Congrats to Maren Mitchell

 Maren O. Mitchell has two poems, "Pale first cousin to red," and "Gray," appearing in The Antigonish Review, Volume 50, Numbers 201-02, Spring/Summer 2020. The editorial office of The Antigonish Review is located at St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada.

From "Untying the Knot" to Happily Ever After

 Good News for a Netwest County Rep and Poet

Hi, this is Karen Paul Holmes. Anyone who has read my poetry probably feels like they know me, and so Glenda Beall has asked me to post this. When we all get to meet in person again and you see me beaming, you'll know why. 

My first poetry collection, Untying the Knot, is like a memoir of experiencing and healing from the trauma of divorce after 32 years of marriage. At the end are poems of finding happiness with a new man. But that ended with his sudden death after six years together. Those of you who attended Writers' Night Out several years ago in Towns County, GA met that wonderful man. 

Now there's a very special person in my life, whom some of you had the pleasure of meeting at WNO last season. My new husband Mark Shaver is a lover of poetry, opera, and BBQ in the mountains, just like me! We married last Sunday in an intimate ceremony, having had to cancel our bigger wedding due to COVID. And yes, I am writing poems about him. I even read one at our wedding. I am now a big believer in late-life marriages. 

By the way, my second book, No Such Thing As Distance continues the story in poetry of my family and me, including Macedonian recipes. I was lucky enough to have poems from it read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac and by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith on her insightful podcast, The Slowdown. Take a listen if you're so inclined! 

FYI: My addresses in the mountains and the city are the same, and I'm keeping my last name. 

ANTHONY ABBOT - January 7, 1935 – October 3, 2020

 We have lost an important North Carolina literary figure, Anthony Abbot. He was winner of the 2015 NC Award for Literature from the State of North Carolina. Anthony S. Abbott is the author of seven books of poetry, two novels, and four books of literary criticism. He was a 2020 Inductee to the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.  nclhof.org

Tonight I am listening to a podcast interview done recently on Charlotte Readers Podcast.

I did not know Tony Abbot well, but will always remember the NCWN Fall Conference when we Netwest writers sat at a table with Tony. This is a photo Barry, my husband, made that evening.

Left: Nancy Sales Cash, Mary Jo Dyer, Lana Hendershott, on right side from back, Glenda Beall, Tony Abbott, Pat Davis.

After reading more about this man and listening to him speak on the podcast, I wanted to know him better. On his website I found his About page and learned his history. I love life stories and his is one of the most interesting I've read.

https://anthonysabbott.com/anthony-s-abbott-in-his-own-words/

Congratulations to Carroll S. Taylor, novelist and poet

Carroll's poem, Linguistic Perspective, was published in the popular online journal, Your Daily Poem.

 

Carroll S. Taylor

Read Carroll's poem here.   http://yourdailypoem.com/

Read more:   https://profilesandpedigrees.blogspot.com/2020/10/your-daily-poem-accepts-carroll-taylors.html

Caldwell Arts Council Announces Winners of the Western NC Regional Poetry Competition

The Caldwell Arts Council is pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural Western NC Regional Poetry Competition. Seventy-nine poets submitted a total of 145 poems for this competition. All poems were reviewed by preliminary judge, David B. Prather of Parkersburg, West Virginia, and award selections were made by Kari Gunter-Seymour, Poet Laureate of Ohio. Both award winners and judges will read their works during a live Zoom presentation on Thursday, October 22, 2020 at 7:00 p.m.

 $500 First Place:      “When you tell me I’m being racist” by Catherine Carter, Cullowhee, NC
$250 Second:           “The Ottoman Empire” by Elizabeth Brandes, Hickory, NC
$150 Third:              “The River at World’s End” by Benjamin Cutler, Whittier, NC
$100 Fourth:            “Lessons from the Field” by Anne Maren-Hogan, Burnsville, NC
$75   Fifth:               “Figs” by Joyce Compton Brown, Troutman, NC
$25 Honorable Mention Awards:

“Nocturnal Howl Before Compline” by Jenny Bates, Germanton, NC

“Old Barn” by Les Brown, Troutman, NC

“Bluegills Take Part in the Creation of the World” by Catherine Carter, Cullowhee, NC

“Prayer for a New Trail” by Bill Griffin, Elkin, NC

“September Sunset” by Benjamin Cutler, Whittier, NC

 Competition awards were made possible by a contribution from Blue Ridge Energy.
The live online poetry reading will take place on Thursday, October 22, 2020 at 7:00 p.m. via Zoom.  This event is free and open to the public, but advance registration is required. Email the Caldwell Arts Council at WNCPoetryCompetition@caldwellarts.com for the link to the zoom event.

Jackson rep's poem in Southern Humanities Review

NCWN-West Jackson County representative Catherine Carter's poem "Lactobacilli" appeared this spring in Southern Humanities Review and can be read online at the SHR site, http://www.southernhumanitiesreview.com/531-catherine-carters-lactobacilli.html

Join us on Zoom for this popular writing event.

 

Scott Owens, Featured on Writers' Night Out - Friday, October 9, 7:00 PM.  

Award-winning poet, editor, reviewer columnist, community organizer, and instructor of English, literature, and creative writing with 15 published books, more than 1400 published poems and 500 published essays, articles, and reviews.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cc/e6/98/cce6985214c14098f4ab37040bcb098a.jpg

We will send the Zoom invitation to all on the membership list. Contact us if you want to read at open mic.

Congratulations to Karen Luke Jackson

 

 

GRIT by Karen Luke Jackson

Finishing Line Press, 2020

 

Thursday, October 8, from 7 – 8 p.m. Redheaded Stepchild will feature Karen Luke Jackson’s debut poetry chapbook GRIT which chronicles the life of Janis Luke Roberts and her alter ego Clancey the Clown. The online event will be hosted by Malaiki King Albrecht, the journal’s founder and editor and current president of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Karen's reading will be followed by an open mic.

 

            To access the program through Facebook, go to Redheaded Stepchild’s page here.

 

To access the program directly through Zoom, click here.

The book can be ordered from Finishing Line Press

 

 

Robert Lee Kendrick Published with Main Street Rag

Writers’ Night Out had a good attendance tonight with participants from Atlanta area up to Hendersonville, NC. Although we can’t hold our face to face meetings, it is fun to get together online and share our writing.

Robert Lee Kendrick presented us with a most interesting program talking about his writing technique and answering my questions. His latest book Shape the Bent Straight was published by Main Street Rag Publishing company. It can be ordered from Scott Douglas at Main Street Rag or from Robert. 

He said he has a number of books on hand because he had planned to be doing readings and book signings at this time. To order from Robert, send him an email at robertleekendrick@gmail.com He will get your mailing address and you can send him a small fee plus shipping cost. It is well worth the effort and the fee. I plan to order tonight.

If you have not joined our Writers’ Night Out Zoom meeting on the second Friday of each month, be sure to Zoom with us October 9. The name of the guest presenter will be sent out with our invitation to all members of NCWN-West and to the mailing list of those who have attended WNO in the past.

The Open Mic readers are introduced and some conversation takes place with each of them. Join us in October.

Poet, Dr. Eugene Z. Hirsch, 12/18/31 -- 9/3/20

This post written by Mary Ricketson

Gene Hirsch, MD, a poet of our mountains, died September 3, 2020, after a long struggle with cancer.  

He was a well-known writer in western North Carolina.  He taught poetry at John C. Campbell Folk School for many years, and helped Nancy Simpson start North Carolina Writers Network West 25 years ago or more.  He regularly attended critique groups, read at organized events, and taught small groups of poets at his home in Murphy.  Gene was teacher and mentor to be remembered.  He lived in Pittsburgh PA and in Murphy NC, and visited Murphy often, until May 2019.

Gene was known as a loving man who listened deeply to every poem from any kind of writer, rustic beginner to polished expert.  He cared about the craft of writing and also cared about the person writing the poem.  As a physician, he had a long career practicing medicine.  In later years he taught doctors and medical students to provide the best of medical and human help to dying patients.  The following is a quote, introduction to his long essay, Intimacy and Dying, written earlier this year, unpublished.

I am a retired geriatrician who, for thirty five years, taught humanistic values in Clinical Medicine to medical students and doctors. From 2000 to 2010, at Forbes Hospice in Pittsburgh, I guided students through the ancient clinical art of responding to struggles and needs of dying people. Among other curricular activities, with permission, we (2 -4 students and I) visited patients in their homes, not to learn procedures for obtaining medical histories, but for the specific purpose of listening to their thoughts, feelings, ordeals and supports. They understood that they were being placed in the role of teachers rather than patients. This proved to be important to all.

Gene kept his illness private, made no apology for that request.  He asked me to talk with him late in his dying process, asked me to be “ears to listen, for some day my dying to be worth my life.”  I will have more to say about that after I have settled enough to review the scratchy notes I kept of this time.  He also asked me to organize a memorial after his death. He said he wants to be remembered in our mountains.  Once the world is safe to gather in person, when the pandemic is over, we will have a memorial for memory, poems, and a celebration of his life.

His body has been cremated.  At some time, in respect for his request, his family will spread his ashes privately at his former home in Murphy.  He gave that home to his wife’s son and family, a family who loves the mountains and the privilege to vacation there. 

During the final months of Gene’s illness, he engaged the help of a friend and poet in Pittsburgh, Judy Robinson, to organize and seek publication of his poems.  The result of that effort is indeed a book, published 7-15-20, available from Amazon, details below.

Cards and words of sympathy may be sent to Gene's wife, Virginia Spangler, 139 Overlook Drive, Verona PA 15147.

In fond memory of Gene Hirsch,  

Mary Ricketson

Speak, Speak, pub July 15, 2020
Paperback $30, Amazon

Dr. Eugene Hirsch, Gene, to all who know him, has extended to me the privilege of editing his poetry, an assignment I accepted with pleasure. This collection, “Speak, Speak,” is the culmination of Gene’s long career of writing, and reflects the complexity of his mind and experience. As a physician/writer he joins a distinguished list, and in my opinion as a reader/editor, he earns his place among the others, notably Maugham, Chekhov, William Carlos Williams.

Judith R Robinson, editor

https://www.amazon.com/Speak-Gene-Hirsch/dp/939020240X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=gene+hirsch&qid=1598800059&sr=8-1

Zoom along with Writers' Night Out!

 Robert Lee Kendrick 

in Conversation with Glenda Beall

Friday, September 11

7 pm

Open Mic Follows

NCWN members will received the Zoom link via email 

Join us for this month's Writers' Night Out featuring South Carolina poet, Robert Lee Kendrick. His third book, which is a novel in verse, is Shape the Bent Straight, recently published by Main Street Rag.  

Of Kendrick's first full-length collection, What Once Burst with Brilliance, former NC Poet Laureate, Joseph Bathanti, said, "These poems are achingly elegiac – a deep, unslaked yearn for a past not vanished but resurrected through the time-honored autobiographical ‘I’ of the eye-witness dutifully chained to memory. Kendrick’s poems are at once documentary and unforgettably imagined.”

Kendrick grew up in Illinois and Iowa, but now lives in Clemson with his wife and dog. After earning his M.A. from Illinois State University and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina, he held a number of jobs, ranging from house painter to pizza driver to grocery store worker to line cook. Main Street Rag also published his second poetry book Winter Skin. His poems appear in Birmingham Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Tar River Poetry, Louisiana Literature, and elsewhere. 

Open microphone will follow for those who’d like to read their own poetry or prose with a time limit of three minutes. 

Those wishing to participate in the open mic can sign up to read by emailing Glenda Beall, glendabeall@msn.com.

Zoom invitations will be sent out again to NCWN-West members before the event. For more information, please contact Glenda Beall.

Maureen Ryan Griffin interviewed on Podcast

Many of us in western NC and north Georgia have had the pleasure of taking workshops and classes with Maureen Ryan Griffin either through Netwest or John C. Campbell Folk School. Her business, WordPlay is thriving from her home in Charlotte, NC.

I have subscribed to her newsletter for many years, and today learned she was recently a guest on a podcast. You can listen to Maureen talk about her journey that led her to writing, teaching and creating her own business. You get to know the person as well as the writer.
Click on this link:  https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/rose-cast-with-dr-sara-rose/e/65202933

Visit Maureen's website: https://www.wordplaynow.com to see how you can take classes online at this time when she can't meet with you face to face. 
She is the best teacher, and she inspired me and encouraged me when I took her classes years ago. She is a generous person with her students and in her personal life. I recommend beginning writers get to know Maureen.

Our friend, Scott Owens, has a new poetry book. Order now for discount

Scott Owens from Hickory was a regular instructor at Writers Circle around the Table for many years. We loved his poems and learned from his classes how to improve our own poetry. Now he has a new poetry book and I just ordered my copy.  This is what Scott has said about this book:

My forthcoming book of poems, Counting the Ways, has taken the longest of any of my books to be written. I started the collection, without knowing I was doing so, as an undergraduate at Ohio University.

The poem, "Breakings," built on the various manifestations of brokenness in my childhood and its lingering presence in adulthood, served as the seminal poem, the model, if you will. But I didn't understand that for another 35 years.

I picked up on the possibility of motif poems about 5 years after writing "Breakings" and dabbled with them for another 30 years or so, even conceiving the idea of a collection of them some 10-15 years ago, but I didn't see the relation to "Breakings" until just a few years ago. In any event, here is the poem "Breakings"

You can still get the Advance Order discount on the book at https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/…/counting-the-ways-sco…/

Breakings

There were always bottles in the well house,

lined up on 2 X 4s, piled in boxes, hidden

above the door. He hung them, bottoms up,
on the sticks he planted in the pasture.
Sometimes he used coffee cans, milk jugs,
a red-lined slopjar, anything to make a noise
as it swallowed the rocks or took the blows
hard against its side. But nothing could match
the sounds of shattered glass, nothing
could match the thrill of breaking.

The changes came sudden but incomplete.
What was once a bottle grew into
the many faces of breaking,
mirrors and windows, stung
running of cows, frantic beating
of redbirds, cries of children.

His father went off to war
to practice breaking on other men.
He became so good at it he came back
to teach others the black magic of breaking.

His mother stayed home and broke water,
broke in husbands and children,
broke her back to hold
some fragment of family together.

The old man, his grandfather,
broke the earth, broke cows
in the pasture, chicken-bones
in his teeth, taught him to break
limbs with the red axe,
the necks of chickens and rabbits,
legs of owls in fox traps,
skulls of cows in the stable.

He saw the breaking of land,
the endless bending of backs
and knees, the big-handed breaking
of his mother’s face, his brother’s
mouth, his own shattered skin.
He heard the news of breaking,
of Attica and Kent, King
and My Lai, the fields and jungles
scattered with war, the streets
emptied through breaking of walls
and windows, hearts and heads.

He saw the night shattered
with noise and lights, a man’s body
broken open on the porch,
the life splattered on the window,
lying messy on the floor.

He wanted to leave it all
behind, to break the habits
of breaking, but even now,
he knows the hearts of those
he loves like glass.

          By Scott Owens

PANDEMIC DISCOUNT FOR dialogue class on Zoom with CAROL CRAWFORD

Fee is only $25 for two hour workshop with poet, writer and editor, Carol Crawford. No matter where you live, you can attend because this is a Zoom meeting.

What text on the page do readers never skip? Dialogue. The conversation between characters catches the eye even when the reader is scanning the page. 

CAROL CRAWFORD

On Thursday, September 24, 2 - 4 PM, Carol Crawford, published writer and editor, will teach a class via Zoom for those who want to improve their writing of dialogue.

Bring your characters to life with dialogue that is authentic, clear, and compelling. Capture the flavor of personality and culture through speech that sounds real. In-class exercises will cover word choice, tone, action beats, what to leave out, and format in this interactive workshop.
Register no later than September 19. 
Email gcbmountaingirl@gmail.com to receive instructions for registration.
Fee - $25
Sponsored by NCWN-West

Opportunities for Writers

THE WRITERS' WORKSHOP

387 Beaucatcher Road

Asheville, NC 28805

828-254-8111 writersw@gmail.com  www.twwoa.org

    HARD TIMES CONTEST , ONLINE TUTORIALS & EDITING SERVICE

Dear Editor, please announce these offerings for writers, such as our Hard Times Contest, open to any writer regardless of residence or experience. The Writers’ Workshop is a non-profit writing center founded in 1985. Thanks so much! – K. Ackerson, Exec. Director

The Writers' Workshop is offering on-line classes for beginning and experienced writers. Each class meets on Saturdays, 10-3 pm (with 1 hr. lunch break). Registration is in advance only, at www.twwoa.org. Classes are $65. Financial assistance is available for low-income writers in exchange for volunteering.

To register, email writersw@gmail.com, or call 828-254-8111.

Hard Times Writing Contest  

 Deadline: Emailed or postmarked by August 30, 2020.

1st Place: Three free workshops (in person or on-line); or 50 pages edited and revised by our editorial staff.

2nd Place: Two free workshops, in person or on-line; or 35 pp line-edited.

3rd Place: One free workshop; or 25 pages line-edited.

10 Honorable Mentions

Guidelines:

•      Write about a difficult experience in your life, how you overcame this obstacle, and how you were changed by it. Winning stories will be chosen for originality and creative writing style.
•  Stories should not exceed 5,000 words (double-spaced, 12 point font). Your name, address, email and title of work should appear on a separate cover sheet. 
•  The entry fee per submission is $25. Multiple entries are accepted.    Enclose self-sealing SASE for critique and list of winners.
•      Make check or money order payable to The Writers’ Workshop, and mail to:  Hard Times Contest, 387 Beaucatcher Road, Asheville, NC  28805.
•      Emailed submission may be sent (in Word Doc) to writersw@gmail.com, with "Hard Times Contest" in the subject. Entry fee is payable online at www.twwoa.org.

* * * * *

Please note: We also offer online one-on-one tutorials for any writer, regardless of experience. Whether you need help getting started and sticking to a schedule, or how to polish your work for publication, we're here to help.

If you'd like more information on setting up a personal or class meeting via Zoom, or on the phone/email, please email us at writersw@gmail.com. Mention your name, email, genre of writing, & any questions re your work. We'll set this up at your convenience!

  

THE RENBOURNE EDITORIAL AGENCY provides expert assistance with revising and editing your work - memoirs, fiction or creative non-fiction.  We use a fine-tooth comb to ready your work for publication. For details, please contact www.renbourne.com, or call 828-254-8111.

The Renbourne Editorial Agency is a division of The Writers' Workshop of Asheville, NC, a non-profit literary center founded in 1985.

                                                          *******************

--

Sincerely,

Karen Ackerson, Exec. Director
The Writers' Workshop
387 Beaucatcher Rd.
Asheville, NC 28805

828-254-8111
www.twwoa.org