Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 10, 1993 TAG: 9309100277
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
Let me be.
Let me sit by the lake
And wiggle my toes at its edge
Or skip rocks across the placid waters
For 60 years, Elizabeth Jackson has been quietly writing poetry and now has accumulated enough of a collection to have it privately published.
"Listen to the Winds" is a 52-page hardback by Elizabeth Barret Meredith, her name before she was married.
She will sign copies from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Saturday at the Fine Arts Center of the New River Valley on Main Street in Pulaski. It will be available for sale for about $10 at the center.
"I really don't want to do it. I'm a private person," Jackson, 82, says of the signing. "I have to do it to sell the book."
She has sold poetry to various magazines, "just to show that I could do it, you know." Commonwealth Press has also printed a 14-page booklet of written reflections, "Grant Unto Me."
But she writes more for pleasure than profit, she says.
She has also composed songs, many of them for children's plays, and written stories on inspirational themes.
"You do have to have faith in what you can do," she said.
Jackson writes wherever she happens to be, but does most of it these days at a table by a tall window in her spacious century-old home now known as Meredith Apartments. She and her mother, the late Constance Beatty Meredith, to whom the book is dedicated, bought the house in 1935 when they came to Pulaski.
When she lived there alone, she rented rooms to as many as eight people. She has narrowed the number to one or two in recent years since closing off the third floor.
A Charlottesville native, Jackson grew up in Clifton Forge, where her mother was organist, as well as a contralto soloist, at a Presbyterian church. Jackson inherited her mother's love of music and, apparently, her talent as well.
Jackson moved around in her education, attending the College of William and Mary; Westminster Choir College in Ithaca, N.Y., and Princeton, N.J., where she was chosen for the Westminster Touring and Broadcasting Choirs; and James Madison University.
She graduated from Radford University and taught for 30 years in Virginia, including six years at James City County, teaching music at all grade levels, and 24 years in the sixth grade in Pulaski County. She has been minister of music at both the First Christian Church and First Baptist Church in Pulaski.
Although she officially retired in 1976, she continues to teach voice and music on a limited basis. And, of course, she continues her poetry.
"You just have to write it down," she said. "Very few people read stuff like this these days. . . . I liked it and I hoped everyone else liked it."
by CNB