We decided to postpone our next meeting a day, so mark your calendars for Friday, January 2nd and have a Happy New Year (please celebrate responsibility, or if not, take notes for an entertaining essay).

We were honored to have John Helfrich, a friend of Faye Tollison, join us at the tables. John is from New York and is a free verse poet. Please come back, John, and bring us a sample of your writings.

John Kingsbury reported that he is batting a thousand. He has now received his 50th rejection letter (out of 50 submissions) for Trailer Trash. John Migacz also had his poker tale "The Table" bounced by a publisher. Hang in, guys! We'll hope for better days in the new year.

Second helpings of Catfish Stew, SC Writer's Workshop anthology, as well as back issues of its earlier incarnation, Horizons, are available from Craig Faris craigfaris@rjsonline.net or Local Authors' Corner in Clover.

Resolve to begin your new year by joining us at a familiar place, The Open Book, on a special day, Friday, January 2 at 6:00 p.m.

John Kingsbury read his revised Chapter 2 of Trailer Trash. It was an improvement from the long version he read last time. The setting was a checker game in the mental hospital ward. I personally liked the details of the checker moves, but a few around the table wanted less of the checker game. It gives the reader a true-to-life feel of life for patients in this setting. The stories of the women were especially intriguing to me. Barbara was in denial about the abuse of her husband and father. I hope John's book can get a message out to potential victims. That would make it a winner.

Robin Prince Monroe / Just BeeLieve

I can hardly beelieve I'm saying this, but I found myself beedazzled by Robin's educational and entertaining children's story about two denizens of a hive of honey bees. The two main characters, BeeLieve and BeeYond, are obviously destined to have great adventures while teaching young readers about the inner workings of a hive. BeeLieve is also the target of unkind teasing due to a birth defect which left her with just four eyes (and the need to wear glasses) rather than the five eyes normal for bees. This is bound to strike a nerve with many kids in Robin's reading audience and may help them learn techniques for dealing with their handicaps.

Generally, there were more positive comments on this selection than negative. Everyone responded well to the clever names of the bees and the wealth of information contained within the story. Robin's use of slightly advanced vocabulary will also help the kids to learn. A few suggestions were made for improvement. One was to re-sequence the first few sentences in the first paragraph to increase smoothness and to emphasize the hook. Another was to add an exclamation point to the first sentence (to get the kids' attention.) It was felt that Robin should use the attributions "He said" and "She said" rather than phrases like "He smiled" or "She cleaned her glasses."

All in all, a very beeguiling start to a beeautiful story.

Pure comedic genius! That's what this critic has to say about the latest essay from John Migacz. How many of us have wondered if the bumper stickers and other personalizing memorabilia found on the average automobile actually fit the personalities of their drivers and occupants? John shares his hilarious observations on this subject when his personal conveyance joins hundreds of others stalled in traffic. Haven't we all questioned the mental competency of the nameless, faceless bureaucrats who seem to wield their omnipotence like a three-year-old with a staple gun? John skewers the decision to close all but one lane of a ten-mile stretch of North Carolina interstate on Thanksgiving weekend-"the busiest weekend of the year." The pandemonium that John describes when swarms of travelers take to the woods to answer the call of nature because the bathrooms at a rest area are "out of order" is surreal in its absurdity. Can somebody spare a hare?

Aside from a few nitpicky suggestions about grammar, word choice, and punctuation, not one eager beaver attending our meeting had anything "negative" (i.e., "critically constructive") to say about this essay. This reviewer agrees. My biggest suggestion would be to come up with a better title. "Sunday After Thanksgiving-Busiest Traffic Day of Year" just doesn't do this essay justice.

Like Forrest Gump, Pat Stewart often finds herself standing in the fringe of the headline spotlight. This time, she's not keeping her eye on the corner fire hydrant to thwart terrorist meddling, but trying to avoid falling before the stampede of "A Nation of Shoppers." In her first person essay, she relates how a favor to her grandson brings her out to the stores on Black (or should we say, black and blue) Friday, the frenzied shopping day after Thanksgiving that most retailers count on to put them "in the black." Rather than swim against the rip tide of Wal-Mart traffic, she opted for Target instead, perhaps thereby avoiding the ignominious fate of a woman who was trampled in the rush for $29 DVD players. "But for the grace of God, I could have been that woman."

Pat's writing, as always, is throughly entertaining and on target in it's analysis of human nature run amok. But her enthusiasm for detail sometimes causes her best lines to be lost in the crowd like a five year old in a toy store. Take a tip from the retails, Pat. Cut a little here and there and soon there will be a stampede out to grab your latest work.

While sifting the wheat from the chaff in my inbox, I became aware of another face next to mine. I turned. Two slate blue eyes looked into mine.

"Mind if I read over your shoulder?" she asked. Before I could muster enough breath to answer she pulled up a chair in from the dining room.

"Don't you girls ever knock?"

"Hi, homey, I'm hon'." She rapped on the desk, then slipped her hand to the mouse. "Mind if I drive?"

"Do I have a choice?" She scrolled through my vast catalog of correspondence. "Looking for anything in particular?"

She shrugged. "Just browsing."

"If there's an e-mail muse, it's new to me," I said. "So which one are you?"

She lifted her hand from the mouse and sat back. "My sisters say I'm the one most like our mother. Got a guess?"

Tendrils of loosely spiraled blond framed a face unmarred by time, yet ratient with wisdom and maternal tenderness, an eternally youthful grandmother. She a wore dusty rose sweat suit and white running shoes. The earphones of her Walkman throbbed as she softly sang along, "...and a time to every purpose under heaven...."

"Okay," I said. "Your mother was Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory.... You are... Clio, the Muse of History. Right?"

She smiled. "You've done your homework."

"I owe it all to the Internet, an electronic encyclopedia at my fingertips."

"It's sure made my job easier." She nodded toward the screen. "E-mail is almost as good as a journal."

"It is," I said, sending the latest batch of spam to the bit bucket. "If you don't delete it."

"Editing history doesn't make it go away."

"Sometimes, it's better forgotten."

"Granted." She nodded. "So one should work at making memories worth keeping."

Her stinging perspicacity made me appreciate Urania's aloof indifference. "This year must have been a piece of cake. Just pop in a tape and catch CNN. The war, Saddam, Scott, Michael, Muhammad and Malvo... it's all there."

"Is it?" She pulled the foam plugs from her ears. "Is that all you'll remember about 2003?"

"So far. But they just jacked up the terrorist threat level a notch. It ain't over till it's over."

She draped her arm across the back of my chair. "Do you recall how the year began?"

"Yeah, I went for a drive in the mountains with...." My throat seized up, I turned away.

She picked up the frayed thread of my bittersweet memory. "With your father. Neither of you knew then, it would be his last good day. Just weeks later, you learned the truth and walked beside him on his journey from the doctor's office to the hospital and the nursing home for hospice care. An evening call from Countryside Village, you knew the message before it came: his pain had ended, yours had begun."

"Yeah...." I wiped my face with the back of a hand, took a deep breath and cleared my throat. "That about sums it up."

"The wound of that rending will take time to heal, but it will."

"You think so?"

"The first year is the hardest, a cycle of seasons, holidays, birthdays. But soon the best memories sift to the surface, and you cherish them as the treasurers they are." Dad's Audubon clock chirped the hour. She looked up and around at his pictures over my desk. She pointed to one of Dad and me in a Model A Ford, sans windows and doors. "Tell me about this one."

I chuckled. "That appeared in the Index-Journal July 4th, 1968. I was 16 at the time; that was my first car...."

Printed Matters is the newsletter of the Greenville Chapter, SCWW, which meets on the first Thursday of each month at 6:00 p.m. at The Open Book, 110 S Pleasantburg Drive, Greenville, SC.

Thanks to our contributing writers and news reporters: Pat Stewart, Marcia Migacz and Kevin Coyle.

Copyright 2003 by Leland Beaudrot, Editor. Contributing writers retain all rights to their work.