Kingsport is beginning to feel like home, especially as I reinvent myself, retired professor, poet.  The past two days make me especially aware of the opportunities right here in Kingsport.  At the Civic Center on Sunday I participated in a booth sponsored by Bubba's Book Swap, where I met several local authors.  If you don't know Bubba's book store, you should search it out.  It's on Sullivan as you approach Church Circle from down town.  You can tell by the yellow awning.  There I met Lisa Hall, Jenny Boggs, Carol Jackson, Sylvia Nichols, and Trixie Stilletto--whose books are available at Bubba's.
     Then Monday night, the Night Writers met at Books-a-Million for an open mic.  These are mostly young people, and I feel grateful that they tolerate me.  I've already told you how much I appreciate Todd Bailey's setting the web site up for me.  I could never have done it on my own.  And they have big plans. 
     On Friday, December 9th, from 7:00 till 9:00 pm, at the Renaissance Center here in Kingsport, Tennessee, the Night Writers will sponsor "An evening of poetry, prose, and song" to support the Second Harvest food Bank of Northease Tennessee.  Admission will be two cans of food per person--nutritious and non-perishable.  Come one, come all, and hear new voices.  For more information, see their website: www.nightwritersguild.weebly.com.

Hi, here I go again.  But what I have to say may seem a little odd to most of you.  That's because I'm all excited about the current issue of PMLA.  What's that?  Hey, I went off to graduate school not knowing what PMLA was.  It's the Publications of the Modern Language Association, and I still get it, even though I'm retired, because I was a member from the time I was in graduate school at UT-Knoxville, and they made me a life member, without further dues.  Anyway, the November issue is the program for the MLA annual meetings.  This year, no, next January, it's gong to be in Seattle, Washington.  After looking at the program, I wish I could go, but that's not going to happen.
     My first MLA conference was in 1975 in San Francisco.  My husband Bill was in school at the New England College of Optometry in Boston, and my two teenage children and I were spending the Christmas holidays with their dad.  Oh, yes, I went off to Boston in open toed shoes and the car quit because I hadn't put in any "dry" gas, but that's beside the point.  MLA was in December, then, just after Christmas, and so I went out of Logan and returned before the new year.  I got to hear Mina Shaunassy's lecture that anticipated "Errors and Expectations," the book that refvolutionized the teaching of first year composition.  I remember standing in the hallways after another late session, "The Failure of the New Linguistics," I think it was.  Although it was only ten o'clock,  my internal clock said past midnight.  It was a conversation with a French professor at a small college in Kentucky, who agreed that the new linguistics wasn't such a failure after all.
      Anyway, what's got me all excited is a session on "Frost and the Politics of Poetry" (#404, scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on Saturday, January 7).  Oh, I wish I could be there.  It's arranged by Timothy O'Brien of the US Naval Academy.  (Yes, he wrote "the Things They Carried.")  Steven Gould Axelrod is speaking on "Frost and Politics."  I met him at a meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, over ten years ago, giving a paper on Gwendolyn Brooks, if memory serves.  Nice man.  I don't know the other two presenters, but their talks sound interesting too.  One even will deal with Frost and Randall Jarrell (and Bishop, Lowell, and Berryman), my teacher and mentor.  O'Brien's website promises abstracts, but I guess I'll have to wait till February to see those.
      Yes, I know.  The media always find MLA sessions to make fun of about this time of year, but it is an exciting time.  I got to hear the first sessions of the first Women's sections and the first Multi-Cultural group, too.  That was in the 1980s when I was still at Roane State Community College.  For three years, I served as the Community College representative to the General Assembly.  Of the 30,000 members of MLA, community college faculty represented only 3% of that number.  I miss the excitement.    Just reading about it will have to do.