Poetry and Memoir

In today’s episode, we meet poets Grace Ocasio and Justin Hunt and explore themes of family and relationships, which appear in much of their writing.Grace and Justin are accomplished and award-winning authors who are members of the Charlotte Writers Club.

Justin reads several poems that speak to the past. He also reads a section from his memoir where he’s driving across rural land no more traveled now than it was a half century earlier when he was a young boy in the back of the family’s big-fin Cadillac on the way to vacation in Colorado.

Grace reads poems inspired by her mother in the time when Rosa Parks took a seat, her great aunt who could overturn injustice like a mother right siding an upside down child and a grandmother whose scrapbook revealed a letter of her youth from an unknown admirer.

We start with Grace reading a poem called “Fall Festival,” inspired by family hayrides at harvest time, and a poem by Justin called “Afternoon on Slate Creek,” that captures the mood of a father and son, together, on a low bank, fishing poles in hand, bobber on the float.