Mentor:
Rebecca Howell
Lecturer, Creative Writing, Department of English
Director, Women Writers of Kentucky
Erik spends his free time memorizing maps of Kentucky. From the passenger side of a truck, down the most rural, unmarked road, he can take you home again. An unimaginable left turn here, a deft right there.
After having worked with Erik for four years now, as a poetry writing stu¬dent, as an intern with the women writers conference, as an apprenticing editor, and now as a Gaines Fellow, 1 can say without hesitation that, for Erik, study is a sacred opportunity to better understand, and when called upon, defend, that which is most important to him — his home. These early poems of his, pub¬lished here, are just a glimpse of a larger, maturing, body of work in which he consistently approaches the occasion of a poem in the same way he does those maps: whether he is writing in the voice of a coal miner's son or the ancient Gilgamesh, to Erik, every poem is an opportunity to get back home — and more, to quietly, deftly, bring us with him.
(KALEIDOSCOPE FALL 2 0 0 5)
During my years as an undergraduate at UK con-centrating on Appalachian Studies, I have, as well, studied writing through classes with Rebecca Howell, James Hall, and Gurney Norman. The work here is part of two collections that are approaching the intersection of experience, history, and home. My home is Girdler, Kentucky (Knox County), and while attending school here in Lexing-ton I have participated in the Robinson Scholars Program and the Gaines Fellowship Program. My learning with Rebecca Howell led to work with Wind: A Journal of Writing & Community, of which I am now an Editor. I edited Wind's most recent issue, #94. That issue spotlights the Hindman Writers Workshop, a community of which I am a dedicated member.
Drink From the jar
Red-Handed
---young boys in the mountains used to work ;b the coal mines, pulling impurities out of the coa coming out of the mine into the trucks. The shaq drearr slate cut their hands so much that the tops of coa. , , trucks were stained red, and received the nam red tops.
1
They stood on ladders,
rickety piles of dead Chestnut
the boys climb
the dry-rotted bodies - ladders
ladders to nowhere
ending up no place, dropping off to no world
they'd climb up
to look down at their bloody hands
blood, to pay for the house
blood, to pay for the food that keeps Papaw on
of the cold soft dirt
they do it - ravens to snatch up shards of slate pieces of jagged shale.
