by Jess McCuan

Women of Words, l-r: Cathy Smith Bowers, Glenis Redmond, Pat Riviere-Seel and Emoke B’Racz.

Being poet laureate is not as glamorous as it looks. Kathryn Stripling Byer was appointed in 2005 but struggles to make time for her own work. Photo by Corinna Byer.Western North Carolina claims its share of famous writers. Thomas Wolfe, Charles Frazier and Carl Sandburg are among the most well known (though Sandburg was born in Illinois and only moved to Flat Rock late in life). For years, few on the list of nationally known WNC authors were women and even fewer were female poets. North Carolina governors have appointed state poet laureates since 1935, and for 70 years they chose men—many of whom lived or taught in the Piedmont or on the coast. In its 24 years of operation, Black Mountain College attracted important avant-garde poets like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov, but none were from the area and few stayed after the school shut down in 1957. 

While big universities elsewhere in the state were  attracting high-profile poets like Randall Jarrell (who taught at UNC-Greensboro in the 1950s and ‘60s) and Maya Angelou (a lifetime professor at Wake Forest starting in 1981), the poetry scene in the mountains left much to be desired. “The mountains of North Carolina have been ignored both politically and by the larger literary community,” says Pat Riviere-Seel, a poet born in Shelby, North Carolina, who moved to Asheville in 1999 and was president of the North Carolina Poetry Society from 2005 to 2007. “We do have so many good poets from Western North Carolina, but traditionally it’s been the east that gets the attention.”

In the last few years, though, the mountain literary scene has bloomed. A Cullowhee poet, Kathryn Stripling Byer, was appointed North Carolina’s state poet laureate in 2005. New writers are coming up through workshops and MFA programs like the ones offered at UNCA and Warren Wilson College. A-list authors from New York, D.C. and other big cities are moving in as the area attracts more newcomers, and Asheville now has a handful of literary journals including the Asheville Poetry Review, which is published annually and distributed in 35 states. Keith Flynn, a Marshall native and Asheville Poetry Review’s founder and managing editor, says that when he moved back to Western North Carolina in 1993, he saw “an explosion of activity in the downtown area” that included writer’s groups and poetry slams. Since then, as more and more writers have poured in, the Asheville lit scene may not have the star power or cachet of, say, New York City’s or L.A.’s, but “so many fine writers have either moved to the mountains or been moved sufficiently by them that it’s become impossible to ignore the quantity and quality of the work,” he says. 

Still, some worry that an influx of city slickers means the literary scene will actually suffer. Emoke B’Racz, a poet who owns Malaprop’s Bookstore & Café in downtown Asheville, says when she opened her store 26 years ago Asheville was basically an “empty town.” Now she wonders if an onslaught of new development all at once could be the “kiss of death” for the downtown scene. “It’s a tough issue,” she says. “Now that Asheville is famous for art, music and literature, we’re going to make it better by having more expensive stores and opportunities to purchase. I think that’s really oppressive to the arts.” 
Suffering or flourishing, the lit scene has grown. And while they are gaining regional—and in some cases, national—recognition, women writers here still struggle to measure their own success. For prose writers, the way was paved to some extent by Wilma Dykeman, who was born in Asheville in 1920 and spent a lifetime chronicling mountain life and culture in nonfiction books like The French Broad (1955) and novels like The Tall Woman (1966) and Return the Innocent Earth (1973). 

But poetry is always a tougher sell than prose, among both publishers and readers. B’Racz, a Hungarian emigrant who moved to the U.S. in high school, says it would be nice for more people to read her work. She’s published two books of poetry, both of which are mainly distributed locally. “Yeah, I really would like to be Mary Oliver,” she says, referring to the Ohio-born, Pulitzer prize-winning poet who has published more than 30 books. “I’d like to have publishers knocking on my door and be going on tours. But that’s not my goal. My goal is to write and encourage and be the fool so that others become brave and write their stuff.” Even Byer, the state poet laureate, who loves the visibility she has among local audiences, daydreams about bigger book deals and national recognition. “I would like for people outside the South to read my work and for them not to think of it as regional poetry,” she says. “Maybe someday people in New York City and out in Seattle will take my work more seriously.” 

Glenis Redmond, an Asheville performance poet, might measure her success a bit differently. First, Redmond has the unusual distinction of being a full-time working poet. And no, she’s not kidding. “People always think I’m being cheeky when I say I’m a full-time poet,” she says. A native of Greenville, South Carolina, Redmond was working as a counselor until she stepped out of that career and into the slam poetry scene in the ‘90s. She took on topics like her family—her grandmother (who’s now 108), her mother, her aunts and the family’s West African heritage. She won the Southeast Regional Individual Poetry Slam two years in a row and placed in the top ten at the National Individual Slam Championship in 1996 and 1997. The strength of her speaking and performing means she can now get paid bookings at schools, colleges, festivals and other venues (though she doesn’t do the slam circuit anymore). She’s finishing her MFA at Warren Wilson and just published a book, Under the Sun, in August. Outside of, oh, say, winning a Pushcart, a prestigious prize given to works published on small presses, she’d like to have more people come to her instead of her spending six months of the year on the road. “The fact that I’m making a living from writing is an accomplishment,” she says. “Still, I’d like to get to a point where I could take a year off.”

As state poet laureate, Kathryn Stripling Byer’s duties include traveling, speaking, promoting North Carolina poets and networking with those poets (check out her blogs: kathrynstriplingbyer.blogspot.com and ncpoetlaureate.blogspot.com). Unfortunately, all the connectedness in the past three years hasn’t left her much time to contemplate her own work. As laureate, she writes commissioned poems to commemorate events or important people and she often composes them while sitting at the computer. But Byer, who was born in southwest Georgia and moved to Cullowhee in 1968, says the poems she considers her own are written out longhand. One of her favorite and most frequent subjects is the hardscrabble lives of women in the mountains, and creating a poem on this topic might involve scribbling something on paper and then mulling it over for months or years before she types it up at the computer. Next year, when she leaves the laureate gig, she’ll dig into finishing three manuscripts, which will mean “shutting myself in a room somewhere,” she says. 

Cathy Smith Bowers takes a similar approach, except she shuts herself in a town. The town is Tryon, North Carolina, 30 minutes southeast of Hendersonville, where she has lived for 5 years and has not told many of her neighbors about her poetry. “I’d like to have some friends,” she jokes. “I love not being taken too seriously in Tryon.” Bowers, a South Carolina native, is known for her wit but often writes about death and loss and considers herself part of the Southern Gothic tradition of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. She has taught writing for 25 years at Queens University of Charlotte, so it’s easy enough to live a double life—an academic for a few months of the year in Charlotte and a “regular person” an hour and a half away in quaint Tryon. So far she’s published award-winning books of poetry like The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas and A Book of Minutes, but she also has a novel in the works and a “literary ghost story” up her sleeve. 

If Asheville was an “empty town” 26 years ago when pioneers like Emoke B’Racz set up shop, it is so full of writers now that the first generation of writers is mentoring the second, which is mentoring a third. Pat Riviere-Seel, a longtime newspaper reporter and lobbyist, was once Bowers’ student in the MFA program at Queens University. Seel published her first collection of poems, No Turning Back Now, in 2004, and it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She now teaches writing at UNCA’s Great Smokies Writing Program. “There are so many ways that writing is being encouraged,” says Byer. For many years, women weren’t recognized on the literary scene, but now, she says, “it shouldn’t be surprising that we’re seeing this renaissance of women writers who realize, yes, I can do this.” 

Places to Read Poetry, Wax Poetic at WOW
It’s not that men can’t write good poetry (think Yeats or e.e. cummings). But let’s face it—sometimes it’s just more fun to share your work with other women, who won’t come up with clunky prose about, say, NASCAR or beer. The Women On Words (WOW) group at Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café in downtown Asheville has been meeting once a month for some 20 years, and they’re always looking for new members. You can share poetry written in any style in a relaxed, fun atmosphere. Just remember to bring six copies of your work for discussion. The next meeting is September 18 at 5:30pm. 55 Haywood St. 828-254-6734 or www.malaprops.com.