Award-winning Delaware author among featured poets at Downtown Artist Cellar

Nov. 9—MALONE — Linda Blaskey, 76, followed the writer's way in her early 50s.

"I had always written my whole life," the award-winning author said.

"I got in trouble in school for writing in class. So, I didn't really dedicate myself to it until I was in my 50s."

For her livelihood, Blaskey was a supervisor in the pathology department of a Delaware hospital.

Now retired, she can spend time writing and driving from Delaware to Malone, where she is a featured poet 7 p.m. today at the Downtown Artist Cellar, 410 East Main St.

Event organizer Jim Bourey is a good friend whom she met in Dover, Delaware.

"We joined a poetry group together," she said.

"We wrote a book together ("Season of Harvest")."

Blaskey is the recipient of three Fellowship Grants in Literature (poetry), including the 2022 Masters for Literature: Poetry from Delaware Division of the Arts. She is poetry/interview editor emerita for Broadkill Review, and coordinator for the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize.

Blaskey is the editor of an online poetry journal, "Quartet," which features the poetry of women 50-plus.

Her work has been selected for inclusion in Best New Poets and for the North Carolina Poetry on the Bus project. She is the author of the chapbook, "Farm" (Bay Oak Publishers), the full-length collection, "White Horses" (Mojave River Press), and co-author of "Walking the Sunken Boards" (Pond Road Press).

She spent her childhood on the plains of Kansas and in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.

Blaskey lives in Sussex County, Delaware with her husband on a small horse and goat farm.

MADE IN ARKANSAS

"I became a poet because a friend of mine, her name was Fleda Brown, she was the Poet Laureate of Delaware at the time," she said.

"It turned out we were at some event at the same time. She's from Arkansas, and I'm from Arkansas. We met in Delaware, and at the time I was writing short stories. She signed one of her poetry books to me, and she said check pages 18 and 51. They were both poems about Arkansas. She said, 'you can do this,' and that's how I got started. It's just crazy."

BOSTON MOUNTAIN

One of the poems was about returning to Arkansas and driving through the Boston Mountains into Fayetteville, which Blaskey had done many, many times as a child.

"The Boston Mountain is in the western part of the state," she said.

"My family was from the Ozarks, but we lived in Kansas and we would drive back through the Boston Mountains. So I knew exactly what she was talking about, about coming over the mountain and seeing Fayetteville. They were both poems that I connected to."

The other poem compared snow in Arkansas and Delaware.

Blaskey started writing poetry using Brown's poems as a guide.

"I discovered I really liked it," she said.

"Then, she was offering a weekend retreat at Cape Henlopen in Delaware, and I signed up for it and got accepted. So that was the first formal exposure I had, and so since then I've been just studying like crazy with well-known poets and taking workshops and learning all I can. It's been over 20 years. I'm a lot better now than I was then."

Her themes are nature inspired.

"Mostly, it's the landscape where I live," she said.

"I have this oak tree that I planted in front of our house when we first moved in. It was just a little twig then, and now it's like 20 ft. tall. I see it from my window. It features in a lot of my poetry. So, do birds. I intertwine relationships with the nature that's in the poems."

FROM THE PHILIPPINES WITH LOVE

Blaskey is in the early stages of a new book, "Letters to Kathryn."

"That was my mother's name," she said.

"I found a box of letters that my father (Hugh Adams) wrote to my mother (Kathryn Onley) when he was stationed in the Philippines during World War II. My plan is to draw some poetry from the letters, but also write poems that are about my parents. They were both in the Navy when they got married, and I have a poem about when they got married."

In the batch of letters, Blaskey found a letter from a Filipina to her mother when her father was in Mindanao.

"When I first saw it, I was like oh, oh," she said.

"She wanted to tell mom her wonderful daddy was because her daughter was really sick and he snuck some medications to her and the little girl got better and was fine and the mother was really appreciative. For part of the time, he was not far from there. He was a pharmacist mate in the Navy, and so was mom. That's how they met. He was where the action was. Okinawa is coming to my mind, too."

Somehow, nearly all of her mother's letters got lost.

"I have one letter from my mother to my father but in it she writes to him that she is going to buy a new coat so she can have a new coat to wear when he gets back," she said.

"There are all kinds of stuff that I'm mining. Like I said, it's at the very beginning."

ANCESTRAL HOME

Living on the Delmarva Peninsula was a return to Blaskey's mother's Eastern Shore roots on Public Landing and her birth in Girdletree, Md.

"Mom's family, her uncles lived in Snow Hill," she said.

"They had a canning factory there. I think it's long gone. I think they probably originated in Onley, Va., and then moved up because my grandfather built boats. So, they were right on the water."

Email: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

Twitter@RobinCaudell