Smile, darn ya - A Reader's Theatre presentation

Some families pass down jewelry. Others pass down money. This family passed down poems.

A Literary Keepsake Three Generations in the Making

Smile, Darn Ya is a multigenerational memoir and family poetry collection unlike anything you have read before. Spanning nearly a century of American life, this heartwarming family history weaves together the handwritten letters, whimsical poems, and true family stories of three remarkable women and the extraordinary family they built around the written word.

The Foundation: Adeline's Legacy

At the heart of this literary keepsake is Adeline Alzina Keyes Canning, a woman of breathtaking resilience. She graduated from university in 1906, taught school at seventeen, and raised nine children largely on her own through the Great Depression. Through it all, she wrote. Her poems and love letters across generations passed between siblings with warmth, irreverent humor, and a tenderness that leaps off the page more than a hundred years later.

A Story of Survival, Strength, and Unbreakable Bonds

This is also the story of a World War II civilian prisoner, Adeline's beloved brother Walter, who survived years in a Japanese prison camp following the fall of Wake Island, and came home with his humor and his humanity intact. It is the story of Donna, a daughter who preserved every scrap of her mother's genius and turned hardship into dignity. And it is the story of Laurie, a granddaughter who carried the family's creative flame from the Minnesota snow to the beaches of Hawaii and back again.