Country Music and Me

Happy 80th Birthday Willie Nelson!
You are a beautiful cowboy.
This is an a great piece in Texas Monthly about Willie’s guitar, Trigger: http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/trigger

This blog post above, “Country Music and Me”  (which you will have to click on link for) is about why I love country music so much. It’s in my bones. My Wyoming bones! Will never leave, settled in good, settled in strong. I love it. I am a country girl. You can take the girl out of Wyoming, but you can never take the Wyoming out of the girl.

This is also a link to my favorite Willie Nelson song, which was also one of my mom’s favorite songs: “You Were Always on My Mind”

Willie Nelson in concert. I won tickets to see him in concert from a local country radio station.

“Be here. Be present. Wherever you are, be there.”
― Willie Nelson

Thanks for shining your light Willie!

MemoMuse

There is a sadness to country music I am a sucker for.  Probably because I am a poet.

And country music is like a reata, wraps itself like a cord, and tugs tight on the heart.  Its big ole’ box of magic, capturing the sentimentality of the human condition in a simple stanza.  Country music drips into ya real slow, seeping into tiny pockets ya didn’t even know could quake.  Like little earthquakes, it rumbles, kicks up dust in the heart you didn’t know was unsettled until ya see the storm rising on the open prairie.

The human condition has always amazed me.  Like now, as I write this I wonder what you may be going through.  What dust is kickin’ up in your heart?

I can’t help myself most of the time when I listen to country music; I usually end up crying, quivering like a kid, with honeydew melon size tears…

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How ‘Bout Them Cowgirls

Cowgirls are beautiful; there is nothing more glamorous than a cowgirl.

Red — you can buy this as a greeting card here: http://www.redbubble.com/people/memomuse/works/8788035-red

Buy this print, Red as a greeting card for $2.80 by clicking here.

Cowboy with Rope
You can buy this photo as a greeting card for $2.80 here: http://www.redbubble.com/people/memomuse/works/8787860-cowboy-with-rope

Buy this print, Cowboy with Rope at my Red Bubble shop for $2.80. Click here.

Hallmark doesn’t make cowboy cards like this: authentic and real, straight from the world’s largest outdoor rodeo — Cheyenne Frontier Days in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

I Hate Writing Bios (Until They Are Done, Of Course)

I hate writing bios.  I will procrastinate until the very last minute.  That is exactly what I did when I had to write my bio for the 2012 SAMLA (South Atlantic Modern Language Association) Conference. I am reading on the Creative Nonfiction panel this weekend. The piece I am reading is called Outliers and Outsiders about my first and only experience eating Rocky Mountain Oysters.  They are a delicacy in Wyoming.  They are not seafood; they are bull balls.

Rocky Mountain Oysters

This is our panel:

185. Text as Memoir: Tales of travel, immigration, and exile
SAMLA Creative Non-Fiction Writers, Session I
Regular Session
Saturday—2:45 pm to 4:15 pm
Empire Ballroom D
Chair: Patricia Leaf-Prince, North Carolina Central University
Secretary: Megan E. Miller-Oteri, East Carolina University
1. Wanna-be, Don’t-wanna-be, or Real? Belonging in America – Lisa Carl,
North Carolina Central University
2. K-Mart and Apple ’84 – Matt Sailor, Georgia State University
3. Montreal – Hayley Hughes, Wright State University
4. Outliers and Outsiders – Megan E. Miller-Oteri, East Carolina University

Here is my bio that will be read by the Chair of the panel to introduce me.  I am glad I got that crossed off my to do list. I really do hate writing bios.  Speaking about yourself in third person is just weird.  My paper is edited and I am almost packed.  The conference is in Durham this year so I do not have to travel far this year.

Megan Oteri has lived in every time zone, but her favorite is Mountain Standard Time.  She writes about her passion for Wyoming and its mosaic of landscape, nature, people, and lifestyle. It wasn’t love at first sight though. In fact, she thought Wyoming was no man’s land at first. She moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming when she was 15 years old from Chicago. In an attempt to escape the least populated state in the union, she went to college as far away as she could: Providence, Rhode Island.  Her classmates and soccer teammates called her “Cheyenne” and “Wyoming.”  Having never met anyone from Wyoming, most people believed she rode a horse to school. Each time she took the train home for school breaks, her love affair with Wyoming deepened.  There is a beauty to Wyoming you come to know and understand — there is magic in the sky; every night sunsets dance across the horizon in a mural of color.  Megan loves Wyoming’s wide open spaces. It is like no other place on Earth. She will always be “Forever West” in her heart; she calls Wyoming home, even though she lives in North Carolina.  Her piece, Outliers and Outsiders is about an experience she had shortly after moving to Wyoming from Chicago when she was 15 years old.  

 Megan has a Masters Degree in English with a concentration in Creative Nonfiction from East Carolina University and a Bachelors Degree in Special and Elementary Education from Providence College.  She is a freelance writer and photographer who writes when her toddler sleeps.  Her book, Baby Monitor is awaiting publication.  She is working on a historic food memoir about her great-grandmother’s catering and hot meal delivery business in Evanston, Illinois that was a model for the nation in the early 1920’s.  The Community Kitchen is about women in the kitchen and history in the making.  Food = Story.

Bio photo

Another thing that is big news is I received a Regional Artist Project Grant to go to Evanston, Illinois to research The Community Kitchen.  I will be able to go in person to the home of the CK and research the archives at the Evanston History Center and Northwestern University’s archives.  This is very exciting.  Another thing I proudly crossed a rather large to do list today was signing the contract. I actually wrote out a list of all the items I need to bring.  I am embracing my love of to do lists.  I really do love a to do list that I can cross things off.

PS – I have a zit I have named Sam (in honor of appearing the day before I present at SAMLA) under my left eye.  Yes, I am vain.  Shame. Shame.  It is poetic justice since I did not have acne as a teenager and I am reading a paper about being a teenager.  I was not able to cross off: Get rid of zit on my to do list, unfortunately.

What’s on your to do list?

Peace & Poetry.

Hope. Wish. Dream. Be.