Last month, we undertook a Pet Photo Contest for the Army Of Good, they were asked to send their favorite photos animals – any animals to The Mansion. The residents want to give something back, so they will choose three winners and send them some gifts.
The entries came rolling in all month, and the deadline for the contest has just passed. All entries received as of today, September 11, will be accepted and are eligible to win the contest. The photos are filling up the Mansion bulletin boards and providing great fun and excitement for some of the residents.
Thanks so much for doing this, the Mansion calendar is pretty full this week, the best photos will be chosen early next week. THis one is going to be tough, there are a lot of interesting and beautiful animals out there. Thanks so much for doing this, your photos have brightened many a morning, and lots of bulletin boards.
They are scoured by the residents every morning and there is already a lot of talk about how hard it will be to choose a winner. Stay tuned, and thanks again for caring and sharing. The Army Of Good does good.
Fate is the most wonderful dog. She wants so much to work, and is always a bit sad when she can’t. She loves being around the sheep but she won’t challenge them or move them. This morning, we went out in the mist and the sheep were out in the meadow and Fate wanted to get there too. She turned and looked at me pleadingly. I let her in and she was in her element, tearing around.
I’ve been teaching writing a very long time, and any good teacher of writing accepts that a lot of students say they want to write, but when all is said and done, very few of them actually do.
Writing is one of those mythological desires so many people aspire to, but I tell them you do need to be careful what you wish for, you might not like it. To become a writer is much, in my mind like becoming a professional wrestler, it is a brawl every step of the way.
As often as writing is about talent, it is also about grit and determination.
Carol Gulley, a shy, gentle, self-effacing woman describes herself as a farmer’s wife, even though the people who know her – me – would describe her in broader terms. We met in the oddest of ways, both of standing next to one another on two treadmills in a hospital cardiac rehab program.
She had read one of my books, and one of her steers, Elvis, had ended up on my farm, the first Bedlam Farm.
We became friends instantly and she invited me to dinner. Maria and I visited her farm, met her husband Ed, and we all became friends together. We just clicked in the way friendships come about. Maria and I are not people who make friends easily.
Carol and Ed (especially Ed) had a lot to say about farm life, and we came up with the suggestion that they start a blog. Ed is a wonderful story-teller and initially, I didn’t realize that Carol would write also.
I often make this suggestion to people, to me blogs are the most important source of individual expression in centuries, and a wonderful way for serious writers and poets to begin writing and learn how to compose and share their work. These days, more writers are discovered by agents and publishers through their blog posts than any other way.
Very few people agree with me, especially older people. They seem to find it frightening or alien. They would rather not write at all then give up the old model of writing. They want to be in The New Yorker, not on Amazon.
At first, the blog was a frightening, even traumatic idea for Carol, a devoted wife, mother, grandmother and farm wife.
The Gulleys didn’t have computer or use cellphones. Carol went out and bought herself an Iphone and started a blog. She bought a computer and taught herself how to use it.
Carol was prolific from the first, and so was Ed.
Seven days a week, every day of the year, day and night, Carol is alongside Ed milking cows, shoveling manure, driving tractors, cutting hayfields, harvesting corn to sell and feed their dairy cows. If you know any family dairy farmers, you see the staggering physical workloads they have. And unlike almost everyone else in our world, they don’t whine much about it, and are grateful for what they have.
Ed’s writes about farming and his own remarkable life’s story of growing up on a farm. Carol’s writing is more interior, she is more apt to write about joy and sorrow. She has suffered from depression at times, it is under control.
Carol’s life centers around Ed and her children and grandchildren, she is notorious for pulling out her cellphone and showing scores of photos of them.
I must have urged 10,000 people in my life to start a blog. One new friend was so horrified and offended by the idea he refused to even having lunch with me.I know I can be an obnoxious pest about blogs, but there has never been a vehicle so tailor made for individual expression in the Corporate Nation. Carol and Ed stunned me by putting a blog up right away, they called it the Bejosh Farm Journal.
Maria and I found someone to help them set it up and it was an instant success.
Carol and Ed post stories and videos every day, Ed talks about farming, his own life, his art. To my surprise, began posting frequently as well, she wrote in a different way her own life, the trials of farm, the unique life of the farm wife. She had never said a word to me that suggested she was interested in writing.
I loved her writing right away. Carol didn’t need to be taught much, she is the whole package. Since Ed doesn’t type, she posted his columns and then wrote her own. I noticed several things about Carol’s writing right away. She writes from the heart, she wrote simply and clearly, she never agonized about writing or made it into a drama, she just writes, almost every day, and there are no short or easy days in Carol’s life.
And she is completely authentic, she does not know how to dissemble or posture. She faces the toughest issues squarely and tells the truth, even when it doesn’t make her look good.
I felt right away I had come across a writer, although Carol has never spoken of herself in that way, she titles her writing “my farmer and me.” I can’t imagine Maria heading up her writing with the words “my writer and me.” She would rather throw herself (or me) under a truck.
At the same time, Carol has a powerful sense of identity. She is strong, hard-working, fiercely loyal and loving. Out of this has come a powerful narrative of life that could and should become a book or a novel.
I asked Carol if she wanted to join my writing workshop. She came with Ed for a few times, and then I suggested Ed leave the class. He was busy, he didn’t wish to be a writer, he was an artist, and I thought Carol might make more progress if she was there by herself. The workshop only has women in it, and that chemistry seems to work.
I thought Carol needed support for her writing and the class is unfailingly supportive of one another. There are no men in it, other than me.
Carol seems to draw strength and energy from the other women in the class. I get the feeling she is less comfortable talking too openly with me. Ed and I bullshit together with abandon, there is nothing we can’t say to one another.
With Carol, that’s fine. We love and respect one another, and I want her to succeed in any way that works for her. That is the teacher’s job. Mostly, I pester her to appreciate her gifts. One day, I hope to hear her say she is a writer, not just a farmer’s wife.
So the farm wife is a writer.
I never saw anyone in my teaching life write as effortlessly and with as little fuss as Carol.
It was as if she was simply waiting to be tapped on the shoulder and put to work. She writes with the kind of clarity, authenticity and feeling I am still working hard to achieve. She does not know what writer’s bloc is, never says she is too busy to write, never walks away from the thoughtful observations on her blog.
She simply shares her life, as I do, she seems born to do it. She was a writer from the minute she came to class and started writing, she never asks for help and needs very little.
Carol’s first project was an effort to write about a horrific farm accident involving her son Jeremy that happened more than a decade ago. He nearly died, and she was still struggling to figure it out.
She came in week after week with the most moving and harrowing account of the accident, and she told me a few days ago she had decided to turn the pieces into a poem, the writing had freed her of much of the pain and guilt she had been carrying around for so many years.
When I read Carol, I think of Willa Cather. the great literary chronicler of farm women and their lives. Lives built on family, strength, tragedy, brutishly hard work.
I wish it were the old days when I could pick up the phone and call an editor or agent and wave a wand, and help push Carol to a book contract, but the publishing world doesn’t work that way any longer. They no longer look for fresh voices, just successful ones.
My first step will be to try to get Carol to self-publish a book, we will help her to do that. And hopefully sell it on her blog and here. I think that could really work for her, and she will almost surely resist the idea that she has anything worth saying. She does.
Carol writes of the rich life of the family farm. She and Ed talk to animals, give birth to them, rescue them, worry about them. She writes poignantly and without complaint about the grueling life of the family farmer, her love of family. She has a great gift for writing about animals, one of her passions in life is to rescue them and return them to nature.
She has a lot of family to love, and she loves them dearly. She writes about the weather, the traumas and surprises of farm life.
Perhaps her complete lack of self-consciousness is what makes her writing so clear and convincing. If you never think of yourself as a writer, your writing has a simplicity and openness to it. And so much of her writing so touching. You can follow it here. She wrote recently about her family’s history with the Washington County Fair and how important it was to her children. Who else is writing about that?
This idea of a book will shock and confound her, but we will get past that. Carol has everything a writer needs but a writer’s ego. I’m on it.
This Saturday, Carol came to class and cleared her throat and said she loved the class and loved writing. But she is very busy and can’t always come to class (she misses about a third of the classes when there is hay to be cut or corn to be harvested, the farm comes first.) She knew there was a waiting list for the class, she said, and she understood if we wanted her to drop out and make room for somebody else.
I could not open my mouth before the rest of the class, shocked and horrified told her how important she was, how much they admired her, how much we needed her to be there. They didn’t even wait for me to speak. When I finally got a word in, I said that she was one of the most gifted writers in the class, one of the most productive. You did it, I said. You are a writer. You don’t talk about writing, you write.
Every single day.
We need you in this class. You are one of the best writers in the class. Come when you can.
She seemed surprised, and a little embarrassed. But I could tell she was pleased.
Carol is staying in the class. Her emergence as a writer stirs my heart and soul, as a teacher, a writer, and a person devoted to the creative encouragement of others. I don’t know how far Carol can or will take her writing, her blog is a great success all of its own, it is read every day by tens of thousands of people all over the country.
She concedes (sometimes) that I was write about the blog, it has helped to heal and inspire her, and to look at her own life. That is has. “You are good for my self-esteem,” she wrote me yesterday. That’s the idea.
They people who come Carol and Ed’s blog come to see the joys and hardships of a truly American life, an iconic but vanishing life, told with fine writing, and with dignity, soul and integrity. She is a gifted chronicler of a disappearing way of living in our world.
You’re a writer, Carol, and I am very proud to have you in my class. This is just the first chapter for you, more to come.
Teachers know that writers are sometimes taught, sometimes born. You can’t really teach someone how to write, you can only help them to be strong and try to do it well. Carol is doing it well. She is a born writer.
Life is filled with crisis and mystery, joy and sorrow. life is good.
We went to see Carol and Ed Gulley at their Bejosh Farm yesterday and Ed showed us some striking new “flower” sculptures he has made out of farm tractor and engine parts. These are especially graceful. Ed’s art evolves all of the time, and he never stops creating and thinking and re-thinking his work.
His idea to make evocative sculptures out of farm implements is pure genius to me, and is an exciting art form. He makes wind chimes, sculptures and animal figures and representations.
Maria, who discovered Ed’s artistic abilities a couple of years ago, and I are both impressed with the work of the artist inside of Ed that wants to come out. Ed will be showing his work at our Open House on Columbus Day weekend. Ed and Carol have launched a deservedly successful blog, the Bejosh Farm Journal, you can keep up with their work there. It is popular all over the world.
I will also be herding sheep with Red and Fate (and Gus), Maria has a wonderful, surprising art show planned, the RISSE Refugee Singers will be here, so will some of the Mansion residents, some poets, some speakers, some friendly donkeys and barn cats, and some friendly dogs.
Our Open Houses are a celebration of the art of rural life. They are also an opportunity to share our lives with the people who support us.
