wild tale you hear, and refusing to even listen to both sides of an issue can make you the bad guy in many instances. Caution is always advised. Beware of the TV News, Facebook, or Twitter Outrage Machine.
BEWARE THE BANDWAGON
It seems that not a week passes these days without somebody getting all worked up and outraged about something, some new horrible thing that’s going to end” Life As We Know It”-it’s all over the mainstream media and social media. Everybody is urged to jump on that bandwagon and share and post and tweet and email and march and protest and petition.
In recent months, for example, a photographer who took an innocent picture of a soldier holding his baby in an American flag had her life turned upside down by a vicious e-mob reaction. In another case, a professor who accidentally sent her students a link to a disgusting pornographic site almost lost her job after the mob demanded her head. It’s a really disturbing phenomenon, because I learned a long time ago that no mob is moral or responsible, even if their ideas are correct or cause is just. Often times mobs form based on wrong or incomplete information. Either way, it’s just not something I want to be a part of. That’s because I’ve been where these targets have found themselves, but thank goodness, it was before the days of Twitter and Facebook and email. I shudder to think what would have happened if those had been available. It’s a real possibility we’d have been the target of physical violence or property damage because of social media’s ability to intensify emotion and de-humanize people.
Let me tell you a little story, with a little Scott County history thrown in, to illustrate why. Twenty years ago, I saw hysteria in action. My husband decided he wanted to do something for the community, so he volunteered to serve on the county Industrial Development Authority, charged with bringing jobs to our county. At that time it was an unpaid volunteer job, subject to appointment by the Board of Supervisors, and their charge was to find ways to bring new jobs. About that time, the state of VA decided it had to increase its prison capacity and set out to build prisons, both public and private.
While nobody likes prisons and it’s clearly questionable as to whether our current philosophy of incarcerating everybody instead of treating addictions and mental illness is a good idea, it is, nevertheless, an undeniable fact that we have to have prisons somewhere. (And I know all about why private prisons are controversial; the state of VA evidently came to the conclusion not to go that route, after all, and I think that was a good decision.) Anyway,after a year of exhaustive research, including traveling to other communities where prisons were located, etc. , the Board of Supervisors decided to try to get those good-paying jobs here, and they would try to get one of the new prisons located in our county. The IDA started the process of making it happen. You’d have thought the world was ending.
Some in Scott County wanted nothing to do with prisons. People wrote letters to the local papers accusing my husband (he was the chairman) and others of benefiting somehow financially from the proposed prisons-complete nonsense. He was called a “crooked politician” when he was no kind of politician at all, only a volunteer. Our phone rang off the hook day and night with people railing at us, making wild claims that had already been thoroughly researched and debunked by the board and other officials. Law enforcement had to walk board members and county officials to cars after public meetings because of the violent rhetoric that took over. We received anonymous threatening calls, even at work. People who had known us all our lives, practically, and should have known my husband’s heart and his integrity called to tell him they were no longer his friends and they’d never speak to him again.
It was a truly depressing experience.
Eventually, the two new prisons were built in neighboring Lee and Wise counties where, twenty years in, absolutely none of the horror stories opponents promoted have come true, and most of the good benefits the IDA tried to explain to people have also come true. (By the way, the almost identical scenario had played out about a generation before when VA decided to build a community college in Scott County. Mountain Empire Community College wound up being built in Wise County, too. People in Scott County said a college would bring drugs and social unrest to our county back in the 60s. Seriously.)
All I’m saying is this-fear is often out of the gate first and facts are slow to catch up. Beware: all forms of media, anyone seeking to increase their own power, and fear itself- all thrive on mobs. Ascribing the worst of motives to people, slandering, believing every wild tale you hear, and refusing to even listen to both sides of an issue can make you the bad guy in many instances. Caution is always advised. Beware of the TV News, Facebook, or Twitter Outrage Machine.
