Writing whimsy
Father-daughter duo publish poetry books
Bryant and Barry recently self-published “My Mother is a Buffalo” and “Do You Ever Stop to Wonder.”
“We started writing silly rhymes to each other, just as a lark,” said Bryant, a retired Presbyterian minister who also previously worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratories and who lives close to the Farragut-West Knox County line. “It never occurred to us to turn them into books until some friends and family suggested it.”
“Since dad’s retired, he’s gotten into a lot of different things,” said Barry, who grew up in Knoxville and moved to New Jersey and Atlanta before returning to Knoxville, where she works as a certified financial advisor. “He and I play pickleball and things like that.
“He decided it would be fun to write a poem, so he said to me, ‘How about I write the first stanza and you write the second stanza, and we’ll go back and forth,’” she recalled. “So we did that a few times over texts. Then, he compiled a few of the poems and sent them to my aunt, and she really liked them.
“Then it just kind of took off,” Barry said. “He started writing poems day after day. He would send me new poems all the time.
“Sometimes, I would add a little bit to them, and sometimes I would say, ‘Dad, these are great,’” she said.
Eventually, Bryant shared the poems with a friend in Dallas, Texas, and the Presbytery who is involved with people who self-publish works. She encouraged Bryant and Barry to self-publish their works in two books.
“We sent her all the poems, and she said, ‘You know, there are too many here. If you write one more poem, it would make two books,’” Bryant said. They did.
While intended for children, he said, “The idea is they come out of the imagination of a small child.
“To a kid that’s 7 or 8 years old, everything is reality,” Bryant added. “They can just invent their own reality. If they want to say, ‘my best friend is a tree,’ so it is … they’re just free thinkers.”
“I’ve got a lot of first cousins my same age, and in the process of sending these poems out to my aunt, we’ve also sent them to my cousins,” Barry said. “They really got a kick out of them, too.
While the poems are the imagination of father and daughter, the illustrations were created through artificial intelligence.
The books are $12.99 per book — sold separately — from Amazon Direct Publishing.
