IT'S A PARTY! Introduction MAGGIE RIDER & FRIENDS

EVENT: 20 FEB 2 pm. ALACHUA LIBRARY. We are FIRM for the book event. Lloyd Baldwin will be there with his Old Time Tunes. Refreshments.

INTRODUCING MAGGIE RIDER & FRIENDS

NORTH FLORIDA CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES, INC.
PRESENTS THE BOOK
THE SALVATION OF MAGGIE RIDER: Stories from Nokofta

SUNDAY 2:00 p.m. 20 FEBRUARY – ALACHUA LIBRARY

Alachua native, author of Florida Book Award Winner SOUTHERN COMFORTS Sudye Cauthen

Music --Refreshments

Readings from Maggie Rider, Southern Comforts, and her
next book, Voices from the Place of Our Remembrance

North Florida Center for Documentary Studies, Inc.

www.sudyecauthen.com - 386-397-1284 – cauthen4196@earthlink.net

Visit us on Facebook and at sudyecauthen.blogspot.com

FEBRUARY EVENTS: ALACHUA, FLORIDA

On 12 February for two hours (with a 20 min break), beginning at 2 p.m., I'll be at the Alachua Florida library, offering the WRITE. WRITE IT NOW! workshop. Then on 20 Fev 2011 I'll return to Alachua Library (also at 2 pm) for an event celebrating release of THE SALVATION OF MAGGIE RIDER: Stories from Nokofta. I'll also have copies of SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place along. Hope to see old friends and new friends. Coming home!

Here's the workshop description; it's a lot of fun:

WRITE IT. WRITE IT NOW!
Tips, Tricks, and Techniques for the Writing Life

Sudye Cauthen, author of Florida Book Award Winner SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place offers a workshop about incorporating writing into our busy lives: how to keep the words coming, whether poetry, fiction, or nonfiction; exercises to sharpen skills of observation; openings and closings. The creation of memoir and its rewards, syntax, tone, flashbacks, and the centrality of yearning. The value of timelines, recognizing soft underbellies, and feeding the muse. We will come away excited about language. This workshop is open to the public; please call the ALachua Library to reserve a seat as space is limited. This workshop is open to the public at no charge.

SOUTH, TO BREVARD: SAMARA, SAMARA, and BLUE SKY

I was gone 3 days, 2 days on the road, 450 RT miles of road construction, devastated countryside, highways, interstate traffic, road repair, subdivisions, McMansions crowded like peas in a pod.

Florida was a beautiful state once and I suppose it still is, in places, for those who fly in and stay on a beach but I, and thousands of others, who live in the interior, have to fight one another’s cars for access to our waters and legendary sunsets, for the sight of Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis)

the Red Snapper (Lutjanus campechanu)

and Great Barracuda (Sphyraena barracuda)

. The roads I traveled were thick with cars driven by some who live here, some who merely visit, and those, like me, who realize what we are seeing as we rush up and down the state isn’t what we came for. It’s not the Florida that’s advertised and it’s not the Florida that used to be, most assuredly not the one where my grandparents wintered on Marco Island in a little fishing cabin lit by oil lamps.

Driving U. S. 1 toward the "Space Coast," I passed through many small communities decorating each end of their city limits with imported palms: Are they importing the Everglades and Florida Silver Palms, the Florida Royal, the Washington Palm, bringing the "Florida look" of advertising north? Every time I observe this replacement of natural landscape with palms, I wonder who has connections at the road department. Palms have, I suppose, become synonymous with “Florida,” but, honestly, we do have other trees.

Mostly, I saw cars, traffic lanes, food franchises, and gas stations, but I did twice pass over the vast blue of the St. Johns River; and, oh! how I'd like to travel its length with Bill Belleville, author of RIVER of LAKES: A Journey on Florida's St. Johns River. I also drove twice through the

potato fields of Bunnell where, on either side, rows of green plants alternate with rows of black soil, one site on this route that’s stayed the same over my lifetime. Someday, I’ll drive Hwy 100 and see condos in those potato fields; maybe actors decked out as Timucuans, paddling their dugout canoes in the St. Johns, posing for tourist photos.

I made this trip—averaging 30 mph on the way down to Brevard County—to see a convalescing friend, my father-in-law, Lee Covell, who came with Northrop to FL from California for the Snark Program of the 1950s at (what was then known as) Cape Canaveral. When Covell helped build John Glynn’s capsule for the first manned flight, he and his coworkers made history. I briefly worked in the space program myself, long ago during its early, glorious first days. I watched Neil Armstrong blast off on his trip to the moon and in 1967 I stood, transfixed, in my infant son’s room, hearing on the radio that astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee had just died in a fire on the launching pad.

It happened that during this recent visit I was in Brevard on the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, that day in 1986 when, on the TV screen, a space capsule in a smoky sky broke in half. This week, in between news reports of street demonstrations in Tunisia and Cairo, commentators repeated the names of those who died in the Challenger; again and again, I heard Ronald Reagan say of the astronauts that they had “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”

Covell is still verbally quick and humorous, but he’s fighting for what’s left of his health and independence; shuttled to appointments on weekdays, he falls asleep with his head on the dining table, suddenly, in the middle of a sentence. For his country, he fought in the Pacific during World War II, and considers himself lucky to have been hit by a grenade, awakened on a hill some distance away, and sent home, alive. I wonder what he would make of world events now--the riots in Cairo today, the tank that swung into view on the TV screen as I ate my restaurant breakfast.

I am overwhelmed by the sense that history's tides routinely sweep me onto a beach, pull away, then lift and drop me again. Lee Covell’s memories of Titusville, Cocoa Beach, and Melbourne in the early 1950s are even older than mine. He was there when beachfront went for $35 an acre, before the Indian and Banana River bridges were cluttered with traffic and motels mounted fake satellites on their roofs, when the Apollo 12 astronauts drove Corvettes, and Covell’s grandson was allowed to order speared hummingbirds at Bernard’s Surf.

I was young once and so was my father-in-law; in fact, I realize now that he was still young when I thought him old, when we first met in 1961. The old could tell the young how beautifully the land once lay before us, the rattle of palms in the wind and the plop of large fish off starboard. Though I saw no ocean and very little natural landscape, as I drove I did look up as much as I could into the swath of blue above the road and on both sides saw the silver tops of bare trees interspersed with red samara, the winged seedpod of the Red Maple.

Those scarlet flags were everywhere I went, silver, red, and blue, above and on either side of me, up I-95 and inland on 100, all the way home. Over all those cell phones, the torturous traffic, airplanes, construction equipment, and moldy roadside motels, I am firmly imposing the memory of those maples flashing their red tops against a pure blue sky.

NEXT EVENT: 24 JAN 2011 - LAKE CITY, FL

24 January at Lake City's Main Library, I'll be speaking about my work (writing, oral history collection, etc.) before Columbia County Historical Society. The meeting begins at 7:00 p.m. and I'm looking forward to it. I will have books for sale.

RAIN PICTURE

Hi, there,

We finally got some rain here and Robert Baxter has memorialized it with this beautiful photo of wild huckleberries at the edge of the Suwannee. The river's been at its lowest since anyone began measuring and, of late, the only time the water moves is when a wind pushes it back upstream. Still, yesterday's visitor, my friend Nancy Sorak, said it was peaceful.

Nancy and I hadn't met in almost two decades, yet we were the same. She said people don't change much; my jury's out on that one. We'll see. Meanwhile, if you'd like to see some of the art Nancy creates, jog over to Fleota in Bay St. Louis. Nancy's work has been amazing me for decades and grows only more beautiful and original.

EVENT NEXT WEEK: 24 January at Lake City's Main Library, I'll be speaking about my work (writing, oral history collection, etc.) before Columbia County Historical Society. The meeting begins at 7:00 p.m. and I'm looking forward to it.

TWO WEEKS, ALREADY . . .

. . . since we've talked and North Florida Center has another shipment of books coming; they arrive tomorrow and there's at least one unsolicited review already up at amazon.com for THE SALVATION OF MAGGIE RIDER: Stories from Nokofta. The reviewer begins " The Salvation of Maggie Rider is a great story about life in Florida" and ends. . . you will find it almost impossible to put down once you start."

Here's a description of the book's contents: In the small southern pocket of a North Florida community called Nokofta, Cauthen's men and women move through lives no longer possible since the 1950s. At home, in church or at school, along paths and roads, in woods and fields, young Maggie Rider searches for an understanding of her hometown and her own place within it. She takes stock, too, of her uncle, the brokenhearted loner, whose secret existence in a converted hen house is a mystery she has dedicated herself to solving. In these layered stories we glimpse an early 20th century Florida that no longer exists and characters--in [the stories] "Maggie Rider," "Maudie May," and "Eva's Barn" united in their timeless and compelling need to make sense of what has gone before.

The blurb above is off the back of the book; not sure it makes clear that "The Salvation of Maggie Rider" is a novella accompanied by two short stories.

Remember we are a not-for-profit endeavoring to document north Florida while there's some of it still left and your purchase of our products go toward this work. I wrote this book, then donated it as a fundraising measure; I don't personally get a penny from its sales. Many thanks to all our supporters, subscribers, and readers. Here's a Robert Baxter documentary photo just in from his walk yesterday along the Suwannee on the Florida Trail:

All best to you as we approach the end of the first two weeks of 2011; I hope your work goes well and would love to hear from you.

scauthen
NFCDS, Inc.