Hey everybody. Welcome to Retell Seller, an ephemera podcast where I uncover forgotten stories and the ephemera people leave behind. I’m Angie a reseller of 10 years, and I’ll share one of those snippets with you. Let’s see what today’s find has to say.
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So this time I’m reading from one of the postcards I have. This was processed in Wetumka, Oklahoma on August 10th, 1909, which is just two years after Oklahoma became a state.
It’s addressed to an Addie Lyle and reads:
Dear friend, I received your card and think it awful pretty. I am going to school now and like my teacher, awful well her name is Penie Jones. Answer soon, Lillian.
The front shows dark purple violets with green leaves and pussy willow branches. On a gold tone background, there’s a verse printed in a small ornate frame off to the lower right and it reads:
One who claims that he knows about it
Tells me the earth is a vale of sin,
But I and the bees and the flowers doubt it,
And think it’s a world worth living in.
This is a shortened version of a poem called A World Worth Living In.
The poem traces back to Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Born in Wisconsin in 1850 and she became one of the most widely read poets of her time, and you may recognize the line, “laugh and the world laughs with you weep, and you weep alone.”
When she was 14 years old, she secretly submitted her writing to the New York Mercury. When it was published, she wrote to the editor asking why she hadn’t been paid. Not long after, a package of newspapers showed up, addressed to her proof that it was her work that earned it. In her autobiography, THE WORLDS AND I, she wrote about the fear of failure being the reason she didn’t tell her family she was even trying.
These next few clippings are from the New York Mercury Ella had submitted to but, these are from much later than when she was 14. She would have been 30 or so in 1880 when these were published. These are only snippets of her full poems that you can find on Newspapers.com. They are a subscription based platform.
So,Ella was known for writing in a way that was direct and accessible. Focusing on emotion and perspective, but she understood she wasn’t writing for critics who thought her work was too simple.
Her first book, DROPS OF WATER came out in 1872 and it was a collection of Temperance verses and you can find some of her books on archive.org.
Her 1883 collection, POEMS OF PASSION is what really brought her into the public eye.
In another part of THE WORLDS AND I she wrote about being praised as a child and how uncomfortable it made her knowing she didn’t deserve it.
She even ran outside to get away from hearing it saying, being overpraised felt worse than being undervalued.
In another part of her writing, she talks about being 15 and meeting a man 11 years older than her, but when he later sent her a love letter. She said, quote, “the man sent me his first, last and only love letter, so terribly misspelled and so ungrammatical that my second romance died a sudden and ignominious death. His blighted life continued, however, to send forth new shoots, and he buried four wives and was living with his fifth. The last I heard of him,”
STORY OF A LITERARY CAREER is another one of Ella’s writings. She talks pretty plainly about how she got started and how it wasn’t anything special or lucky.
She’d just send out handfuls of manuscripts at a time and most of them would come right back and she would just send them right back out over and over again until something finally stuck.
Reading about all of the effort, the trying, the taking risks, failing. Trying again, brings up a couple of thoughts for me. I remember when I had just moved from Alabama to Illinois.
No friends, no confidence. I had an accent the other kids made sure to point out. I was starting my new school in seventh grade, and when the spelling bee was coming up, I was actually excited because I love words. I remember being in class and spelling the word shoals correctly, as in Muscle Shoals, Alabama and my teacher pulled me aside to say, you know, SHOALS because you lived in Alabama, right?
On the one hand, I had an immediate sense of comfort that she knew something about me. Then I thought, oh, she knows I didn’t have to work for it.
I got to the point where I was at the school level and if I succeeded, I’d make it to the county level. I studied all night. The day of the competition, I was doing fine until the fateful word…controversy.
I remember spelling it and I remember the moment I began misspelling it.
C-O-N-T-R-O-V-E-R-S-A-R-Y
I spelled controversary. It’s not even a word.
If I weren’t standing in front of the entire school, I probably would’ve bolted just like Ella did. My hard work didn’t pay off, and I didn’t deserve to win. At least that’s what my 11-year-old self thought.
The next memory is all too recent and it is starting this podcast. In my welcome episode, I talked about how I didn’t really know what I was doing exactly and I’ve learned everything along the way.
I was lucky enough to have been accepted into a cohort for those starting a podcast, even though by that time I’d already published a few. But it gave me the confidence I needed to keep going. The other podcasters and I were working hard to make our ideas come to life.
And the last thing I’ll take from Ella is her motto for life: If you haven’t what you like, try to like what you have.
I do not like every podcast I’ve made, but I like that I’ve made every podcast step by step, we just keep learning and doing. I’m guessing right now you may be thinking of a moment in your life in which you failed or screwed up, or just were disappointed in what you did.
What did it tell you at the time and how do you look at it now?
Also, do they have spelling bees for adults?
Thank you for joining me. As I shared a snippet of the past, I’d love to know if it connected with you in some way. Did it spark a memory or make you see something differently? If so, consider sharing it. Be sure to check out the show notes for additional info, links and ways to connect. It’s not nostalgia, it’s human.
Until next time, may you find something worth holding onto.
ADDITIONAL LINKS & INFO:
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox – Wikipedia
- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ella-wheeler-wilcox
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ella-Wheeler-Wilcox
- List of Ella’s poetry: https://onlyart.org/poets/ella-wheeler-wilcox/
Here are the links to Ella’s books. All are on archive.org
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DISCLAIMER: The content on this site is for storytelling purposes only.
pinny please
