Do You Know about Marsha White Warren? What does she mean to NCWN-West?

We are kept up to date on the literary world by North Carolina Writers' Network. Did you know about the NC Literary Hall of Fame? New inductees this year will include Marsha White Warren who was Executive Director of NCWN in 1987 – 1996. She is responsible for our program, NCWN-West.

This is from Nancy Simpson’s history of NCWN-West:

“When NCWN-West Began

During 1990, NCWN Executive Director Marsha Warren mailed a survey to NCWN members living here in the mountains. At the same time, then NC Arts Council Literature Director in Raleigh, Debbie McGill, also mailed a different survey to writers. Both organizations seemed to want to know about the mountain writers. They asked questions about what we needed. Included was a place for comments. The results of both surveys moved these leaders to reach out and help writers in the mountains.

In 1991, I applied for and received an Artist Fellowship in Poetry at NCAC. Soon after I got a call from NCAC Literary Director Debbie McGill congratulating me and asking me to come have dinner with her in Sylva (a two and a half hour drive for me at the time.) I immediately said, “Yes.”

A few days later, I received a formal letter on NCAC stationery signed by Kathryn Stripling Byer. That letter was sent to all writers in the area, asking us to come to a meeting on the same evening that I was invited to have dinner with Debbie Mc Gill. I rode over the mountains with Bettie Sellers of Young Harris, Georgia (she would become Poet Laureate of Georgia) who had also received a letter.

At dinner before the meeting, Debbie McGill asked me to help form a writing group in the mountains west of Asheville. I said I would. That evening in Jackson County, Rita Rudd, a writer who lived there, volunteered to get organized in Jackson County. I took a copy of the membership list of NCWN and NCAC members living in Clay County (Hayesville), in Cherokee County (Murphy), and in Macon County (Franklin). I set up a meeting for NCWN members in those three counties. We met in Murphy. …

I will always be grateful to Marsha Warren, who worked with dedication to get NCWN West organized. She is the one who named the counties and areas to be served as NCWN West: Cherokee County, Clay County, Graham County, Haywood County, Jackson County, Macon County, Swain County, Transylvania County, and adjacent counties in Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina. During my service as Program Coordinator, I was asked to include Qualla Boundary.”  Read more here.

New Inductees to Be Honored October 7

SOUTHERN PINES—On Sunday, October 7, at 2:00 pm at the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities in Southern Pines, the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame will welcome five new inductees.

James W. Clark, Jr., Randall Kenan, Jill McCorkle, Penelope Niven, and Marsha White Warren will join the sixty inductees currently enshrined.

Marsha Warren 

Marsha White Warren was an elementary school teacher, poet, and children’s book author when she became Executive Director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network in 1987, only two years after its founding. She would serve in that role until 1996. During those years she helped Sam Ragan develop and open the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, as well as serving on numerous state and national literary boards and as a consultant to literary centers in Tennessee, Massachusetts, and Idaho. In 1991, she also became director of the Paul Green Foundation and is still with the Foundation after twenty-seven years. In that position, she has overseen $575,000 in grants to nonprofits that support the arts and human rights. Her awards include the John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities, R. Hunt Parker Memorial Award for Lifetime Contributions to Literature, Sam Ragan Award for Contributions to the Fine Arts, and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from St. Andrews College. She lives in Chapel Hill.

Like Nancy Simpson, I am grateful to Marsha White Warren for creating NCWN-West. I moved to NC in 1995, just as our program was taking off and building community for writers here in the mountains. 
Thanks to Nancy, Kay Byer and to Marsha Warren, we are a thriving organization, the western arm of NCWN, but many, many writers and poets don’t know how we began. Now you do. 

Congratulations to Marsha Warren, 2018 NC Hall of Fame Inductee.

JCCFS's The Literary Hour to feature poets and writers Glenda Council Beall, Karen Paul Holmes, and Estelle Darrow Rice, on Thursday, September 20, 2018, in the Keith House, Brasstown, NC

On Thursday, September 20, 2018, 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. 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 Glenda Council Beall, Karen Paul Holmes and Estelle Darrow Rice. 

Glenda Council Beall has been writing and publishing poetry, short stories and personal essays since 1995. In 1998, she published a family history book, Profiles and Pedigrees, Descendants of Thomas Charles Council (1858 – 1911). In 2009, her poetry chapbook, Now Might as Well be Then, was published by Finishing Line Press. 

Beall is owner/director of Writers Circle around the Table, a writing studio in Hayesville, NC. She opened the studio in 2010 after her husband passed away. She teaches there and brings in top rated instructors to hold classes at reasonable rates for local writers. Beall also teaches at the Institute of Continuing Learning at Young Harris College and at Tri-County Community College in the Community Enrichment department.

Animal lover Beall, along with writer Estelle Rice, produced their first book together. Paws, Claws, Hooves, Feathers and Fins. Filled with color pictures of family pets and family members, these stories will entertain, and bring a smile or a tear.

Karen Paul Holmes splits her time between Atlanta and the Blue Ridge Mountains. With an MA in music history from the University of Michigan, she eventually made her way to the warm south and became Vice President-Marketing Communications at ING, a global financial services company.

Karen now leads a kinder gentler life as a freelance writer and poet. She finds joy participating in poetry readings and supporting poetry.

A member of the North Carolina Writers' Network, the Atlanta Writers Club, and the Georgia Poetry Society, she has studied with poets: Thomas Lux, Denise Duhamel, Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, William Wright, Carol Ann Duffy, and Nancy Simpson (whom she counts as her first poetry mentor).

Karen Paul Holmes has two full-length poetry collections, No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin Books, 2018) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich Press, 2014). In 2012, Karen received an Elizabeth George Foundation emerging writer grant for poetry. She was chosen as a Best Emerging Poet in 2016 by Stay Thirsty Media. Publications include Prairie Schooner, Valparaiso Review, Tar River Poetry, Poet Lore and other journals and anthologies. Holmes hosts a critique group in Atlanta and Writers’ Night Out in Blairsville, which she founded. She also teaches writing classes at the Folk School, Writer’s Circle, and other venues.

 

Estelle Darrow Rice is a poet and writer of short stories and personal essays.  She holds a BA degree in Psychology from Queens University, Charlotte, NC and a MA degree in counseling from the University of South Alabama, Mobile AL. Her work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies.  She published a popular book of spiritual poems, Quiet Times.

She is originally from Charlotte, NC, but she and her late husband, Nevin Rice, lived in Mississippi before retiring to Cherokee County. She has resided in Marble, NC for the past twenty years. Before her husband became ill, Rice taught writing classes for NCWN-West and at Writers Circle around the Table. She was always a favorite instructor.

Estelle is an animal lover and with co-writer Glenda Council Beall, wrote and published a collection of poems and stories about family pets and other non-human species, Paws, Claws, Hooves, Feathers and Fins.

Brent Martin, poet, and Angela Faye Martin, singer-songwriter, to be featured at CWPW, Wednesday, September 19, 2018, at the Moss Memorial Library, Hayesville, NC

On Wednesday, September 19, 2018, at 10:30 AM, the NCWN-West’s Coffee with the Poets and Writers (CWPW) will feature poet Brent Martin. Martin’s wife, Angela Faye Martin, a singer-songwriter and artist will perform after Brent’s reading. CWPW is held at the Moss Memorial Library, 26 Anderson Street, Hayesville, NC. The reading and entertainment are free and open to the public, and an open mic will follow the reading and performance.

Brent Martin is the author of three chapbook collections of poetry, Poems from Snow Hill Road (New Native Press, 2007), A Shout in the Woods (Flutter Press, 2010), and Staring the Red Earth Down (Red Bird Press, 2014), and is a co-author of Every Breath Sings Mountains (Voices from the American Land, 2011) with authors Barbara Duncan and Thomas Rain Crowe   He is also the author of Hunting for Camellias at Horseshoe Bend,  a non-fiction chapbook published by Red Bird Press in 2015. 

Brent Martin’s poetry and essays have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, Pisgah Review, Tar River Poetry, Chattahoochee Review, Eno Journal, New Southerner, Kudzu Literary Journal, Smoky Mountain News, and elsewhere. He lives in the Cowee community in western North Carolina where he and his wife Angela Faye Martin run Alarka Institute, a nature, literary, and art-based business that offers workshop and field trips.  He has recently completed a two-year term as Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the West.  

Angela Faye Martin is a singer-songwriter, artist, and naturalist, and has worked for The Wilderness Society, Georgia Forestwatch, Armuchee Alliance, and the Pacific Rivers Council. She has written and recorded two lP's and one EP - One Dark Vine, Anniversary, and Pictures from Home, which was produced by Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse fame. She recently wrote and narrated the documentary, The Sad and Beautiful World of Sparklehorse, which is currently screening internationally at various film festivals and in the US.

When Angela Martin is not leading phenology and nature outings in the wilds of the Great Smoky Mountains, she is drawing 'tree portraits', writing songs, letters and spending time with her sagacious mutt, 'Isabella Queen of France.’

CWPW is sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Association-West, which is a program of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. For more information, please contact Glenda Beall at: 828-389-4447.

The Literary Hour on August 22, 2018, at the JCCFS, Brasstown, NC, will feature NCWN-West's writers Catherine Carter, Joan Howard, and Karen Luke Jackson

On Wednesday, August 22, 2018, at 7:00 PM, John C. Campbell Folk School (JCCFS) and NC Writers' Network-West (NCWN-West) will sponsor The Literary Hour at the JCCFS, Brasstown, NC. The Literary Hour is usually 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 Catherine Carter, Joan Howard, and Karen Luke Jackson.

Catherine Carter lives with her husband in Cullowhee, near Western Carolina University, where she teaches in the English Education and Professional Writing programs. Her full-length collections of poetry include The Swamp Monster at Home (LSU Press, 2012) The Memory of Gills (LSU, 2006), and Larvae of the Nearest Stars (forthcoming from LSU, fall 2019.  The Memory of Gills received the 2007 Roanoke-Chowan Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association; her chapbook Marks of the Witch won Jacar Press’ 2014 chapbook contest; other awards include the 2018 James Applewhite Poetry Award from the North Carolina Literary Review, the 2014 Poet Laureate’s award from the North Carolina Poetry Society, the 2013 poetry award from Still: The Journal, and numerous Pushcart nominations.  Her work has also appeared in Best American Poetry 2009, Orion, Poetry, Asheville Poetry Review, Tar River Review, and Ploughshares, among others.

Carter is assistant poetry editor at Cider Press Review and the Jackson County regional representative for NCWN-West. Carter blogs at: https://catherinecarterpoetry.com/.

Joan M. Howard's poetry has been published in POEM, The Road Not Taken:The Journal of Formal Poetry, the Aurorean, Lucid Rhythms, Victorian Violet, the Wayfarer and other literary journals.  She published the book Death and Empathy: My Sister Web, in 2017, available on Amazon.com.  Her latest book, Jack, Love and the Daily Grail, is available from Kelsay publications and Amazon.com. 

Howard is a former teacher with an MA in German and English literature and member of the North Carolina Writers' Network West and North Carolina Writers Network.  She enjoys birding and kayaking on the beautiful waters of Lake Chatuge near Hiawassee, Georgia.

Karen Luke Jackson’s oral history background and contemplative practices provide a latticework for her writing.  Her poems and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Kakalak, Alive Now, Ruminate, moonShine review, Emrys, TOWN Magazine, The Great Smokies Review, Broad River Review, Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction, and two anthologies featuring western North Carolina writers. 

Jackson lives in Flat Rock, North Carolina, holds a doctorate in education from North Carolina State University, and is a retreat leader with the Center for Courage & Renewal.