Book Review by Gary Carden

Turnback Creek by Lonnie Busch
Huntsville: Texas Review Press $12.95 – 65 pages

In reading the works of major Southern writers in recent years, a singular theme repeatedly emerges: the protean nature of water. In the novels of Ron Rash, water appears as both lethal and life sustaining (Saints at the River); while in One Foot in Eden the building of a dam obliterates a small farming community. At other times, water is an agent of renewal or teasing mystery. In the writings of James Dickey (Deliverance) and William Gay (Provinces of the Night), water sometimes brings violent transformations. Lonnie Busch’s slender novella, Turnback Creek, manages to embody many of these diverse themes in this skillfully crafted work - only 65 pages – a truly amazing accomplishment! In essence, Turnback Creek represents a kind of literary distillation in which the author has stripped his story to a polished crux.This accomplishment has not gone unnoticed. Turnback Creek has received the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize and the praise of his peers, many of whom stress the work’s resemblance to a parable of life, death and redemption. The book’s protagonist, Cole Emerson, is a man who is in the process of “coming to terms” with his misspent life. Now in his 70’s, Cole finds himself living on a small farm in a remote section of Missouri. He has lived a heedless, nomadic existence as a heavy equipment operator, often bragging of pulling down a white-collar salary operating backhoes and tractors. He has little to show for it. At the end of his life, Cole, now a widower and estranged from his daughter, spends his days tending a dying sister. At night when the sister is sedated, he fishes a tributary of Hartman Lake called Turnback Creek and ponders the past. It is here that he first encounters Hannah, a naked fourteen-year-old girl, who emerges from the darkness one night, driving a backhoe through the moonlit woods adjoining the lake. Is she real? Is she perhaps a projection of Cole’s yearning for his own lost youth? Regardless, the naked girl behaves like a demonic sprite as she struggles to control the backhoe. The old man is transfixed by the girl’s antics. Further, Cole senses that she knows he is watching her, and when he turns his boat towards home, he sees the moonlit figure on a cliff above the lake. The next night, he is back, hoping she will appear again. In time, Cole comes face-to-face with the girl and learns that her name is Hannah. Despite daylight encounters that reveal Hannah to be a troubled and angry teenager with an alcoholic father, the old man continues to perceive her as a near-supernatural being. Cole becomes obsessed with Hannah and finds himself plagued by guilt and foreboding. He begins to brood about his former jobs – removing coffins from graveyards that are destined to be flooded, constructing dams and diverting rivers. When Hannah asks Cole to teach her to operate the controls of the backhoe, he discovers that she intends to dig a hole near her home … a hole deep enough to “bury a man so that he will never be found.” Finally, Cole perceives a disturbing parallel between Hannah’s irresponsible father and his own sire – another heedless, undependable man who mysteriously vanished one day as though “the earth had swallowed him.” There is much to admire in Turnback Creek. The beauty of Busch’s descriptive passages are noteworthy, especially those that capture the haunting imagery of a lake at night, the sheen of moonlit water and the plop of a lure. Reading these passages brought to mind, Any Cold Jordan by David Bottoms, another midnight fisherman who can capture the soft whistle of a cast line and the splash of a moon-drunk bass. Lonnie Busch is currently serving as co-editor (with Jubal Tiner) of the quarterly literary magazine, Pisgah Review, which is based at Brevard College.

Tired but Inspired in Greensboro

I sit here in Greensboro, NC tired, but inspired after spending all day at the Elliot Center at the UNC-G campus. NCWN held the 2008 Spring Conference here and it is the first time I've attended the annual spring conference. I usually make it a priority to register for the Fall Conferences in Asheville and last November we drove to Winston-Salem.
Most presenters for the conference today were on faculty at UNC-G.
My favorite part of the day was the Publishing Panel consisting of Scott Douglas of Main Street Rag, Kevin Watson of Press 53, Jeanne Leiby of Southern Review and a man from the Georgia Review, but I never understood his name. After a short talk by each member of the panel, I realized once again how important it is to know your market. Read the guidelines carefully and follow them. While the writer may not know it, the guidelines are specific for a reason. Douglas said it is a matter of resources. He hires editors to read submissions therefore, he makes it clear he does not want simultaneous submissions. The reason is obvious. After he has paid an editor to read work that he cannot publish because it has been accepted somewhere else, he is out that money with nothing to show for it. I can't blame him. Although Scott has grown MSR into quite a good business over the years since I first met him, he says he still sweeps the floors and binds the books. "It is easier to find a person to read submissions than to find someone to bind books," he said.
I didn't know until today that he prints books for a number of other magazines. He is still a rebel in this business and not so snooty as the Georgia Review. Their representative said don't send your poetry to them unless you don't mind letting them "meddle" with it. I got the impression that they "edited" or "meddled" with everything that goes in the magazine.
Scott, on the other hand, wants the work you send him to be ready for the printer when he gets it. He doesn't want to have to rewrite or work too much to make changes to a submission. And don't try to make changes after he has it ready to print.

Listening to some of the stories they told today made me a little more understanding of the editor's and publisher's problems with writers who are inconsiderate and hard to work with, who won't follow guidelines and seem to have no understanding of how a book is made..

This panel covered everything a writer wants to know about submitting and publishing. I sat in on about an hour of Ed Southern's session on publishing and found a good discussion going there. I wish I had been there for the entire session.
Congratulations to Ed Southern and Virginia Freedman for the work they put in to bring us this great conference. Even though they had some challenges, no one knew it and things went off well.

I worked with Virginia and Ed at the registration tables and enjoyed meeting the writers, greeting them and seeing friends like Valerie Nieman, Katherine, who was in my JCCFS class in March, and Marlyn who came to Hayesville for our Lights in the Mountains conference and stayed four days. I enjoyed meeting Jan Parker and hope she is reading this blog now. I wish more of our Netwest members would attend the NCWN conferences. They are always interesting and fun.

Folk Drama

NET WEST FOLK DRAMA??
Almost one hundred years ago, a remarkable man named Fredrick Koch began teaching drama at the University of North Dakota. Within a decade, his accomplishments were noted by other universities, including the University of North Carolina and he was “invited” to design and launch a Carolina-based theatre program.

Koch pulled up stakes and came to Chapel Hill. The results changed American theatre forever. Koch encouraged his students to write one-act plays based on events drawn from the history of their home towns, their state and regional folklore. The results were remarkable. Over the next decade, his students wrote hundreds of plays on subjects ranging from ghost stories (Elizabeth Lay’s “When Witches Ride”) moonshine and bootlegging (Herbert Heffner’s ‘Don Gast Ye Both”), legends of outlaws (Paul Green’s “The Last of the Lowries,” and Thomas Wolfe’s “The Return of Buck Gavin,”) and the birth of Abraham Lincoln (“Nancy Hanks, Bondswoman.”)So began the Carolina Playmakers, one of America’s greatest theatrical movements. In time, these fledgling saw their plays produced and toured throughout the state. In the process, the Playmakers learned to build portable sets, design costumes and create essential lighting. Eventually, Koch published eleven volumes of folk drama and the folk drama movements spread, eventually taking root in other countries.

Many school children in North Carolina (circa 1920-1940) saw their first plays when the old Playmakers van arrived at their school. (I was in the 5th grade when I saw“Lost Horizon” and went back stage to see the airplane that flew over the town at the play’s conclusion. (It was a piece of cardboard pushed into an electric fan). Since the primary goal of the Playmakers was to promote an interest in theatre, their productions stressed simplicity – plays that could be done with a minimum of resources. Playmaker productions were often done in gyms, cafeterias and classrooms. The benefits were impressive. In addition to seeing a dramatic work, students learned about their region’s history and culture. Assuredly, the children who participated in these events found their lives immeasurably enriched and the memory of the Playmakers’ visit gave them a sense of pride in who they were and were they lived.

Which brings me to this conclusion. I think it is time to do it again. Is it within the realm of the possible that Writers Network West could be instrumental in launching a new “folk play movement”? Are there students in the high school in Hayesville or the Community College at Blue Ridge Community College who are capable of writing a one-act play? Could Writers’ Network West nurture this movement by monitoring progress? Arranging for productions of student-written play, planning a festival?
Comment, please.
Gary Carden

Gary reviews books at www.blogholler.blogspot.com

Writing for Newspapers

Newsletters are an ideal way for writers to practice their craft and become known as writers in the community. Editors of existing newsletters welcome well written features, and a church or organization without a newsletter, if queried, would like to have one. Church newsletter feature subjects would include interviews and profiles of an elder, choir leader, church officer, or church school teacher. Historical topics are popular and might cover the person named on a stained glass window or a short anecdote told by one of the older church members or gleaned from old session notes (how the church got the organ, the balcony used for segregation, when the Presbyterian elder got so tired of session wrangling that he went to the Methodist Church for a while).

Some feature ideas are easy to research on the Internet. The liturgical colors which change during the year, and what Maundy Thursday means, for example, or the story behind a well known hymn.

Features about different departments would be welcome in hospital auxiliary newsletters. The special surgical helmets worn by surgeons; an interview with the Lifeline coordinator who mentions the times the call button is hit by accident by hugging a relative or having a cat step on one; how many individual meals the hospital food service serves and the different diets it accommodates or statistics about the number of dozens of eggs or pounds of coffee it uses every week/month/year are very interesting stories.

These newsletter features, used as publishing credits build resume portfolio clips, stepping stones for future writing positions and introductions to new editors. With prompting, the newsletter editor can write a short recommendation mentioning how the writer met deadlines, showed initiative, and the popularity of the articles.

By Peg Russell

reprinted with permission of The Perspiring Writer

Writers and Poets Reading Stories and Poems

JC Walkup from Canton, NC and Paul Donovan from Murphy, read to an enthusiastic audience at John C. Campbell Folk School Thursday evening. Dr. Gene Hirsch and students in his current poetry class were present for the reading, as well as Nancy Simpson, writer-in-residence at JCCFS. Paul Donovan told the group, representing many different states in the United States, that they were in the presence of some very important people to writers in western NC. Dr. Hirsch founded the writing program at the folk school, and Nancy Simpson brings in the wonderful faculty each year. Nancy served as Program Coordinator for Netwest for 13 years and continues to mentor and teach poetry.

JC read a gory horror story which kept the listeners on the edge of their seats. Her husband Bob says JC finds ideas for her stories wherever they travel. Just one little incident can grow into an interesting mystery.

Paul Donovan gave one of his very best readings ever. With his tongue-in-cheek humor his poetry often ends with a twist, but a little of the dark slips into his work occasionally.

Reading in May, on the third Thursday, will be Shirley Uphouse, non-fiction writer and Brenda Kay Ledford, award winning poet. Time is 7:00 p.m. at John C. Campbell Keith House living room.

Jerry Hobbs on romance in the garden

A Story of Romance
by Jerry Hobbs

Though poetry is the true language of love, a romantic story can be successfully written in prose if certain rules are followed. For example:
The timeline and location should be clearly defined.
Introduce the protagonists.
Establish a valid reason for interaction.
Create tension, then resolution.
Use a device such as drama to launch emotion.
The emotion should nurture and build over a respectable period of time.
Closure should include a happy ending.

The Artichoke Affair – A Poetic Story of Romance – Written in Prose


It was spring.
The day was late.
The market was ready to close.
One artichoke remained.
He reached.
She reached.
Their hands touched.
Their eyes met.
They smiled.
They spoke.
A salad was shared.
A kiss was shared.
Love blossomed.
Summer arrived.
They wed.
THE END

Find Jerry's books at: http://www.lulu.com/

Are you a poet? Do you want to be a poet?

Nancy Simpson will teach YOUR POETRY, LETS HEAR IT with focus on sound techniques at the John C. Campbell Folk School
in late July. Whether narrative or meditative, sound is important in a poem.

Nancy is the best at teaching free verse poetry. If you haven't had the opportunity to take a class with Nancy, be sure to find some way to register for one. Go to http://www.folkschool.org/ and look under writing or under instructors and find her class. This is a beautiful time to visit the mountains of western North Carolina.



It was spring of 1995 when I took my first class with Nancy in the Orchard House at JCCFS. I remember asking her, "Is this a poem?" I was unfamiliar with elements of free verse poetry and had shared very little of my writing with anyone. From that time on, I practiced Nancy's advice on writing poetry and by 1996 I had published several poems. Over the years I studied with Nancy Simpson at every opportunity. Many of us in Clay, Cherokee, and Graham counties of NC and in Towns, Union, Fannin and Rabun counties in Georgia claim Nancy as our mentor. Through her classes at JCCFS, Nancy continues to teach and encourage students from all over the country in their quest to write and publish poetry.

Have you taken a class with Nancy Simpson? Please comment or email and let us know.
writerlady21@yahoo.com

Janice Townley Moore celebrates Poetry Month at Emory University

I attended a conference called “A Fine Excess,” which was a celebration of poetry at Emory University on April 2-4. It coincided with the opening of an exhibit in the Emory Library’s Shattan Gallery of the Danowski Collection of books of poetry in English. This collection includes 75,000 books collected by Raymond Danowski and now housed at Emory. The Shattan Gallery had a fine exhibit of a small portion of these, such as first published books by Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams, the original Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, a volume of Sylvia Plath poems owned by Anne Sexton, a very early poem of Seamus Heaney in a small literary magazine, the early printed poem of T.S Eliot’s famous “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” inscribed to Emily Hale, an American girlfriend, and much, much more.
The conference celebrated three former United States poet laureates with readings and personal interviews during the several days. They were S. D. Snodgrass, Mark Strand, and Richard Wilbur. Other award winning poets also did readings and signed their books for the large and enthusiastic crowd attending.

One of Gary Carden's wonderful Essays

ELECTRIC CORN SHELLERS

I remember a warm afternoon in August, 1949 when the county agent came to our house with an electric corn sheller. It was a demonstration model and had been a big hit at several large farms in the county. When the agent plugged it in, it hummed like a bee hive and smelled of hot oil and scorched corn cobs. The agent made a big thing out of shucking an ear of corn and holding it over the big slot in the top of the sheller. My grandfather stared at the contraption the same way he observed most “marvels of the future” – with distrust and fascination – the same way he looked at snakes and rabid groundhogs.
“Are you ready, Arthur?’ My grandfather grunted and the agent dropped the big ear of yellow corn into the slot.
“Zzzzit!” said the sheller and deposited a double handful of corn in the tin bucket beneath the sheller. The cob shot out of the side and ricocheted off the wall of the corn crib, thereby confirming my grandfather’s opinion that the sheller was probably dangerous. However, I was impressed The agent shucked a dozen ears and dropped them in the slot. “Zzzit, zzzit, zzzit, zzzit!” said the sheller until the bucket brimmed with yellow corn. I picked up the hot cobs like they were the hulls of shotgun shells.
“Now, you can shell in one afternoon what it would take you a week to shell with.... that!” He pointed contemptuously at our hand-cranked sheller in the corner. “How many Corn Zappers do you want?”
] My grand-daddy pulled the plug out of the wall, and the big hummer hushed. “I don’t want one,” he said.
The agent gawked. “Why not ?”
“Cause that was the way my daddy done it,” he said, pointing at the old sheller, “and that’s the way I’ll do it. Either that, or by hand.”

I was not pleased by my grandfather’s decision since I had spent untold afternoons and was now doomed to spend many more with that hand-cranked sheller, my arms aching and my fingertips numb and bloody from shucking. The agent shook his head as he carefully loaded the sheller in his car like it was a prize stud bulldog.
“You are fighting the future, Arthur,” he said. “It just makes good common sense to take advantage of things like this.”
“Maybe so, but there is something unnatural about all these ‘lectric gadgets,” he said, peering at the Zapper with distaste. “I don’t like it.”

As we watched the county agent’s car vanish in a cloud of dust down the Rhodes Cove road, Arthur Carden shook his head and delivered his judgment on time past and time to come: “Things have been bad, and they are gonna get worse.” That is what he would say when our dusty trail became a paved road and his own children insisted on getting a telephone. (He once tore the telephone off the wall and threw it into the cornfield because it rang constantly while we were eating supper.) He reluctantly accepted indoor plumbing but refused to drink city water. (“It ain’t healthy to drink water that has been standing in iron pipes.”) The most marked exception to his rejection was the big Silvertone radio. As soon as it produced Bill Monroe singing “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” it was given a corner of the living room where it squatted like a household god, delivering music (The Grand Ole Opry) and prophecies (Grady Cole’s Farm News).

Oddly enough, I seem to have inherited my grandfather's contradictory
attitude about technology. While I nurture a cautious appreciation for television, stereos and computers, I am extremely suspicious of anything that alters my environment or makes radical changes in my accepted mode of living. I especially resent being compelled to change. Living in my grandparents’ old house, I sometimes feel that I am under siege by aspects of progress that are either unwanted or deceptive. Several years ago my grandfather’s spring had to be abandoned when tests indicted that it was contaminated. Now, I have city water that probably stands in plastic pipes, and a telephone that rings incessantly due a host of “marketing specialists” in distant cities who call at inopportune times. My doctor tells me that my persistent cough is largely due to air pollution. (Right here in Rhodes Cove, folks!), and when I look from my porch at the Balsam Mountains, I am distracted by the grid-locked traffic on the Cullowhee road. A decade ago, I learned that I now live in the city limits, (if I think of an advantage to this new status, I’ll let you know!) and street lights have spread like malignant fireflies to the top of the ridge. At night, despite my deafness, I hear a constant medley of boom boxes, rap music and stripped gears. Rhodes Cove was once quiet (except for mournful hounds), peaceful and very dark. Now, the new, all-night convenience store over on the highway hovers in the dark like the mother ship in “Encounters of the Third Kind” and ambulances and highway patrol cars speed up and down the Cullowhee road with flashing lights and wailing sirens. Progress.

When “progress” would get to my grandfather, he used to talk about moving to “the Cove.” He owned an isolated piece of land in Macon county which, he assured me, was so far back, he would never hear another car horn, stripped gear or telephone. “Nothing but wind, night critters and running water,” he used to say. He took me to see it once, and we flushed quail and pheasant, fished and listened to whippoorwills. He didn’t get to go there when he retired, of course, (he didn’t retire) and I’m told that it now has a paved road and a dozen retirement homes, street lights and a security patrol. Progress.

All of this makes me think of a passage in the play, “Inherit the Wind.” Henry Drummond (Clarence Darrow) makes a comment on technology in which he envisions a little man in an office someplace who is in charge of “Progress.” You tell him the marvelous advantage that you want (flight, international communications, entertainment) and he tells you what you will have to sacrifice in order to have it. “You may have world travel in futuristic air ships,” he says, “but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.” He notes that you may have communication devices that will allow you to talk to foreign countries or distant planets, but “you must sacrifice forever the wonderful world of privacy.”

What is the answer, then, for people like me who grudgingly accept the benefits of technology and bitterly resent aspects of progress that are thrust on me without my consent? I have heard a few learned experts who advised the bewildered public to “readily accept innovation that is beneficial and reject that which is harmful.” Such profound conclusions are meaningless. How do you tell the difference? Sugar substitutes end up poisoning us, computers purvey pornography and some “genetically enhanced” grain are harmful to both cattle and humans. Small wonder that my grandfather was skeptical of electric corn shellers!

A few years ago, a prosperous fellow invited me to dinner in his home – one of those $250,000 “log cabins.” The house was full of furniture and objects from the Appalachian past: pie safes, a cider press, hand-carved furniture, shoe lasts and coffee mills. At one point, he invited me into another room to see “something that his grandfather gave him.” He pointed reverently to it on the wall, mounted like a trophy deer. A corn sheller. “My grandfather actually used it,” he said. I told him that I used one, too. He looked at me skeptically. “You can’t be that old,” he said.

Maybe I am an artifact, too. Maybe I should be preserved in formaldehyde and kept in a room lit by beeswax candles with a tasteful plaque under my embalmed husk that says something like “Extinct life form that once inhabited an undeveloped portion of Rhodes Cove.” Perhaps tasteful music could whisper from hidden speakers – Perhaps, “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Perhaps I could have my own recorded message that could be activated by pressing a button – a message that says in a pronounced mountain twang, “Things have been bad, and they are going to get worse.”
See Gary's website and blog:
http://tannerywhistle.net
http://blogholler.blogspot.com/

Spring Conference

Valerie Nieman seems 'with bare hands (to) embrace live steam.' Wake Wake Wake is sinew and tendon, hard muscle and bruised bone; the volume sings with every inch of the body and every breath of the spirit. If she speaks of "hearing that we have all fallen short," she yet believes-she knows-'the way a path is best walked/not by looking down/but by looking out.' Would you be stout of heart, steadfast of purpose? Read Valerie Nieman." - - -Fred Chappell

All-Day Fiction Workshop with Valerie Nieman: Dialog as Combat: Developing Urgency in Your Work

For Valerie Nieman, dialogue is imperative for expressing any emotion and furthering the plot. In the beginning of the workshop, you will study examples in fiction and then write your own. This workshop can make the difference between someone saying your work is well-written to people not being able to put your work down. Valerie Nieman is a creative-writing professor at A & T and is a published poet, novelist, science-fiction writer, and journalist.


Please go to http://www.blogger.com/ to register or call (919) 251-9140.
The 2008 Spring Conference will be at the Eliot Center on UNC-Greensboro campus, April 26th.

I appreciate the resident curmudgeon's sense of humor. On his blog today is an essay that made me laugh out loud. If you have a minute, read the one on Caps by Al Manning

short essay says so much

Compassion 101
By Glenda Barrett, writer and poet from Hiawassee Georgia

We shivered in fear at North Georgia College as we performed our clinicals under the ever watchful eyes of the nursing instructors. Stressed to our limits, we carried bulging book bags crammed with mounting assignments. It was not unusual to have hundreds of pages to read each night, and it was overwhelming at times, especially for those of us who had families to care for at home.

I thought this would be the usual day at school but soon learned it would not be. During class lecture we had two teachers instead of one. The younger one sat in the back of the room and listened while the other one taught. About halfway through the class the one in the back stood up and said these words.

“I promised myself, I’d never let another nursing class go by without saying what I have to say. I’ve not been able to be here for several weeks because I had to have surgery due to cancer.
During my hospital stay, friends, family and co-workers did everything they could to make me feel better. They brought fresh cut flowers, magazines, books and heaping plates of home-cooked
food. But, I want you to listen closely because it won’t be long until you will be nurses.
As I lay in my bed in the wee hours of the morning alone and afraid, I would have given anything in this world if someone had walked into my room, asked me how I was feeling, and let me really tell them.”

Visit: http://www.yessy.com/Oils/bio.html
Glenda Barrett worked in the medical field until she developed her own health problems which she courageously manages every day of her busy life.

Spring Literary Festival at Western Carolina University - Free events

From City Lights Book Store in Sylva, the following announcements:

(April 7-10): WCU Spring Literary Festival
Western Carolina University's sixth annual Spring Literary Festival will be held on campus in Cullowhee April 7-10 and includes a wonderful line-up of authors. Books will be available for sale at each reading, and all events are free and open to the public. As an encouragement to attendance, campus parking regulations will not be enforced for attendees from the community (as any tickets will be forgiven). For more information, please call the WCU English Department at 227-3265.

Monday, April 7, 2008 7:30 p.m.Location: Western Carolina University, Coulter Auditorium, Memorial Drive, Cullowhee, NC 28723 Novelist Lee Smith reads from On Agate Hill. Performance of On Agate Hill by Barbara Bates Smith and Jeff Sebens immediately follows.Growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Virginia, nine-year-old Lee Smith was already writing-and selling, for a nickel apiece- stories about her neighbors in the coal boomtown of Grundy and the nearby isolated "hollers." In 1968, she published her first novel, The Last Day the Dog Bushes Bloomed.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008 4:00 p.m.Location: Western Carolina University, University Center Auditorium, Memorial Drive, Cullowhee, NC 28723 Poet Thomas Lux will read from his work.Thomas Lux's many books of poetry include The Cradle Place; The Street of Clocks; New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995, which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

Tuesday, April 8, 2008 7:30 p.m.Location: Western Carolina University, University Center Auditorium, Memorial Drive, Cullowhee, NC 28723. Author and commentator Dagoberto Gilb reads from his work. Dagoberto Gilb's first story collection, The Magic of Blood, won the PEN/Hemingway Award. He is also author of The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His newest novel is The Flowers, published this year. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and as commentaries on NPR's "Fresh Air."

Wednesday, April 9, 2008 4:00 p.m.Location: Western Carolina University, Coulter Auditorium, Memorial Drive, Cullowhee, NC 28723. Poet's Panel: Joseph Bathanti, Sarah Lindsay, Carolyn Beard Whitlow. Poet and novelist Joseph Bathanti is the author of four books of poetry: Communion Partners; Anson County; The Feast of All Saints; and This Metal, which was nominated for The National Book Award, and won the 1997 Oscar Arnold Young Award from The North Carolina Poetry Council for best book of poems by a North Carolina writer. His novels are East Liberty and Coventry, was a winner of the 2006 Novello Literary Award. His collection of short stories, The High Heart, was winner of the 2007 Spokane Prize. Sarah Lindsay is the author of Primate Behavior, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Mount Clutter, as well as two chapbooks, Bodies of Water and Insomniac's Lullaby.Poet Carolyn Beard Whitlow is Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Guilford College in Greensboro, where she teaches Creative Writing and African-American Literature. Her most recent collection of poems, Vanished, won the 2006 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008 7:30 p.m.Location: Western Carolina University, Coulter Auditorium, Memorial Drive, Cullowhee, NC 28723. Novelist Pat Conroy reads from his work.Pat Conroy is the bestselling and award-winning author of The Water is Wide, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, Beach Music and My Losing Season. His novels are populated with domineering fathers, southern belles of steel, and inexorable tragedy; all are elements the author is familiar with from his own life.

Thursday, April 10, 2008 12:00 p.m.Location: Western Carolina University, University Center Auditorium, Memorial Drive, Cullowhee, NC 28723. Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Cathy Smith Bowers presents Caleb Beissert, Haley Jones, and Tom Lambert. Cathy Smith Bowers, Distinguished Poet for the western region, presents emerging poets Caleb Beissert, Haley Jones, and Tom Lambert. The Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Series supports the mission of the North Carolina Poetry Society to foster the reading, writing, and enjoyment of poetry across the state. Three Distinguished Poets, one from each region, mentor a middle-school, a high-school, and a college or university student.

Thursday, April 10, 2008 4:00 p.m.Location: Western Carolina University, Coulter Auditorium, Memorial Drive, Cullowhee, NC 28723. Poet Gloria Vando reads from her work.Poet Gloria Vando is publisher /editor of Helicon Nine Editions, a nonprofit literary press she founded in 1977. Her book of poems, Shadows and Supposes, was named the Best Poetry Book of 2003 by the Latino Hall of Fame.

Thursday, April 10, 2008 7:30 p.m.Location: Western Carolina University, Coulter Auditorium, Memorial Drive, Cullowhee, NC 28723. Novelist Russell Banks reads from his work (an LCE event). Russell Banks grew up in a working- class world that has played a major role in shaping his writing. His titles include The Darling, Cloudsplitter, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, Searching for Survivors, Hamilton Stark, The New World, The Book of Jamaica, Trailerpark, Continental Drift, Success Stories, and Rule of the Bone. The Angel on the Roof is a collection of thirty years of Banks' short fiction.

JC Walkup and Paul Donovan will read at John C. Campbell Folk School on Thursday, April 17 at 7:00 p.m. in the Keith House.

JC Walkup, from Haywood County, NC says that "creative writing has been her life long avocation." Her short stories have been published in anthologies. She has written two novels and a stage play since her retirement three years ago. She serves in volunteer capacities in the community related to literacy, the libraries and writers' organizations. She is reading at John C. Campbell Folk School for the first time.

Paul Donovan, poet, from Murphy, NC, initiated an annual poetry and essay contest for students in Cherokee County, N.C. Paul has published an autobiographical book of poetry, Ramblings of an Idiot, and is published in journals and anthologies including Lights in the Mountains. He has spent the last three years, since becoming aware of the healing art of Reiki, writing poetry and essays from a more spiritual prospective. Paul is the host of Fireside Friday, a monthly reading sponsored by the Curiosity Book store at the Shoppes of Murphy.

Audiences at the Folk School are often made up of students, blacksmiths, quilters, jewelry makers, banjo players, dulcimer players and writers, who have come from all over the United States and even some foreign countries. They are always warm and open to the work of our writers.

The public and Netwest writers are urged to come, bring your friends and enjoy Paul and JC read their work. You will be glad you did.

KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER READS POEMS AT YOUNG HARRIS COLLEGE

--Nancy Simpson

What better way to celebrate poetry on the first day of National Poetry Month than to hear a poet laureate read her original poems? No better way for me and for other Netwest members who drove over to Young Harris, Georgia, on April 1st to hear N.C. Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer read her poems.

Kathryn Stripling Byer is the 2008 Byron Herbert Reece Speaker , and she visited the college especially to work with students. In the afternoon, she met with them in Wilson Hall and read some poems.
They had been studying her poems in English class, and they asked many questions. She asked them questions too, such as , “What else have you been reading?”

In the evening, Kathryn Stripling Byer read her poems to a packed auditorium of students, faculty, and citizens of the community. She read from a number of her collections, showing her development from a young poet interested in family and home to a mature poet struggling with issues of humanity, life and death.

Collections Kathryn Stripling Byer read from were: The Girl In the Midst of the Harvest, Wildwood Flower, Black Shawl, Catching Light, and Coming to Rest. Her books can be found in all mountain libraries and can be bought in most area bookstores. The Craftshop at John C. Campbell Folk School has a full selection of her books.

Again, she was open to questions and there were many asked. Bettie M. Sellers, former Georgia Poet Laureate asked her to tell the students about her appointment as Poet Laureate of NC. She talked mainly about her visits throughout the Old North State and about her Poet Laureate Web Site set up by the NC Arts Council (ncarts.org) where she discusses and promotes poetry and where she has featured poems by North Carolina's poets.

Kathryn Stripling Byer said her most important responsibility as Poet Laureate is to continue to write about issues that matter and to continue to celebrate and defend language itself.

Graham County Writers

Graham County writers meet with Natalie Grant and Glenda Beall to discuss future writing events sponsored by NCWN West.

The next writers meeting will be held in the Robbinsville library on Thursday evening, April 24. All writers in Graham County are invited to participate. Pictured are Zelerie Rose and Louise Stewart. Also present were Dennis Akison, Glata Grindstaff and her two daughters. Dennis is the author of Murder at Fontana Dam. He is working on his second novel which sounds like another thriller.

Contact Zelerie Rose at the Graham Star newspaper in Robbinsville to learn more about the April meeting, or contact writerlady21@yahoo.com

Saturday, May 3, Hayesville, NC All Genre Workshop with Darnell Arnoult

This lady, Darnell Arnoult, is fun and smart. Her workshop in Hayesville, NC on Saturday, May 3, will be great. Register now and be sure you get in.
Contact writerlady21@yahoo.com for registration information.


One of the 4 A's to avoid, according to Darnell:


1) Authorial Intrusion – When you write a piece of fiction, you create the voice of a narrator. It may be a first person point of view narrator, or it may be a more omniscient voice of the story itself. But it is not the author talking, and the author’s opinion or explanation should not come creeping into the lines of your narrative. Present you story and let your reader be the judge. If you want to write fiction, your job is to part a curtain on your characters and expose them at a moment when they reveal themselves for good or bad. Then the reader makes the ultimate judgment of them. If you want to write so you may convey a social, political, or religious opinion, among others, write nonfiction. If you are true to your characters, and they are true to you, then most likely, by the choice of story you wish to tell, a certain world view may show through. But be wary of this. Do not manipulate your story to express your theme. Write your story and see what themes show themselves. (from Darnell's website: darnellarnoult.com