Weldon Payne     

Weldon’s oil and watercolor paintings were  featured  in June at  The Celtic Cup in Tullahoma Tennessee,  A reception for the artist was held June 1. About 20 paintings were on display in various places in the two-story restaurant and coffee shop.  Payne also entered an annual art show in Tullahoma May 22 & 23 and was among prize winners.

Weldon's new  two-act play "Beyond the Rain"was brilliantly performed four times in October in Tullahoma, Tenn., as a fund-raiser for the Alzheimer's Association in Tullahoma.  Noel Wayne Clements of Manchester directed the eight-member cast.  Performances were held Oct. 22-25 at the Community Theater in the South Jackson Center, with a total attendance of more than 400.  

The play was taken from Payne's novel by the same name, which was published for simultaneous release with the play. 

            Set in rural Alabama in the 1970's, "Beyond the Rain" focuses on Mama King and her care-giver daughter Edna.  The youngest of three children, Edna finds herself confined to caring night and day for her aging mother whose dementia is growing progressively worse. Edna's two older siblings are married and living in other states and both essentially deny the seriousness of the situation and adamantly oppose any consideration of nursing homes. 

            "This story focuses equally on Edna and her mother," says Weldon.  Previously, Edna had quit her book-keeping job in order to care for her father, paralyzed after a rock fall in a coal mine. Her own ambitions to attend college and become a school teacher, along with hopes of marriage and children, have been shoved aside.  Her loneliness is temporarily abated by the appearance of Johnny Scoggins, home from the Vietnam war. His visits are limited to the midnight hour after evenings of drinking at the VFW club, and end in jolting Edna back to reality. As Mama's condition worsens, Edna is frightened at her own lack of control and finally concedes her helplessness to handle the situation alone and makes decisions that, in her mind, will allow her to truly love the woman that her mother has become.

            "Little Boys Bad" – Weldon Payne's second novel – is a "gritty story about loss of innocence, and redemptive love," the Manchester, Tenn., author says.

            Set in a fictitious Alabama mining camp in the late thirties, the story is told in the unvarnished vernacular of a young Ray Atkins who struggles to "belong" after moving with his family from a tiny farming community.

            Published by Beaver Press in Manchester, the 100-page paperback costs $16 and may b e ordered directly from Weldon at P.O. Box 618, Manchester TN 37349 or by contacting him at  weldon@cafes.net or calling (931) 728-7609.

Another book of Weldon's fiction, Lonesome Time, was published in 2007 by Beaver Press. It is a love story as well as a poetic tribute to Time, which he says "controls our lives and outlasts our deaths."  Both books are priced at $16 plus postage.

Born in Thrifty (Brown county) Texas and reared in Alabama, Weldon graduated from Hueytown High School and earned a bachelor's degree in journalism and fiction writing at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He and his Mississippi wife, the former Barbara Bridges, who teaches piano, met at the University.  It was there that he first wrote "Through the Pane," a column that now appears weekly in Middle Tennessee newspapers. Its subjects range widely from nostalgia of growing up in the country, letters now and then to his grandchildren, experiences from serving aboard Navy destroyers during the Korean Conflict, humor, philosophy, politics, or, as he says, "Whatever I see 'through the pane' each week." The column has won prizes from Tennessee Press Association.  Two of Weldon's three plays have been produced at a Manchester theater.