Wednesday, May 19^th 2021
To Members and Friends of
First Presbyterian Church, Champaign
 
Dear Friends,
 
            Tonight at 7:00, our Wednesday Zoom will feature poet and children’s author—locally and internationally known—Janice Harrington. She’ll read some of her poetry, talk about the creative process, and answer our questions in a way that only a poet can begin to answer. Join us. Invite a friend.
 
            The Poetry Foundation says this about Janice: Poet and children’s author Janice N. Harrington grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also the author of The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (2011) and Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin (2016). Her children’s books, The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County (2007) and Going North (2004), have won several awards and citations, including a listing among Time Magazine’s top 10 children’s books and the Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library.
 
Harrington has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for emerging women writers. She has worked as a public librarian and now teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois.

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            Join the conversation tonight. The link follows at the end of this email. Invite a friend.
 
            Here’s a poem by Janice.
 
SHAKING THE GRASS

Evening, and all my ghosts come back to me
like red banty hens to catalpa limbs
and chicken-wired hutches, clucking, clucking,
and falling, at last, into their head-under-wing sleep.

I think about the field of grass I lay in once,
between Omaha and Lincoln.  It was summer, I think.
The air smelled green, and wands of windy green, a-sway,
a-sway, swayed over me.  I lay on green sod
like a prairie snake letting the sun warm me.

What does a girl think about alone
in a field of grass, beneath a sky as bright
as an Easter dress, beneath a green wind?

Maybe I have not shaken the grass.
All is vanity.

Maybe I never rose from that green field.
All is vanity.

Maybe I did no more than swallow deep, deep breaths
and spill them out into story:  all is vanity.

Maybe I listened to the wind sighing and shivered,
spinning, awhirl amidst the bluestem
and green lashes:  O my beloved!  O my beloved!

I lay in a field of grass once, and then went on.
Even the hollow that my body made is gone.
 
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Much love to you all.
 
Matt Matthews
matt@firstpres.church

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Enough rain!  Sunday weather says partly cloudy with a high of 88 … a great day to join us for a Sunday in the Park at West Side Park at 11 am following the 10:15 am in-person worship.  See you Sunday!