Writers from the Past: A Call to Writers & Families from the Toe River Anthology 1979

               

Thirty-five years ago a group of novice writers began meeting in the mezzanine of the Burnsville Library.  Mayland Technical Institute (now Mayland Community College) cosponsored the class with the newly-established Toe River Arts Council. The teacher was a retired English professor from Asheville, Dr. Francis Pledger Hulme, who cajoled, encouraged and teased the 24 members, ages 18 to 80, into producing poetry, fiction and memoirs.  He was so impressed by the writing he was seeing that he suggested publishing an anthology.  Dr. Hulme selected the contents of the Toe River Anthology 1979.  Marilyn Cade illustrated the book, Yancey Graphics produced it, and the Toe River Arts Council sold it until there were no more.

            Some of the original writers continued to write and to meet in a group that adopted the name of The Scribblers and continues to this day.  Others wrote on their own or moved on to other activities or away from the area. Now with an invitation from the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, a few of the original group plus two from The Scribblers will be on stage in the Burnsville Town Center on Saturday, September 14, at 11:00 a.m. to read from the anthology and from their more recent writing as well. 

The theme of this year’s festival of “Take Me There” befits this reading, which will be given by Donna Jean Dreyer, Susan Larson, Pat Riviere-Seel, and Ruth Pope, and will honor all the writers in the anthology as well as the Scribblers.  Those writers were Sally Burrowes, Gladys Coletta, Mabel Cox, Phyllis Downing, Jewell Hall, Mary and Robert Helmle, Frances Higgins, Dessie Honeycutt, Stormy Honeycutt, Mary Kay Klein, Susan Larson, Carmela Mandala, Dorothy Morgan, Hilda Nocks, Della Ogilvie, Beverly Plummer, Ruth Pope, Barbara Talley, Fred Topping, Leonard Widawski, Carmela and Maurice Woodruff, and Jo Woody.  Family and friends of these writers are especially encouraged to attend the free event.

            Toe River Anthology 1979 is being reprinted and will be available to purchase at the literary festival.  Within the anthology readers will find a broad cross-section of writing, from heartfelt poems to keen observations of nature to deft vignettes about mostly older citizens, some of them written in local dialect.  Mystery, romance, comedy – all forms are in the anthology.  The mountains in Yancey County and up to Tennessee and down to Georgia and west to Cherokee and east to Grandfather Mountain provide the setting for much of the writing.  However, as some of the authors were from “off,” the writing also transports the reader from Paris (Ruth Pope) to New York (Maurice Woodruff) to Oak Park, Illinois (Robert Helmle).  A former mayor of Burnsville, Robert Helmle was a childhood friend of Ernest Hemingway and his memoir “Boyhood Recollections of Ernest Hemingway and His Father,” concludes the anthology. 

            The audience will also learn first-hand what being in the writing group has meant to the four readers.  Poet Pat Riviere-Seel and memoirist Donna Jean Dreyer are both published authors, and Ruth Pope is working on a memoir. 

            Writers or relatives of writers from the anthology are encouraged to contact Susan Larson at 828-765-2652 if they have questions about the event or the book.

 

written by Susan Larson