This long-overdue author spotlight honors one of my favorite writers, teachers, and people in the entire world: the gracious, multitalented George Ella Lyon!
In addition to her fiction, playwriting, songwriting, and poetry, Lyon’s books for young readers are a favorite in classrooms and libraries. Her newest book, Time to Fly, illustrated by Stephanie Fizer Coleman, features a hesitant baby bird enticed to leave the cozy nest for the first time.
Lyon is a writer who understands the importance of home, as well as the power of continuing to touch lives in a larger community. When her book All the Water in the World appeared in a cereal promotion, she was thrilled to think of her book finding families at the breakfast table.
Lyon’s work has traveled the world, perhaps none more so than her poem “Where I’m From.” She developed a writing exercise used by writers, teachers, and students of all levels; this year, her work turned up in a speech given by a certain familiar professor . . . Dr. Jill Biden.
. . . for my first lesson of the year, I use the poem, “Where I’m From,” by George Ella Lyon. Its verses tell the story of the author’s hometown, not in locations, but in sensations and experiences and memories. Then I ask my students to think about their own lives: Where does their inner strength come from? What made them who they are?”
First Lady Jill Biden, Los Angeles City College Commencement, 2022
Building Creative Communities
Lyon’s creative life is rich with teachers, mentors, and friends. She gives credit to her parents’ love of story and song, her marriage to a musician (a “partner who values the creative life as much as I do”), and her children who, she says, opened her eyes and deepened her soul.
“And I can’t leave out Richard Jackson,” George Ella says, “my beloved editor, who in 1984 invited me to write for children, giving me work that I love . . .” And of course credit also goes to “all the trees who have held and counseled me.” (Appropriate, considering her 1993 poetry collection, winner of the Appalachian Book of the Year award, was titled Catalpa!)
If you ask George Ella what she would most like to celebrate, a list of supporters, teachers, and fellow creatives pours out: Ruth Stone, Danny Marion, Gurney Norman . . . “Gurney got me to Hindman,” she says, “and you know what happens when you cross that bridge!”
At Hindman Settlement School, working with Jim Wayne Miller, washing dishes at the historic Appalachian Writers’ Workshop at Hindman Settlement School with Harriette Arnow, taking part in readings and classes and friendships, George Ella says she “grew up as a writer.” Those days have given her a writing community she still enjoys today.
Below is a writing prompt from George Ella Lyon that may look a little familiar: it’s a variation of a “Map” prompt shared by Leatha Kendrick. Lyon notes she and Kendrick are fast friends. Working together leads to learning together, not just about teaching, but about writing too.
In a perfect example of an entwined creative community, this exercise grew from shared work and creative community, including the shared inspiration of Jo Carson, who published maps of herself and her body in Now & Then magazine.
Writing Prompt: Mapping Your Memory House
While both Kendrick and Lyon begin the exercise with sketches, Lyon’s version “navigates memory in a different way.” Comparing these two is a great example of adapting a prompt for different audiences.
- Draw the floor plan of a place where you have lived. Show where all the rooms are. Use another page if you need to.
- Now make a note of a memory, something that happened in each room. Include hallways, bathrooms, closets, the attic, basement and garage. Write this directly on your map.
- Choose the memory that has the most energy for you.
- Draw the scene in that room.
- Put yourself back there. Who was with you? How old are you?
- Take a sensory inventory. What can you taste, touch, smell, hear see? Write this on your map.
- Can you hear anyone talking? What do they say? Is there music?
- Is there something in this scene that you can’t draw?
- Is this a moment of power? Who has it? Does it shift from on person to another?
- Free-write this moment. You might begin “I am in the __________.”
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and an emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of poetry that was lost.
from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1956, trans. Maria Jolas, 1969)
