Celebrated Knoxville poet Linda Parsons Marion will speak at the March 5
meeting of The Knoxville Writers’ Guild about "Mother Land" (Iris Press,
2008), her new book of poems about her mother’s mental illness and her
family’s loving attempts to deal with it.
The meeting will be at 7 p.m. at the Laurel Theater at the corner of
Laurel Avenue and 16th Streets in Forth Sanders and is open to the public.
Refreshments are served, and a $1 donation is requested at the door. The
building is handicapped accessible.
"Mother Land" is a story in poems of Marion’s experiences with her mother,
who had undiagnosed bipolar disorder, her grandmother who tried to hold
things together in the face of the illness, and her stepmother who took in
Marion as a young girl and tended her wounded spirit. Woven through the
book are poems about gardening, which Marion describes as her “partner in
excavating childhood.” Gardening is the tool she uses to move from
woundedness to wholeness, to reconcile her inner and outward landscapes.
Parsons will also talk about issues of writing about your own family.
“Using very personal family material is a mixed blessing for both writer
and reader/audience,” she said. “For the writer, this process can be a
wrenching but healing exorcism; the reader/audience may feel uncomfortable
to see so deeply into the writer’s life struggles or may identify with the
experience and be led to their own larger understanding or epiphany.”
“The poems in Mother Land are often heartbreaking, but the heartbreak is
transcended by acceptance and forgiveness and, ultimately, a hard-earned
wisdom rendered in beautiful language. I have admired Linda Marion’s
poetry for many years, and this book is a stunning confirmation of her
talent,” wrote poet and novelist Ron Rash.
Marion is the poetry editor of Now & Then magazine and has received two
literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission. She is the author
of poetry collections Home Fires and Mother Land. Her poems have appeared
in The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Shenandoah, Asheville Poetry Review,
Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Potomac Review, Poet Lore, among others. Essays
and poems have also appeared in The Movable Nest, Listen Here: Women
Writing in Appalachia, Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary
Appalachian Women’s Poetry, and Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers
and the Art of Survival. Marion is an editor at the University of
Tennessee and lives and gardens in North Hills with her husband, poet Jeff
Daniel Marion.
The Knoxville Writers’ Guild offers monthly meetings, writers’ groups and
periodic workshops for local writers. It receives the support of WUOT 91.9
FM. Visit www.knoxvillewritersguild.org.
For more information, please contact:
Kelly Norrell
Publicity Chair
Knoxville Writers’ Guild
806-0132
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