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6-minute Stories

Everybody loves a good story
Listen to these 6-minute stories
from both new voices and experienced writers
from the Personal Story Publishing Project anthologies:
Bearing Up , Exploring , That Southern Thing , Luck & Opportunity,
Trouble , Curious Stuff , Twists and Turns , Sooner or Later , and Now or Never.
Copies of all 10 books in the series available here.
“6-minute Stories” episodes announced on Facebook @6minutestories

"Listen Up! by Kenneth Chamlee - 2

 – “Don’t panic. Keep your feet up.”

It bucks and dips, pitches and plunges while cold water slams you every few seconds.

 

A retired English professor, Kenneth Chamlee still enjoys teaching workshops on humor in poetry, writing in personae, and the remarkable connections between poetry and painting and photography. His poetic biography of 19th-century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, The Best Material for the Artist in the World (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023), won the Outstanding Poetry Book Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Ken is the author of If Not These Things (Kelsay Books, 2022), and his stories have appeared in several PSPP anthologies. Learn more at www.kennethchamlee.com .

Author’s Talk

Ken Chamlee

Being in or even near the noise, rush, and spray of a pounding river is a breath-catching experience. That’s why rafting, canoeing, and kayaking wild rivers are such popular sports. 

The wildest whitewater I have ever seen is the Niagara River as it roars downstream from the legendary falls. You can ride an elevator down from the gorge rim and follow a wooden walkway along the river’s edge. This is spectacle, not recreation. No one runs water of this violence and intensity except experts with rare, special permission. It is illegal even to try, though jail would be the preferable outcome. There is foolhardy, and then there is death wish. 

Extreme whitewater up close is something to be seen and felt—the thunder, the vibrating ground, the huge waves kicking up and sucking back. All of the water from the American and Canadian falls channels into a gorge only a couple of hundred feet wide in some places. It is deafening, terrifying, exhilarating. 

You can brush the edge of that thrill by rafting a relatively tame Class 2 rapid on the Nantahala River if you like. Or if you want to push it (and have some experience), go for Class 5 action on the Chattooga or Colorado. But whether you are rafting or paddling, guided or ungoverned, my advice is—stay in the boat

Ken with the 2023 Western Heritage Wrangler Award
for Outstanding Poetry Book

Ken Cnamlee with painting by Albert Bierstadt

Randell Jones