Showing posts with label John C.Campbell Folk School. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John C.Campbell Folk School. Show all posts

Thursday, June 23, 2022

Support John C. Campbell Folk School - It supports you.

 About John C. Campbell Folk School

The Folk School transforms lives, bringing people together in a nurturing environment for experiences in learning and community life that spark self-discovery. Located in scenic Brasstown, North Carolina, the Folk School offers year-round weeklong and weekend classes for adults in craft, art, music, dance, cooking, gardening, nature studies, photography, and writing.

NCWN-West is proud that the folk school advertises with us on our website and our blog. Please help us spread the word about this great place to learn about ourselves, learn a craft or an art, and meet so many terrific people. The writing program is excellent. Check out the classes you will find there.


Saturday, May 9, 2020

Writers' Night Out in May

We held our second Zoom online Writers' Night Out on Friday with guests,    Travis Denton and Katie Chaple,husband and wife poets from Atlanta, Georgia.           


The evening was enjoyable with the two talking and asking questions to each other about writing poetry. They were humorous, relaxed and likable.

We had a glitch at the beginning of the hour because we had sent out two different links for the Zoom meeting, but hopefully, everyone found us eventually.This type of venue is not as familiar to us as we would like, but hope we can master it before long. Our open mic readers were in Florida, Watkinsville, Georgia, Hiawassee, Georgia, and local.

I thought it interesting that Katie and Travis have already scheduled a week of workshops in the fall and all will be online. We will probably find that many of the gatherings we have been used to will end up being online. NCWN has ongoing workshops online. 

At the present time, we have no plans to hold Coffee with the Poets and Writers this summer even if the Moss Library opens soon. Neither will we hold the Literary Hour at the John C. Campbell Folk School if it opens soon. We hope to plan for the fall, but will see what the country looks like then. 

Because these meetings are open to the public, we would have to police seating and wearing of masks and our leaders aren't ready to take that on now. Also, many of our members and audience are over 65 which puts them in the high risk group for COVID-19. We prefer to stay home and wait than to take risks with our lives.

I hope you are learning how to take online classes to improve your writing and to motivate you to write while you are home. With more time on our hands, we can polish up those manuscripts in our folders and submit them.

We would love to have our members contribute posts for this blog. Give us ten tips for writing poetry, fiction, short stories or creative nonfiction. You are accomplished writers, and I know you have things you can share with others.

If you have a list of prompts you could share, send them in and we will publish them. We don't get many comments but we have a large readership from all over the world. When you post here, we will also list your books, your website, etc. This site belongs to our members. Let us hear from you.
To make it easy, send to glendabeall@msn.com 


Wednesday, September 11, 2019

You are invited to hear Martha O. Adams, Glenda Barrett, and Loren Leith, at The Literary Hour, Thursday, September 19, 2019, 7:00 PM, at the John C. Campbell Folk School, Brasstown, NC


On Thursday, September 19, 2019, at 7:00 PM, John C. Campbell Folk School and NC Writers' Network-West will sponsor The Literary Hour. At this event, NCWN-West members will read at the Keith House on the JCCFS campus, in Brasstown, NC. This event is now held in the community room. The Literary Hour is held on the third Thursday of the month unless otherwise indicated. This reading is free of charge and open to the public. This month's featured readers will be Martha O. Adams, Glenda Barrett, and Loren Leith.


Raised in Ohio, Martha O. Adams graduated from Bowling Green State University with a major in education and minor in music. Her poetry arises from wide roots in ten states, though she has lived in Hendersonville, NC for nearly 2 decades. She has worked as an educator, a mother of four children, retreat leader and reverent farmer in her vegetable garden. In this day of dawning realization that the Earth will suffer only so much before leaving all life diminished, Adams believes poetry, art and beauty may save us with their wake-up call. Her poems, like mirrors, reflect the scale and impact of our human lives within the interconnectedness of all things. 


Adams is author of a non-fiction book for caregivers of the Alzheimer afflicted, Courage for Those Who Care, United Church Press, 2nd edition, 1999. She has published, with House of Myrrth, three collections of poems: Buried Seed; 2015, What Your Heart Needs to Know; 2008, and Peeling the Rind; 2000. Her Readers’ Theatre Play epic poem, “She Rises Through the Sickle Moon” from Peeling the Rind, has been performed from New England to Florida.


Glenda Barrett, a native of Hiawassee, Georgia, is a poet, writer, and visual artist. Her work has been widely published since 1997 and has appeared in: Woman's World, Farm & Ranch Living, Country Woman, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Journal of Kentucky Living, Nantahala Review, Rural Heritage, Wild Goose Poetry Review, Kaleidoscope Magazine and many more.

Barrett is the author of two poetry books, When the Sap Rises, published by Finishing Line Press, in 2008 and The Beauty of Silence, published by Aldrich Press, in 2017. Both books are available on Amazon.com. Glenda's artwork is online at Fine Art America. She is very grateful to be able to devote her time to the two things she loved as a child, painting and writing. She has two grown children and two grandchildren, and lives with her husband of forty-two years in the North Georgia mountains.


Loren Leith is the author of MOSQ, by Shepherd Graham (pen name), winner of the Silver Royal Palm Literary Award and the Pascoe Award for Best Thriller of 2011.  In 2018, she won first place in the RPLA competition for her nonfiction short story, “Basement Level.” She has also received an award for her short, nonfiction story, My Box Top Cat from God, and two of her other stories are finalists in a national competition.   Leith is known for her powerful, poignant, and often humorous nonfiction short stories, soon to be published in book-collection format and CD formats.  She recently transformed three of her works into scripts for live-performance Old Time Radio Shows.  She lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina, surrounded by nature and wild animals, which are often the subjects of her writing.

Leith is also a Licensed Professional Counselor and Criminal Justice Specialist in private practice for 34 years.


For more information on The Literary Hour event on September 19, 2019, please contact Mary Ricketson, at maryricketson311@hotmail.com.

Thursday, June 13, 2019

SUCCESSFUL MOVE TO COMMUNITY ROOM AT JCCFS FOR LITERARY HOUR

We had a good audience at the Literary Hour in the Community Room of the John C. Campbell Folk School Wednesday evening. With a larger venue there is more seating available and it is more comfortable than the chairs in the Library. We hope this will entice even more visitors to our monthly reading.

I could see that more JCCFS students attended, and we hope that trend will continue. Mary Ricketson was host and the three readers, Maren Mitchell, Ryvers Stewart and Richard Cary, all members of NCWN-West, were entertaining as they read their poetry.

As always we thank the John C. Campbell Folk School staff for setting up chairs and making us welcome.

We also appreciate the support of the Folk School through their advertising on our website and our blog. We reach out to writers around the world with our online presence including our Facebook Page.

We ask our readers to click on the John C. Campbell Folk School logo on the sidebar of this blog post. There you will see the writing classes offered at this venerable campus that attracts students from our local area, our state and from other continents.

Some of the best writers have taught at John Campbell Folk School for many years including the late poet laureate of NC, Kathryn Stripling Byer. Other poets were the late Nancy Simpson, outstanding poet and first Program Coordinator of NCWN-West.  Dr. Gene Hirsch taught poetry at the school for many years and is responsible for the Writing Program at JCCFS. Dr. Hirsch will be in Hayesville, NC on Wednesday, June 19, 10:30 AM at the Moss Memorial Library. Everyone is invited to come and hear him read at Coffee with the Poets and Writers.

Dana Wildsmith, Valerie Nieman, Karen Holmes, Rosemary Royston, Ruth Zehfus, R.T. Smith, Carol Crawford, and so many others have brought inspiration and knowledge to those of us who create with pen on paper or with a keyboard and monitor.  I, personally, owe my writing career to those teachers who have come here to the far western mountains of North Carolina, to the little town of Brasstown, to share their wisdom with us.

Preview
Valerie Nieman will teach a three hour session on Under Pressure: Creating Complex Characters at Moss Memorial Library, Hayesville, NC on Saturday, July 6, 1:00 - 4:00 PM.
Fee: $40 - pay to NCWN-West. Mail to PO Box 843, Hayesville, NC 28904

Read more from Val Nieman Here.