The Mountain Keeps Its Own Time

Joe Beckham’s The Mountain Keeps Its Own Time: Poems and Photographs from Western North Carolina grows out of a lifelong practice of paying close attention to landscape, to memory, and to the quiet movements that shape a life. A retired professor of higher education policy, Beckham turns here to poetry as his primary medium, bringing with him a sensibility formed by years of teaching, writing, and public service, as well as an earlier life spent in the outdoors as a climber, fishing guide, and Outward Bound instructor. The poems are rooted in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where ridges, rivers, and weather are not simply background but active presences—shaping perception, testing resilience, and offering moments of clarity that resist easy explanation.
Throughout the collection, Beckham pairs poems with the photographs of Skip Sickler that deepen and extend the work, inviting the reader to enter both the visual and emotional terrain of Western North Carolina. These are not grand, declarative landscapes but lived-in places: trails half-hidden by rhododendron, rivers rising and receding with the seasons, rock faces that demand attention and trust. The poems often dwell in thresholds—the moment before understanding arrives, the pause between lightning and thunder, the quiet after loss, suggesting that meaning is rarely announced and more often discovered in passing.
Written in retirement, this book reflects a deliberate turning toward what remains when professional roles fall away: the discipline of noticing, the willingness to sit with uncertainty and the recognition that time, like the mountain, moves according to its own measure. Beckham’s work is shaped by both experience and restraint, seeking not to explain the world but to meet it with clarity, humility, and a steady, attentive gaze.

In his early years, Joe guided fishermen in Yellowstone Park, climbed in the Tetons, and taught courses for the North Carolina, Minnesota, and Hurricane Island Outward Bound Schools. He also earned a BA from the University of South Florida and a JD from the University of Florida.His background in administrative law led to an appointment as Administrative Counsel to the Governor of Connecticut, where he helped develop programs for youthful offenders funded by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, including the Connecticut Wilderness School, an adaptive Outward Bound program.Joe later joined the University of Florida's National Education Finance Project, authoring a state constitutional amendment expanding the authority of Florida's public higher education system. After teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, he moved to Florida State University in 1980 to direct the Center for Studies in Higher Education. During a 35-year career at FSU, he became nationally recognized for research on higher education policy and law, publishing widely and teaching graduate courses in education law, policy, and finance. He retired in 2011 as a named professor and emeritus faculty member.An advocate for greenways and trails, he helped establish Florida's first rail trail, the St. Marks Trail, and was president of the Florida Greenways and Trails Foundation. Since 2022 he's been active with the White Horse, Asheville Symphony, and Greenville's Peace Center. Relocating to Highland Farms in November 2025, he remains active with OLLI /UNCA, writes poetry, practices clawhammer banjo, and enjoys time with his grandchildren.

Now in the waning years of his life and well into retirement, the relentless search for meaning and fulfillment continues to doggedly nip at his heals. Since his earliest recollections, Skip sought solace in the outdoors. While immersed in the mountains, forests, and streams, he finds himself more centered, more alive. "It is the rekindling of the scared fire of which I am most in need- a reprieve from the daily concerns of life in a bustling world of people, cars and other modern distractions."Years ago, Skip was moved by a passage written by Aldo Leopold in his classic work on the conservation of the natural resources, A Sand County Almanac: "We reached the old wolf in time to watch the green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes - something known to her and to the mountain." Skip continues to search for the essence of "the green fire", the mystery and magic of life. It is this sense of wonder he continues to cultivate within himself as an artist. After all, art is only a means of seeing. Sigurd Olson wrote, "only when one comes to listen, only when one is aware and still, can things be seen and heard." Skip's photography helps him look more closely, more intensely, more soulfully, more intentionally at the world and his relationship to it. The translation of these feelings into a visual image is his challenge of creating impact and meaning as an artist; and, ultimately to have an influence on the viewers' reactions to his work.Skip began photography in 1971 when he received a camera for Christmas. A camera was his constant companion while working as a National Park Service Ranger; as a wilderness guide/instructor with Outward Bound; and, as a trainer for various groups and teams. Skip considers himself still a student and continually seeks to see the world around him with "fresh eyes". He invites you to join him in the protection and preservation of wild areas, where nature lives and survives by the ingrained rules written in its DNA and the natural processes that have shaped our fragile blue spaceship, planet Earth.