Feb 12 Writers' Night Features Poet/Writer Lisa Ezzard of Tiger Mountain Vineyards

Writers' Night Out via Zoom
Lisa Ezzard
poet, writer & vinter

February 12, 7 pm

Reading & Discussion + Open Mic

Hosted by Karen Paul Holmes & Glenda Beall

For Zoom link and to sign up for Open Mic, please contact glendabeall@msn.com 

Lisa Ezzard is a poet, writer, and the current vintner (wine maker and grower) at Tiger Mountain Vineyards. As the 6th generation on her family farm, which is now a boutique winery, she chose to write poems that follow the growing seasons for her book Vintage (Native Press). Through beautiful imagery and personal details, we learn much about the joys and toils of cultivating grapes, caring for vines, and producing handcrafted, award-winning wines in the N. Georgia mountains. She also writes prose and has an essay in Appalachian Adventure: From Georgia to Maine-a Spectacular Journey on the Great American Trail, a book nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. 

Lisa taught literature and writing for 25 years in places as varied as the University of Bordeaux in France and the Idyllwild School of Arts in Southern California. She is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and has received writing grants from Casa Don Miguel in Mexico and Hambidge Art Center in Georgia. Most recently, her work appeared in the anthology, Mountains Piled Upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene (WVU Press). Other publishing credits include Wild Goose, Exit 271: Your Georgia Writer’s Resource, The Squaw Valley Review, and From the Web: A Global Anthology of Women's Political Poetry. 

ZOOM Helpful Hints: You can join Writers' Night Out by cell phone, notebook, laptop, or computer and use audio only or audio and video. You can do a test for yourself anytime at zoom.us, where you'll see yourself on video and be able to test your audio too. 

The night of WNO, try to get on before 7 pm to make sure everything is working on your end. You will be in a waiting room until the host opens the door.

Writers' Night Out is the second Friday of every month.
Unlike previous years, we will continue through the winter (via Zoom): 
March 12: Sally Mohney poet & writer, Eventide
April 9: Annette Clapsaddle, novelist, Even as We Breathe

The North Carolina Writers' Network is not allowing in-person events right now. Some time In 2021, we hope to continue in person.  

The true story of a miracle in an African slum: Writers' Night November 13 via Zoom

Special Guest Paul Higdon
Hope and a Future:
Life, Survival, and Renewal on the Streets of an African Slum

Writers' Night Out
November 13, 7 pm
Reading & Discussion
+ 
Open Mic

Join us on Zoom
You do not need a Zoom account nor a Zoom app.
Netwest members, check your email for the Zoom link and login. 

You may wish to purchase a copy of this fascinating book ahead of time.
All proceeds go to charity. 

During Paul Higdon’s 36-year career in international finance, he had the honor of serving for six years as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of a children’s welfare operation in central Kenya. Based on that work, he was presented a Global Volunteer Award by Bank of America.

Since retiring from his banking career, he says the most rewarding endeavor has been composing his first book, Hope and a Future: Life, Survival, and Renewal on the Streets of an African Slum, which chronicles the true story of a street boy, John Maina, who lived in the slums of Nairobi. Eventually, John and Higdon became so close that in an African sense, they are now father and son. In conjunction with the book’s publication, Higdon created a public charity, Little Boost Children’s Fund, whose mission is “Giving vulnerable kids a little boost.” All proceeds from the book go directly to the fund.
 
Higdon holds degrees in philosophy, politics, and economics from Cornell, Oxford, and Johns Hopkins, and he continues to enjoy a wide range of intellectual pursuits, especially early Christianity, and modern history.
 
His wife, Linda, is a classical pianist, an award-winning filmmaker, and now runs a tour company offering a unique “Women’s Journey to Kenya.” They live on the edge of the Kettle Moraine forest in the southern lakes region of Wisconsin.

Netwest members, check your email for the Zoom link and login. 

A Literary Trail: stories and poems from Mississippi to North Carolina, author readings by Mary Ricketson & Mary Jo Dyre, Murphy Art Center, Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Mississippi to North Carolina, a literary trail, featuring:

stories and poems by Mary Peavey Ricketson and Mary Jo Dyre

Meet the authors for selected readings, book signing, and reception:

Murphy Art Center, 33 Valley River Ave, Murphy NC 28906

Tuesday, March 31, 2020, 5 PM

Mary Ricketson’s new book of poems, Mississippi: The Story of Luke and Marian (Kelsay Books, 2019), relates a story of her family, from the perspective of racial tensions in troubled Mississippi, 1948-1969, and the parents who believed in equality and found a way through these troubled times.

Written in a personal manner, these poems engage an audience by speaking to diversity, understanding, and trust in context of the lives of people who were less aware than many of us today.

Living near Murphy NC, Ricketson is inspired by nature and her work as a mental health counselor, Her poetry published in journals and her books: Disorgananza, private publication 2000, chapbook, I Hear the River Call my Name, and three full length collections, Hanging Dog Creek, Shade and Shelter, and Mississippi: The Story of Luke and Marian. 
 
Ricketson writes a monthly column, Women to Women, for The Cherokee Scout. She is a Certified Clinical Mental Health Counselor in private practice, and an organic vegetable, herb, and blueberry farmer. 

Mary Jo Dyre native Mississipian, living in the Murphy area of North Carolina since 1979, officially entered the arena as a writer as she finished and published DARK SPOT from a partial manuscript left by her brother, Arnold Dyre, at his death in 2017. DARK SPOT is the fourth book in the Jake Baker Mystery Series.

Long before picking of the pen of fiction writing, Dyre taught 10th and 11th English in the Marks, MS, then World Literature, Writing and Art Appreciation at Tri-County Community College. She now has a far-reaching reputation in education with the founding of The Learning Center, first as a private school in 1983 and then with its conversion to a North Carolina Charter School in 1997.

Dyre is currently developing a strategic facility project for the school, writes monthly columns for two Mississippi newspapers, The Grenada Star and The Coffeeville Courier, and is working on her next novel SPRINGHEADS. The work is a blend of history and mystery that promises to intrigue her growing base of both Mississippi and North Carolina fans 


This event is sponsored by Cherokee County Arts Council and the Jackie Ward Foundation, supporters of the arts in far western North Carolina.

Hat's off to NCWN-West member David Andrew Westwood--new book, The Paisley Tree House

Check out NCWN-West member's new book, The Paisley Tree House



Sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll ... and a distant place called Vietnam. 1968 is shaping upto be a tumultuous year in America, though in Topanga Canyon, northwest of Los Angeles, little of the tumult is visible. Freaks coexist with straights and bikers, the sound of dulcimers and the smell of weed is in the air, and young men quietly disappear to serve in a war in Indochina. One Topanga family embodies the conflict sweeping the nation-—the Sobieskis. But unlike most, it’s parents Maddy and Bret who are laid-back hippies, and elder son Jackson who perversely yearns to prove himself in battle. Middle children Sundown and Robbie are, like their parents, well entrenched in the counterculture, while young Charity just tries to make sense of everything. Soon, the family’s ties are tested by the worst upheaval they can imagine. And at the center of it all is the paisley tree house.


David Andrew Westwood was in an L.A.-based band in the early seventies, and as a transplant from London the whole experience seared itself into his memory, turning itself into textural detail for The Paisley Tree House. Nevertheless, this is not an autobiography. Westwood is the author of thirteen other novels.

You can find Westwoods work at Amazon.com, and at:

 https://www.davidwestwood.com/writings

Linda Grayson Jones, Meagan Lucas, and Janice Townley Moore to read at The Literary Hour at JCCFS, Brasstown, NC, on Thursday, November 21, 2019, at 7:00 PM

On Thursday, November 21, 2019, at 7:00 PM, John C. Campbell Folk School and NC Writers' Network-West (NCWN-West) will sponsor The Literary Hour, where NCWN-West members will read at the Keith House’s Community Room on the JCCFS campus, in Brasstown, NC. This event is typically held on the third Thursday of the month, is free of charge and open to the public. This month's featured readers will be Linda Grayson Jones, Meagan Lucas, and Janice Townley Moore.

Linda Grayson Jones, a poetry devotee since childhood, has a B.S. in Biology from

Stetson University, an M.A. in Biology and a Ph.D. in Pathology from Vanderbilt University. In 2009, she returned to her first love—teaching.

Jones is currently an Associate Professor of Biology and Dean of Math and Science at Young Harris College. She remains a reader and writer of poetry. 

Janice Moore is an Associate Professor Emerita of English at Young Harris College.  Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, Southern Poetry Review, Poetry East, and The Journal of the American Medical Association.  

Moore's chapbook, Teaching the Robins, was published by Finishing Line Press. Among the anthologies that include her poems are The Bedford Introduction to Literature, and three volumes of: The Southern Poetry Anthology: Contemporary Appalachia, Georgia, and North Carolina, from Texas Review Press.  

Moore is coordinator of the NCWN-West’s poetry critique group and is on the poetry editorial board of The Pharos, publication of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society.

Meagan Lucas teaches English at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College and is the Fiction Editor at Barren Magazine. Meagan has a BA in History from Wilfrid Laurier University, an M.Ed in Curriculum and Instruction from Ferris State University, and an MA in English and Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University.

Meagan’s stories have been published in a variety of journals including: Four Ties Literary Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, The Same Literary Journal, The New Southern Fugitives, Barren Magazine and Still: The Journal. Lucas  won the 2017 Scythe Prize for Fiction, was the runner up in the 2017 SNHU Fall Fiction Competition, and a Judge’s Choice finalist in the 2018 Still: The Journal Fiction competition. Her story “Voluntary Action” was nominated by Still: The Journal for a 2019 Pushcart Prize.

Her first novel, Songbirds and Stray Dogs was published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company in August 2019.

For more information on this event, contact Mary Ricketson at:

 maryricketson311@hotmail.com

 

Nov. 8: Last Writers' Night of 2019, Blairsville, GA, 7 pm

Diana Anhalt + Rosemary Royston + Open Mic

Please join us for the last Writers' Night Out of the year!

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Diana will read from her new book. 

Diana Anhalt of Atlanta (by way of Mexico) has two full-length  poetry collections, Walking Backward (Kelsay) and Because There Is No Return, (Passager), and two chapbooks, Second Skin, (Future Cycle) and Lives of Straw (Finishing Line). She has lived in Atlanta for nine years, yet her poems colorfully depict people and places in Mexico, where she lived most of her life. Many of her essays, short stories, and book reviews have appeared in both English and Spanish along with her non-fiction book, A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965. Her poetry as also appeared in Nimrod, Concho River Review, The Connecticut River Review, The Atlanta Review, and Spillway, among many others.

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Rosemary Royston of Blairsville has been a Writers' Night Out favorite with her intelligent and interesting poems and compelling reading style. She's a lecturer and Vice President for Planning & Research at Young Harris College, where she periodically teaches a creative writing course. Author of Splitting the Soil (Finishing Line Press), her poetry has also been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Split Rock Review, Southern Poetry Review, Appalachian Heritage, Poetry South, KUDZU, NANO Fiction, and *82 Review.

After this event, Writers' Night Out will take a break for the winter and resume in April, 2020 on the second Friday of every month. To be considered as a featured reader of poetry or prose, please contact Karen Paul Holmes (kpaulholmes AT g mail dot com) who will begin working on the schedule in January. 

Here's a link to the Union County Community Center. Sign up at the door to read at open mic for 3 minutes of poetry or prose. Come early if you'd like to enjoy The View Grill. You can bring drinks to the room where the reading takes place.