Beth Wellington

About Me

I'm a poet, journalist and activist living in Southwest Virginia.

I'm honored to get a invitation from Sam Rasnake. I didn't know that poets were at a site called "fictionaut." I know Sam from when I used to visit Abingdon to attend a writers' group to which we both belonged.

If you want to read about my day job, go to:
http://www.google.com/profiles/118430206271245673048#about

One of my early high points as a poet getting selected by Bill Stafford to do a long residency with him as a 1985 fellow at the Atlantic Center for the Arts when I was an "emerging writer" ((so long ago) and the friendships that remain from that time in the form of Verbal Events, a quarterly poetry swap the fellows (and sometimes invitees) conduct. Some of us love book making and construct chapbooks when it is our turn. And the next year, the Chester Jones Foundations awarded me a cash prize for "Madame Curie Remembers Radium." (Not online--I'll have to post it at my blog.

Another high point was being selected for Coal, A Poetry Anthology with some pretty steller writers:

http://amzn.to/bVIT80

Disclosure, yes that's an Amazon Affiliate link. To see why,
http://bethwellington.blogspot.com/2010/07/why-i-decided-to-try-and-fund-this-blog.html

If you visit the blog, you'll see the poem my contribution,

http://bethwellington.blogspot.com/2009/07/shannon-wamsley-talks-about-sago-mine.html

And another high point was attending Split this Rock Poetry Festival:

http://bethwellington.blogspot.com/2008/03/split-this-rock-poetry-festival.html

The formatting on that one is weird because I changed blogs and couldn't import and blogged sometimes requires handcoding. Some day!

Why do you write?

I write to recreate an experience that affected me for my readers.

I also consider myself a cultural worker. I often construct narratives in the form of "testimonios"--the Shannon Wamsley poem is one of them.

(for an article on this I just grabbed from the web, with no promises, see: http://www.worldlitonline.net/testimonios.pdfhttp://www.worldlitonline.net/testimonios.pdf)

Another one is here:
http://bethwellington.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/appalachian-nightmare-073007/

And here:
http://bethwellington.blogspot.com/2006/12/looking-out-over-abyss-in-boone-county.html

Any favorite authors? Books?

FICTION: Flannery O'Connor, John Dufresne

POETS: Diane Gilliam Fisher, Bill Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, Martín Espada

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