Teresa Scollon & Ellen Lord

A Still and Quiet Conscience by Holly Polich

Our featured author for the Antrim Writers Series February 18 and 19 events is writer is Teresa Scollon, who is, well, amazing. I discovered her work about ten years ago, through her collection of poetry, To Embroider the Ground with Prayer. I was smitten: she wrote about her family and her home in the Thumb of rural Michigan with such detail and care, I felt like I was living her life through her poems. When I teach poetry, I tell my students that poems are designed to either help you see something more clearly or to feel something more deeply. Scollon’s poems do both. 

And her abilities with language are on full display with her newest poetry collection, No Trouble Staying Awake, which features scenes, memories, and emotions from her life in northern Michigan. Fleda Brown (one of our former Antrim Writers Series poets) said “Teresa Scollon’s poems are rooted. I say there is nothing more valuable in the world.” Yes, and yes, and yes again. Here’s one of the poems in that wonderful collection:

King Kong

I was seven: just old enough to buy, if I wanted,

a bottle of pop and hold it carefully, not spilling, 

while King Kong peered into the windows of a tall building

and Mr. Hawkins patrolled the aisle with his flashlight,

keeping an eye on us kids at the Saturday matinee.

I was there with my friend Michelle. After the movie,

outside it was snowing and near-dusk, and the cars

on Main Street had their wipers going and the street

was slush. We looked both ways and crossed

to the Wester Auto hardware, to see Michelle’s mom.

I remember the humming lights and the squeak 

of the wooden floor and her mother smiling down.

Everything around me said: This is a good place.

We keep an eye on things here.

Except at night

when it was only me, lying terrified and awake

in the dark next to my sleeping little sister,

waiting for King Kong to rise just beyond

my mother’s handmade curtains. I knew how 

to cross the street, how to hold a baby, how

to greet a strange dog. I had a plan for escaping 

fire, for waking my brothers and sisters to come

with me. But what would I do when the world

came for me –huge, rough, and sick with longing?

-Teresa Scollon

Our local Antrim Writers Series author featured this month is Ellen Lord. Make no mistake: Ellen Lord is a magician. She tells stories of great loss and weaves them into images from the natural world, where they are able to grow into something more, something greater. Her latest collection of poems, Vigil, is about keeping watch over the memories of ones she loved, while staying in the present. It’s no small feat, this practice – and it is even more impressive in her poems. Don’t miss your chance to see her at Bee Well Meadery, where she will share the stage with Teresa Scollon on February 18.  Here’s a poem from her current collection:

Thin Space

I love the early gloom of a December morning, how

 dawn seeps through frosted windows and cold

 suspends time. Last night, I dreamed of our old cabin,

 empty now. Silent. How I stood by the rusted gate but 

could not bring myself to enter.  I recalled a long-gone

 August night, just us awake & stormbound. Heat 

lightning, stark and jagged—how we counted seconds to 

rolling thunder, eager for an all-night deluge of rain. 

Years later, I think about our journey, so many quiet

 interludes. I trudge the frozen lake, snowbound—look 

for beaver tracks by their lodge—imagine a mated pair 

snugged in, oblivious to endings. They too, are 

creatures of darkness. Night is opening her secret maw 

of delights.  I want to believe in redemption. I wait for a 

sign of life, like iced breath, like prayers… mercy.  

adrift— 

snowflakes melt    

on my tongue