Runyon will be giving a poetry reading at the 4M Festival (Mountain Makers Mushroom & Music) over Labor Day weekend in Sylva, NC:
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Where Is Our Prague Spring?: $20 + $4 shipping
men weaving
traditionally it was the women who wove
in the mountain hollers
and the men who built the looms
out of rough-hewn wood
then the railroads that had been built for the mines
to haul off the feldspar, kaolin and mica
also brought in dry goods for clothing
so the looms were put away
and stayed away, until Lucy Morgan
went to Berea College in 1924 to learn to weave
and came back to Penland to teach the women there –
where only Aunt Susan Phillips, age 95
still even knew how to weave, but didn’t –
but had a big old rough-timbered loom
way up high in the loft of her cabin
****
when Penland School was born in 1929
my great-aunt Lucy invited Edward F. Worst –
an expert on handweaving from Chicago –
to the new Penland School to teach
and he came, and came back
summer after summer
on his own dime
and then it was Mr. Rupert Peters
who came from the Kansas City Public Schools
to take the helm of the Lily Loom House in the 1930s
he was still there when I was a child in the 50s
though elderly, and no longer taught
but came to The Pines for all his meals
always chucking me under the chin, saying
“you’ve got a little soft spot there, haven’t you?”
Mr. Peters – tall, bespectacled, white-haired –
his picture high on the wall above the mantle in the weaving room
where we wove late at night, while keeping an eye out for bats
swooping down from the rafters
and later it was Colonel John Fishback, round and bald –
a cranky old army colonel who had been wounded in the war
and didn’t want to do anything until someone said
bring him to Penland, he can learn to weave
and he did
and it was he who taught my cousin and me
all those men weaving, but fifty years later
it was under the tutelage of women once again
that my own tall son learned to weave
bright star of the weaving studio that season
with his youth, his bright red hair
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