Hester Furey and Edward Hall

00:05 My name is Ed Hall.

00:08 I am 55 years old today is October 1st 2016. I'm in the storycorps booth in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood.

00:20 With my friend the poet teacher and historian hesterly Fury.

00:29 My name is Lisa Fiore. I am 53 years old today's date is October 1st 2016. I'm here in the Atlanta History Center storycorps Booth with my friend Ed Hall.

00:46 Lee what did I omit from that list that you would normally put on it?

00:53 I maybe now Community activist Dark Souls.

00:59 In addition to the problems that I have with a facial memory these days increasingly. So I've always had just a crap Bob sequential.

01:14 Memory, so I'm going to ask you to tell me the story of the first time. We met Bears repeating Atlanta in July 1994 with my then-husband Tony, tabi, and I knew a couple people here in town. I had I had been in East Central, Illinois for grad school in a postdoc. And so I moved here. I knew a couple people and I immediately got in touch with them and one of them was and balsamo and she call me back and said that she was getting married and I should come to her wedding reception, which is that the King Plow.

01:59 And and you were there with Monique Hewitt and Don and Jeanette Fleischer. Okay, and then y'all were having a party and you said hey come to our party and then you know hilarity hilarity ensued. I forgotten that. And Jeanette were there so that's why I asked you tell that story because I knew some detail that has completely lost to me it would you would you read it out of the depths? That's my job at a job. You were the historian here.

02:40 Lee where were you born I was born in Americus, Georgia

02:44 My parents were living in sin together out at the Flint River in my father's party cabin while he was still married to another woman and they were living on the America side of the river road that Kevin's been torn down a long time ago. And so went when my when my mother went into labor my dad freaked out in Gladstone Wade had to drive her to the nearest hospital, which was in America's

03:16 I get the sense not based on your description of them just now but will your folks religious?

03:26 Free thinkers for sure. I mean they were really just in their own way I guess but but no not not it in the same way as everyone else down there at that time.

03:40 Because I know you grew up in.

03:43 Cordial cordial in Douglas in Vienna in Valdosta. I don't think I knew that till today. Yeah, my dad my dad knew the Carters he campaign for Jimmy Carter for governor and really loved old. Mr. Carter because they were farmers during the New Deal together and old. Mr. Carter bought the first butter bean sheller and South Georgia and allowed everyone to come and use it for free.

04:17 I like those, Yeah, my dad is very social St. And so he he like that sharing a separate question from where your folks religious. Were you

04:35 No, I not for a long time.

04:42 I started going voluntarily to the Catholic church in Valdosta. I have gone to church has kind of unwillingly Baptist churches with friends and had been traumatized when one of my little Baptist friends took me to a Revival when I first heard that if you didn't accept Jesus as your savior, you were definitely going to burn in hell and I had to be taken home hysterical that night. So my parents were just like, you know who takes a tile to a Revival this is just so wrong in any way. So when we when we when we move to Valdosta, I started going to St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church

05:28 For a number of reasons not really being religious, but I sort of became more religious overtime and now my children think I'm very religious but I tried to think of you as well as well. Yes, so it's something that I've turned into my my daughter Becky. I think I told you this my daughter back you said you used to say that she was okay with my religious beliefs because I was more on the voodoo side of Catholicism that made it okay if he was very religious time, but now they're at the Whole Yoga Mantra chanting part, which she completely doesn't understand around about time. You know, who the British philosopher right who insist that a religion is is too full of good stuff to leave for the religious.

06:28 I'm just how I feel right now. You know, like I have my weibo each of us has our Shrine in mind Scott. Who's the elephant Ganesh Jai Ganesh playing with some blue hippo from somewhere in South America. And and and then there's a gear the most beautiful gear that Trip Lee perforated in a triangle with these great cheats. It's really kind of a good prayer session in right before their

07:13 So will I have that I have an essay in the works called speaking in tongues that the kind of lynx my my revulsion at my Aunt Ali and her daughter Caroline who came to get me in Valdosta when I was I guess I was 13 or and they came to get me for a family funeral and it turned out they had taken up speaking in tongues. And then after I started increasing my yoga practice a few years ago and started singing. Keratin. I ran I ran across some of the words that they had said when they were speaking in tongues somewhere. They got a hold of some Sanskrit. And so then I was like, oh my goodness. This is this is very interesting how that has.

08:00 How did you tell me the price of how did you discover this what you saw the Saints get written somewhere and recognized it was the first time I had gone to keratin it was with blue spirit will ever it this way yoga, and no it wasn't just to go get with up in Roswell Plum Plum Tree yoga or something like that. And so we were it so call and response and and so

08:30 And I think it was going to show shot and I'm shot an unconditioned. I was like shut enum I've heard that word before and as the as the chant moved along. I realize that I had heard a lot of those words before.

08:51 That's what you had to do fails me right now. Do you remember the first poem you wrote?

09:01 It was probably for school. It was probably some exercise for school when I was in Middle School or Junior High and then I wrote some I started writing more in high school as my conflict with my mother grew.

09:20 So that's are the elderly typical all day all the angry teenager poems. None of which exist anymore.

09:31 And

09:32 I don't know. You've got the the one chatbook out. Is that right? Or have you snuck something out while my back was turned now? I add two little fish Finishing Line, press 2010 and I have written more I have many projects completed but not so many published. So I have written another chapbook last last year over the last year. I wrote a chapter book called House of jars and I have a full-length manuscript of poems called skeleton woman buys the ticket but that neither of those has been published.

10:12 Why is Little Fish the title poem of that chapter?

10:22 The emotional Arc of my

10:28 Relationship with two men and one of them. I was involved in a long-term relationship a long-term long-distance relationship for 21 years. And so little fish was kind of in the ending of that relationship and there was it's the title poem because it encapsulated.

10:59 Why why it wasn't going to work out, you know, he and I we saw the same things, but they didn't mean the same things to us.

11:10 So that's so it's really a poem about symbiotics. It's a poem about we both see the well, we don't you know, we're at the beach we see the little fish in the tide or I see the little fish in the tide but he can't see anything without his glasses and he just assumes that I'm making stuff up or it's not really there or whatever. Anyway, he can't see it though. It means something you know, this is like a heartwarming memory to me but to him it's if he remembers it's another one of my crazy lies.

11:46 I c e

11:50 Huh?

11:53 You know, I'm reminded of that trip that we took and we were in that Park the spider webs flying along the ground and the sun hit them. It was like watching lightning bolts race along the Earth. So yeah, that wouldn't been able to see that. They wouldn't have believed us. Yes. Yeah Ponder Williams had a thing about that the other day she posted online and said, hey somebody spilled silver everywhere. It's about that same time of year. It was in September. It was hurricane season and it was right. It was after Ivan pit of islands in the armpit of Ivan and all these places are closed because of the storm.

12:53 Yes, you know you are.

13:00 Among the readers who Inspire pure Envy in me.

13:08 And among the writers who just inspire me. What with?

13:17 With what I think of this your

13:20 Really intense Devotion to craft

13:28 Who are the writers who inspire you?

13:31 And

13:34 Is there any writing that you envy hell? Yeah all the time. Okay, so right or to inspire me and writers inv writers who inspire me Ursula Le Guin.

13:56 It for her ability to bring all that anthropological awareness and forestalling of judgment to storytelling that she is able to tell so many different stories because she does not have this belief that there is a center somewhere that is

14:24 The center from which all other Fender should be judged. So so I really am inspired by her.

14:35 For poetry

14:39 Gosh, it changes all the time that you know.

14:45 I should have been prepared for this question. And I'm not I have a favorite short poem in a favorite long poem. You know, my favorite short poem The the AR Ammons one can't have it both ways. And both ways is the only way out, which I don't know if it's meant to be like the bisexual Anthem but that's what it is for me. So like for me to bisexual Anthem would have to be two nice girls. I spent my last $10 on birth control and beer.

15:28 Well, so there you go, right so right or to inspire me to inspired me in the last year I can I can speak to that last year. I was going through a really terrible time. I had given up my full-time job and was getting ready to sell my house. I had moved and I was going through menopause and losing my mind and this friend of ours Al Matthews told me I should read the autobiography of William Carlos Williams and I studied Encino non-canonical writers when I was in graduate school Dan from the modernist. But non-canonical so I had a little bit of resistance and I was and I felt like I felt like been there done that, you know, I'm not going to go back in but I did I looked at the autobiography just because I hadn't read it before.

16:23 And it

16:26 It allowed me to reinsert myself back into modernist.

16:32 Art and writers. It's mostly a book about his career as a doctor and how that underlay his career as a poet.

16:47 And anyway, it just it change it got me started on a new project and really inspired me and I'm free poems into a new series with that and really excited about that research. It's all it's the series about modernist doctors and their bugs so Williams got me started because it's all that he writes about working in the hospitals in the city of New York in the early 20th century in their battles with you no roaches and bed bugs and and microbes.

17:22 And and I found out that really powered me forward in a weird way. So at least one of those poems we adore it. A lot of people really like it a different from anything I've written before but writers i n v i don't know I guess whenever there is not really an envious person, but occasionally, I do have a little wistfulness when I when there's somebody for whom formal experimentation and editing seems so easy to them. I do feel a little bit wistful because it's never easy for me.

18:04 But you thinking of anybody in particular with that door. I might my poetry man Torres Steve Davenport, and he doesn't

18:17 As far as I know he doesn't write a lot but he's extremely disciplined. He counts syllables. He everything is metered or if it's off meter. There's a reason and he's planned at all and he does he's amazing intellectual experiments with poetry that I I've come up with one that is kind of my I started trying to write a mashup of the 23rd psalm and Bob Dylan's

18:47 Pause it. What is it positively?

18:51 3rd Street or something like that? It's the one that that says you you got a lot of nerve.

18:59 To say that you're my friend. Anyway, you're not you're not my friend anyway, so I was trying to do a mash-up of those two and I think it's failed but that's it. But Steve is really good at that hill-to-hill intellectually design an experiment that will create a poem and then something amazing and I just I don't I don't write that way. I write from my God. I write from my ear. And and so that's not how it happens for me.

19:33 Yeah, I think I know the end of the pole that you're talking about and for me, it's there's always some sort of logic that applies even when I'm writing about things that don't exist. They're still governed by a certain you typically story logic.

19:55 You know we even absurdities jokes.

20:02 And I guess with Envy what I was thinking of impossibly you don't experience the sensation for me. It's the David Foster Wallace story Little expressionless animals, which is which I point to when I think of all the stories in the world, that's the one that I wish I wrote. Like I said, well, I know I have an answer to that then so my my two stories in the world that I wish I had written were and I asked men's houseboat and

20:34 I'm turning member of

20:36 Secret room

20:38 So yeah, and then also, yes, he the one secret room is the is basically the story about that she different she develops this.

20:52 Trope of a room that everyone has a secret room hidden inside them and you may be able to see the window on the outside but you can't figure out how to get in there. So like, you know, it's there but you can't get in and and then and then houseboat is a really really beautiful story about this this kind of Bohemian character who has a houseboat on the cinnamon and then she and it's all kind of beaten up and she goes there and sleeps and dreams of the city and then she gets up in the morning and sees the police and the prostitutes in the fisherman and

21:31 Anyway, it's just this very tumultuous story. And then she has to the police come and clear away all the people who are living in their house boats on the river and tell him they have to go down somewhere else. And she said she takes it somewhere else to get it repaired cuz it's kind of Scruffy and then it never really happens, but it's a beautiful story.

21:55 How are you on the water? Have you spent time on a houseboat yourself? I have not. Unfortunately, I am very good on the water. I am a water person. My parents were living at the river when I was born and I swam I think from the time I was a toddler and I had this longing to go back and and I live on a river again or live on the coast and swear that I'm going to make my way to the Georgia coast and live on one of the coastal islands. And yeah, I could swim a long ways and I know it one time you were doing these was it cave diving? No, I did bring diving. I love the Ocala national forest and it's full of all these little springs and spring-fed rivers with really cold water.

22:47 And it's great to be there when it's a hundred degrees and the water is called so I I own a wetsuit and I do snorkeling in a little freediving but I have scuba dived down and beliefs when Tony and I were on our honeymoon, but but just snorkeling is just

23:09 Amazing joy to me. There was I went to Spring they're called peacock spring and that's where the the people who are getting their scuba diving certification do their cave diving test. So Dave Lynn took me there and it was just like it was way back up in the woods and and we drove up and they're all these cars parked and we got up in this it was this dark little bit didn't even look like a spring it look like a I don't know like a ditch or some other good small and it was dark and we got in there and I kind of just, you know, waited in on trust and I wasn't wearing anything on my feet and I got in and the thing was full of turtles and I was afraid of being bitten it was small, but we're like looking around and and waiting we could see a cave mouth over in the corner. And so we waited around I guess about 10 minutes and kind of paddled around and tried not to trouble the true.

24:09 And then all of a sudden like 30 scuba divers came out of the hole that was amazing, but I have not done any cave diving I again though. I think I may be too claustrophobic. Like I experienced a little bit of claustrophobia when I scuba dive, but I think that if I knew that I were in a cavern it might be too much for me never get me there.

24:46 Text with me. Do you know Monique was always the water baby when she and I were together. She's Pisces with some weird Aquarius thing going on and you know, I think most of the vacations we took together with a Saint Simons Island where she born of the water and I stayed on the beach VRBO perfectly happy.

25:14 Oh, yeah, I love Saint Simons. I really wanted to move there in the spring and just couldn't make it happen in time. But I still I still long to live there and I'm in my day and working on my novel. I'm learning a lot more about Saint Simons. Tell me more about your novel where you are with it. Just don't get too much of what about two-thirds done? I think I or 2/3 drafted I should say it is it's looking like it's going to be about 30 is Chapters. It is about eight.

25:55 South Central Georgia family that turns out they think they're white and they turned out to be more racially complicated then they believed in it all comes up in a land dispute a real estate coral. And anyways, I'm doing a lot of research for it because I

26:17 At first I was kind of working with this go. I'm going back and forth between made-up historical documents and the start of third person narrator and then I decided to let one of the one of the one of the late nineteenth and early Twentieth Century characters narrate a chapter and she promptly informed me that I have research to do and so I've been doing research ever since to try to expand to write about her world.

26:55 A real thing

26:57 Today that

27:00 Initially thought you know, I should I should just I should mention this to lie. And I thought and for whatever reason something made me go back possibly the link you sent me to the scapulimancy article about these bones with the oxen oxen Sip & tortoise. Yeah ancient Chinese characters that no modern Chinese can read already a fantasy story of amazing proportions and it's true but it was it was some weird mix of that thing that you sent me great words scapulimancy, by the way, but

27:59 This was actually from a political article.

28:04 They have a great headline.

28:08 Harvey Keitel the actor mr. Wolf from Pulp Fiction quote from him Harvey. Keitel says real men. Don't note for Trump and these next Murray and it was just hold him expounding on you know, why you feels like trunks not appropriate but there's a free quote near the bottom of it. This is Harvey Keitel in the Poetry of things. There's intuition Instinct being tucked with with deeper realities, which is why we turned to the Arts and I read that and I thought of you

28:48 Okay, so I don't know what you might have to say to that. But the fact is that I thought of you that's very sweet.

28:59 Well 2

29:02 To to connect it back to modernism.

29:09 I'm just going to let you know there is one of my favorite poems of all time is Yeats lapis lazuli and I I think about that poem all the time now because it's all about how everything is going to hell and everything is bad and we've gotten ourselves into such a big mess and it was a poem written during World War II and and saying that you know, there's a lot of popular sentiment that

29:46 That people of serious intellect need to be serious all the time and need to be kind of pessimistic in order to be taken. Seriously. So what Gates had sort of held up in response to that is this image of this ancient carving with these?

30:10 Philosophers climbing a mountain probably in time of War there probably fleeing the city and they're going to you know, they're going to sit up in the mountains and play some music and be happy and he says All Things fall in it and are built again and those who build them again or gay

30:30 And so I die.

30:34 That's what I thought about when you read that that quotation.

30:39 Gay in the old sense. I presume it would be the reading of it. No, I like to read it both ways. I believe that I completely appreciate that so funny, but I know I and I put that in a poem I said that he felt his poems with the gay art lovers who teaches how did their resurrectionists then they teach us out of rebuild the world. So anyway,

31:20 Is there anything that you have always wanted to say to me and never said?

31:26 No, I don't think I've I think I've said that a lot of stuff to you. We've known each other for 22 years.

31:41 So

31:46 Well

31:50 I hesitate to even ask but I'll ask and you can say no.

32:00 Shall we talk about sex? I mean we can we have eight minutes to phono. Maybe we shouldn't if you have that attitude.

32:19 Yeah, Noah, cuz I've walked from home to the the MARTA station and I'm thinking about poetry and I don't have much to report these days Eddie. I don't know what to say. I seem to have turned back into a kind of Monk.

32:40 No, it's just me. I don't know. I just know.

32:45 I just died by there's no one in whom I'm interested. And so there's there's nothing going on.

32:54 I just I really I think since I'm since I turned 50. I've just had a greater sense that I need to get my books done and

33:04 And you know, I kept saying that I wish that instead of all my ridiculous man problems. I had learned an ancient language and so now I'm doing that sounds great.

33:15 Well into and there's a there's a poetry connection here, which is I think I had this Revelation that was in front of my face all these decades and I never saw it which is I guess it's is it Prufrock? Shall I eat a peach? You're not the one and and I dare to eat a peach and Elliot primarily was homosexual, right? And I got that wrong. It is very difficult to talk with certainty about people of that era. So and I'm not an Elliot scholar. He was married at least he was married twice. Okay, hun. Hope all is well knows.

34:07 Will course you're going well with married and had eight. However, many eight or nine children and probably was gay. I don't know people were different back then I guess where I'm headed with it is is that the is that the obvious Peach that I should be thinking? You know that you would go to that runs right. Yes. I do. I do know what yeah. So do I dare to eat a peach? Well, that's a that I think has to do with it could have been any other juicy fruit that makes a lot of noise and mess and gets stuck in your teeth. And there's no graceful way to

34:49 To do it and I'll and it's yes.

34:57 Is it Cranford where the ladies had this debate about how to eat an orange and one of them wants to one of them wants to suck the orange and they say she has to go to her bedroom.

35:13 Hilarious not that's not suitable public.

35:25 See that what was it? I was doing something like literally I just had this image. Oh, no, it was the other way around like the things you never believe anyone could do the quiz show. Wait. Wait, don't tell me one of the questions today one of the multiple choice questions, right? You're which one of these is the true thing and they were all like these ridiculous restaurants around the world and the actual answer was this restaurant in China where you sit on toilets to eat?

36:00 Well, that's what I always tell people about my poetry. Is that the all the dead of course the Mystic Frameworks and stuff for made-up, but they're all the really messed-up stuff. That's true. You can't make us right and I forget who it was recently that I had to like. I felt compelled to scandalize by reminding them. I think we were going for some ridiculously expensive meal that we weren't going to pay for and I said, yes, but it's good to remember that the finest meal in the history of the world ultimately turns to shed.

36:35 And I just looked to me like the point.

36:41 So yeah.

36:49 I don't know, we have to say something else. I can't have shit. If the last time I ever know I'm not thinking about my sex life, of course is sworn off men again and seem to be dating Hadley Breckenridge.

37:13 You know who that was kind of like kind of Thunderbolt e right like I saw a picture she was suggested on Facebook as a friend and I was like, well, she's gorgeous, but I'm not going to friend her because she's gorgeous cuz I'm not that shallow. Will Facebook keep suggesting her and so I wouldn't look to her page and then discovered that she was an artist and she might be in Atlanta artist and you can figure where things went from there, but

37:47 Yeah.

37:51 I guess in my 50s.

37:55 I've kind of cycle through feeling at first considerably less sexual and in some of this was some of this was chemical certainly like I had to rejigger my whole sugar intake has basically impotent at one point from eating sugar and they swore to me. No, no, this is happening. But but I noticed it was just it was definitely tied to that and I'm not sure where I'm headed with this in terms of the question, but

38:32 I don't know. What's

38:35 Are you asking about my cycling through 2001 and

38:51 And that was terrible.

38:55 I really haven't met that many women that I've been interested in since I came back down here and then down to Georgia and then the

39:06 And then Nieto Bob Naaman really dug fellow I was with for 21 years foreign policy lobbyist. Ended January 1st, 2012. And for the best, I think but you know that relationship was really good for me and that I had you know, I felt like I had a relationship I saw him one to four times per year and and down, but I had my freedom and I had like he would

39:41 He would never have asked me to be no be small.

39:45 To be with him as so many other men have so I don't know just there's a limited subset of women and men who are interesting to me. And so I am just very very thankful for your friendship after all these years. You're probably one of the people who knows me best.

40:05 And and I'm staggered to share friendship with you lie, you're among the people that I treasure most in this life, and I want to thank you for taking time to sit down with me today. Thank you for asking me.