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Jeanne
Shannon
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My mother must have been prescient, for she gave me a book of poems for children on my third birthday. After I learned to read, I read it from cover to cover numerous times. Then when I was eleven I began writing my own poems, trying to imitate some that I had found in books my parents owned, particularly an anthology called The Lyric South, a book my mother had studied at college in the 1920s. A year later, inspired by Gone With the Wind and other works of fiction that I was too young to appreciate fully, I decided to write a novel. Unfortunately, while the characters I created were exciting (to me, anyway), the story could not find its plot and I returned to writing poetry.
My first published poems appeared in 1962 in an anthology published in the town of Appalachia, Virginia, in the area where I grew up. I was living in Arizona at the time, and in retrospect the fact that, distance notwithstanding, my first published work appeared on my native soil seems to carry special significance. A few years later my poems began to appear regularly in a variety of little magazines.
Meanwhile, as a student at Radford College (now Radford University) in Virginia in the mid-1950s, I had come across a poetry magazine called The Lyric, edited and published by a woman in nearby Christiansburg, Virginia. At that moment the seed of The Wildflower Press was planted, for I began to realize that I would like to publish my own poetry magazine someday-and if a woman in small-town Virginia could do that, so could I.
"Someday" came in 1975, when the first issue of Blackberry magazine was published. After eleven issues, it was followed in 1981 by the Wildflower poetry leaflets. When I ended the series with leaflet number 100, I gradually turned to publishing books of poetry, fiction, and memoir, and The Wildflower Press was officially launched in 2001.
In the 1970s I had begun to write short stories and memoir pieces, all drawn from memories of my early life in the Southwest Virginia mountains. Some of these, along with poems calling upon the same experience, are included in my book Stars Scattered Like Seeds.
I have published ten chapbooks of poetry, as well as a full-length collection, Carrying Water in a Sieve, which was published in a bilingual Japanese-English edition in Tokyo in 2002. My work has appeared in Hunger magazine, Drexel University's Drexel Online Journal, Appalachian Heritage, The Bitter Oleander, and Quarter After Eight, among others.
Copies
of my books and chapbooks, all issues of Blackberry magazine and the
Wildflower poetry leaflets, as well as numerous items related
to my work and to the history of The Wildflower Press, are
archived in the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New
Mexico General Library in Albuquerque.
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