The Book Club Reading
It’s been fun to read poetry in different places and to different audiences. This time, thanks to Elle Roe and others, the hosts were a local book club. We met on the back porch of The Floyd Country Store.
It was not a back-and-forth Soulful Aging duo between me and Katherine, as we have been doing, but a reading I set up with Elle when Objects Are Closer Than They Appear came out in December. Hitting an emotional cord, talking to my late sister in dreams, becoming a tourist to my own aging and inhabiting the inner life where the ground of consciousness isn’t mine alone…
I took a request, answered a few questions and told the story of how I used to have public speaking phobia (story HERE). Every remnant pulled from memory or a dream resonates with an afterlife, as if it was a visitation from the same place where my dead loved ones are, closer than they seem… Katherine shared some of her poems and haikus.
Did I mention there was cake?
In February we took our Grief and Relief Soulful Aging Tour to the Jessie Peterman Library in Floyd. We read with other poets at the Taubman Museum in March, and also joined with other poets in April at a Poetry Society of Virginia reading in Floyd. In June we performed the Soulful Aging Tour at The Little River Poetry Festival, and repeated it at the Soup Shop later that month. Our next Soulful Aging Tour reading will take place in the Yoga Jam Tea Shanty on Saturday, September 3. Note: Both Katherine’s and my books, Objects Are Closer Than They Appear and Poetic Memoir of a Nascent Senescent: Poems from My Sixties, and others are available on Amazon and locally at The Harvest Moon Food Store and the Floyd Country Store.
