: About Me

Jim Curtis was born and raised in a small coal mining town in western Pennsylvania where he was influenced by mountains, long winters, football, small-town values, and by people like Lawrence Whittaker, painter, who taught him to see, Keturah Fornear, piano teacher, who taught him to feel, and Margaret McLaughlin, English teacher, who told him, writewritewrite. From high school through his years at the The Johns Hopkins University to this day, Jim has seen, felt, and written as charged. His writings include poetry, essays, short stories and longer prose works. He has lived much of his life in the same nineteenth century farmhouse in the Hereford zone of Baltimore County, Maryland where his belief that nature should have the first and the last word in all things is carefully observed.

My passion is ...

beauty

I know too much about ...

doubt

My parents always told me ...

care

My childhood ambition ...

to climb the tallest tree

My favorite memory ...

touching the inside of a girl's thigh the first time

Why I write ...

I do not have a choice

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

Earth Medicine by Jamie Sams

My first job ...

farm laborer

My best moment ...

rafting down the Colorado

My inspiration ...

the way native americans viewed nature

Creative Writing > Poetry Poetry: Creativity

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The Alchemy Of Dawn There was no valley anymore. It had been absorbed Into a solemn, gray-white sea. Had I not known that there Beneath those churning waters Were fences, barns, and fields, I might have thought those seas Ebbed and flowed above a reef Where gold and glistening gems From foundered ships Lay lost amid the sands Where children of the mermaids play. Even as I stood and stared I saw There in the sea's thick fogs Two mounds of leathery curves emerge As black and threatening coils That undulated slitheringly Through the pusillanimous light. Had I not known that there Beneath the ...

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