Hemingway-Pfeiffer - grace grits and gardening

This Week’s Goodness

November 12, 2016 By Talya Tate Boerner

I haven’t blogged in a few days because I haven’t been able to think of anything worthwhile to blog about, not after something as significant as the presidential election. And especially not after reading the ugliness spread across social media. I have a severe case of election fatigue. Are you feeling politically weary, too? I’ve decided the best way to wade back into the blogosphere is to focus on this week’s specific goodness.

I have to believe doing a little good here and there adds up to a better, more positive place. More goodness.

This week brought lots of goodness in the form of good people, yummy food, and inspirational ideas. And it all happened in Piggott, Arkansas.

For the past few days, I’ve been holed up in Piggott, Arkansas, attending the fall Hemingway-Pfeiffer Fall Writer’s Retreat. I’ve blogged about Hemingway-Pfeiffer before—I believe this to be my fifth year attending. Yes, Ernest Hemingway wrote in the barn-studio here. This is the place where I first felt like a writer, the place I wrote the first and last lines of my novel, two years apart.

I’ve had a productive week, met new writers and spent time with writers I now come to think of as friends. I’ve felt somewhat isolated from the rest of the world. That’s probably a good thing.

For a writer, spending time with other writers is comparable to a bicyclist drafting off another rider. The energy and conversation and ideas being shared, those light bulb moments, the encouragement—all these things feed the writer’s imagination and soul. Having dedicated, uninterrupted time to write is priceless. And especially this particular writer retreat—the mentor charged with guiding us, Andrea Hollander, knew how to help us reach inside, dig deep, and pour it onto paper.

And.The.Food.

Mercy sakes. We are fed very well at this retreat. For those of us staying at The Inn at Piggott, our day starts around the dining room table with a delicious breakfast. Lunch is catered at the education center. Supper, not that we are hungry by supper, is on our own. While Piggott doesn’t have too many choices, we don’t need many. The week always includes a trip to Strawberry’s a few miles away in Holcomb, Missouri, which if you live anywhere in the bootheel area of Arkansas/Missouri, you know the amazingness that is Strawberry’s. Pork steaks as big as your head. The restaurant’s motto = You can smell our butts all over Holcomb.

More goodness…

While spending a week at one of my favorite writing spots, we had wonderful fall weather, more typical of May than November. Piggott has a charming new coffee shop on the square (also owned by the owners of the inn). Piggott City Market makes excellent lattes and also serves scones, cinnamon rolls, quiche, etc. Having a fabulous coffee house is a plus. (Pumpkin latte, y’all.)

So to those of you who are reeling from the election, look closely and you’ll find goodness. Still. It’s all around. To those happy with the election results, be gracious. We all have a stake in this. I, for one, will pray for our country and our President-elect and continue to look for goodness.

interesting leaf I found!

Grace Grits and Gardening
Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

Slowing down in Piggott.

June 6, 2015 By Talya Tate Boerner

Happy Saturday! I thought I’d check in to let you know I’m still alive. I’ve been busy doing a whole lot of nothing but writing. After another successful writer retreat in Piggott, Arkansas, at the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center, my whole body feels drained. And that’s a good thing. Hemingway-Pfeiffer is an awe-filled place. A place for slowing down. A place for concentrating on the craft of writing.

The grounds are gorgeous and peaceful, not too contrived but natural, the way I imagine things looked when Hemingway wrote inside the barn/studio.

Small-town Piggott feels like home to me. Treasures can be found if you slow down and notice.

The Piggott Library has a signed first edition of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, (along with an entire cabinet of related ephemera.) I’m guessing not many small town libraries can claim such a thing.

I love the history around the town square, especially the faded advertisements spanning old brick buildings.

The train rumbles through town at all hours of the day and night, tapping into a deep memory of another time.

The next time you drive from Dallas to Austin or Atlanta to Savannah (or wherever), hop off the interstate and spend some time in one of the small towns along the way. Have lunch. Visit the library. Walk around the square. Take time to slow down. Slow is good.

Grace Grits and Gardening

Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

Piggott is located approximately 180 miles northeast of Little Rock and 110 miles north of West Memphis. For more information about Hemingway-Pfeiffer and other Arkansas Heritage Sites, click HERE.

[tweetthis]Take time to slow down. Your #writing will benefit. @hpmuseum #HemingwayWroteHere[/tweetthis]

Musical Pairing:

Mayberry, Rascal Flatts

Two Degrees of Separation

March 26, 2015 By Talya Tate Boerner

Everyone knows about Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, right? The idea that everyone is six steps away from anyone else in the world. I’m convinced that as the world has continued to shrink, six degrees has dwindled to something more like two degrees of separation. It seems to me that at any moment, I appear to be connected to most every person I come into contact with, and there’s very little separation. My husband thinks this is naturally occurring as I morph more and more into my mother. I think we are all connected, we just don’t take the time to find out.

I have two recent examples to prove my theory.

Example One. This picture was taken at the most recent Hemingway-Pfeiffer Writer Retreat I attended in Piggott, Arkansas last November. I met several new (to me) writers including Ruth, the lady standing beside me.

Hemingway-Pfeiffer Writing Retreat (Why did I wear a silly poncho on picture day?)

Ruth and I chatted quite a bit throughout the week. She lived in Little Rock. I had just moved to Fayetteville from Dallas. Somehow Baylor University came up.

I graduated from Baylor, I said. My daughter graduated from Baylor, she said. We discovered our Baylor years overlapped. Small world, we agreed.

A few weeks later, Ruth called me. Her daughter read through the anthology published after our retreat and recognized my name.

My daughter, Anne, roomed with you one summer at Baylor, Ruth said. And of course then it all came back. Anne and I were roommates in Alexander Hall during the summer Lady Diana married Prince Charles.

She (Anne not Lady Di) had long blonde hair, was an English major who planned to go to law school. And she did. She’s an attorney in Little Rock. WHAT are the odds I would attend a writer retreat with my Baylor summer roommate’s mother thirty-three years later?

Example Two.

Last week, I spent a few days in Texas. (If you missed my trip, you can catch up HERE but this isn’t a sequel so don’t feel compelled, even though I always appreciate the page views.) While in Dallas, I went for my annual physical because I don’t have a new doctor in Fayetteville yet. I’ve been going to my Dallas doctor for years, and my Dallas doctor has had the same nurse for years. The odd thing about this is that after all this time, I learned that my doctor’s nurse is originally from Arkansas. When she said, Oh I’m from Arkansas and I said, yeah, where? and she said well I lived in Blytheville, went to school in Luxora and was born in Osceola but I’m sure you’ve never heard of those towns, I nearly fell off the table. Because I was born in Osceola and had friends in Luxora and know Blytheville as well as any place on earth. Before I left, we talked about friends of friends, American Greetings (where lots of people worked), Big Star (the best grocery store), Erman Lane (the street to drive to get anywhere), and Bobby George’s liquor store (ahem)—things no one except people from there would dare know about. The same doctor (Dr. Fairley) delivered both of us only a few years apart. He was THE doctor in town.

Shared from Main Street Osceola Facebook Page

So perhaps right here, right now in the comment section of this post, we should all figure out how we are connected, because we probably are. And probably by way less than six degrees of separation. It’s a crazy small world, don’t you agree?

Grace Grits and Gardening

Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

[tweetthis]Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? I think it’s more like two degrees. We are all connected. @hpmuseum [/tweetthis]

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon