America
Who is Blogger/Poet/Fiction Writer/Artist Ann Johnson-Murphree?
HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO EVERYONE
2014
HOLIDAY SNOW – ACRYLICS
BY
Ann Johnson-Murphree
Ann Johnson-Murphree
Author Bio…
Born in northern Alabama, father was a Native American (Chickasaw) sharecropper who managed a farm for a businessperson from Decatur, and a mother who worked in the local cotton mill during the Depression to pay for Beautician School. Although her mother lived in the same house, she was emotionally absent since the Author’s birth. The author, raised by her father, Native American great-grandmother and an African-American woman all were great storytellers.
Instead of playing like most children, she roamed the countryside alone or with her father and at night she sat at the feet of these strong-minded individuals listening to the stories of their lives. During the summer, she lived with her fathers’ sister in Birmingham, Alabama; it was there that she would discover a library, and mingle with her aunt’s circle of friends that included local writers, artist, and politicians. A cabin deep within the Black Warrior Forest was the weekend retreat and filled with these people from a different life than her own. This aunt encouraged the imagination of a young Ann with the gift of her first journal, which she filled with stories over the summer. Planted was the desire to write, a seedling waiting to spurt from the warm southern heart of a child.
Nonetheless, with adulthood, the desire to create buried itself deep within, the dream wilted but did not die. It lay dormant, gaining experience all written in hidden journals. These experiences, the contents of these journals became short stories and poetry reading to share with the world.
Throughout the years along with her father, great-great-grandmother, and her beloved Aunt Francis, other influences were, Faulkner, Capote, Fitzgerald, and Harper Lee. Later in life, I discovered the warm and comic writing of Grace Paley. The Collected Stories, the vivid poetry of William Carlos Williams; the strong poetry of Phyllis McGinley, and the world’s most exciting women, Maya Angelou are some of the poets at the top of her list.
The harshness that shrouded her life would cause her to withdraw from most of the world; it fills the pages of her writing, the heartache, the abuse, and the denial from her mother. Today, at a stage of life where she enjoys her children, grand and great grandchildren, her four-legged companion Mason, she lives in Southern Wisconsin…far from her southern roots, writes and paints daily.
ONE OF THE MANY REVIEWS ON HER WORK:
Southern living, tragedy, memories, and nostalgia… 2014
By Dr. Karen Moriarty – Karen Moriarty, Author of “Defending A King ~ His Life & Legacy” [about the incomparable Michael Jackson]
“As a former teacher of English and creative writing, I approached the reading of Ann Johnson-Murphree’s “Honeysuckle Memories” with real enthusiasm. Poetry is not a wildly popular genre currently. However, I have always enjoyed it, partly because it can be consumed in bits and pieces and at any time of day or night. This book did not disappoint. I consider poems the poet’s personal journey of heart-soul-and-mind. This collection of poems is about Southern living, tragedy, death, and memories. The poet-author’s background as a child who grew up in northern Alabama, a sharecropper’s daughter who farmed for his living, colors much of her work. I enjoyed the flow of her writing, her style of combining prose and poetry, and her reflecting the imagery from her earlier memories in vivid terms.
I recommend that you buy and read this book. It is priced well — to entice the potential reader to venture into the realm of poetry. Ms. Johnson-Murphree enjoys, above all else, sharing her love of writing with others who will enjoy it, understand her better, and share her personal journey.”
THE POETRY OF ANN JOHNSON-MURPHREE AT AMAZON.COM –
I HAVE MOVED…
Libretto
Thank you for following Ann Johnson-Murphree Confessional Writing…I have moved…
Please visit and follow my new blog Libretto
http://writerannjohnsonmurphree.wordpress.com/
Ann Johnson-Murphree
Memories…
I have enough memories from the past
to last me for the rest of my life. My
benevolent memory will not bury them
from which they were born.
A small country church, a chorus of
crows; the splashing sounds of the
brook running through the Birch trees.
The wind caressing the colossal row
of Oaks in the field.
Death road away from the weathered
house of worship, followed by black
feathered angels. No longer will the
water beneath the Birch cool, nor will
the wind surrounding the Oaks embrace
The rocker on the porch is stilled, no hand
waves goodbye. In a cobwebbed corner of
the room, tattered sun struck curtains dance
in the nearby mirror. Childhood is dead.
©2013®annjohnsonmurphree.echoingimagesfromthesoul
Rebecca’s Story…
Thank you Elouise
http://tellingthetruth1993.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/where-is-my-mother-part-1/
for this comment which touched the heart of the story…”Southern culture. The look, the smell, the ungodly expectations and the heaviness of tightly guarded secrets. You’ve captured it so well.” ajm
The story below was the inspiration for the book of poetry called “A Sachet of Poetry – Adoration, Anger, Asylum and Aspiration”. The poems with thoughts of adoration come from the possibility of love. The anger poems come from thoughts of being placed in a position of abuse. Asylum poetry is derived from the position she was placed in by her mother and the man she was forced to marry when only an innocent girl. Apparition became the final voice for Rebecca, her desires, her wishes, her thoughts on her life and how her innocence was lost behind the walls of an asylum in the mid-1950. Her goal, her most needed aspiration was her death, her death meant freedom.
Rebecca’s story is one of a developing collection and this is an excerpt from her story…
Rebecca watched her father walked through the double door without looking back. Her mother and husband was telling the family doctor how she had been upset with her marriage and threated to kill herself. When she looked at her arm, the rubber tubing, the syringe was freighting then her mind froze in time. Her vision blurred and the fleur-de-lis wallpaper in her parent’s living room became waves of beige and gold swaying in an invisible breeze. The reason she was there dissolved into an ocean of oblivion.
Still dazed, she woke lying on an examining table in the Shelby County Medical Clinic, beside her was the doctor who had given her a shot and a nurse she knew. Standing in the corner of the room were her mother, husband and two sheriff deputies. She did not protest when the doctor gave her another shot of his magic that sent her to a place where she no longer cared. The wheelchair bumped over each crack in the sidewalk, each time giving her the feeling as if she was falling into a dark black hole. The doctor and nurse put her in the back of an ambulance as her mother began to tell Rebecca’s husband that his wife would never leave him. She steps into the ambulance, and in her own heartless way said in a low malicious voice…
“You see what happens when you try to disgrace me, putting you away for being insane will be more acceptable than have you leave your husband. You’re a southerner, southerners don’t leave their husbands”
Quivering beneath the threadbare blanket she fought violently against the straps confining her to a bed as her mind battled with drugged hallucinations. When she slept they became chaotic dreams. Mostly, she lay quietly watching other unwanted souls shuffle back and forth in a dimly lit hallway or being carted off to where the black box was kept. She knew that she had been admitted to Challis Manor located at the edge of the Appalachian foothills it provided medical treatments for the mentally ill. A place where wealthy Tennesseans paid to have members of their families placed to avoid embarrassment; Rebecca was not there because she had a mental or physical problem, she was there because she tried to leave her husband.
In a Cloudless Thousand Years…
We must mourn the waste of the earth
as caretakers we have quit caring about
what we are leaving behind for future
generations.
It is our responsibility to care for what
Mother Nature has given us, she has
nourished us and allowed us to live off her
good graces.
Our treatment of Earth is sinful and
the selfish people numb me
who take from it and refuse to give
back by loving her as they do their own
gluttony. Give back as much as you
want to take away from her.
Are we demons that live in high
towers above the filth left upon the
land. Does that make us good
Bastards?
Take from the earth only what is
needed or evil will come and rob
you of your children’s future filled
with the beauty of Mother Nature
Is it too late, will we never catch up
from our pilferage and lack of
wisdom. The landscape continues to
change, will it become sinister and dank
transformed into a wasteland filled with
greed.
The stink may vanish, in a cloudless
thousand years, but can those of us
who cared about Earth today take comfort
in the fact that someone finally listened?
©2014.annjohnsonmurphree
Fragments of Yesterday…
In the dusty corners of yesterday are buried fragments
of humanity, ancient history, forgotten mothers, fathers,
children, good, evil, and beyond death a veiled ambiguous
world that is still a mystery.
A people that after millions of years of evolution, cannot
see the reality of it all; the human race learns nothing they
endlessly continue their destructive fall.
Blood drenched roads from barbarity to civilization measured
by the futility of the enlightened, and those sacrificed are
forgotten.As humans, we judge others by our own beliefs, we
recoil, we threaten, we kill, and the blood of virtue we continue
to spill.
Millions of years from now when barren land reaches as far as
the eyes can see; will the dusty corners of yesterday show
fragments of how we destroyed humanity, will the veiled curtain
of death no longer be a mystery.
©2014.annjohnsonmurphree
Ann Johnson-Murphree books at:
Casualties of Times
The homeless cannot sleep on
winter’s cold nights, they gather
around a burning barrel, men,
women and children, forgotten,
shattered and despised; in the
distance a baby cries. Begging
for food, living on the streets, no
jobs to be found, families no longer
sound. Government talks end up
in contradictions, poverty is the
prediction. The spirit freezes,
fruit of labors rot, life squeezes and
struggles persist, bad luck smothering
heart and soul, hope ceases to exist.
Shifting winds turn into storms, will
the world grow wiser, or will it be
humbled and beaten back into servility?
Trust departed, a cardboard box in the
streets is where the homeless make their
beds, hope disappears and the future to
the homeless is dead.
©2014.annjohnsonmurphree
Artwork-Acrylics-Watercolors…
A Red Bird Day…
Revisiting childhood…
It is a Red Bird kind of day as I carefully walked the bramble-hedged path through the forest that edged our home. I could hear leaves crunching, not from my shoes… but a lighter slower movement.
I can hear the crusted creek running beside the path flowing gently through vein like openings in the ice. I can smell the wood smoke from our potbelly stove.
I know that on the warming shelves of the old wood cook stove are hot; biscuits and ham waiting for me to get home from scurrying the woods for nuts and berries, a treat while we sit around the stove listening to grandpa’s latest tale of the war he fought during his youth.
Then I saw mother watching from the window for signs of my bright colored hat she knitted me for Christmas, she opened the door and waved; I was late and she was worried. I showed her my overflowing basket, she smiled…I wanted keep her happy so, I did not tell her about the Wolf!
copyright.2013.honeysucklememories.annjohnsonmurphree
ann johnson-murphree 
