‘Magic from the first minute.’ Ky. folk artist, Lexington poet share long creative friendship

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Lexington poet and songwriter Mike Norris remembers vividly his first meeting with famed Kentucky folk artist Minnie Adkins.

“It was magic from the first minute,” he said in a recent interview.

And, he said, it was all because of Mikhail Baryshnikov.

It was 1992, and the Soviet ballet dancer had come to Danville to perform at the Norton Center for the Arts.

Meanwhile, Adkins and her late husband, Garland Adkins, had come from Elliott County to the Centre College campus to pick up the first Jane Morton Norton Award for outstanding contributions to the arts in Kentucky.

At the time, Norris, a Jackson County native, was the college’s communications director, and he was assigned to escort the couple because, as he put it, “we spoke the same language. That is, Eastern Kentucky.”

“I felt like I had known Minnie all my life,” Norris said.

He said her generous, creative spirit reminded him of his grandmother.

She said he reminded her of her brother, who had died just weeks earlier.

“I said it was like God sent Mike my way and helped me to heal over my brother,” she said in a recent interview. “He’s become like family to me.”

Before they parted from that first meeting, she gave him a carving of a guitar.

He gave her a cassette tape with a recording of a song he’d written called “Bright Blue Rooster.”

When Adkins got home and listened to it, she was surprised.

“I couldn’t understand how the person I met at Centre wrote that song,” Adkins recently told Norris. “The song was like the way people talk where I growed up, and you was all dressed up in a suit and tie at the college. I thought you was somebody.

“Then when I got to know you, I realized you’re just as foolish as I am.”

Their joint foolishness has resulted in a 30-year friendship and five whimsical children’s books that gently impart lessons adults can learn from and enjoy too.

“The kinship and connection that Minnie and I share, I think that fuses in our books,” Norris said.

Their most recent collaboration is “Mommy Goose’s Appalachian Melodies,” the third in a series of Mommy Goose books that feature Appalachian-flavored rhymes written by Norris illustrated with wood carvings by Adkins.

“Mommy Goose’s Appalachian Melodies,” released earlier this month by the University Press of Kentucky, is what Norris described as the pair’s “magnum opus,” a project more than four years in the making.

“This one came about in a way because of COVID,” Norris said in an interview.

They had just finished their second Mommy Goose book, “Ring Around the Moon,” in 2019, and in early 2020, Norris said, “I was kind of tired and ready to take a break.”

But Adkins, who is now 90, wasn’t ready to rest.

“She said, ‘This COVID thing has just got me stuck here by myself, so we might as well write another book,’” Norris recalled.

“I wasn’t going anywhere,” Adkins said.

It didn’t take much to twist his arm.

“Her energy and enthusiasm is contagious,” Norris said.

Adkins spent the year when everything was shut down for the pandemic making carvings for the book, along with her regular art, which is prized by collectors all over the country.

Norris said “Appalachian Melodies” has more text than the previous two installments in their Mommy Goose series and more original carvings by Adkins too — over 200 in all.

“It was a lot of hard work,” Adkins said. “I really enjoy doing what I do.”

She said she still works five days a week making art, with the help of her son and grandson.

On a recent Friday night, she said it had been a good day: “I have whittled a pig today and two piglets.”

As he has for each of the previous Mommy Goose books, Norris has written dozens of rhymes and recorded an accompanying song.

While “Appalachian Melodies” is a standalone book, Norris said readers familiar with their previous books may recognize some characters, and since this is the last Mommy Goose book, he said those storylines are brought to a conclusion.

The power of words is a prominent theme throughout all three of the Mommy Goose books.

In “Appalachian Melodies,” a carving of the long-beaked matriarch of rhymes holds a sign that reads,

The tools we use are twenty-six.

Good or bad is all in the mix.

You can choose from pain or pleasure.

Use the letters to make things better.

Norris’ rhymes have layers of meaning that he hopes will also give adults something to ruminate on too.

“These are not just little ‘Goodnight Moon’ books,” he said.

Conflict is another recurring theme.

“You’d have to be living in a cave not to know that we’re living in a very contentious time,” he said. “People divide into groups.”

The poem “Us and Them,” he said, is “addressing the issue of conflict with the possibility of unity.”

It ends with the line, “There’s no them but only us.”

As Norris writes the rhymes, he sends them to Adkins in batches of no more than 10, sometimes with notes for what she might carve to illustrate them.

But ultimately, she does what she wants.

“He lets me do what I think his words is describing,” Adkins said.

After Adkins finishes her carvings, Norris photographs them at his home. The resulting illustrations, he said, “have a 3D quality to them.”

He knows of no other children’s books that are illustrated with wooden folk art carvings.

Adkins said her favorite carving from “Appalachian Melodies” is the Possum Man, a figure in a blue suit with a possum’s head.

“It was just so silly and so goofy,” she said.

The Possum Man is part of the illustration for Norris’ poem “Sally Ann’s Reply,” in which Sally Ann rebuffs unwelcome advances from Willie, telling him she’d rather “court a possum.”

In addition to her carvings of Willie and Sally Ann, Adkins contributed a carving of a hopeful Possum Man who lurks in the background in the photo illustration.

“I don’t know how his mind can think of such stuff,” she said of Norris’ poems.

The book has drawn praise from a number of fellow Kentucky authors, including Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame member Gurney Norman, who wrote that he opened the book “intending to browse, and ended up reading every word, appreciating every picture.

“This is a book full of fine storytelling, colorful characters, lively wordplay, good sense, and pure fun,” Norman wrote. “The book takes the reader on a delightful journey, all accompanied by Minnie Adkins’s whimsical, colorful carvings.”

Former Kentucky Poet Laureate Crystal Wilkinson described the book as “a children’s book and an adult’s book simultaneously. It’s part story, part poetry, steeped in whimsy and imagination while sticking to the realities, the humor, the richness of Appalachian life.

“I just love it,” she wrote. “The mixture of Mike’s voice and Minnie’s art is pure magic.”

Norris said the generous praise from some of the state’s best-known writers is “about as gratifying as anything.”

Though this third Mommy Goose book will be the last, Norris said “it’s not the last Minnie and Mike book.”

He is currently at work on a retrospective of Adkins’ career as an artist with photographs of her work through the years alongside anecdotes telling some of the backstories behind the art.

“We don’t want it to be just like a museum catalog,” he said. “Even Mommy Goose is getting a foot in there every now and then.”

Of the more than 500 carvings Adkins has done for the Mommy Goose books, none have been sold, she and Norris said.

A future exhibition of all of them is planned at the Hickory Museum of Art in North Carolina, he said.

Norris also has several upcoming events planned for Mommy Goose.

He’ll be presenting at Danville’s Art Center of the Bluegrass at 1 p.m. Sept. 7, and he’ll be set up at the Kentucky Book Festival at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington Nov. 2.

“It’s been a blessing to my life,” he said of his long friendship with Adkins. “If you’ve got Minnie as a friend, you’ve got a friend.”

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