Eva Poole-Gilson, who has been writing and teaching poetry in the Owens Valley for a long time. It is a testament and thank you to the land and the people here who have so enriched her life and the lives of many thousands of others.

After a year and a half in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, writing my first novel and earning a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing, I spent even more adventurous months in the Amazon, Columbia, Peru, Ecuador and Chile, seeing things, people, and animals sometimes startling to a naive, young, white, teenage girl from flat Wisconsin, sometimes experiencing exotic, thrilling events, sometimes surviving dangerous ones through a fool’s ignorant luck.

In 1973 I returned to the U.S definitely more realistically “educated.” Now, 50 years later, I add: living in an unrecognized state of shock, a sub-conscious, immensely expanded awareness of the grandeur, and terror, of the world.

I settled in San Francisco, but somehow was unable to find a “realistic” job. I yearned for the long free and loose writer-adored days I’d spent in San Miguel...

I did manage to gain an honorary stay at a writers/artists colony on the East Coast, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

It turned out an internationally known writer, Evelyn Eaton, spent some months there a bit later. Miraculous and complicated events led her and the owner of the grounds of VCCA to track me down in San Francisco to see if I’d like to house-sit Evelyn’s place in the High Sierra/Owens Valley, while they went visiting tribal lands and people in the Northwest.

Yes!

I fell head-over-heels in love with Inyo County.

Seems like a moment later I found my own nook there, and almost as quickly I was discovered there by John Oliver Simon, then Director of California Poets in the Schools. He invited me to become a teaching poet. He had, too, a great love for the High Sierra because of many childhood fishing trips here with his grandfather.

For me the rest is history: teaching poetry in most every school in Bishop, Lone Pine, Independence, Big Pine, Round Valley, Mammoth, Coleville, and Lee Vining; winning a CAC grant to be poet-in-residence at Bishop High in the early 1980’s; starting ArtBreak, a local TV program, interviews of local and visiting writers and celebrities. Pretty soon I opened Pegasus Gallery and featured the work of artists in diverse genres.

And I published my first book, Love Letter to the High Sierra, which wanted its title to be the theme for this Job Spot window display. The display centers on a TV video of many of the visionaries I’ve met here, offering photos of the work of Janice Kabala, David Kirk, Nancy and Ron Overholtz, Burrell Gilson, Lorna Yarbro, Dorothy Rinne, Dana Hodgdon, Cindy Kamler, Raymond Stone, Iren Marik, Roberta McIntosh and Evelyn Eaton.

Eva is happy to hear from you at bkebkb@hotmail.com

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www.eva.poole-gilson.com

Eva’s books are available from Amazon