Homeward Bound
August 29, 2015
I read the other day that Paul Simon wrote "Homeward Bound" while on a train trip in or around Manchester, England. That song was a favorite when I was a teenager, though I'd traveled no farther than Maine, and still calls up strong emotion when I hear it.So it's not surprising that when I connected with the folks at Kestrel literary journal to appear again this year at the Kestrel Festival in October, that music began playing in my thoughts. Kestrel was a special part of my years in West Virginia, where I began my work as a writer, gained my first publications, and then was "brought into the fold" as a literary magazine editor with the nascent Kestrel.
Martin Lammon and the late John King and I would gather over coffee at the Poky Dot restaurant in Fairmont, WV, a classic "breakfast all day" diner that's been upscaled in recent years, to exchange our stacks of manuscripts and discuss what we liked, and what we weren't certain about. I'm proud that in those early years were published many writers who were already well known or who would go on to gain distinction nationally.
Soon after the magazine began, we started thinking about a festival of literature, art, and music. That came to be, and we hosted such luminaries as Donald Hall and Jean Valentine and Margaret Gibson and many others.
Mary Dillow Stewart would join the editorial team, then John Hoppenthaler. I left West Virginia in 1997, but Kestrel is still going strong, under the leadership of Donna Long and Suzanne Heagy and Elizabeth Savage. The festival, too, endures.
If you are in or around Fairmont, WV, on Oct. 9-11, catch the events at the university and venues in town. I will be reading Saturday at 2 p.m. and doing manuscript consultations.