Poetry leads woman back to Silver Valley
MAUREEN DOLAN | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 13 years, 3 months AGO
COEUR d'ALENE - Linda Beeman's way with words and her Wallace roots are intricately woven together in a series of poems that offers an intimate view of the small, history-laden Silver Valley city.
She will be in town this weekend reading some of those poems from "Wallace," her recently published chapbook.
Beeman left the city of Wallace in 1965, when she was 16. She now lives on Whidbey Island.
"As a Wallace native daughter, I was first just anxious to get myself out into the wider world, then increasingly intrigued by the history of my gutsy little hometown," Beeman said.
The poems were inspired by a trip back to Wallace in 2010, for the centennial of the Great Fire, also known as the Big Burn. Beeman says that while there, she felt like she was "tripping over ghosts."
Tim Egan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Book Award author who wrote a book about the fire, spoke at the commemorative event two years ago.
"He mentioned the little town that had produced so much wealth for the world, that had survived not only the worst forest fire in our nation's history, but a concerted effort to run I-90 straight through its core," Beeman said. "You felt how gratified residents were by his acknowledgment of their remarkable history."
In Beeman's poems, that colorful history is intertwined with personal memories from her childhood in the '50s and '60s, forming lyrical, intimate narratives in just a few lines:
every 12-year-old charged
with selling something to benefit anything
knew like the Lord's Prayer
the first steps you climbed led to brothel doors
The early labor wars, the Sunshine Mine disaster that killed 91 miners, and Wallace's history as a mining district are highlighted in poems like "Galena":
in the beginning is galena
lead sulfide crystallized
brittle as glass
heavy as guilt
When she returned to Wallace in 2010, it had been about a dozen years since Beeman's last visit.
"Beeman's Wallace poems show the uncanny details, forgotten characters, the ravaged traces of nature after mining with a sure hand and a tenderness which can only come from a native child," writes reviewer Lorraine Healy.
Beeman will be reading from and signing "Wallace" this Sunday at 1 p.m. at Hastings, 101 E. Best Ave., Coeur d'Alene.
ARTICLES BY MAUREEN DOLAN
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