BLUE FIFTH REVIEW

Blue Fifth Review, first appearing in March of 2001, is an online journal of poetry and art edited by Sam Rasnake. The primary focus for the review is to maintain a venue for new works by writers and artists. BFR is only interested in works that have not appeared in print or online.

The number of issues varies – with two or three issues – each year. Often, the issues will have a thematic focus. Past issues include awareness of violence against women, film, journey, obsession, place, the world from the female perspective … from the male perspective, contemporary Appalachian poetry, works in collaboration, and the body. At least once each year, issues are general in design and open to unsolicited submissions by poets and artists.

Past contributors include Eleni Sikelianos, Natasha Sajé, doris davenport, Jeff Daniel Marion, Marty McConnell, E. Ethelbert Miller, Virgil Suárez, Barbara Jane Reyes, Marge Piercy, Rebecca Loudon, J.P. Dancing Bear, Nathalie Handal, Roger Pfingston, Arlene Ang, M.L. Liebler, Edison Jennings, Felicia Mitchell, James Owens, Sandra Beasley, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Eileen Tabios, Suzanne Frischkorn, Gerhardt Thompson, Doug Beasley, Jeff Mann, Daphne Gottlieb, Cheryl Dodds, Leslie Marcus, Ioanna Warwick, and so many other wonderful writers and artists.

In 2006 a Broadside series – invitation only – was established, presenting a distinguished individual work by a poet. Past contributors include Evie Shockley, Peter Pereira, Vicki Hudspith, C.E. Chaffin, Susan Terris, Yun Wang, Collin Kelley, Amy Lemmon and more.

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Blue Fifth Review invites submissions for its online poetry journal.This is an e-zine that Netwest members might find appealing and supportive.

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Blue Fifth Review, first appearing in March of 2001, is an online journal of poetry and art edited by Sam Rasnake. The primary focus for the review is to maintain a venue for new works by writers and artists. BFR is only interested in works that have not appeared in print or online.

The number of issues varies – with two or three issues – each year. Often, the issues will have a thematic focus. Past issues include awareness of violence against women, film, journey, obsession, place, and more.

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Recent News

NEWS FROM ABOVE THE FROST LINE - BOOK CONTRACT SIGNED

As some of you know, I’ve been keeping a poetry website for the past fifteen months dedicated to promoting southern and Appalachian poets. It is free and all are welcome. It is not a formal web site but rather it’s a blog site with my main topic being poetry. It is called LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE. I set up this site during a NCWN West Saturday workshop in Oct. 2008. I had no grand goals then, no ulterior motives what so ever. I only wanted to promote the poetry of our poets writing in the mountains and some of them in other forgotten parts of the south. I was amazed at how easy it was to communicate with other writers, and I was thrilled by your response.

The growing seasons gets extended for those who dwell above the frost line. Extending the growth season is something I’ve experienced since first coming to Cherry Mountain in the southern Appalachian mountains. A companion idea is that one’s writing life can also be extended. It’s true. Never has it been more true than this year in December 2009. Just after the hard freeze, as the last of the flowers melted into the ground, word of my poems came back to me from the literary world.

Word came from Carolina Wren Press, Durham, North Carolina, that they will publish a collection of my poetry in the forthcoming spring titled Living Above the Frost Line - Selected and New Poems. It is to be the first book in their new Carolina Laureate Series and was chosen by NC Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer. The collection will span 32 years of my poetry writing career.

I signed my book contract on December 24th, and Janice Townley Moore, my long time poetry writing buddy, witnessed my signature. We met in the parking lot at Kerr Drug Store and sat there in my car laughing and saying “Who would have thought it?” and “On Christmas Eve.” Then I drove to the US Post Office in Hayesville and mailed the contract back to the press, imagining how on Christmas Eve, the contract might accidentally end up in Santa’s sled.

Today on the first day a the new year 2010, I find myself singing “Happy New Year” every time the phone rings, and I find myself more filled with hope than I have been in a long time.

Happy New Year and Best Wishes to all of you Netwest Writers and to others reading and writing in the mountains.

Please visit when you get the time. http://www.nancysimpson.blogspot.com/

City Lights Books in Sylva

While book stores across the country try to hold on in this tough economy, one of our favorite western NC book stores is changing ownership. As writers we should support these independent bookstores where we can meet the owner and staff and they can learn about us and our books. City Lights Books has always supported artists of all kinds, and we hope they will continue to do so for a long, long time.
Click here to read Joyce Moore's letter and announcement.

WORDS SHINING IN THE NIGHT

This is a LANGUAGE MATTERS column I wrote in the winter of 2006 as part of my Laureate duties. As our country becomes more and more diverse, this season invites us to celebrate these "holy days" in many ways and in many languages, and to carry what Native Americans call the ever-widening hoop of understanding into the New Year. I wish all of you a joyful holiday and a restorative New Year.

Words Shining in the Night


By Kathryn Stripling Byer



Nothing brings our language into brighter focus than religious holidays. As we gather to
hear the words of this holiday season, we have lately become more aware of how those
words can both bind us together and push us apart. Just last Christmas, there was an
uproar over greeters at various stores using Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas,
as if the former somehow diminished the latter. Yet, many Americans do not celebrate a
traditional Christmas and many others do not celebrate it at all. Some, like certain Native
American tribes, never have, welcoming the solstice instead with their age-old earth-
based rituals.

So, what to do in our increasingly pluralistic society, where Latino, Arabic, Jewish, African, and
Asian voices are joining our own? Can we agree at least on the meaning of this yearly
turning, that it pulls us back into the light, if we let it? And that the light can bring us
together, if we let it?

Perhaps learning some new words for light would be a good place to start. Tara, for
example. We English speakers think of Ireland and Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation. But the
word is also Urdu/Hindi for star, descended from the Sanskrit for “shining.” And this
time of year the star shining in the night carries special significance. In Spanish it is the
beautiful word estrella, and in French, etoile. The German star rings in the season as
stern, whose light cuts through the darkness and leads the way to revelation. In Arabic,
the haunting word shihab means flame. How can we deny this light shining in the
darkness, regardless of which word a culture uses to say it? We all light our candles this
time of year and watch the flames dance in the night.

I like the word shihab because it is the given name of a poet I admire, Naomi Shihab
Nye, American-born daughter of a Palestinian journalist and an American Montessori
teacher. For years she has worked to bridge cultural and religious differences, to heal the
divide that keeps us from being able to communicate with one another. Her voice shines
like a candle flame in this season’s dark night of suffering and war.

Her poem “Red Brocade,” begins: The Arabs used to say,/When a stranger appears at
your door,/feed him for three days/before asking who he is,/where he’s come from,
/where he’s headed./That way he’ll have strength/enough to answer./Or, by then you’ll be
/such good friends/you don’t care.

Let’s go back to that, she pleads in the line that follows. No matter the language used, this
time of year we call out to light, not only to the flame of the sun returning to our
hemisphere, but also to the light of understanding. This season challenges us to believe
that our words for that light matter. Call it luz, lumiere, shihab, or tara, it means the same
thing: the realization that we are called by the light to live together in peace.

Which Writers Have Writing in the Forthcoming Anthology ECHOES ACROSS THE BLUE RIDGE?

Hello Fellow NCWN West Members and Friends. I have been working as the editor on Netwest’s forthcoming anthology for about one year now, with the work arriving in my mailbox from December 1, 2008 to February 28, 2009. Getting a book published is a long process. Sometimes things move along like clockwork, but time stalled due to circumstances beyond our control. Still, I am happy to announce we are making progress and seeing our way clear to publish the anthology, titled Echoes Across the Blue Ridge: Stories, Essays and Poems by Writers Living in and Inspired by the Southern Appalachian Mountains. In fact, we have completed the proofreading process. The galley copy is being made at this time. We plan for publication in the new year.

An Introduction to Echoes Across the Blue Ridge has been written for us by Robert Morgan.

Other North Carolina authors have endorsed the collection including Lee Smith and more comments are forthcoming.

These authors, who live within the Netwest area, were invited to contribute their work and they did so with generosity: Our Program Coordinator Kathryn Stripling Byer, Thomas Rain Crowe, Steven Harvey and Bettie M. Sellers. The anthology is dedicated to the memory of our Appalachian ballad poet Byron Herbert Reece.

Check the list below of other contributors who have work forthcoming in Echoes Across the Blue Ridge:

Ellen Andrews

Richard Argo

Glenda Barrett

Glenda Beall

Jo Carolyn Beebe

Janet Benway

Joan Thiel Blessing

Rachel T. Bronnum

John T. Campbell

Gary Carden

Nancy Sales Cash

James M. Cox

Paul Donovan

Robert Edward Fahey

Jayne Jaudon Ferrer

Debora Kinsland Foerst

Joyce Foster

Karen Gilfillan

Gerri Wolfe Grady

Lana Hendershott

Eugene Hirsch

Sam Hoffer

Karen Paul Holmes

Tom Hooker

Kitty Inman

Carl Iobst

George Ivey

Mary Michelle Brodine Keller

Eileen Lampe

Blanche Ledford

Brenda Kay Ledford

Susan Lefler

StarShield Lortie

John Malone

Gail Maye

Marshall McClung

Jennifer McGaha

Mary Lou McKillip

Dick Michener

Maren O. Mitchell

Janice Townley Moore

Clarence Lee Newton

Arnie Nielson

Nancy Purcell

Betty Jameron Reed

William V. Reynolds

Estelle Rice

Mary Ricketson

Judy Roney

Rosemary Royston

Peg Russell

Linda M. Smith

Susan Snowden

Dorothea Spiegel

Wendy Richard Tanner

Carole Richard Thompson

Shirley Uphouse

J.C. Walkup

Cecily Hamlin Wells

Eleanor Lambert Wilson

Charlotte Wolf

Jane J. Young

Congratulations to Philip Sampson of Young Harris, Georgia

whose photograph was chosen for the cover.

Congratulations to Katja Holmes for her cover and book design

and for formatting the galley manuscript .

MORE NEWS WILL COME . STAY POSTED,

Cover for Echoes Across the Blue Ridge

After many hours spent pouring over the photos submitted for the cover of the NCWN West anthology, this photo by Philip Sampson of Young Harris, Georgia fits the recommendations of our book sellers and others who insist this book will jump right off the shelves into hands of readers when they spy this cover. The reflection of the mountains in the lake echoes the scene and fits the title ECHOES ACROSS THE BLUE RIDGE, Stories, Essays and Poems by Writers Living in and Inspired by the Southern Appalachian Mountains.
The book was titled by the editor Nancy Simpson. The cover design is by Katja Holmes.
Glenda Beall is marketing manager and is already promoting the book. A list of contributors will be posted here very soon. Read poems from the book on the blog of Nancy Simpson.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, the book will not be released until after the first of the year. Continue to watch this site for more information.

Coffee With the Poets at Phillips and Lloyd Book Store on the square in Hayesville

Poet Dorothea Spiegel was featured and honored with a fond farewell at NC Writers' Network West's Coffee With the Poets on Dec. 9, 2009. She is leaving the area to live with a daughter in Tennessee.

Someone asked her, "How long have you been a member of N C Writers' Network West?"

Since the beginning." she answered.

It's true that Dorothea Spiegel was the first Georgia representative back during the founding days of the writing program that was established by N.C. W.N. to help the isolated, mountain writers of North Carolina and the north Georgia mountains.

Part of Coffee With the Poets also featured an open mic reading.

Karn Holmes reads a new poem

Blue Ridge Poet Brenda Kay Ledford read a poem.

Founder of Coffee With the Poets, former Program Coordinator, read poems from her recently published poetry collection Now Might as Well Be Then, Finishing Line Press.

ANNUAL READING AT MOSS LIBRARY IN HAYESVILLE, NC

Glenda Barrett

Writers and Poets Reading Holiday Stories takes place Thursday evening, December 17, 7:00 p.m. at Moss Memorial Library in Hayesville, NC.
Featured writers for the evening are NCWN West members, Estelle Rice, Carole Thompson, and Glenda Barrett.

The mic is open to guests after a short break to partake of the delicious buffet of finger food served by the library staff.

Left:Estelle Rice

          Right:  Carole Thompson

The reading is an annual event begun by Nancy Simpson, and is sponsored by Friends of the Library.

         

                                                                         

MAIDEN RUN by Joan L. Cannon is published and available from book stores

My friend, Joan L. Cannon, who lives in Morganton, NC is the author of two novels, SETTLING and MAIDEN RUN. She tells me that Maiden Run which was first an E-book, has now been published in paper. As anyone who has written a novel knows, the writing is just the beginning of having your book reach the reading public.
Joan says on , Hilltop Notes,
When you love your story as it unfolds under your fingers, completing it feels like a mixed blessing. When you then wonder whether it will ever see the light of day, you can begin to regard it as a curse. Nobody who writes for publication will fail to understand what I mean.


When the Adams family is approached on an ordinary summer day in 1935 by a pair of representatives of a mining company about investigating the family farm for deposits of natural gas or oil, none of them suspect this will be the pivotal summer of their lives, as they strive to save the land and its heritage.



A second theme is that of the destruction of beauty in nature, of tradition and history in the name of "progress."


Filled with a cast of colorful characters surrounded by the beauty that is rural America, written with the engaging style of a natural storyteller, Maiden Run will call to your own story of roots that can't be pulled thoughtlessly from the ground, and the love between siblings.

Three members of the same family with three vastly different views of their places at Maiden Run and just as varied views on life, find themselves changed over thirty years. Each must find a way to continue without the home to which they have always been able to return.

You can find Cannon's book, MAIDEN RUN, and excerpts from the book on the website of the publisher, Write Words, Inc
ISBN 1-59431-801-8 Fiction / Women's Contemporary as well as on http://www.amazon.com/.  It can be read on Kindle. Local book sellers can order it.

GLENDA C.BEALL: POET OF THE WEEK

                                            Photo by Valoree Luhr

GLENDA BEALL IS POET OF THE WEEK ON MY http:///site. Please drop by and enjoy the poems! K. Byer

Byer, Duncan, and Woloch at Malaprop's Bookstore this Sunday

Two reading/signing events are scheduled for this weekend, both featuring Cecilia Woloch and Kathryn Stripling Byer. On Saturday Night, Byer, Woloch, and Mary Adams will read from their new books at Cith Lights Bookstore at 7:00. Mary Adams chapbook Commandment was recently published in the Spring Street Editions Chapbook Series.

On Sunday, December 6, 2009, Malaprop's Bookstore/Café (55 HaywoodStreet in downtown Asheville, NC) will host poets Kathryn StriplingByer reading from ARETHA'S HAT: INAUGURATION DAY, 2009; Julia NunnallyDuncan with AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY and new, unpublished poems; andCecilia Woloch, author of CARPATHIA.

Kathryn Stripling Byer, poet laureate of North Carolina from 2005through June 30, 2009, was born in Southwest Georgia but moved to NorthCarolina in 1968 and has lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains ever since.She is the author of five poetry books, including COMING TO REST(2006), and most recently (in collaboration with Penelope ScamblySchott) of the chapbook ARETHA'S HAT: INAUGURATION DAY, 2009. Writingon the topic "Why We Love North Carolina" for the February 2009 issueof Our State magazine, Kathryn Stripling Byer noted these particularhighlights of her term as Poet Laureate: the "generous community of[North Carolina] writers . . . who continue to amaze me with theirtalent and energy" and most of all, "the students I've met in ourschools . . . these young faces looking back at me, ready to say whothey are. May we all listen well to them." As poet laureate, KathrynStripling Byer's primary goal was to "help make poetry accessible in asmany ways as I could," through frequent visits to schools and withwriting groups; appearances at bookstores, literary events, and avariety of public celebrations; a regularly updated poetry page on theNorth Carolina Arts Council web site; and her own generous laureateblog -- as well as by continuing to write and give public readings of herown poetry. In the process, she has demonstrated the perseverance andconstant delicate balance of energies required to lead a very publiclife as a dedicated writer. Asked why she writes poetry, she recentlyreplied, "It's the best way I know to sing with the world" (Writer'sDigest interview with Robert Lee Brewer, July 2009). We are very happyto welcome Kathryn Stripling Byer back to "sing" her poetry at Malaprop's.

Julia Nunnally Duncan writes both poetry and fiction. She haspreviously published two collections of stories and a novel, and hersecond novel, WHEN DAY IS DONE, is just out from March Street Press.Her Appalachian poems have appeared in scores of literary journals,and her first published collection of poetry, AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY(2007), was named a finalist for the 2008 Roanoke-Chowan Award forPoetry. She recently completed the manuscript for a second collectionof poems, AT DUSK. Rob Neufeld, book columnist for The AshevilleCitizen-Times, wrote of Julia Nunnally Duncan that she is one of fourWestern North Carolina "poets to watch." He remarked that her poems"make the greatest possible use of line breaks, so that individualphrases glow like haiku observations. Metaphors develop naturally and emotionally." In a recent article in North Carolina Literary Review, Jeffrey Franklin observed of AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY, "Duncan always makes the place solid, the people real, the situation, in all its emotional complexity and perilousness, rendered with a deceptive simplicity that quietly resonates. . . .[Her] people are as recognizably human as any in Shakespeare[.]" Like our other readers for December 6, Julia Nunnally Duncan is at once a dedicated writer and an experienced teacher; she has served as a full-time English instructor at McDowell Community College for nearly two and a half decades. At Malaprop's, she will read selections from AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY and from her manuscript, AT DUSK.

CARPATHIA is Cecilia Woloch's fifth poetry collection. Published in2009, it went into a second printing about two months after itsofficial publication date. Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winningpoet, has written of CARPATHIA, "The poems . . . are guided by anexquisite lyricism and heartbreaking emotional honesty. . . . This isa gorgeous book by a poet who is passionately alive in the world."Cecilia Woloch has traveled widely and taught just as widely, offeringpoetry workshops for children and adults across the United States andin several locations abroad. She serves as a lecturer in creativewriting at the University of Southern California and is foundingdirector of the Paris Poetry Workshop. The recipient of numerousawards for her writing, teaching and theatre work, in 2009 alone,Cecilia Woloch has been recognized as a finalist in the CaliforniaBook Awards of The Commonwealth Club of California for her 2008chapbook, NARCISSUS; as a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize inPoetry at Nimrod; as the first prize winner of the New Ohio ReviewPrize in Poetry; and as a Fellow at the Center for InternationalTheatre Development/US Artists Initiative in Poland.

Please join us in welcoming three distinguished poets on December 6,and begin your holiday season with poetry!Poetrio: Kathryn Stripling Byer, Julia Nunnally Duncan, Celia WolochSunday, December 6, 2009, 3:00 p.m.Malaprop's Bookstore/Café55 Haywood StreetAsheville, NC 28801(828) 254-6734www.malaprops.com

Fathers and Daughters, PATERNITY By Scott Owens

Tonight I ordered from Main Street Rag, a poetry book by Scott Owens.

The cover and the title, PATERNITY, intrigue me. I always get a bit misty when I see a loving father with his daughter. Scott will be in Hayesville and Murphy in May and will be reading and signing this book at Coffee with the Poets at Phillips and Lloyd books.

Poems of aching tenderness. PATERNITY explores with a discerning, clear-eyed sensitivity the daily small delights, frustrations, and purely unexpected miracles that, taken together, make up the building blocks of one father's personal salvation.
--Joanna Catherine Scott, author of Night Huntress and Fainting at the Uffizi

In Scott Owens' lovely book of poems, PATERNITY, we have a remarkable account of how his very special relationship with his young daughter, Sawyer, has saved him from the darkness of his own childhood. The poems are engaging in the deepest sense--funny, touching, and full of the kind of wisdom we all need as parents and family members to sustain the balance of daily life. How can anyone resist a girl who makes up the word, "effluctress," to describe what only a four-year old can see.
                                           --Anthony S. Abbott, author of The Man Who.

APPALACHIAN HERITAGE: CHEROKEE ISSUE

The new issue of APPLACHIAN HERITAGE has arrived. A special issue devoted to Cherokee culture and literature, it features Robert Conley, now Sequoyah Professor of Cherokee Studies at WCU, Debora Kinsland Foerst, MariJo Moore, and the striking paintings of Sean Ross.

Go to my www.ncpoetlaureate.blogspot.com to read more about this issue.

CLOTHES LINE BOOK SIGNING

Celia H. Miles, Joan Medlicott, and Barbara Ledford Wright, attended a CLOTHES LINES book signing at the Fire Side Books in Shelby, NC on Saturday, November 21st.

These three women contributed stories to CLOTHES LINE. This anthology includes work by 75 western North Carolina women. The volume covers a gamut of women's fashion.

Joan Medlicott also signed copies of her new Covington Holiday novel, A BLUE AND GRAY CHRISTMAS, at the Fire Side Books.

Take a look at Wrightsville Beach. Were you there this weekend?

Thanksgiving is approaching this week. The feverish shopping frenzy will begin on Friday, and I hope all the shoppers in the Murphy, Hayesville, Robbinsville, and surrounding area will stop in at Curiosity Shop Books at the Shoppes of Murphy for my book signing of NOW MIGHT AS WELL BE THEN, poetry by Glenda Council Beall.
Some comments about the book from Scott Owens:
Beall begins the collection with a love poem that celebrates the timelessness of a relationship. The speaker in the title poems says, “You brought me spring in winter // youth when I was old, / you found my childhood self.” If not for the dedication of the poem which announces who is intended by the indefinite second person pronoun, one could easily read this as a celebration of many things--god, nature, the mountains of North Carolina—and interestingly, any of these meanings would fit for the poems that follow as these poems celebrate the presence and influence of all of these elements.

     We would love to have you come in and vist a few minutes with me and Linda Ray, owner of the bookstore. 11:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. If you have a favorite poem in the book, I'll be most happy to discuss it and read it for you. Pick up a few books for Christmas gifts.
Scott Owens in his review that will be posted online in mid-February likes the poem, Roosevelt, and this Roosevelt is not a president. I'd like to know your favorite.

FRESH: A new literary magazine flies its colors

Fresh magazine's first issue features Robert Morgan with three poems, a story by Kathryn Magendie, and, among many other pieces, a poem by Keith Flynn, Editor of The Asheville Poetry Review, just off the presses. The deadline for the next issue is Dec. 1st, so consider submitting some Winter related work right away. The address is fresh, LLC, P.O. Box 107, Canton, NC 28716.



Why a new literary magazine? Publisher JC Walkup explains below. Please click on the image for better reading.



Fresh offers a literary contest for fiction and non-fiction. Not much time left to enter it, so brush off your manuscripts!