Wesley Woods book club invited me to talk about being a writer, thanks to a long-time friend, Rosemary Woodel. Fourteen members plus the education director, my sister-friend, Louise, and me. They asked how I began as a writer and it brought back a memory from when I was nine years old. I fell in love with Lord Byron’s poems.

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
― Lord Byron

I wanted to be a poet. I wrote poems that I stuffed into the bottom of a tissue box so no one would read them but me. As a preacher’s daughter, I grew up living in a pastorium and when there were revivals, the visiting minister would stay in our house. That meant that my brother’s room decorated by the Women’s Missionary Union, housed the visitor and my brother slept on the living room sofa.
Dr. Roy Beaman, a professor at the New Orleans Theological Seminary in New Orleans came as a revival preacher. Dr. Beaman wore glasses that were cracked and I was interested in how he saw things, literally and figuratively. He wrote poetry. I wrote poetry. He wanted to read my poems. I shared. We talked long and often about words. He offered to continue to read and discuss my poems but only if I would read and discuss his. After he left, he sent me a copy of his latest anthology. He had published one of my poems in it! I was without words. We corresponded through my high school years until he retired and I moved away from poetry. Mentoring young people is important. Dr. Beaman taught me that to teach you must also listen. Though I am not a poet, I continued to write.

“By the small little which I know, my heart would help my brothers grow.”

Who was Dr. Roy Beaman?
He was a Professor of Greek, Bible, Spanish, and Hebrew at the West Kentucky Bible School, Murray, Kentucky; President and Professor or the West Kentucky Bible School, Murray, Kentucky; Private Instructor in Sanskrit and Latin; Professor of Greek, Archaeology, English at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary; conducted doctoral seminars at the Mid- America Baptist Theological Seminary; studied and worked in thirty-eight languages other than English. Though my father studied Greek under him, Dr. Beaman was my poetry mentor.