The Power of the Written and Spoken Word
Wilma Dykeman's great effectiveness as a communicator grew from her skills with both the written and spoken word. She became an excellent writer in multiple genres: memoir, histories, journalism, novels, essays. She was also a world-class public speaker. Her training as an actress enabled a strong stage presence, while her passionate and articulate delivery followed naturally from her own creative messages.
Important aspects of the Written and Spoken Word:
- What is your life story?
- What stories do we need to hear?
- What makes a good novel, and does it matter?
- How can we truly understand the past?
- Where is the poetry in our lives?
- Is investigative reporting a dying art?
- How do we grow compelling public speakers?
- How can the pen best serve social and environmental justice?
Related Articles
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Written & Spoken Word
My Story: Patsy Walker
Part One
“It’s not been an easy life, but it’s been a good life.”
Written & Spoken Word
Wilma Dykeman's last days with her mother - Part Two
Part Two
"Written as a I sat with her, stroked her, hugged her, till morning 12:30 a.m."
Written & Spoken Word
Wilma Dykeman's last days with her mother
Part One
"Are you Wilma? My little Wilma? Are you sure? Do you love me?" "Will I die tonight?"
Written & Spoken Word
Crystal Cauley - Part Two
"Grounded - A Mother's Love"
"I consistently have curiosity about where on the beautiful African continent my ancestral roots reside."
Written & Spoken Word
Crystal Cauley - Part One
"The Talking Walls"
"I heard a voice whisper 'look up' and the wall held this beautiful Ghanaian carving of a woman kneeling down with a child on her back."
Written & Spoken Word
The Irreplaceable Gift 2
A lyrical, atmospheric new picture book celebrates author and environmentalist Wilma Dykeman.
“Wilma’s companions were flowering dogwoods, twinkling fireflies, tumbling streams. In nature, she was never alone.”
Written & Spoken Word
Wilma Dykeman's Letters from Northwestern - May 20, 1939
May 20, 1939
"I'm happy tonight. When I think on how much there is to give and find from life, it simply sets me afire."
Written & Spoken Word
Wilma Dykeman's Letters from Northwestern - May 12, 1939
May 12, 1939
"Something wonderful happened yesterday. I only wish you'd have been here to share my joy."
Written & Spoken Word
Fred Chappell
"Fred Chappell: I Am One of You Forever"
A documentary film about the life of Fred Chappell (1936-2024), produced by UNC Greensboro Media Studies professor Michael Frierson
Written & Spoken Word
The Totality
Robert Nozick and Wilma Dykeman
"When we see and conceive of ourselves as a part of those ongoing processes, we identify with the totality..."
Written & Spoken Word
Brothers and Sisters Like These - Part Three
A Creative Writing Program for Veterans
"What carries us all are the relationships we've been privileged to build with wounded veterans willing to write and share their remarkable stories."
Written & Spoken Word
Brothers and Sisters Like These - Part Two
A Creative Writing Program for Veterans
"Each of them has found an ability to articulate memories, losses, and triumphs in their own unique voice."
Written & Spoken Word
Brothers and Sisters Like These - Part One
A Creative Writing Program for Veterans
It didn't take Veterans Administration physician Bruce Kelly long to "realize how many veterans in my care were still carrying wounds from service."
Written & Spoken Word
The Metamorphosis - Part Three
Franz Kafka
"'I will not utter my brother's name in front of this monster, and thus I say only that we must try to get rid of it.'"
Written & Spoken Word
The Metamorphosis - Part Two
Franz Kafka
"About one month had already gone by since Gregor's transformation..."
Written & Spoken Word
The Metamorphosis - Part One
Franz Kafka
"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."
Written & Spoken Word
Moby Dick - Chapter Four
Read by Rick Kisner
Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner.
Written & Spoken Word
Alice in Wonderland - Chapter Four
The Rabbit Sends In a Little Bill
Alice is once again approached by the White Rabbit, but finds herself once again changed after having a drink.
Written & Spoken Word
Wilma Dykeman's Letters from Northwestern - November 18, 1938
November 18, 1938
"I really feel quite adult in many of my ideas and beliefs. I truly feel I have a firmer basic moral and spiritual stronghold than any of the girls."
Written & Spoken Word
John F Kennedy - Remarks at Amherst College honoring Robert Frost
Wealth Inequality and the Value of the Artist
"I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist."
Written & Spoken Word
Wilma Dykeman's Letters from Northwestern - October 27, 1938
October 27, 1938
"Saturday is the big Homecoming Celebration for the football team, and we play Minnesota, which will probably be the toughest game of the year..."
Written & Spoken Word
Wilma Dykeman's Letters from Northwestern - Introduction
Introduction
"I know that you're being taken good care of now, and if you will enjoy yourself, and not worry about filthy lucre, everything will be hunky dorey."
Written & Spoken Word
Changing the World One Poem at a Time!
How can we promote social justice through poetry?
Aeryalle Coward - Pamlico County High School - Bayboro NC
Written & Spoken Word
Moby Dick - Chapter Three
As read by Rick Kisner
"...and an exasperated whale proposing to spring clean over the craft as in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mastheads."
Written & Spoken Word
My Story: Matthew Bacoate, Jr. as told by Becky Stone
Integrating the first privately owned commercial facility in Asheville, North Carolina
"Everyone had to stay in their place. So that was the Asheville that Matthew Bacoate was born into in 1930."
Written & Spoken Word
Nella Larsen
An Introduction by Sharon Lynette Jones
"Larsen's works are read, discussed, and written about by scholars nationally and globally, and are taught in colleges and universities."
Written & Spoken Word
Jim Stokely on Wilma Dykeman's life and career - Part Two
As told by son Jim Stokely to Henry McCarthy on WEHC 90.7FM-WISE 90.5FM "The Voice of Southwest Virginia"
On July 24, 2019, at Wilma Dykeman's childhood home just north of Asheville, North Carolina, her son Jim Stokely discussed Wilma's life and career.
Written & Spoken Word
Jim Stokely on Wilma Dykeman's life and career - Part One
As told by son Jim Stokely to Henry McCarthy on WEHC 90.7FM-WISE 90.5FM "The Voice of Southwest Virginia"
On July 24, 2019, at Wilma Dykeman's childhood home just north of Asheville, North Carolina, her son Jim Stokely discussed Wilma's life and career.
Written & Spoken Word
Stephen Crane's "Men in the Storm"
Stephen Crane's short story "The Men in the Storm"
"In this half-darkness, the men began to come from their shelter places and mass in front of the doors of charity. They were of all types..."
Written & Spoken Word
With Fire and Sword: The Battle of Kings Mountain, 1780
by Wilma Dykeman
There, on an early October afternoon 5 years after the beginning of the Revolution, [occurred] a confrontation that marked a turning point in the war.
Written & Spoken Word
Moby Dick - Chapter Two
Chapter Two as read by Rick Kisner
"Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air..."
Written & Spoken Word
Moby Dick - Chapter One
Loomings
"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse..."
Written & Spoken Word
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Zora Neale Hurston - Part Two
Sharon Jones on Hurston's autobiography: Dust Tracks on a Road
"I was born in a Negro town," wrote Hurston on the first page of her autobiography. "I do not mean by that the black back-side of an average town."
Written & Spoken Word
Zora Neale Hurston - Part One
Sharon Jones on Hurston's Life and Achievements
Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison called Zora Neale Hurston "One of the greatest writers of our time," yet she died in a Florida welfare home.
Written & Spoken Word
Alice in Wonderland - Chapter Three
A Caucus-race and a Long Tale
Now on the bank, Alice receives a history lesson from a mouse. Alice's story of her Dinah cat causes all the other animals to run away.
Written & Spoken Word
John Muir - The Wild Gospel of Nature
A video narrated by Chris Highland
"Contemplating the lace-like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains..."
Written & Spoken Word
John Burroughs: In Love with the Earth
A video narrated by Chris Highland
"I find something akin to poetry and religion in the shows of day and night, and in my excursions to fields and woods."
Written & Spoken Word
Alice in Wonderland - Chapter Two
The Pool of Tears read by Lorraine Montgomery
"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice..."now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!"
Written & Spoken Word
What Good are Novels?
Peter Brooks' book Seduced by Story
I go through alternating phases of preferring fiction to non-fiction and vice versa.
Written & Spoken Word
Alice in Wonderland: Chapter One
Down the Rabbit-Hole read by Lorraine Montgomery
"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do...
Written & Spoken Word
Writing Out of Pain: Forgetting the Former Things
Brain Injury's Invitation to Vulnerability and Faith
55-minute video talk featuring co-authors Tamara Puffer and Joyce Hollyday
Written & Spoken Word
Neither Black Nor White
by Bruce Mulkey
On August 1, 2021, the Asheville Citizen Times published an opinion piece by Bruce Mulkey...
Written & Spoken Word
Introducing Thomas Wolfe
by Tom Muir, Site Manager, Thomas Wolfe National Historic Site
Considered to be one of the giants of 20th-century American literature, Thomas Clayton Wolfe was born in Asheville on October 3rd, 1900...
Written & Spoken Word
John Ehle
by Terry Roberts
John Ehle’s mountain novels are the finest artistic representation of Appalachian culture that we have.
Written & Spoken Word
“Tandy”
One of the short stories in Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
Now considered a landmark of modernist fiction – moving beyond the genteel tradition in American letters