Good to see Sue Renault and Faye Tollison back around the table in March. Faye is recovering from a couple of back surgeries, so we owe John Helfrich special thanks for "Driving Miss Daisy" to the meeting. John's poetry was well received recently in a reading at The Guitar Bar. Sci-Fi writer Kevin Coyle has received an invitation to attend the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston this September. Jumpin' Jupiter! And we were delighted to welcome newcomer Lynn Hester. Hope to see you again, Lynn. President Emeritus Randy Crew also dropped in to share his insights. Good to have you in sight again, Randy.

April 30 is the deadline for submissions to our SCWW Anthology, Catfish Stew. Members of SCWW may make one submission of fiction, essay, poetry or play free, additional submissions are $3.00 each. For complete details, see the SCWW website.

The web site also features information on the annual SCWW Writers Conference, October 15-17 at Myrtle Beach. Check it out and make plans to be there.

Don't fool around and miss our April meeting at The Open Book, Thursday, April 1st at 6:00 p.m..

Leland Beaudrot read his article to be published in the April issue of The ARP magazine, the publication of his church. Titled "Nailed", it is an Easter article based on Biblical sources for the crucifixion of Jesus. One comment from around the table was that it took a little long to get to the real meat of the piece. The momentum picked up later. By page four, it was an excellent piece. I was glad that he included the passages from Psalm 22. It made the historical references I always read in connection with Christ's suffering and death.
Leland tied it all together with the Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ, where "the filmmaker finds himself nailed by the guilt of his own sin." The centurion said, "Surely this man was the Son of God." Leland leaves us with the question "What do you say?"

A personal note: Leland tells me that Isaiah is the Old Testament book most often quoted in the New. Thanks, Leland, for enriching my very limited Biblical knowledge!

John Migacz read from his story Second Chance. Johnny has been in an electrical accident and wakes up in his six-year-old body. He realizes he still has his 34-year-old mind (or brain.) The plot is set in the time before his mother dies. John sets up for the next chapter, "Can he somehow prevent his mother's death," from his 34-year-old perspective? It is a theme used before, but it caught my attention. I want to find out what he can do from his older person. One question to consider, "Was it his brain or mind that was 34 years old?" It might make his next move different. One suggestion was to make the older person older than 34. Another was not to mention the age at all. John's themes always get my interest and I want to hear how it all comes out in the end. Bring it back next month.

"Drowning is a good way to die ... ." Fatz doesn't agree with the sentiment, but he does agree that this hook quickly pulls you into Christa Rice's new novel Voodoo. The ride doesn't end there. Her fast paced, rapid action keeps it's momentum through the chapter. Christa pulls it off nicely without the benefit of dialogue to heighten the tension. The reader is hooked even though they might not be up to speed on divers' equipment and lingo.
The group thought the piece was well paced with good visuals. The descriptions of "pastel pastry colored houses, iced in creamy stucco" set the Florida scene well. The passive sentence police did find a few offenders and had to subdue a clawing tree. The 'Ft. Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport' mouthful should be changed as well as the reference to 'Hollywood Boulevard.
We have Claire, her wheelchair bound daughter Katie, a boat owning beach bum named Brian and clever repartee all creating an interesting dynamic that offsets the tension in the opening chapter.
Fatz smells a delicious gumbo of murder, mystery, a woman starting a new life, a sandy haired man, a sympathetic kid and possible romance simmering on the back burner. My bowl is ready for the next installment. Christa, do do that Voodoo that you do so well.

John Kingsbury brought in Chapter Twenty-Five of his novel Trailer Trash for the group to review. In this section, Paige is ready to settle the accident claim her sister Mary Ann's law office is handling. Paige wants to settle because she needs the money to help Jake. A petulant Mary Ann wants Paige to dump Jake and use the settlement money to start a new life. Paige just wants to help her husband get back on his feet.
The group felt that there was more information needed about the sisters' relationship with possibly too much dialogue and repetition hindering the scene. The group loved the segment about how wifely services or 'Loss of Consortium' boiled down to 'how much a man would pay a hooker in ten weeks for sex three or four times a week.'
The group felt the writing was compelling but Fatz would like to sample one consecutive chapter at a time to allow the characters and story to grow on the readers.

John Helfrich shared with us his poem, entitled "Pain." This reviewer knows virtually nothing about poetry, so the following should be taken with a grain of salt—or, given the theme of John's poem, would that be a spoonful of sugar?

No one argued with the message of John's poem: that pain and pleasure compliment each other, with the former allowing us to appreciate the latter. Rather, the group's comments focused on the particulars of the writing. For example, someone pointed out that the repeated use of "one" as a substitute for a name or pronoun was cumbersome. But I suppose one never knows, do one? Another problem was the fifth stanza, which seemed a little clunky. With all of its multi-syllabic words, the fifth stanza read like a passage from a medical textbook. This reviewer liked the device of leaving off the punctuation from the end of each stanza (except the last, of course) as a means of expressing the seemingly never-ending quality of pain.

John's poem was "[d]edicated to Faye." We all hope that Faye will make a full and speedy recovery and look forward to seeing her at the next meeting.

You know you're hot when you leave your readers wanting more. That's what happened when Pat Stewart finished her essay "Finding Michele," a touching story about a reunion of a "birth mother" and the child she gave away four decades ago. Several writers suggested Pat develop this bittersweet tale into a longer narrative. Questions were also generated about the search process and the ALMA organization. We can only say how happy we are that Michele has discovered the extended family that we've all come to know and love through Pat's warm, humorous essays.
Pat's second essay, "Kathy's Revelations" set us all to reminiscing about our colored chicks of Easters long ago. And just exactly where do these little chicks end up when their little owners have lost interest? I won't go into the lurid details right here, but needless to say, "Kathy still finds it hard to look at a whole fryer in the grocery store without a twinge of pain ... ." Once again, Pat gives a fresh stroke to some of the old familiar pictures we all carry in our memories and in our hearts. Nicely done, Pat.

After reading about the big bucks AARP The Magazine doles out for its articles, Phil Arnold had a great idea. Why not write an article about the many seniors he encounters each year in Memphis for "Elvis Week"? Phil shared his query letter with us at our last meeting. In it he lists his qualifications: a contributing editor for Elvis International magazine and a senior citizen (you don't look it, Phil). He offers a catchy title for the article: "White Hair and Blue Suede Shoes." He also suggests that the stories he hears from the seniors waiting in lines will interest AARP The Magazine's readers.

We thought Phil made a great case for his article. A few suggestions were made for making small changes to the proposal, like omitting the reference to the tape recorder and leaving out the word fine when describing the AARP publication. We seemed to agree that the letter was well written and included all of the right information. Hopefully we'll see Phil's byline in AARP The Magazine soon!

Having something to say and having it mean something is a writer's dream. Sue Renault has found such a project with her chapter in a book on the treatment of leprosy. The relationship between self esteem and the elimination of the skin ulcers caused by leprosy is something I had not considered. In part because I didn't know such things could be treated. This piece is intended to convey the nature of living with leprosy in a poor country to Americans. Sue's description of having to sell one's jacket to buy oil to use on ones hands to prevent the signs of leprosy returning is so elegant. In engineering elegant is defined as a design that has nothing missing and nothing extra. Instead of spending pages explaining this idea, Sue gives us this simple image of a group of leprosy suffering counseling a person that preventing ones hands from cracking because of leprosy is more important than the comforts of a jacket. Simply elegant.

Kevin Coyle continued his work on A Cool Dry Place with a scene of a mugging on a futuristic subway in New York City. The natives avert their eyes, but the scene would be more interesting if he showed the reaction of a few tourists riding the train. In New York you don't look at other people. It's not polite. If you are in rural Iowa and a you meet a car you have to look into the car and make sure you don't know the driver because if you don't wave back the driver will be offended. It's a bit embarrassing when the driver sees you later and says "I saw you out by the Coyle placed last Tuesday and waved. You didn't wave back. Didn't you see me?" So you learn to wave at all of the passing cars. Elegant, but polite.

Kami Kinard isn't afraid to stretch her poetic skills to explore new realms beyond the safe, familiar and always clever children's verses. She served up two of these, along with two on more mature planes in our recent meeting. "Pirates" tells of those sailors gone sour, both in demeanor and body odor: "They cuss and smell rank"—as much fun for small boys as a loud soda-fizz burp. Besides being hygienically challenged frat-boys and terrors of the high seas, "They sail in big ships and they always have fun." Which leads to the apt conclusion, "I wish I was one." Kami's second poem for little folk tells of the sedate realm of kings who "Sit in cold castles and twiddle their thumbs." Our expert auditory auditors suggested excising "for" from the beginning of the sixth line to adjust the meter, making the rhyme more melodic.
Kami stepped out on a limb (or was that walked the pirate's plank) in penning "Love Poem" as a favor for a friend. She proved to be her own critic, confessing in her first two lines "She asked me to write a love poem/I wasn't sure I knew how." Rejecting the starry eyed luminance of infatuation which grabs "you by the heart and groin/and yanks you into bliss." She focuses instead on the love that labors and is fundamentally "A mundane decision/... to work, forgive, commit." Though she concludes "A poem about love would be boring," she certainly gives us something to ponder, even if it's just being grabbed by heart and groin.
In "Cancer: a young woman's perspective," Kami reaches deep into the soul to reflect on the lonely journey of one stricken with this relentless affliction. No playful childhood pirates here, only the double edged sword of disease and treatment, both of which strip away life like the layers of an onion, with equally tearful results. In the end, all that remains is "hope/hope/hope/hope" which falls, drop by drop, like chemo.

With the arrival of Spring, the crowds who packed the "Y" in January disperse to show off their newly buff bodies. Fridays are particularly sparse, allowing me to get through the weight machine circuit in time to watch the 6:00 news. On the last machine, the Roman Chair, I bobbed up and down, arms extended, ankles and hips supported by the pads, my eyes sweeping from the floor to the mirrored back wall.

An upward swing brought into view an athletic young woman in a cropped tank top and silky shorts descending the stairs at the end of the hall to my left. Head erect, she walked with proud purposeful stride, like a queen or a goddess. As though a dutiful subject, I bent and lowered my fingertips to the floor. When I raised up again, she appeared before me transformed. The braided sweatband around her brow had been replaced by a laurel wreath, she wore a short linen tunic, cinched at the waist by a silken cord and sandals on her feet tied with a network of leather thongs about her calves. She caught my eye and smiled. I knew she was a link in the Muse chain. I had to talk with her.

In my haste, my feet got tangled in the machine and I hit the floor. By the time I sprang to my feet she had disappeared. I rounded the corner just in time to see her slip through a doorway.

She looked back and said, "Glad you could see me on such short notice."

As we entered the room, banks of lockers came into view, along with a counter with sinks and a long mirror. A woman wrapped in a towel walked toward the showers. "This is the women's locker room!" I gasped in hushed tones to my escort.

Before I could get away, she grasped my arm and pulled me before the mirror. "Nothing to worry about. I've made a few adjustments."

"Look!" said that peculiar voice. I lifted my left hand and gasped."What have you done!?"

A glance told all. "You've turned me into a forty-something woman!"

"No," she said. "You're still fifty-one."

"Don't I get to lie about that now?" I stroked my beardless chin and saw that my wedding band had disappeared and my nails wore an exquisite French manicure. "What's this all about, anyway? I know you're one of Thaleia's sisters, but I didn't think any of you dealt in magic."

"I am Terpsichore, the Muse of music and dance," she said, adding a pirouette en point.

"What are you doing here? I thought you girls didn't show yourselves in public."

"What's a Muse to do these days? I'm teaching aerobic dance here. You should try it."

"Are you saying I look fat?"

She pinched the soft bulge above my waistband. "You could tone up a little."

"Hey, you made me this way. Do you mind telling me why?"

She explained as we walked to her locker. "If you recall the last time you saw my sister, she was about to say 'If only you could see things from my perspective.' I thought I'd give her a hand in making that happen."

"Okay, sweetie, you've made your point. I am sooooooo sorry for messing up in Thaleia's eyes. If you want to whisk her here with your magic arts I'll kiss her little pedicured feet. But first, put me back to normal."

She pulled a Dasani from her locker, opened it and took a drink. "What is normal?"

"Certainly not this."

"Are you sure? You like to write romantic comedy. Who do you think reads that stuff? You need to get into your reader's skin." She took another drink and pulled out a towel. "Let's hit the showers."

"No!" I cried, alarmed at the thought of revealing me even to myself.

"Afraid of a little water?" With a quickly swung of the bottle she doused my face.

Sputtering, I jerked my head and found it wracked with pain. "OOOOH!"

Her hands cradled my face. "Hold still," she said softly.

"Wha'...," I drawled. "Wha's happening?"

"You fell off this thing and hit your head," she said. "I'm a nurse. Let me make sure you're alright."

Realizing I was still lying on the floor next to the Roman Chair, I lifted my left hand before my face. "My ring is here."

She grasped my wrist to take my pulse. "You've got ringing in your ears?"

"No, they're fine." I touched the swelling on the back of my head. "Feels like I'll need a bigger hat, though."

"Better make it a hard hat," she said. "Girl watching can be dangerous."

"Oh, I didn't mean to stare a minute ago. I thought I recognized you."

"There's blood on our fingers." She stood and grabbed a paper towel from the dispenser by the door, folded it and fastened it over the wound with her headband. "That will keep your headrest clean on the way home."

"How can I get this back to you later?"

"Just leave it at the front desk." She helped me to my feet. "Tell them April had to patch up your boo-boo."

On the way out, I stopped by the men's room to wash my hands and saw in the mirror my head crowned with a laurel wreath.

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, John Migacz, Kevin Coyle, Sue Renault, Kami Kinard and John Kingsbury.

Copyright 2004 by Leland Beaudrot, Editor. Contributing writers retain all rights to their work.