Impressed by the Southern Silence Show at Mac-Gryder Gallery, Wilbo Offers to Organize a Poetry Reading to Get to the Heart of Southern Silence.

Hi Garlyn, I came to visit the gallery while you were away at the Frieze Art Fair in Los Angeles. I see the fair continues through the weekend. Such an event must be a wonderful way to fill the imagination with ideas for future exhibitions! Your mother, Mika, and I took a walk around the gallery and chatted about a few ideas.

I've enjoyed my walks along the Julia Row and Julia Street. Maybe I now love Julia Street more than St. Claude and Royal Street.

Let's return to the title "Southern Silence". On one hand, it is a phrase that often has served as a title of the book. A mere Google produces many hits upon the phrase. In your gallery, it serves as a jest. As I explained to friends visiting the Bloomberg HQ where I have been working, it tells the Mardi Gras to "Shut Up"! That made the couple laugh quite a bit. They had heard Michael Bloomberg speak with Judge Judy in Oklahoma City. The candidate and the judge spoke together at the Oklahoma History Center.

By the way, I have yet to have noticed boards on your windows. The FedEx Office building put up plywood. Blitch Knevel put up barriers of wire fencing. The Julia Row Thirteen Sister can just closed the Creole doors and batten down the hatches. Are you going to just ride the storm out? 

I digress. I believe that your exhibition requires a literary response, one with a touch of humor, before the show closes at the end of March. There's plenty of room to pop up chairs. Maybe the family of Dean Mitchell knows a few writers in the area who would be happy to read from their work. One of the reasons Southerners can keep silence comes from the great tradition of reading Southern Writers, who write well and at length. William Faulkner comes to mind as well as many others. A southern family reading on the porch to beat the heat as night grows dark won't be whooping or hollering but profoundly quiet.

I volunteer my services to help find suitable talent for a reading in March and to grow an audience. My friends in the fiction book club at Trinity Episcopal in the Garden District have asked for me to keep them posted should I organize an event. We have been reading Signals: New and Selected Stories by Tim Gautreaux. I swear many of the paintings on exhibition could be paintings from Mr. Gautreaux's fiction. I submit to your attention one published in the New Yorker called Idols.

As for your chess instruction, first begin with the right set. I recommend the following set from Amazon. It's important to have the right pieces and a durable board when you begin!

That is a mess of words on the topic of Southern Silence. I'm afraid it identifies me as a bit of a carpetbagger.