Saturday, September 29, 2018

"The Worlds of A. Wetherell Johnson" Founder of Bible Study Fellowship . . .



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CRC Blog Analysis On A. Wetherell Johnson’s
Created for Commitment: The Remarkable Story of the Founder of the Bible Study Fellowship
“The Worlds of Audrey Wetherell Johnson”



Tyndale House Publishers (www.tyndale.com) published A. Wetherell Johnson’s memoir Created for Commitment:  The Remarkable Story of the Founder of the Bible Study Fellowship (https://www.amazon.com/Created-Commitment-Wetherell-Johnson/dp/0842304436/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1530807246&sr=8-1&keywords=created+for+commitment) on December 1, 1982.
      
One would think the memoir would be outdated since Johnson died in December 22, 1984 but Bible Study Fellowship, an international Christian interdenominational Bible Study, is now active in over 35 countries and every single state of the union.
       When Audrey’s mother, Maud Wetherell, became a born again believer she told her widowed and strongly Anglican mother that she was converting outside of the Anglican faith.  As a result Maud was kicked out of her own home and estranged from her mother.  Maud sought employment as a nanny where she met her first husband staunch Anglican John Cope.  The couple had four children, two boys and two girls:  Claude, John, Katherine, and Marjorie.  (Above Right:  The Cope Family Home) 
       
 John died and his wife and four children moved into his parents’ house.  When the children were all teenagers Maud  moved herself and her four children to Leicester in order for them to have a better education.  She supported the family with the proceeds from the sale of the family home and by working at Dr. F.B. Meyer’s church. (Above Left:  Maud, Kitty, Marjorie, and Henry Johnson)
There she met her second husband and Audrey’s father Henry Johnson and Audrey was born on December 1, 1907 in Leicester.  Audrey and her older sister Katherine “Kitty” moved with Maud and Andrew to France where Andrew served as a Christian missionary. Her mother Maude became seriously ill and had to return back to England.   While Andrew continued his ministry throughout France, Africa, and Switzerland, the two sisters Kitty and Audrey finally returned back to Kenilworth, Warwickshire, England to join their mother in August of 1914, due to the threat of World War 1. The three moved to the suburbs of Birmingham while Andrew continued his ministry, visiting his wife and children every chance he got.  (Above Right:  Audrey Wetherell Johnson in 1914) 
       Audrey found escape and solace in classical music by Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, and Back which she and her sister Kitty would listen to every night before going to bed.

       She also found solace in books by Shakespeare, Mark Twain’s The Prince and The Pauper, Kipling’s The Jungle Book, A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Jack London, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, C.S. Lewis, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

      
In her late teens at the request of her father, she moved to Paris, France to be tutored in the French language and culture by Mademoiselle Mercedes Heldwein.  Heldwein taught Audrey a smattering of French, Latin, made sure she excelled in sports and took her to French Intellectual Salons where she observed the discussion of the great intellectuals of the day.  She also  introduced her to professors and journalists from France, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Spain and Japan.   (Above Left:  Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier's A Reading in the Salon of MME Beoffrin in 1755)
       She also studied history, philosophy, psychology, Buddhism, Confucianism, read books by Fredrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Hegel, Coue, Blaise Pascal, and Voltaire


It was while she was in France that she discovered that all of her Christian experiences were feigned and that she no longer believed in the Bible and at best considered the Bible a bunch of myths; in other words she identified herself as agnostic.  She returned to England to visit her mother where she was appalled at the blood of Jesus Christ and found it harder to still hide her unbelief from her Christian parents; perhaps she was afraid her mother would reject her like her mother before her. (Right:  Maud Wetherell Johnson) 
At her father’s (Henry Johnson Left)  request she attending a business college and then got a temporary job as a member of the faculty of a public high school, which she excelled, but still within her she was in great despair:  she no longer believed in the Christian God Jesus but yet she had nothing to fill the emptiness.  She started her quest –what is the truth?  Is God real? She prayed that God would reveal if He was real along
with some reasonable philosophy that made sense to her.  Johnson details the inner conversation she had with God and how that conversation led her to accept Jesus Christ as Personal Lord and Savior and that her salvation experience was not superficial or based on emotion but authentic.  Soon she had a spiritual hunger to read, research, and study the Bible and immediately took five correspondence Bible courses from well-respected Bible Scholars.
I studied with three questions in mind:  (1)  What does this Bible passage say?  (2) What did it mean to the people of the day when it was written?  And (3) What does it mean to me? Page 43
Thus began her love story not only with the Trinity God but also with the Bible, which she read with such passion, such velocity and such intensity – that each experience of reading the scriptures was a literal touch or message from the Holy Spirit.  
Soon she began to give speaking engagements about the Bible and what she learned.  She realized that she wanted to commit to full time Christian ministry and preferred to work with the most depraved and the most poor, in what she was convinced was Sudan.  In the meantime she taught a group of factory girls about Trinity God and the Bible in the slum area of Floodgate Street in Birmingham, England. (Left:  Girl in the slums of Floodstreet)
       She then received training as a delivery nurse and became the nurse for a large district in Bracknell, Berkshire where she delivered over 600 babies on her own without anesthetics or doctors present during her two years there.   During that two- year period she also taught Bible classes; one that focused on the writings of Andrew Murray. (Right)
      
She still had the desire to be a missionary to Sudan, but read a variety of magazines about mission work in different countries around the world.  But
what made a huge impression on her was Mildred Cable’s autobiography Something Happened, where Cable details her conversion experience as well as her and her sisters’ (Evangeline French, and Francesca French) experiences serving as missionaries in China.  When she heard about the meeting to be led by Mildred Cable in London she knew she had to attend.  (Above Left:  Sisters Evangeline, Francesca, and Mildred)
Mildred spoke of the absolute paganism in China, the danger of the travels, and the glory of seeing God change lives after only one hearing of the gospel.  I sat enthralled.  Deep down in my heart, it seemed God was saying to me, “This is what I have for you.  Why do you keep trying to get Me to call you to Africa.”  Page 62.  (Left China Map in 1935) 
       Audrey filled out her application and sent it to the China Inland Mission founded by J. Hudson Taylor and was called for an interview by Mr. Roland Hogben and was later accepted into the C.I.M. Bible Institute in London where she studied theology, Bible, how to teach the Bible, the Chinese language and its culture and its history.
      
She was scheduled to sail for China in 1935, but due to the murders of C.I.M. Candidates in China all missionary assignments to China were stopped.  In the mean time, Audrey worked as a missionary for Thonon Mission located in France on the Switzerland border near the Haute Savoie Mountains, where she was assigned to minister to a group of 30 girl scouts. (Left:  the building where Audrey taught the girl scouts) 
       Finally in September of 1936 Audrey (Right) set sail on the H.M.S. Ranchi for China where she would remain for the next nine years without taking a single furlough. Her first task was to attend the language school in Yangchow where she learned to write, speak, and read in Chinese.  
In April of 1937 she was assigned to her first missionary station in Kiangsi Province of China where she arrived in June of 1937.  While at Kiangsi Province of China Audrey experienced illnesses and bouts of depression.  She sought comfort from her spiritual mentor and dear friend Miss Ruth Brittain.(Below Left)
I remember going into her room once feeling very despondent and like an unworthy Christian.  I said, “I need a fresh touch from God, perhaps an outstanding work of the Holy Spirit.”  She replied, “What you need is to saturate yourself in the Bible.  Why don’t you leave your study, and lie on an enclosed private porch, and meet God through saturating yourself in one of the books of the Bible!” This was a shock.  I had just come out of the Bible Institute, under Mr. Hogben no less, and thought I knew the Bible.  Page 115
Audrey did what Miss Brittain suggested by going to the upstairs balcony and started reading the book of Hebrews the way she always had but nothing happened.  She then prayed an earnest prayer to God and then started reading Hebrews all over again and a miracle happened.
Looking back I cannot explain any particular truth the Lord gave me or remember any particular verse that shone with special meaning.  But what happened was this: Through reading God’s Word in the power of the Holy Spirit and depending upon God to give life through it, it was as though God had picked me up and taken me into Heaven where He dwells.  I had been with Him!  My entire spiritual being was renewed.  Leaving the balcony, feelings of lassitude disappeared, depression was gone – I had received God’s words and was rejuvenated in every part of my being.  Page 116.
Her next station was at Lin Ming Kawn in the Hopeh Province of north China where she arrived in March of 1939.   There she ministered to a Chinese congregation of 300 Chinese who would walk 9 miles to get there.  Services were held all day on Saturdays and Sundays.   
Until that hot day in August of 1942 when the Japanese came to the Chinese Inland Mission’s headquarters and took all the missionaries to two interment camps, one in Shanghai and the other fifteen miles away called the Longhua Camp.  It was the Longhua Camp that Audrey along with 2000 other aliens would be held for three long years.   

For the next three years she would eat rice covered with worms, one-inch cube of meat, and every now and again a half spoonful of vegetables (spinach, cabbage, tomatoes, and beans) that the prisoners grew themselves from the packets of vegetable seeds they smuggled in their luggage and pockets.  She along with her fellow prisoners would stand in line twice a day for water.  At bedtime, 7 p.m., she would strap her waist with a tight belt to ease the hunger pains.   She did have her triumph – one of her greatest was her being able to teach 500 children in one room with only a blackboard and chalk.

Then the war ended and in August of 1945 allied  airplanes appeared in the sky dropping every color possible of parachutes full of cans of food.  Audrey saved a red parachute as a memento.  Then an American Liaison officer arrived at the camp and for the next two hours told them all the news of the war and how they won.  He and the other Americans then passed out newspapers and magazines to the prisoners. (Above Left:  F Block Internees on top of the buildings roof the night the war ended)
Then the most emotional and compelling part of Created For Commitment happened:  the prisoners of the internment camp now set free decided that they needed to put the Japanese Flag (what they called the Rising Sun or the Poached Egg) down and raise all the flags representing all the countries the prisoners were from.  Immediately the women set to work and gathered any materials they could to produce each country’s flag.   Once the flags were made it was decided by the prisoners that they would unfurl all of the flags on the same balcony and same place where guards would stand with their guns in what would be a religious service.  
Never will I forget the dramatic scene.  Two thousand newly released prisoners stood before that balcony where the flags were now mounted but still unfurled!  Someone had managed to procure from the Chinese a small harmonium.  We sang, “Our God Our Help in Ages Past,” and also “Praise My Soul the King of Heaven.”  Then the master of the ceremonies read two meaningful passages of Scripture from the Old Testament, chosen partly in deference to the Jewish friends present.  He read Deuteronomy 8 (Below Right), which remarkably fitted our situation and was a warning to the nations, “lest ye perish.”  Following this, he read the beautiful Psalm 23. Below Left)
Following the singing and reading, the leader led us in prayer, and all the flags on the balcony – about ten of them – were unfurled.  We were asked to keep silence as we remembered the lives laid down for this victory.  The sun was setting, the sky was red, the only sound we hear was the flap, flap, flapping of the treasured unfurled flags that represented our new freedom. 
At the end of the silent prayer someone sat down at the harmonium and played the national anthems of all the nations represented.  There was not a dry eye among us as we sang.   Pages 161-162
In 1947, at the age of 40, Audrey and her spiritual mentor, best friend and companion Miss Brittain sailed to San Francisco, where after a six-month rest, she began speaking at conferences and universities.  
It was here that she decided to go by the name Wetherell instead of Audrey since there were so many women named Audrye in the United States.  Then in 1952 while Wetherell finished a speaking engagement at a church in San Bernardino, California,  five women from that church asked Audrey to please teach them from the Book of Colossians.
These were all earnest Christian women, well-versed in Bible content.  My heart fell!  What had I come to?  There in San Bernardino was such an abundance of churches where people could hear God’s Word, while by contrast in China were millions who had not even heard His name.  Am I to give more to those who already have so much? Page 214  (Right:  Wetherell Johnson in 1950)  
After much prayer and God leading her to read verses Jeremiah 45:5 and Zechariah 4:10 Wetherell decided to grant the five women’s request but she did have her own conditions which she felt were God ordained.

A few days later, when these ladies returned for my answer, I said, “I will not spoon-feed you.  Are you willing for me to dictate a few questions, which will help you in your study of each passage?  I would then like you to first share with all of us what God has given you, after which I will share with you what He has give nm.”  Readily they were happy to agree to this method of study and teaching.
Wetherell soon made a demand upon herself when she noticed that during her lecture she saw the women taking notes which she felt was a distraction from them listening to her own words which could diminish the spiritual impact they might otherwise experience. (Left:  The Bible Study Fellowship production department in Oakland, CA)
Therefore I decided to type a resume of each lesson, together with typewritten questions applying to the following lesson.  I stipulated that the use of commentaries would not be allowed!  Little did I anticipate then that these lesson notes, with questions, would someday develop into the composition of 5,000 words to each set of notes and twenty related questions for the following week’s lesson.  Page 214 (Above Right: BSF notes in Chinese) 
Bible Study Fellowship did not discriminate:  everyone of every single color, economic status, and religion or lack thereof were welcome:  atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Hindus, Christian Scientists, Jehovah Witnesses, Mormons, Jews, and every Christian denomination one could think of including Catholics.

       A Catholic priest attended my class for six weeks and we developed a real friendship.  Sometime during the 1960s after Pope John advocated Bible reading, we noticed a great increase in Catholic membership.  Priests in one of the Bay Area churches were so impressed with Bible Study Fellowship that any one who taught catechism on Saturday had to be a member of Bible Study Fellowship class.
Page 238  (Right: Wetherell Johnson in 1969)

The remaining the 392-page-book Wetherell explains the growth of BSF, and the guidelines for the Christian life, what the Bible says about salvation, reading the Bible, how to live the confident Christian life, and how to be triumphant even amongst a suffering life. (Left: Johnson in 1980)

There is so much more in Created For Commitment:  Wetherell’s extensive traveling all across the globe and how she found the presence and existence of God in every experience; her heartbreak over her family including her half sister who suffered a nervous breakdown and severe depression; her broken romance; and her life while living in England, China, Switzerland, France, California and Texas. (Right: Johnson in 1981)
Some might say this book is about Audrey but this writer would say the book is ultimately about Jesus living through Wetherell’s (Left) spirit and the birth and the metamorphosis of BSF, which exists and thrives to this very day.

Monday, September 24, 2018

#31 Backstory of the Poem "After We Drove" by Mark Lee Webb. . .



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***This is the thirty-first in a never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific poem and how the poet wrote that specific poem.  All BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links are at the end of this piece. 


#31 Backstory of the Poem
“After We Drove”
by Mark Lee Webb

Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form?  The genesis of this poem was a bad vacation, if there is any such thing as a vacation being “bad”. It’s just that my wife and I were having teeny-tiny little tiffs here and there as we traveled around California during the summer of 2015. We started in LA and were working our way up the coast. I’m from the LA area I grew up in Malibu Canyon, but it’s all changed so much. It’s concrete from the beach all the way to the San Gabriel Mountains now. It can wear you out.

Anyway, we’ve been fighting LA traffic for a week and arguing a bit every day, and now we’re headed up to Northern California, stopping for a few nights in Morro Bay and, hopefully we’ll be able to relax and enjoy ourselves. We get to Morro Bay, one of the most iconic spots in all of California, and right next to the ocean and bay there’s this gigantic abandoned power plant with smokestacks hundreds of feet high. (Above Right:  Copyright permission granted by Mark Lee Webb for this CRC Blog Post Only) My wife and I have been bickering a bit all week and we’re all set to get away from the mess that is LA and relax on the Central Coast and here’s the view of Morro Bay spoiled by this gigantic abandoned power plant. The town itself turns out to be a tourist trap. “The Rock” (Above Left:  Copyright permission granted by Mark Lee Webb for this CRC Blog Post Only), which is a 300-foot high prominence in the water that everyone goes there to see, is fenced off. It’s just a crummy place. It ain’t like the postcards.

I get this idea about how California itself is a bit of a mirage and not really like the postcards, and along with the differences between my wife and I that led to a bit of bickering (she’s a risk taker/ I worry about everything: she wants to drive up to Hearst Castle via Highway 1/ I’m afraid of heights) I came up with the idea for this poem. I actually continued to write other poems on this idea, and it became the basis for my MFA thesis (Queens University of Charlotte 2018) (Right:  Copyright permission granted by Mark Lee Webb for this CRC Blog Post only). I wrote most of the lines in this poem rather quickly, and it seemed in its best form using couplets, so I stayed with that form and never changed it.

But I could not come up with an ending. How to get Morro Bay into the ending of the poem and make it a surprising ending. No clichés allowed. Well, it just so happened that a few weeks later we’re watching a production of Romeo and Juliet on DVD  (Left) (we decided to dive into Shakespeare that fall and watch one play a week) and there is this line in Act II Scene I where Romeo’s friends are making fun of him, and Mercutio says, “Till she had laid it and conjured it down.” I thought that line remarkable, so I sorta stole it and morphed it into “lay low, conjure me down” But I still needed some way to get to that end; I now had what I thought was a great ending, but I needed a bridge to get there.

I went back to my journal (Right:  Copyright permission granted by Mark Lee Webb for this CRC Blog Post Only) and found some notes I took in LA while I was walking on the Huntington Beach Pier about a fisherman jigging for crabs with the head of a mackerel and how he pulled up a large crab clinging to the mackerel’s eye, and that’s how I got the lines, You pick a mackerel’s eye/from the claw of a crab and make-believe/it’s a pearl.” Now I had my bridge from beginning and middle of poem to the end, and I had an ending thanks to Shakespeare. I included a picture of that page of the journal so you can see what I wrote that day in July on the pier.

Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail.  I was back home in my basement office. My officeis a 10’x10’ finished room in our basement.  (Left:  Copyright permission granted by Mark Lee Webb for this CRC Blog Post Only) My writing desk is large and old, with plenty of scars. It takes up most of the space in my office. I have a nice stereo down there with a vintage turntable that spins vinyl jazz albums. There is a small window in the corner of my office just over my desk—way up high almost to the ceiling—that drizzles the room with light in the mornings. I also have several bookcases packed with books—virtually all are books of poetry. A lot of chapbooks. I love chapbooks: I delight in the intimacy of reading a small portfolio of a poet’s work.
What month and year did you start writing this poem?  Around August of 2015, about a month after we returned from our vacation in California. (Right:  Mark Lee Webb at the Russian Tea Room in October of 2015.  Copyright permission granted by Mark Lee Webb for this CRC Blog Post Only)
How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?)   Not many. I did workshop this poem with a wonderful poetry group in Columbus, Ohio that I belong to: The Pudding House Innovative Writer’s Program.( https://www.facebook.com/Pudding-Magazine-206203566056760/) I submitted it to Ninth Letter (https://www.facebook.com/ninthletter/?tn-str=k*F) in November of 2015, so I didn’t spend a lot of time with it. It was one of those poems that worked well from the beginning and didn’t require many revisions. 

Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us?   No, none that I can think of.

What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem?   Don’t sweat the small stuff. Don’t worry about things out of your control. Don’t let the little petty things in life get in the way of relationships with your loved one. Believe in magic.


Which part of the poem was the most emotional for you to write, and why?   My wife is a dreamer. I worry about everything. I’m afraid of heights. She did all the driving across SF Bay bridges and on the coast around Mendocino. It was hard to catalog differences between the two characters in the poem because I was really cataloging the differences between my wife and I. That was tough to do.

Has this poem been published before? And if so where?   Yes. Ninth Letter published it in 2016, and Aeolian Harp (https://www.facebook.com/groups/639918179442754/)   reprinted it (along with several more of my poems) in 2018.

Anything you would like to add?   Too many people are afraid to write poetry: “It’s too complicated. It’s too deep. I can’t understand it. I can’t write it”. I encourage them to write
about what happened today, or last week. Don’t write about the universe. Write about the date you had last night. Write about that chair in your kitchen that always wobbles. Don’t worry about the form, or artificial rules. Write anything—just don’t be afraid to write.
When I lead children in writing poetry I give them no rules other than write about what’s in their rooms or closets or behind their back fences. They just blossom and can’t stop writing poems. Free from rules and constraints, they feel free to, well, just write. And they craft the most marvelous poems. That what this poem has in it: a
catalogue of what I saw and experienced in California. A mackerel’s eye. Little ponds on little ranches baking dry in the summer heat. Santa Ana winds. Brush fires. Shake roofs. Ojai, and Morro Bay. My wife, Molly McCormack (Above Left) (http://mollymccormack.com/index.html), wrote a terrific song, “Silent Woods” (as well as a short illustrated children’s book with the same title, “Silent Woods”), (https://www.amazon.com/Silent-Woods-Molly-McCormack/dp/1494487845/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1537819125&sr=1-6) about not being afraid to use your talents. She borrowed a line from Henry van Dyke: (Above Left)"Use what talent you possess:  the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best."  I think that says it all. 


AFTER YOU DROVE

from Ojai to the foot of Adobe Hill,
found the Chumash Kohsho near a grove

of sycamores, you came home and said
everything I told you was a lie.

You believe in sympathetic magic—
rattle carved of coyote bone to cure

crowning teeth. Hawk feather halos
stitched from fiber of milkweed

adorned with glass beads. Keep a cache
of polished charmstones for casting spells.

But California summers, all the hills crinkling
to ginger. Little ponds on little ranches

bake dry. Santa Ana gusts dust chaparral to
shades of buff-brown, the air sick with sage,

brush and scrub rolling down the arroyos.
I worry. Over sidewalk stains from walnut

shrubs in our front yard, August brushfires
scorching the shake roof, sea-cliffs eroding

along the Palisades. You pick a mackerel’s eye
from the claw of a crab and make-believe

it’s a pearl. Swim with speckled sea snakes
in Morro Bay. Lay low, conjure me down.

I was born in Louisville, KY, but we moved to California in the late 60’s. Growing up as a teenager around SoCal beaches, I know where a skeg is on a surfboard, and how to get from Malibu to Westwood via Mulholland.  I am happily married to the talented musician Molly McCormack (Left:  Webb and McCormack on their wedding day.  Copyright permission granted by Mark Lee Webb for this CRC Blog Post Only) and we each have two grown sons from previous marriages.  I received my MFA from Queens University of Charlotte.  I've had two chapbooks published:  WHATEVERITS (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and The Weight of Paper (ELJ Publicans, 2014).  My poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Ninth Letter, The Louisville Review, Aeolian Harp, Soundings Review, Glassworks, Chiron Review, The Baltimore Review, RipRap, and Star 82 Review.   



BACKSTORY OF THE POEM LINKS

001  December 29, 2017
Margo Berdeshevksy’s “12-24”

002  January 08, 2018
Alexis Rhone Fancher’s “82 Miles From the Beach, We Order The Lobster At Clear Lake Café”

003 January 12, 2018
Barbara Crooker’s “Orange”

004 January 22, 2018
Sonia Saikaley’s “Modern Matsushima”

005 January 29, 2018
Ellen Foos’s “Side Yard”

006 February 03, 2018
Susan Sundwall’s “The Ringmaster”

007 February 09, 2018
Leslea Newman’s “That Night”

008 February 17, 2018
Alexis Rhone Fancher “June Fairchild Isn’t Dead”

009 February 24, 2018
Charles Clifford Brooks III “The Gift of the Year With Granny”

010 March 03, 2018
Scott Thomas Outlar’s “The Natural Reflection of Your Palms”

011 March 10, 2018
Anya Francesca Jenkins’s “After Diane Beatty’s Photograph “History Abandoned”

012  March 17, 2018
Angela Narciso Torres’s “What I Learned This Week”

013 March 24, 2018
Jan Steckel’s “Holiday On ICE”

014 March 31, 2018
Ibrahim Honjo’s “Colors”

015 April 14, 2018
Marilyn Kallett’s “Ode to Disappointment”

016  April 27, 2018
Beth Copeland’s “Reliquary”

017  May 12, 2018
Marlon L Fick’s “The Swallows of Barcelona”

018  May 25, 2018
Juliet Cook’s “ARTERIAL DISCOMBOBULATION”

019  June 09, 2018
Alexis Rhone Fancher’s “Stiletto Killer. . . A Surmise”

020 June 16, 2018
Charles Rammelkamp’s “At Last I Can Start Suffering”

021  July 05, 2018
Marla Shaw O’Neill’s “Wind Chimes”

022 July 13, 2018
Julia Gordon-Bramer’s “Studying Ariel”

023 July 20, 2018
Bill Yarrow’s “Jesus Zombie”

024  July 27, 2018
Telaina Eriksen’s “Brag 2016”

025  August 01, 2018
Seth Berg’s “It is only Yourself that Bends – so Wake up!”

026  August 07, 2018
David Herrle’s “Devil In the Details”

027  August 13, 2018
Gloria Mindock’s “Carmen Polo, Lady Necklaces, 2017”

028  August 21, 2018
Connie Post’s “Two Deaths”

029  August 30, 2018
Mary Harwell Sayler’s “Faces in a Crowd”

030 September 16, 2018
Larry Jaffe’s “The Risking Point”

031  September 24, 2018
Mark Lee Webb’s “After We Drove”
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2018/09/31-backstory-of-poem-after-we-drove-by.html