Dana Biography

Biography	Dana Wildsmith ● Grace Farm ● 943 Harry McCarty Road ● Bethlehem, GA 30620-2611
Home Page Articles Back to Abnormal One Good Hand Jimmie Wayne Calendar Grand Canyon Journal Links Contact Dana	In 1972 my parents were looking ahead toward retirement in a few years time. Daddy, the Rev, H.W. “Speed” Scoates, was a United Methodist minister in that church’s itinerant system; translation: he and Mama had moved every few years of their married life from one furnished parsonage to another and were now facing their Golden Years owning nothing more than a sewing machine and a couple of chairs. They had in mind to get away from South Georgia’s gnats and humidity, so they headed toward the mountains, stopping in Barrow County to check out an old farm they’d been told about near the one-crossroad town of Bethlehem where North Georgia’s pottery artisans had once flourished but where nothing now flourished except poverty, moonshine and the Dixie Mafia. The farm they found was dirt poor and dirt cheap. They bought it. Six months later my young Viet Nam Vet husband and I (even younger) moved there because we had nowhere else to go. We left a few years later, poorer than when we had come, our only wealth being our daughter. During the next twenty years of moving around with Don’s Navy career, I began to write. Like Eudora Welty, “it was living that made me write”. I wrote poetry because it is so close to singing and singing flows more through my veins than blood does, and also because poems are short- I was busy with a small child and trying to get an education. I wrote about the elemental focuses of life because I was too busy and too poor to afford anything but the elemental. Readers obviously like being taken to a focus point because my first chapbook, Alchemy, sold out its first printing within a matter of months, an almost unheard-of circumstance in the world of small poetry presses. This first small collection was followed by Annie, a collection of portrait poems about a young mountain woman, and then Our Bodies Remember, poems about living with middle-class poverty. When Don retired from the Navy we moved back to Bethlehem because we had nowhere else to go (I love maintaining a consistency) and because Mama and her new husband, Mac (Daddy died of cancer in 1992), were likely going to be needing someone else living on their acreage to help with its upkeep. We could do that. I didn’t know how much I’d been longing for a home until I moved back to Grace Farm (we’d named it for Mama, much to her embarrassment) and found one there. The hitch is that half the mid-west and much of Mexico, Columbia and Cambodia also decided around that time to stake their claim in Barrow County. When 2000 dawned, I found myself living in the twelfth-fastest-growing county in the nation, and fighting to protect our old farm from encroachment. I fought back partly by writing about how I was living my life on this old farm, first in poems which became my fourth collection, One Good Hand, and then, when poems proved not large enough for all I had to say, in essays which would eventually bind together into a farm memoir, Back to Abnormal: Surviving With An Old Farm In the New South. It has also been here in the very toe of the Appalachian chain that I have been able to enlarge upon my other love: teaching. During our gypsy years I had begun teaching creative writing here and there, and had worked as an Artist in the Schools in South Carolina. I was Artist-in-Residence at Devils Tower National Monument and also in Sitka, Alaska where – to the later esoteric embellishment of my resume- I taught fourth-graders at Keet Gooshi Heen Elementary School. In April of 2010 I served as Artist-in-Residence for the South Rim of the Grand Canyon where - still loving to rack up unlikely credits - I hiked down the Kaibab Trail to Phantom Ranch and gave a talk by flashlight to the Rangers, other hikers, and some of the trail maintenance crew. As my day job at home in Barrow County, I teach English as a Second Language to adults of many nationalities through the Adult Education Program of Lanier Technical College. I tell people I love to teach so much that if I were asked to step in as a last minute sub for a Plumbing class, I’d say, “Just give me half an hour to look over the textbook and I’ll be there.” Now my teaching, and getting to know about the lives of people I teach, has led me to step into the scary-for-a-poet world of writing fiction. And I'm finding that I love it! Writing fiction is, it seems, pretty much just a slant on what I've always done; instead of putting my own thoughts into a poem or an essay, now I'm putting those thoughts into the mouths of the characters I am creating. How could anything be more fun than that?

Biography

Dana Wildsmith

● Grace Farm ● 943 Harry McCarty Road ● Bethlehem, GA 30620-2611

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Articles

Back to Abnormal

One Good Hand

In 1972 my parents were looking ahead toward retirement in a few years time. Daddy, the Rev, H.W. “Speed” Scoates, was a United Methodist minister in that church’s itinerant system; translation: he and Mama had moved every few years of their married life from one furnished parsonage to another and were now facing their Golden Years owning nothing more than a sewing machine and a couple of chairs. They had in mind to get away from South Georgia’s gnats and humidity, so they headed toward the mountains, stopping in Barrow County to check out an old farm they’d been told about near the one-crossroad town of Bethlehem where North Georgia’s pottery artisans had once flourished but where nothing now flourished except poverty, moonshine and the Dixie Mafia. The farm they found was dirt poor and dirt cheap. They bought it. Six months later my young Viet Nam Vet husband and I (even younger) moved there because we had nowhere else to go.

We left a few years later, poorer than when we had come, our only wealth being our daughter. During the next twenty years of moving around with Don’s Navy career, I began to write. Like Eudora Welty, “it was living that made me write”. I wrote poetry because it is so close to singing and singing flows more through my veins than blood does, and also because poems are short- I was busy with a small child and trying to get an education. I wrote about the elemental focuses of life because I was too busy and too poor to afford anything but the elemental. Readers obviously like being taken to a focus point because my first chapbook, Alchemy, sold out its first printing within a matter of months, an almost unheard-of circumstance in the world of small poetry presses. This first small collection was followed by Annie, a collection of portrait poems about a young mountain woman, and then Our Bodies Remember, poems about living with middle-class poverty.

When Don retired from the Navy we moved back to Bethlehem because we had nowhere else to go (I love maintaining a consistency) and because Mama and her new husband, Mac (Daddy died of cancer in 1992), were likely going to be needing someone else living on their acreage to help with its upkeep. We could do that. I didn’t know how much I’d been longing for a home until I moved back to Grace Farm (we’d named it for Mama, much to her embarrassment) and found one there. The hitch is that half the mid-west and much of Mexico, Columbia and Cambodia also decided around that time to stake their claim in Barrow County. When 2000 dawned, I found myself living in the twelfth-fastest-growing county in the nation, and fighting to protect our old farm from encroachment. I fought back partly by writing about how I was living my life on this old farm, first in poems which became my fourth collection, One Good Hand, and then, when poems proved not large enough for all I had to say, in essays which would eventually bind together into a farm memoir, Back to Abnormal: Surviving With An Old Farm In the New South.

It has also been here in the very toe of the Appalachian chain that I have been able to enlarge upon my other love: teaching. During our gypsy years I had begun teaching creative writing here and there, and had worked as an Artist in the Schools in South Carolina. I was Artist-in-Residence at Devils Tower National Monument and also in Sitka, Alaska where – to the later esoteric embellishment of my resume- I taught fourth-graders at Keet Gooshi Heen Elementary School. In April of 2010 I served as Artist-in-Residence for the South Rim of the Grand Canyon where - still loving to rack up unlikely credits - I hiked down the Kaibab Trail to Phantom Ranch and gave a talk by flashlight to the Rangers, other hikers, and some of the trail maintenance crew. As my day job at home in Barrow County, I teach English as a Second Language to adults of many nationalities through the Adult Education Program of Lanier Technical College. I tell people I love to teach so much that if I were asked to step in as a last minute sub for a Plumbing class, I’d say, “Just give me half an hour to look over the textbook and I’ll be there.”

Now my teaching, and getting to know about the lives of people I teach, has led me to step into the scary-for-a-poet world of writing fiction. And I'm finding that I love it! Writing fiction is, it seems, pretty much just a slant on what I've always done; instead of putting my own thoughts into a poem or an essay, now I'm putting those thoughts into the mouths of the characters I am creating. How could anything be more fun than that?