Courtesy Photo
Local poet Wendy Taylor Carlisle will be the Ozark Poets and Writers Collective Featured Writer for March, reading her work in the program that begins at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 29, at Nightbird Books on Dickson Street in Fayetteville.
Twenty-five years ago, a bike accident in New York put Wendy Taylor Carlisle’s son in intensive care, causing her to decamp from her home in Texarkana to be at his side, there, as she told me, to will him to live. He did. And her life was changed: She knew she had become a writer. “I write,” she says, “because I cannot keep from it.”
Wendy Taylor Carlisle will be the Ozark Poets and Writers Collective Featured Writer for March, reading her work in the program that begins at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 29, at Nightbird Books on Dickson Street in Fayetteville. The event is free, and all are welcome. Carlisle’s books will be available for purchase and the author’s signature, as will refreshments. Available for purchase, that is; the author does not sign coffee cups.
Carlisle had written some in her younger days, in the ’60s and ’70s, most notably with the encouragement of the famed Miller Williams. But her life took a non-literary, more practical turn then, with an MA in history, not an MFA in poetry, and she set out on a full life: Historian. Physician’s wife. Mother. Community leader. Philanthropic activist.
And there it remained until her son’s accident in ’91. She wrote at his bedside in New York, and has not stopped writing since. She has published three full-length poetry books — Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda Press 2000), Discount Fireworks (Jacaranda Press 2008) and Persephone on the Metro (MadHat Press 2014). And she has several shorter chapbooks. She has contributed to many poetry journals, both in print and online. She has done multiple workshops, including four memorable stints in Slovenia, as part of her MFA studies at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She travels widely to read from her work (or you can listen to her read at http://www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com) and she is an artist-in-residence at the Village Writing School in Eureka Springs.
Carlisle writes, sometimes, about the process of writing:
“This is not a goose feather armchair poem, not a poem made up / of mamma’s Repousse. This isn’t some verse about stepping out / of a too-tight sequined dress, about coming / to terms with leaving a silk pillow in an Oklahoma motel. / This is a poem about being / the last board standing in a falling-down house.”
Which brings us back, perhaps, to the pen she took up at her son’s bedside and to the writer’s life she took up after she willed him back to life.
Please join the Ozarks Poet’s and Writer’s Collective as we welcome Wendy Taylor Carlisle to the Nightbird Books lectern March 29. Before and after her reading the microphone will be open for the members of the local writing community to each share four minutes’ worth of prose or poetry, memoir or essay with a friendly and encouraging audience. As always, the open mic is uncensored so the themes and language can be a little rough at times. Not always, though. Please join us.
