The Beautiful Creatures featured in the SL Enquirer

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The faint sound of trumpets, approaching the crest of the hill...

For the entire school year, I have been earnestly praying (yes, praying) for there to be "a new sherriff in town"--- The Honorable Scott Cooper is a judge. My cup runneth over. He is running for a vacant spot on our local school board. Here's what he had to say about our kids yesterday:

"Last night, I attended a meeting of the Crook County School District budget committee. This was the final meeting of the committee before it deliberates on how to cut $3 million to $4.5 million from its $28 million budget. Needless to say, the pain is real. This was brought home to me when I was visiting with a group of high school students recently who very articulately observed: “Everyone is talking about us, but no one is talking TO us.” I took it upon myself to take that message to the school board in my role as citizen (although I very well could have taken it under the Partnership under the banner of civic engagement.) The committee, especially the school board, was oddly reluctant to take on the meeting but finally agreed to do so.



Notwithstanding that, nearly 100 students showed up to speak. By and large they represented not the “jocks and cheerleaders” crowd, most of whom were involved in either a couple major out-of-town sporting events or away serving as camp counselors this week at the sixth grade outdoor school. Instead, those that showed up were but that group of students who perform at the middling level who are typically not heard from. Given the setting, the relative placement within the power structure of the high school of these students and the high level, highly technical, no-quarter-given financial overview with which the superintendent and business manager started the meeting, it must have been terrifying prospect for these kids to line up at the microphone to address their concerns.



But these kids were so motivated out of passion for saving the things they considered important to their lives and futures, that they overcame their fears and testified anyone. It was an awesome display of courage. Tears ran down my cheeks as I watched—not figuratively but literally. I don’t think I could have been more proud of our student body.



Their themes, some delivered passionately, some delivered creatively, some delivered succinctly but all delivered reasonably, responsibility and respectfully (the three R’s that govern student at CCHS) were clear:



They are aware of and concerned about the connection between trade skills learned while in high school and their career potential. These kids are not floating through life assuming the government or Mom and Dad will take care of them once they graduate. Many of them know that college is not in their future, and they know that they need competitive skills if they hope to find jobs and be competitive with a large pool of older workers competing for those same jobs. They rely on their high school to provide those skills from traditional vocational training to computer-aided design to public speaking skills to foreign language to give them the ability to find post-graduation work and they connect the loss of these programs with a diminished future for themselves.



They understand very clearly that they are the upcoming generation of leaders in their communities. They believe that without arenas such as extracurricular activities, school-based community service opportunities and the opportunity to compete on the athletic field that they will not gain the skills they need to provide leadership in their communities when they become young adults.



They understand very deeply and articulate well that success in core classes and the likelihood of their peers attending or completing school correlates directly to the financial stability of the school district and the well being of the entire community. They understand that creative outlets and athletic achievement make for well rounded adults and individuals and better communities. They understand that young people will vote with their feet if their schools are unable to meet their needs.



One girl stirred deep emotions when she explained that she lives in deep poverty and that the only thing that makes her day worthwhile are the two back-to-back drama classes she has in the morning where she can be someone other than herself for two hours each day. And then she added that she knows that when the drama teacher asks her some mornings, “Are You OK?” she’s the one person in her life who really means it. Humbly, she asked the committee not to take away that lifeline from her.



Two girls from FFA gave presentations that were so well polished and so well put together than none of us in this office could pull them off. And they talked about how when they put on their jackets and look in the mirror in their own minds they put on not just an article of clothing but the mantle of role models to other students. Take that away from them, and they simply sink back to obscurity with the rest of the student body.



Two young men from the NJROTC program described how the combination of military discipline and creativity expressed through choir and band class had given them purpose and direction, both in setting life goals and in improving their academic performance. Both have their sites firmly set on career goals of becoming music teachers—something that can’t happen if they don’t have a music program. I know the circumstances in which one of the young men lives. Without the motivation and opportunity that high school provides, his future is challenging.



A THIRD GRADER competently addressed the board and the room of 100 people and explained why her elementary school is special to her and why shutting it down would create discord in her family and her community.



A young man told the board that he couldn’t express in words his concerns. So he played his guitar and sang a song he had written in class expressing his angst over the diminishment of his opportunities.



For three and half hours this went on. It was one of the most compelling things I have ever seen in my public life, primarily because it came from such an unexpected place.



I came away admiring the courage of young people, the awareness that this generation has about how its welfare connects to the welfare of society as a whole and the passion that causes young people to be willing to stand up for something bigger than just themselves. I have administered public hearings for the past 12 years, and I can only wish that the adults in the community had half the skills and approach of these young people.



I can’t wait for the next person to tell me how our kids are underperforming in our schools. If anything, it is the community that is underperforming for its kids."



Scott Cooper

Director of Public Policy,

Partnership To End Poverty

521 SW 6th St.

Redmond, OR 97756

direct dial: (541) 923-9663

cell phone: (541) 420-1998

fax: 541-420-1399

scott@partnershiptoendpoverty.org

www.partnershiptoendpoverty.org

Prineville Students to Present Poetry from The Nature of Words Creative Writing Program

Darkness and scarcity abound in our district, and yet...check out this article which features our students, as well as the great generosity from a solid local literary festival...

To Ellen Waterston, Margie Robberson and our Writer/Teacher in residence Jamie Houghton, we are forever in your debt.

My Boys-Smith Rock

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When darkness surrounds, hunt for the light. I am the moth to these two flames, and I am blinded by my love for them. This is a darkness I can live with.

The Better to See You With My Dear

I can't stop giggling. If you're not reading Katie's blog, you are missing out. Here is an example...

And the most important part of the week (from a letter to my friend Beth)

I lost a treasured former student to an auto wreck last week. She was blossoming, doing so well. She would be 20 on the 5th. I went to her funeral, packed with beautiful studded leather multi-pierced smelling of hand-rolled tobacco angels who loved her and sang raucous irish/punk goodbyes. I don't cry at funerals. I suck at death. Everything is numb and sucked inside of me in mid-inhale, afraid I will break something. But their singing broke me free. Sad, Sad and raucous and beautiful and tragic...

In case you didn't hear about 1/3 of my week last week...

You Might find this interesting...


http://www.bendbulletin.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081211/NEWS0107/812110432/1041&nav_category=

Torches n' Pitchforks to launch over Thanksgiving Holiday

Editor’s Note.

As I write this, I am atop Misery Ridge in Central Oregon. It is a gloomy, and overcast afternoon, the first day of November; 11/1. Whenever I see these ones stacked upright together, I am reminded of those picket fences in my idealized college dreams. Today, in this moment however, I think of Three Fingered Jack, hidden by a rare clotting of Autumn-grey clouds.

These “upright ones” also bring me to think of pitchforks; the three pronged, hand-fashioned tools (or weapons) of a medieval peasantry. I imagine crowds stirred up into a fearful and angry frenzy, armed with pitchforks and also with torches- torches blaring together in an angry mob, illuminating and setting fire to every fear that huddles in the darkness.

Torches and pitchforks. How times have not changed! I asked some local students at Crook County High School what images came to mind when they heard of these paired objects. Their responses trickled in, then gathered momentum and force… “Fear, injustice, isolation, Frankenstein’s creature, being judged for what one was not, being outcast, abandoned, being other—”

I wish I was surrounded by a community of young writers like these when I was in high school. They may have been able to help me put words to the weighty heat that was in my chest as I navigated my teen years, groping for a word, any word that would release what I was trying to voice.

As you read the following pages, I offer a warning: take courage with you. For any community that values its children, who wishes them safety and comfort, it can be unsettling to hear what roils in the depths of them as they begin to put new words to their feelings. Caught in the middle stages of metamorphosis between child and adult, they sometimes resemble the creatures and monsters we were taught to fear as children.

Instead, it is my hope that we, as a community of listeners, put down our pitchforks for the moment. Let us dampen our torches that stain the night sky. In that darkness, huddled together for safety and warmth, let us gaze at the stars in wonder, as the pale moon rises to the East. And let us listen closely to what is rustling in the trees. Let us hear the gathering voices of our young, as they discover what is deep and rattling inside their throats. Let us hear them howl with their entire bodies… wet, squirming and outraged at anything and everything that has held their song back until now. Let us hear their howling melodies mingle together into the rising dark, and wonder at the dawn that will inevitably rise in its place.

Let us hope and pray that they greet the morning with their newfound power,

to tell us a story…

Jim Churchill-Dicks

Editor, Torches n’ Pitchforks

Smart Billy: Prologue II "A Loss in Translation"

Smart Billy: Prologue II \"A Loss in Translation\"

A Mentor, A Friend, a Priest, A Brother...

I had the honor of working with Chris Abani this Summer at the Port Townsend Writer's Conference. His fierce kindness and ferocious generosity have deeply marked me.

In his own mother's words, "You can steel your heart against any kind of trouble, any kind of horror, but the simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will unstitch you…"

So true, I have been unmade, and I hope to never recover from this generosity. Listen to the man...

More Pics

A Peony for Bill

Reading my friend Bill's blog again at Poet's Farm, I realize that I have been rushing to such a degree, that Memorial Day has passed me and I am approaching the last week of June. Bill's grandmother grew and sold peonies over Memorial Days past. Today, of my four, one peony on the shaded northern bush is still in bloom.

So in honor of those who are gone, but still in bloom inside of us, as Bill so beautifully said, here are some photos to witness and remember the sunlight and color, as well as a poem reminding me of the redemptive power of having my hands in the soil:

Earth

Through the curtains
I watch my mother planting
flowers; alyssum, indigo
lobelia, the bulbs
of lavender tulips, her
clipped nails christened
in earth.

My sons gallop toward her. She squeals
as they tumble together

laughing.

And Mother,
I remember you spinning
me, round and round
in your arms, me
squealing with delight,
your open smile
my only focus

in a rapidly dizzying world.

And for context sake of the earlier entry- Smart Billy's Prologue

Smart-Billy
By Jim Churchill-Dicks


PROLOGUE


Witness a man, a 19th century trapper, violently shivering in a snow cave with his dog. The dog has shared her heat with the man, has positioned herself between the man and the cave opening, protecting the man from the elements, because she is a good dog.

But now, just now she is dead, heat escaping her body.

Witness the man, buried and shivering in a snow cave up high, near Heaven’s Gate on Mt. Hood. His dead dog is his only company. Wind howls over the mountain, burning with snow in relentless curtains. For the moment, ignore the impulse to wonder why this trapper is so high upon this lifeless slope. Instead, wonder at his body, his sinewy skeleton loosely draped in blotchy pale skin.

Behold the man, the man whose shivering now stops. He strips away his beaver pelts, delirious and warm. He is chanting with graveled breaths, incomprehensible, swaying forward and back, forward and back. Behold the preconceived syllables of his language. The groaning vowels, the gravelly aspirates, the whiny whistle in each breath.

Behold the man’s pink face, freckled and burning through frizzy shocks of a chest-length, auburn beard. Behold the dried and broken blisters on his sharply cut nose, the wild green eyes, and closer, to his right eye, with broken capillaries slowly pooling with blood, just below the cornea’s surface. Behold the caked mucous at the lashes. The whitened salt-stained lower lid from dried tears—

Gaze into this eye, some reddening cloud that could swallow the moon— Look closer. Behold the muscular green filaments twitching in unison, now growing sluggish, failing, as they begin to give way to the pupil, a growing shadow swirling inward. Lean closer. Hear his whistling whisper in a final plume of breath— then stillness.

Wait. You heard something. Let your mind register it. You are correct. A final word, no, a name escaping the trapper’s rapidly cooling lips—

Billy .

Smart Billy: Chapter One Process Brainstorm

any feedback you have for me would be grand.

CHAPTER ONE Brainstorm
EAGLE CREEK OREGON, SPRING 1878:

Billy is fifteen. and here should be the Billy sentences, lots of them, of what he does, repetition of billy. Checking traplines, wondering at father’s eleven week absence, fashioning a homemade bear trap, one that will kill its quarry this time, not like last summer, losing his brother, everything falling apart after that, mother catatonic, father leaving, billy running household on own,

(secret: the father putting younger brother out of misery, covering his face, older brother walks in, to brother’s newly strong kicking. Hidden memory. Not until long after, a revelation, father leaving, not out of shame of the older, but out of shame for himself.)

Describe the carrying back of the comatose brother, of the wet powder from earlier, how the boy failed to fire at the bear, the father surviving by batting the butt of the rifle on the bear’s nose.

Billy finding this bear near punchbowl falls, by Tanner butte, indepth fashioning of this mankiller trap, not aboriginal, not a connection to the circle of life, but of revenge, of hatred for an animal, a quest for atonement.

EXPERIMENT: OPENING SCENE, BILLY TRYING TO FIT THE PIECES TOGETHER, TO NOT GIVE TOO MUCH AWAY, TO VALUE THE READER’S INTELLIGENCE, TO PIECE TOGETHER WHAT HAS HAPPENED, TO LEAVE SOME TO THE IMAGINATION, TO LEAVE SOME FOR LATER. WHAT ABOUT AN EXPERIMENT- A PROSE SESTINA, IS THERE SUCH A THING? 1 STANZA PER 2 PAGES, END LINE WORDS REPEATED OVER AND OVER IN A PARAGRAPH, 3 PARAGRAPHS PER PAGE SWITCH ORDER AS THE SESTINA SWITCHES.

END WORDS TO CONSIDER:
BILLY
BROTHER, BROTH, BROTHEL, BOTHER
GUN (POWDER?)
BEAR (GOOD, WITH HOMONYMS BEAR[A BURDEN] BARE)
FATHER, FARTHER (Water?)
MOTHER SMOTHER MOTH, OTHER
OPTIONAL, IN PLACE OF GUN: RIVER

Final stanza a realization, the father killing brother? Too soon? We’re setting up for the missionaries to find them, and take them, yes?

Just found this on the net, thought I invented something new. But googled "prose sestina" and found this little nugget:

The Prose Sestina. A narrative of seven paragraphs in which six words recur in each paragraph in the same order as dictated by the rules of a sestina: 123456, 615243, 364125, 532614, 451362, 246531, 652431. The paragraphs are of about the same length, except for the last paragraph, which is half as long as the others. (Ron McFarland)

Still, I was thinking a paragraph per word uttered several times, which would be new, would possibly be impossibly droll, or hypnotic, or shamanic, healing the boy, hurtling him toward revelation, to meaning, or at least hurtling him the hell out of his present circumstance-that may be all the exorcism anyone needs. Who knows? But Billy is in crisis, searching for answers by doing works in a routine, maybe needing to mix up the routine in different order to reassemble the puzzle, as it were. Can I do this with action and gesture and very little else, other than the form? Will the form stick out, like an ill-fitting suit, or will it suit Billy, in his tendencies, his story, what he has been mutely shouting to me for the last five years?

Jesus Billy, what are you trying to say to me? What are you needing me to help you figure out? Go home. Rest. The leaves are whispering in the trees. Go to sleep…

Would that all of my friends be recognized by such kind and generous eyes...

I am shy when it comes to praise, but I'd like to share an article that one of my Freshman wrote about me in CCHS's inaugural online journalistic enterprise called The Rimrock Echo.

http://my.highschooljournalism.org/or/prineville/cchs/article.cfm?eid=17149&aid=220673


They have also featured two of my poems.

Would that all of my friends be recognized by such kind and generous eyes.

Our Father

He extended
his routine flight and flew
above our camp, hovered there
in his rescue chopper, that rumbling chariot
as we ran to the lake shore
to greet him, waved and hollered;

an image of God and angels.

He circled behind the trees,
a thundering perimeter,
a whirring proclamation

I am that I am and you are mine!

Today he snowshoes up to a rented
hut. His wife has barred him from his house,
scattered his belongings
into locked up warehouses,
skilled at taking hostages.

Alone,
a thin candle fixed
into a cut away coffee can, he reads
about a boy, a delinquent boy, the toughest
kid on the Big J ranch,
who rode off on a wounded horse,
beaten ugly, a lazy eye, trailing ear,

he reads
about how the ranchers found him in a clearing,
face buried, sobbing into the horse’s chest
whose sad face stood with newborn watchfulness

and our father,
hunched on a rough hewn bench, far
from home, sobs into his massive, perfect hands
in the fading light,

a vision of God and angels.

A Crack of Light

I remember the salt-stained boulders, encrusted with mussel shells, which flanked the levee to my father’s Coast Guard base, reaching like a prickly arm around the Port Angeles harbor.

I remember delivering casseroles late at night in the pilot’s hangar, being driven through the gates-the guard’s salute because of our officer’s bumper decal. Delivering casseroles to my father as he pulled all-night duty flying his lumbering H-52.

I remember my father, at dawn, dragging his heavy boots across the threshold, peeling his orange flight-suit halfway down, a snake shedding his skin as he chugged milk from the up-turned jug, draining its contents in front of the open refrigerator.

I remember watching him from the crack of light in the swinging kitchen door as he told his wife about his latest search and rescue case, “I lost him,” he whispered in a milky gravel. “Twenty-foot seas, winds at 50 knots, only five feet of rotor-clearance on either side— It was the water’s temperature that killed him.”

His voice was tired, but without emotion, not like when -that same summer, in the middle of the night, when he thought I was asleep in the back seat- he sobbed behind the wheel, a forceful engine choking into gear while listening to the radio, listening to how Thurman Munson –his favorite Yankees catcher- had perished in an airplane crash.

“Augered in—” he cried. “My boy has augered in…” as I watched him through the rear view mirror, the intermittent streetlights staining his warm, wet face.

It is graduation week here at Crook County High School, but all I can think about is my father, who will make his last flight as a helicopter pilot on the 4th of June; the day of his retirement. He has been a pilot since I was a baby. Over the next couple of entries, I will post some of my archived work about my dad as a pilot.