Powerful Southern Illinois Writers

It was exciting last night to listen to several local writers share their work at the Writers Guild at John A. Logan College. Those sharing ranged in age from a Herrin high school graduate who is leaving now for his second year at Florida State and also his father to some of us in our seventies. There were fiction pieces, oral stories, humorous pieces, nonfiction and yet another tantalizing chapter from our president Linda Allen's mystery novel. I can't wait until she finishes it and I can hold the published book in my hands. I was most impressed with a very original form of writing by Roger Poppin. He delivered an entire series of one or two sentence observations on life that were so powerful that they repeatedly took my breath away. The observations were not exactly poetry, but because the meaning was so intense and so condensed, maybe it could best be described as poetry.