Nikki Giovanni, the world-renowned poet and Virginia Tech distinguished professor whose “We are Virginia Tech” memorial speech offered a stricken campus strength after the mass shooting in 2007, spoke to a community of seniors in Blacksburg about a year before her death in 2024.
“Afterwards, we went up and talked to her, and she was amazed that we were still on. She didn’t realize that the writing group she’d started decades before was still going,” said Kenny Harrah, current leader of the Warm Hearth Writers Group.
Harrah, who is also the fitness director at Warm Hearth, will be the emcee for the Writers Group’s first-ever public reading on April 13 from 1-3 p.m. at the Warm Hearth Village Center.
On April 3, I met with Harrah and five other writers you’ll hear if you go to the event. We sat around one end of a long, rectangular table in a long, sunny conference room that smelled a bit of maple syrup. The writers had just attended Harrah’s Posture, Balance and Gait class in the fitness center down the hall past the Huckleberry Café where French toast was one of the specials of the day.
Now the writers sat chatting. They leaned toward each other, heads tipped to nearly touching, patting each other’s forearms with one hand, smoothing the other over binders resting unopened on the table. Each writer had brought a binder.
Betsy O’Brien had also brought a stack of slim books published by the group over the years. O’Brien will turn 92 in May. Her mother, Anna Kenney, was one of the original members of the Writers Group. Her work and photo appear in “Appalachian Elders — A Warm Hearth Sampler,” which Giovanni edited.
For the next hour, from a spiral notebook hardly bigger than a credit card, O’Brien passed me notes. She stood and performed a poem that she’ll read next week at the event: “You will never again have to get an unsatisfactory in deportment or an F in calculus…You will never again have to fight in Gettysburg or go down with the Titanic…”
Sharon Yoder is in her 70s. She’s written hundreds of poems. Her family is helping her organize them. “Well, the thing that just blew me away was my oldest brother. I was thinking he’s going to be dying, because his health was going down, down, down, and then suddenly he gets into his head to help me with this [writing] project. And now, and now…” Yoder said, tears dissolving her voice.
“…And now he’s really living,” someone finished for her.
At next week’s public reading, 85-year-old Nancy Leech will read one of Giovanni’s poems, and she’ll sing. She’ll accompany herself on guitar — a 1967 Martin made of Brazilian rosewood that she bought a few years ago.
Dee Ann West, 86 years old, may read a poem that she’s still working on about whale songs. She tried it out on us on Friday. I can’t tell you whether it was her heartbeat or the whale’s, or her father’s, or mine, or all of ours; but the poem had life.
Patricia Bell is 82. A hooked rug she made depicting her childhood will be displayed at the public reading. On Friday, she read us a two-minute prose piece about a bow-legged tramp who sometimes stayed in her family’s sleeping porch when she was a child. He died alone — “perhaps, that was his preference” — in a Georgia swamp.
Swamps, it turns out, are a common experience in the Writers Group. Nancy talked about growing up in a Massachusetts swamp. Dee Ann’s swamp was in Florida.
When the group meets, they share and discuss what they’ve written that month.
They write about the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam. They write about motherhood, about being rescued from a sinking boat in a lake in Guatemala at age 21, about leaving their first marriage after 24 years and three children because they couldn’t stand being married to a gay man for a 25th anniversary, and more.
“Why,” I asked, “do a public reading now, after all these years? What was the catalyst?”
“When we met Nikki she said, ‘I have to tell you people, you all have stories, and you need to tell them. Old people all have stories, and they need to be shared,’” said Kenny.
“Old people all have stories,” Nancy repeated, unclasping her hands and unfurling her fingers, palms open, facing up, “and believe it or not, we’re still building them.”
The public reading will be held April 13 from 1-3 p.m. at The Village Center at 2387 Warm Hearth Drive in Blacksburg. The event is free and open to all. No reservations are required. Attendees can come late and leave early as need be.
