Readers and writers blog

Most people have a lot of thoughts, but Jennifer Weber writes hers down. She does it very well. And some of her thoughts come out as poems.

We offer three of them today in our poetry section.

Ah, you poets. What you do, I love, but do not pretend to understand. My only theory about poetry and prose is that the better each is written, the more they become indistinguishable.

The prosaic side of Weber is to be found in her weblog, I’m Having a Thought Here, a collection of family experiences, news, personal philosophy, much of it related with humor, and an occasional groupie paean to Johnny Depp or Josh Groban — this from a grandmother of two, no less.

Actually, we have a lot in common. I’m at least a half generation older than Weber, and I also am a big fan of Johnny Depp — “Edward Scissorhands” is still one of my fondest cinematic memories.

Weber also has a profession I identify with — court reporter. No, not a news reporter like me who used to cover court trials, but a member of the court who records every word said in the proceedings, an ability I’ve always considered remarkable.

She lives in Columbia, S.C., where her husband, Greg, is a small business owner. Now that their four children, ages 19 to 27, have left the nest, Weber has turned seriously to writing.

“(It’s) something I wanted to do and should have done a long time ago,” she told us in an email. “I let lots of things stop me, not the least of which was fear that I’m no good as a writer. Now I know that even if I’m no good, I still have to try.”

I don’t think there’s a writer among us who hasn’t shared those feelings.

Weber is hard at work on two novels, has sketched out a few short stories, loves flash fiction and has been published several times on Six Sentences, a unique website where writers contribute works limited to, yes, six sentences. (It’s interesting. Check it out.)

And, of course, she regularly writes poetry.

Now, I don’t know how Weber and other poets do their work. I’ve always imagined it’s done at times like Longfellow’s “The Children’s Hour” — you know . . . ‘Between the dark and the daylight, when the night is beginning to lower, comes a pause in the day’s occupations . . .,’ and so forth. In other words, quietly.

Longfellow is a favorite poet mostly because he and I both used to live in Portland, Maine. I also like Robert Frost — he and I both used to live in New Hampshire. And I really like Walt Whitman for a lot of good reasons, including his love of lilacs and Lincoln.

No, my idea of a good writing environment comes from my first newspaper job where my desk was separated from the press room by only a thin wall and I wrote obituaries in the afternoon with the press running at ear-splitting decibels, forcing verbal communication into hand signals and lip reading. For all those succeeding years, noise was good. And if a fist fight happened to break out in the newsroom, so much the better. It forced me to focus even more. (I still talk when I write, either to anyone else in the room or, if alone, to myself.)

Which is why I leave the poetry to Weber and the others.

Besides her poems, today’s new offerings in our Works section:

• Chapter 12: Clayton Street of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard recalls the Christmas of 1963 that he spent with a girlfriend with Mafia connections and that the love of his life, Virginia, spent with a black poet.

• Chapter 18: Revelations of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing. Now that humans have demonstrated their intelligence to it, an alien ship in the New Mexico desert gives them nearly unlimited access to its own intelligence.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is from an illustration on the website deviantART from a contributor identified only as darktwilite, who apparently is an American artist named Krista Jean, no last name given.