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| Dr. Irene McKinney |
| Funeral Date: |
2012-02-08 |
| Nickname: |
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| Viewing Times: |
Receiving Friends from 4-9pm on Tuesday February 7th 2012 |
| Funeral Time: |
Celebration of life 11 am Wednesday Feb. 8th 2012 ,funeral home chapel |
| Burial Location: |
Talbott Cemetery |
| Obituary: |
Doctor Irene Durrett McKinney, Poet Laureate of West Virginia since 1994, passed away on February 4, 2012, on her family farm and birthplace in Belington, West Virginia after surviving with cancer for eight years surrounded by family and friends. Dr. McKinney was born April 20, 1939 and graduated from Belington High School in 1956. She went on to receive degrees from West Virginia Wesleyan College (BA), West Virginia University (MA), and the University of Utah (PhD). Professor Emerita of West Virginia Wesleyan College, McKinney was widely respected regionally and nationally as a poet, scholar, and teacher.
In addition to numerous publications in literary journals and magazines, McKinney is the author of six books of poetry: The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap (North Atlantic Books, 1976), The Wasps at the Blue Hexagons (Small Plot Press, 1982), Quick Fire and Slow Fire (North Atlantic Books, 1988), Six O’Clock Mine Report (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), Vivid Companion (West Virginia University Press, 2004), and Unthinkable: Selected Poems 1976-2004 (Red Hen Press, 2009). Her forthcoming collection of poetry, Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet? No, I Haven’t Had Enough Darkness, will be published posthumously in 2013 by Red Hen Press.
McKinney also edited Backcountry: Contemporary Writing in West Virginia (Vandalia Press, 2002) and was coeditor with Maggie Anderson and Winston Fuller of the literary magazine Trellis from 1973 to 1979. Since 2006, McKinney has had a popular radio commentary on National Public Radio; her poems have been featured on Michael Feldman’s What Do You Know?, Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and West Virginia Public Radio’s Mountain Stage. McKinney’s honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Blue Mountain Center. She also received a West Virginia Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Excellence in Poetry, and Potomac State College of West Virginia University named her a 2005 Whitmore-Gates Scholar.
McKinney was Writer-in-Residence at many colleges and universities, including Western Washington University in Bellingham, the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, the University of California at Santa Cruz, Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and Lynchburg College in Virginia. In the last three years of her life, she founded and directed the Low Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at West Virginia Wesleyan College.
Daughter of the late Ralph and Celia Phares Durrett, Irene McKinney was married to Joseph McKinney of Fort Ashby, West Virginia, from 1956 to 1973. She is survived by her daughter, Julia Vickers, of Germantown, Maryland, and her son, Paul McKinney, of Santa Cruz, California. She is also survived by her five siblings: Harold Durrett and his wife, Betty, of Harrisonburg, Virginia; Eleanor Leary and her husband, Edward, of Elkins, West Virginia; Ralph Waldo Durrett of Route 1 Belington; Janet Stonerook of Route 1 Belington; and Eileen Martin of Clyde, Ohio. She had fourteen nieces and nephews.
Notes of condolence may be sent to West Virginia Wesleyan College c/o Dr. Boyd Creasman, Division Chair, English Department, 59 College Avenue, Buckhannon, WV 26201. A fund in her memory, the Irene McKinney Award for West Virginia Wesleyan MFA Students, has been established at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Donations can be made to the West Virginia Wesleyan College Irene McKinney Award at the same address. Donations to Mountain Hospice in Irene McKinney’s name would also be appreciated.
Friends will be received at the Talbott Funeral Home 210 Brandenburg Street in Belington, WV. 26250 from 4-9pm on Tuesday February 7th, 2012 and again on Wednesday from 8am until 11am when a celebration of her life will be conducted from the funeral home chapel with the Professor Emeritus Maggie Anderson bringing the eulogy . Interment will follow in the Talbott Cemetery near Belington .Condolences can be sent to the family at www.talbottfuneralhome.com .
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Click Here to Express Sympathies
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Gail Galloway Adams [2012-02-07 01:01:16]
I will send another note of condolence but want now to say how sorry I am that Irene is gone from this earth. She was a vivid and wonderful force, a woman filled with wit and wisdom and an absolutely clear eyed vision of what is important. Could anyone ever forget that intelligent face with its alertness and her eyes bright, alive under her helmet of copper hair. She will be very much missed.
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Eileen Durrett Martin [2012-02-06 17:02:02]
My big sister Irene: I always felt a connection, we looked alike, we were creative, we were free spirits. I will miss you, but I know I will connect with you again. peaceful journey my dear sister.
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Kay Wright [2012-02-06 10:39:42]
I will always remember my Aunt Irene for her mischevious smile and literary talents. I always wondered what was she really thinking behind that grin. I chose the purple candle.
Purple is often associated with mystery. (I think we all thought you were a little mysterious at times.)
This meaning is clearer with dark purples than with lighter shades, just because of the depth and darkness. Depth and darkness are a bit mysterious.
But all purples are a mixture of two very opposite colors - - red and blue. And this is what makes it a mysterious color. Red is hot, passionate, energetic and aggressive. Blue is cool, tranquil, calming and secure. The two colors combined create the mystery of the color purple. (I think this is an accurate description of my Aunt Irene). You will be missed.
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Donna Durrett [2012-02-06 08:47:55]
Although my Aunt Irene was a very accomplished person in life she was even more to me, she was my Aunt Irene and I loved her. I will never forget her smile or her voice and we can take a part of her with us in our precious memories.
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Jan Durrett Stonerook [2012-02-05 23:25:13]
After 65 years of your being my big sister, you would think there would be nothing more about you that could surprise me. But I am finding that you bemuse and baffle me even more since your passing! Getting to know many of your close friends as we have banded together to be with you in your home during these last days of your journey has given me much insight but even more questions into who you really are. You once told me your greatest fear was being boring or predictable but I think you need not have worried. You were an imp and a mischief maker at times. But we all forgave you your shortcomings because, in the end, you brought color and drama into our sometimes otherwise hohum existence. It has been an honor to have traveled with you in this journey and I will catch up with you a little further on down the road. Jan
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Edward Moore [2012-02-05 17:32:21]
A voice which has touched so many will never be silenced.
On behalf of many West Virginia Wesleyan College alumni, deepest sympathies.
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Shauna Hambrick Jones [2012-02-05 12:50:40]
Ekphrasis – Photo of Irene McKinney’s Ponytails
February 2, 2012
Dear Dr. McKinney,
Do you remember the last morning of our winter residency when I asked to take your picture from behind? I wanted to capture your ponytails, and though at the time, I thought it was a simple, random request, I think of it differently now.
Those ponytails remind me that you are one of the reasons I applied to the MFA. The truth is, when you told me in Advanced Composition during the fall semester of 1990 that I had created a piece of work that may be publishable, I believed you, even though I never pursued it. I’ve since lost the essay during one move or another, but I never misplaced your encouragement. I know, I know; you don’t care for writings that are “too precious,” so I will focus on your hair.
Those ponytails capture your spirit—strong, fiery-red and wild. Some would say that your age “should” prohibit you from wearing your hair so long. What do they know? You have never worried much about convention.
Those ponytails are separated by a perfectly imperfect part with a few sections that want to veer from a straight line and wander for a while. Blue and green elastics hold your auburn hair, green on the left and blue on the right, all of it together reminding me of your “disheveled West Virginia”—“hills thrown around like old green handkerchiefs,” “the morning glories…cascading down in blue,” “the raised rock veins of burnt sienna.” These words of yours entangled in your head of hair.
Those ponytails are not sleek. Instead, the long copper pan tendrils lay in different directions, some waving to the left, others curving to the right. They are dynamic, just like the owner of the hands that pulled the hair into the elastics that January morning.
Thank you, Dr. Irene McKinney. Continue “dancing to the Mahotella Queens” forever.
xoxo,
Shauna
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