Main Street, Wyoming; 401; Peggy Simson Curry

Main Street Wyoming is made possible in part by grants from Kennicott energy proud to be a part of Wyoming's future in the uranium exploration mining and production industry. And by the Wyoming Council for the Humanities and ridging lives of Wyoming people through the study of Wyoming history values and ideas. Thank you Simpson Curry was Wyoming's first poet laureate. She died in 1997 six years after Governor and her Slayer surprised her with the appointment but her influence on writers in Wyoming including three were with us today goes far beyond the title.

She was a teacher as well as a writer. One of the best teachers of the writer's craft in her life is worth examining because it was more than just a keyboard life she could fly fish and play poker with the best of them as she herself wrote memorable writing can happen only out of memorable living. Let's begin by listening to one of paganism some Curry's poems read by Robin Cole wordless. What I am trying to say with words is wordless Unwin whispering through an empty log cabins where the rabbits sleep unspoken in spokes of broken wheels wrapped in the sighing grasses of September dumb and muted flame of winter willows painting red gold crosses on the snows. What I am trying to tell is tolling rains of April in holes where foxes fold to one another in the dark. The eagle's nest lined with lamb

pelts on a rock. It is the loneliness. The leaning after of the aspens. When the wind has gone. A footprint melting in the melting snow birds falling in the golden grief of autumn. It is Rivers from the country's far and strange pouring into the heart and mind definitions of desire designs of oceans that have no names. With me today are three people writers all who knew Peggy Simpson Currie Well Charles Laughton downscale is Wyoming's second poet laureate and he worked with Peggy in Wyoming's innovative poets in the schools programs. He now runs the editorial page of the Casper Star-Tribune. Welcome Charles. Thank you for being here. Tom Rey succeeded Charles running the poets in the schools program and is now the city editor at the Casper

Star-Tribune. Welcome thank you. He also published one of Peggy's books of poetry in the dooryard press and finally Mary Alice Gunderson is a writer from Casper who will soon succeed me when I give her time same job. I don't know. Not true not true. Mary Alice is the author of a book on Devil's Tower called Stories in stone. She's the editor of a collection of Peggy Simpson curious stories titled landmarked from high plains press. Welcome rails. I think we have to start by discussing what exactly a poet laureate is intro since you're the current one. Leave that to you. Well a poet laureate is this is really an honorary position more than anything else. Thank you sort of establish the tone forward but letting it be known through her readings and through her commentary about the poet laureate position that it would be a position. She didn't feel like she had to write a poem for any ceremony. Although we are invited to

ceremonies we are invited to state functions on occasion when the governor remembers. That. She does. She has felt like this is not going to be a position where I have to write a poem for the occasion. I'll be glad to come and read a poem if I request it but that was it. And I the poor laureate. There is a little money put aside to for the poet laureate to travel around the state to give poetry readings or to lecture about poetry. And she was the very first. She was the first. What was the concept of a poet laureate. Well defined when she stepped into the job. No it actually was the fund but an exchange between the orts Council the governor and myself. There was a question as to whether the poet laureate ought to be for life or whether it should be for the tenure of the governor appoints the person the arts council and myself. And I felt like it was better to have a just for the tenure of the governor that way. As Bill

Stafford was to tell me later when he was appointed governor by the governor of Oregon to be part laureate for life that all those young parts out there waiting for you to die. And so it was more casual and there could be more poet laureates. I think the idea of it is you know one person you have a sort of the sense of the poetry of the state. I think that is the way the poet has to look at it I think. Peggy looked at it that way that she carried somehow in her something about a way of looking at the land and the people and. Certainly that that's all a poor lawyer can really do would be that it was a surprise to her when she was appointed she wasn't aware that this was you know it was me being suppressed as it had happened there and I remembered I had to make some excuse for me to get down there and be down there and also to get her to come

down. She was she had decided that she wasn't going to go down with Bill for the legislative session and that's when she that was she was officially announced and her husband Bill was in the legislature. Yeah Bill Curry was in the legislature. And so I had to make some cuts. I had a fib to her and tell her there was something going to happen down there that I needed her to come down with me which. So we drove down together and that appointment was was kind of the apex of her career in Wyoming but it there was a lot leading up to it and I think Mary Ellis having written the introduction your book a lot of her life story maybe you could tell us a little bit about that. Can't begin to write early as a child the way a lot of writers do I think through high school. At the University of Wyoming she was a journalism an English major and was always interested in writing wrote for the Laramie boomerang. Also what she did then she really cut her teeth on the confession that disease and made no excuses for that. She often said that those

editors of The Confession magazines like true love and ranch romances that they taught her how to write. And from that she went on to four novels books on creating fiction from experience and her two poetry collections a lot of articles and interviews although she preferred fiction to nonfiction. And where was she from was she a Wyoming native. Almost almost they lived us ahead of myself when. She was born in Scotland and came to United States when she was about three to a ranch in North Park Colorado just over the border not too far from Laramie. And she told she ultimately moved into the state then into Wyoming. She went to school early school there in Colorado I don't believe she was actually in Wyoming until she went to college at Laramie. She in addition to being a writer was well-known as a teacher and I think all three of you worked with her in the schools as a teacher and including you. Could you tell me a little bit about that experience maybe you want to start with how you first got to know it with her.

The first I was trying to remember when that was and I was myself new to the state and I wanted to work in a portrait in schools program and I called her up and said How do I get to do this and she said well first you have to publish something. Yeah. I don't. And but I was thinking recently actually not about the first time but about the last time I saw her which was about a month before she died she was in a nursing home in Casper and I went in to say hi one day and and she was she was to talk about a lot of things that day. She talked about growing up around those cowboys in North Park and how they would go out and look at the sky and say let's see what this guy says. And then they'd be out on the range for a while and they'd say let's go see what town sis. And but she also told me that day that she was working on another project she had another project in mind which was going to be writing about her early life. And it was called a way to begin. And that was this great. She died a month later.

What do we know about early life. Can Can anybody describe a little bit about her family and their origins in Scotland and what brought them here. A little through that open and they will volunteer that we have come up to the present Alice knows that stuff better than I do. Her novel so far from string was was somewhat autobiographical in that. I begs parents wanted to be married and that the both sets of in-laws forbid something had happened in Scotland her father wanted to become manager of this store and the laird in the town they wouldn't allow it. And so the two of them went out and stayed together stayed out overnight thinking that surely this will do it. They will let us marry after this and they did not. And he came to the United States to work for a relative in Colorado and didn't know for several years that Peg had been

born. And. It was very difficult for Peg's mother I think to stay there at home. Being in 1911. Things were very different and there was a great deal of criticism about that but he went back and one of Peg's memories that she told was her one of her earliest memories was standing there in the town the hall by her parents when they were actually married in front of the whole town and how what a wonderful celebration it was. She didn't quite know what was going on that it was you know the memory of her being small and her parents there in this being some wonderful event happening this very very touching. And let's And now let's come back to Wyoming and Charles we haven't really heard your introduction to Peggy and how you and I met are 19. See I came here in 1972 and met her in 1971. I'd come out to do poetry in the schools for two weeks.

The former the first poet in residence for the state of Wyoming that came from out of state was John Perl and I had met Joel just as going away party the first time before he came to Wyoming and we got along real well and so he invited me to come out for two weeks and two weeks I worked with AG. We worked a week in Casper and a week up at Gillette. Right. She was a woman right off that I that I had only identified a few times in my life as the frontier person. I mean she had a kind of independence and we had about her and lack of fear about anything. It seemed like and. We traveled together and gave and taught in the schools and she watched me teach and I watched her teach and sometimes we taught jointly. And. I knew I wanted her for a friend when I got back to to New York I was teaching at NYU at the time and I told my wife I said you know for any strange reason we ever get

to Wyoming I know just what school I want the kids to go to and what school you would love to teach here this year later here we were. What was she like as a teacher. You took her classes and you know yes I don't have the very longest record of attendance. I I did take a class from her I think over a 14 year period possibly the longest record holder is her great friend in Casper Benny Vinson who was there for eight years. She was a wonderful teacher who could take the raw material of whatever writing we brought in every night. We would read it aloud and critique it and discuss it. And from that she would distill some essence of of writing you know how a piece should and where it was too short. We learned an awful lot by listening and we were never bored every every night it was something new that we learned a real natural teacher is what she was. Now we have to get to what I think is the hard part which is to talk a little bit about her writing before we do.

Let's have a robin Cole read another piece by piece and some of her driving down from the big horns. I would like to keep this always driving down from the big horns down from the when cool to summer arrange down the hills to lesser hills to Plains. Drifting into evening humid and bold and strange drawing the mountains down and drawing down the sky work like and water green. Tilting the mountains over tilting the sky in long slow curving like a river we'll feeble with time that lifts a river lifts it up and turns and turns it down. Even as the heart now turns the mountains sky and sun and flight to one vast arc of flowing earth and light

but motion carries me beyond the dream conceived in moving and I feel the mountains heavy straining back. Where should I have stopped and stood surrendered to that perfect arc. When did my mind betray me over to the flat earth and the dark. Well let's talk a little bit about what he's writing. Tom I'm going to turn the spotlight on you first and ask you. She wrote a actually a rather book broad spectrum of work given subjects different styles. Can you talk a little bit though about her writing. Peggy was I was Charles and I were talking about this morning as we were driving up here and it was occurring to me that pay was from maybe the last generation in this country of writers who were able

to be educated by markets by paying markets of literary writers who were able to be educated by paying markets that is she. She started out I guess writing for the confession magazines but before very long she was selling stories to the Saturday Evening Post and the colliers and magazines like that which she did for quite some time in boy's life and so that these were this was a way to get money and encourage yourself this is something that fiction writers don't really have anymore. And when I was reading the book that Mary Alice additive of piggy stories again recently I was occurring to me that here are some stories some of which are clearly better than others but all of which are you can feel her teaching herself and to have the end to have to have that market out there to help you learn I think is something that a lot of writers including me these days wish they had and isn't quite the same anymore. And and so that there are I think probably choices she made in those stories that she might not have made had the market situation

been different for example. I think the first story she sold to the post was when it was one of those ones about trotting races in Illinois. And so she writes another one also on the racetrack in Illinois which isn't quite as good as the first one. But you know that's part of the business side. And I kind of like that doesn't seem real or at the end a lot of the writing that gets done now. The stories she wrote about Illinois really harken back to some of her husband's memories believe he was from the ANC. So we got a little tape of an interview we did with Bill Curry and we're going to run an excerpt from that right now. I am sure. She would write poems about horses you know things with that kind of appealed to her. Business it was because. You have to take a lot

of rejections. She worked every day on a story or two were involved and. It was working. She worked out regularly. By 9 o'clock in the morning she was at the typewriter. Sometimes when she'd give a story going she'd work very late sometimes two or three o'clock in the morning. If it were growing you know you want to keep. Their job. That's where a lot of. Short stories fall short. You know you've got to you've got to get your characters in there and you got to have conflict. But she was the genius

of data of the West. We lived in Illinois two years after we were married we were married in 1937 and. Lived there until 1913. She did not like the Middle West. She said no. Why the whole scroll down. As I said earlier Peggy Simpson Curry had a variety of subjects in a variety of styles of writing she wrote about herring fishermen in Scotland she wrote about the oil patch and yet she's identified as poet laureate with Wyoming. And I guess I'd like to throw out that question of sort of the regional identification of a writer Charles maybe you'd like to respond to that as a when I came here and met Peggy she had already published read wind of Wyoming which is I think a very important work. It was my first the first time

I ever came across that whole new Johnson County cattle war. And we're reading her book. I liked it a lot better than Mercer and anyone else who wrote about it. That short little portray. But she she gave the essence of it. She gave it in human terms. And the remarkable thing about it was when she tells about how that that poem happened she said she was down in the bar just exactly the way this poem starts out. And she was she took me down there to show me and we had a drink and she showed me the pictures on the wall of the bar and said this is you know suddenly they have started talking to me as it is that the champion there on the wall and my girlfriend said something wrong. And you know it she made Nate champion live for me. I mean like no other book. And it's to me that's a mark of literature is when years later you pick up a book and the characters in their

lives and they move for you and they turn something inside you. And another thing about Peggy was that she was willing to change and it was one the most remarkable things. She's 20 years my junior and I came here brash and full of myself and here is a woman who has already achieved a great deal in her writing and yet because the young poets were coming in she saw that they were changing the style in the Gyle of American poetry was changing she began to write free verse. And and she always called it because American poets of my generation stopped calling it free verse. But Peggy I always call the free verse that she was writing a poem and free verse and what I think about it. Did she particularly herself identify with Wyoming or the west and is there any. Yeah I think I thought I was. I was also thinking that this summer that the real

She writes stories about she wrote a novel about Scotland she wrote some of the stories are about Illinois and other parts of the West some Her poems are most of the book that I published most of them are in Wyoming but not all of them there's one about the Grunion Run on the beach in Santa Barbara. But the really the emotional and geographical center of all her work are those beautiful haid Meadows in North Park Colorado. And that I when I think of her work more than any other thing I think of the smell of fresh cut hay and and that summer in the high the high mountains summer feeling and now and it's it's just kind of runs through everything. What you did so I feel like it's real located and centered like that in a way that not all writers work is I think that's very valuable. She worked in those hay fields as a child. I heard she had wanted to and her father said if you do this you're just like one of the men do it and do it well. That was where she met Jackie Hatten had so much influence on her work.

What about I mean I sometimes wonder how aware are people in Wyoming might be that they have this writer who's written about this area and others and it is it is a fine writer. What would you it let's have a quick recommendation for what one ought to read to get acquainted with a you Simson Curry's work. Her books are in the libraries. Some of them had recently been published a republic. Well all of it I've enjoyed possibly so far from spring I think she liked the best. So it was a model. Yes it was republished I believe in 1900 by Pruitt. And Bill told me the last time I talked with him someone else was looking at it too. To do it again and then of course there's landmark right but the short story is that these stories still have the power to move me as much time as I spent with them you know I defined them all I had to Xerox them. I had to borrow them from people go through the reader's guide at the at the library and I typed them I decided I wanted to go all the way through them instead of having just going in and I learned a lot about Peg not about writing but these stories will still move

me. The only matter how many times I've gone through them I have the power to engage I think. We were told just out of time here so let's get a little of that power. Tom if you'd be willing to read it. So please I want to get this chance to read the book that pic put first in this poem that picked them up and read a whole book of the poem that put first in this book that we did cults. The name of the book is summer range. The name of the poem is the singers the rosy crown Finch felt dying in the fresh June grass. You must've hit a wire or a window. He lay in sunlight by my door while others came to claim their share of sunflower seeds. I buried him beneath wild dandelions on the hill while others sang from the arms of mountain ash and alder Come From Me to You come for me to you a little music we cannot keep I can't quite do this

for me. A little music we cannot keep. Others will sing the notes we learn by heart. After. After we lie down in final sleep. Okey to like you. Thank you Mary Alice. Thank you Charles. Thanks for joining us on Main Street Wyoming. Main Street Wyoming is made possible in part by grants from Kennicott energy proud to be a part of Wyoming spirit you're in the uranium exploration and

mining and production industry and by the Wyoming Council for the Humanities and ridging lives of Wyoming people through the study of Wyoming history values and ideas.