Post Tagged with: "We are Charleston"

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivering a speech.

FOCUS: Poetry, politics, Dr. King and our beloved community

By Marjory Wentworth, poet laureate of South Carolina | I am guessing there won’t be a poem at this week’s presidential inauguration. Too bad, because now is the time to think like a poet.

Through empathy, precise language and imagery, poets connect us to the things of this world and to one another. No one understood this better than the late Winston Churchill, who hand-wrote his speeches in iambic pentameter. This five stress line of verse is essentially the length of the average sentence written in the English language and can be said in one breath. Churchill had to inspire a nation under attack, and he accomplished this in ways that will be remembered forever.

by · 01/16/2017 · Comments are Disabled · Focus, Good news
FOCUS: Making Emanuels out of us all

FOCUS: Making Emanuels out of us all

By Marjorie Wentworth, contributing editor | The relatives and friends of the nine people murdered on June 17, 2015, are facing a second New Year’s without their loved ones.

The strength and dignity the bereaved have displayed during the killer’s trial is an extension of the goodness of those who died at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. And we all must keep telling their stories — to remind us of who they were and all that we could be.

by · 01/02/2017 · Comments are Disabled · Focus, Good news
WENTWORTH: New Charleston book grew after “my heart was broken”

WENTWORTH: New Charleston book grew after “my heart was broken”

By Marjory Wentworth, contributing editor | In our very first television interview about our book We Are Charleston, Tragedy and Triumph at Mother Emanuel, the reporter thrust the microphone in my face and asked “Why would a white woman want to write this book?”

I was standing between my African American co-writers, Herb Frazier and Dr. Bernard Powers, at the time, and the question took me by surprise, but it shouldn’t have. I wanted to respond that if he had done his research, the reporter might have asked the opposite question; how could I not write this book?

by · 06/13/2016 · 1 comment · Focus, Good news