Linda Parsons
I Was Planting Roses the Day You Said the Word Hospice
Stone Soup
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
These days, I usually say I’m writing about time, reasonable being in my early 70s. How the passage of human time has carried, marked, and changed me, both within and the outer self the world sees. How those changes coincide with losses, the gains harder to embrace until revealed slowly in the fullness of time. How the natural time, that of season and growth, perennial and annual, is a far more comforting and reliable turning in the larger scheme—and roots me in what I am here on this Earth/earth to teach and learn.
Linda Parsons is the Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee. She is also the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in journals such as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and many others. Her sixth collection is Valediction:Poems and Prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville.