Breakfast for champions for Macon Writers’ Club

On March 11, the Macon Writers’ Club held its 92nd breakfast to recognize members who love to write and to pursue the challenge of transcribing creative thought to print.

This year, Leslie Bean’s “Sleeplessness” won first place in the new poetry category of competition, with Isabelle Wright taking second for “The Days Before Christmas.” In non-fiction, Jane Turner placed first for “Yellow Plastic Raincoat,” followed by Susan Causey’s second place entry, “Whisper in the Wind.” In the fiction category, “Bill’s House” by Harriet Wallace won first place, and “Serve the Lord” by Karen Shockley took second.

These club members qualify as renaissance women, for they are known in Macon for many other talents and interests. Turner is an avid collector and has made quilts in the old handmade tradition. Wallace is a painter and works in other media, participating in area art exhibits. Causey, president of the club, is an accomplished ceramicist.

Each year, a writer who has achieved some renown is asked to be the honored guest and speaker for the breakfast celebration. In the past, authors as famous as Margaret Mitchell (“Gone with the Wind”) and Flannery O’Connor (“A Good Man is Hard to Find”) have been featured speakers. The late Seaborn Jones, a native of Macon and winner of the 1993 National Poetry Competition, spoke to the group in 1995.

The speaker for this year’s breakfast, held at Idle Hour Country Club, was Carolyn Newton Curry, who was introduced by her husband, the legendary athlete and former Georgia Tech coach Bill Curry. He made it abundantly clear that his wife had not lived in his shadow, but, through 35 moves, teaching school and taking care of their children, had earned a doctoral degree in history at Georgia State University.

The author describes herself not as a writer, but as a historian. Her biography of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, “Suffer & Grow Strong,” is as entertaining as it is accurate in recording the life of a woman who lived through the Civil War — and its ancillary tragedies and devastation — and rose to prominence in the suffrage movement in Georgia.

According to Curry, she has been interested in Thomas’ story for more than 30 years and has pored over the diaries the woman kept religiously for 41 years — from the time she was a young teenager, recording her daily activities and thoughts before, during and after the Civil War. Thomas was born Ella Gertrude Clanton in 1834 and graduated, in 1851, from Wesleyan College in Macon. She is considered one of the forces of change in Georgia, which resulted in the women’s right to vote in 1920.

AN AMERICAN WOMAN’S INFLUENCE ON WORLD EVENTS

In the 1800s, living abroad was quite popular with young, privileged American women for whom the thought of meeting and marrying a titled Englishman or European was a dramatic affirmation of their charm and beauty and, of course, could possibly bestow on them a royal title.

Mary Esther Lee, who grew up on Union Square in New York, was the daughter of a self-made entrepreneur, who made his fortune in the grocery business, and his wife, a Connecticut socialite. Mary visited Paris in 1855, an extended trip that brought her mother and sisters to France and eventually to permanent residence in Europe.

Rick Hutto has entertained readers with his accounts of local history in “A Peculiar Tribe of People” and is known internationally as an author, a historical speaker and a consultant. In 2008, his “American Wives of Princes and Dukes” briefly included a little known Mary Lee.

However, Hutto’s fascination with her story and with the influence she wielded in political, religious and royal circles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries took him to the libraries at Harvard University and at Princeton Theological Seminary, to embassies in Washington, D.C., and to research sources in Germany to uncover the immense power Lee had as the wife of a prominent and titled man. Her access to Kaiser Wilhelm II, the king of Prussia and the man whom Hutto says can be blamed for the loss of life in World War I, is in many cases chilling — particularly in the climate of zealous religious beliefs and of rigid prejudice, which was the precursor to the reign of Adolf Hitler.

On March 12, Hutto signed books and briefly discussed his immense research for his latest book, “The Kaiser’s Confidante,” the story of the first American-born princess, Mary Lee, at Travis Jean Emporium on Cherry Street. Hutto’s account of this period is interspersed with irony and humor that reminds his readers that, among political animals internationally, there will be a number of buffoons. The book is available at Travis Jean and through local book stores.

This story was originally published March 17, 2017 at 8:22 AM with the headline "Breakfast for champions for Macon Writers’ Club."