Poet Maren O. Mitchell to have poem in Jan. 2016 isssue of The Lake, an online poetry journal

Maren O. Mitchell's poem, "Raymond Duvall, Sleeper," is appearing in the January, 2016, issue of the English online poetry journal, The Lake .

Maren O. Mitchell’s poems have appeared in Iodine Poetry Journal, The Lake (UK), Appalachian Heritage, The South Carolina Review, Hotel Amerika, Southern Humanities Review, Skive (AUS), The Classical Outlook, Town Creek Poetry, Appalachian Journal, Pirene’s Fountain, Wild Goose Poetry Review and elsewhere. Her work is included in Negative Capability Press Anthology of Georgia Poetry, The Southern Poetry Anthologies, V: Georgia & VII: North Carolina and Sunrise from Blue Thunder. Poems are forthcoming in Hotel Amerika and Chiron Review. Mitchell's nonfiction book, Beat Chronic Pain, An Insider’s Guide (Line of Sight Press, 2012) can be found at: www.lineofsightpress.com, the Curiosity Shop bookstore in Murphy, NC, and on Amazon.

 

Open Mic Night at City Lights in Sylva, NC

As a new Jackson County Netwest representative, I'd like to announce an open microphone reading at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva on Friday evening, January 15th, at 7:00 p.m.  NetWest and non-NetWest members alike are welcome.  We'll have wine, water, and a few desserts upstairs in the bookstore; readers and listeners may also wish to go down to City Lights Café to buy coffee or dinner.  We'll sign up for a reading order beforehand, beginning at 6:45; unless our numbers are very small, writers may read for up to four minutes (please note that this limit is firm.  If our numbers are very large, we'll cap the event at two hours and ask all readers to be as brief as possible.)  We hope to see you there!  I look forward to hearing new work and to meeting other Jackson County members of NetWest and NCWN.

Polly Davis to present her memoir at City Lights Bookstore, Sylva, NC, Sat., Jan 9th, 2015 at 3:00 PM

Polly Davis will present Stumbling Toward Enlightenment on Saturday, January 9th at 3 p.m. at City Lights Bookstore. Married to a Special Forces soldier during the height of the Vietnam War, Polly Davis was a soldier’s wife with a difference: she often led, always followed, and sometimes fought alongside her Green Beret. Whether leaping out of airplanes, SCUBA diving off the coast of Massachusetts, hauling her family and their dogs over two continents, or battling a life-threatening disease, Davis’ life story is superbly rich with courage, compassion, and a sly humor that overcomes all obstacles. Failure is not an option with this warm and enticing tale.


Polly’s is a companion book to her husband’s memoir, The Most Fun I Ever Had With My Clothes On: A March from Private to Colonel. Come join Polly and Tom for a He Said She Said reading. While writing their memoirs, they would compare notes and wonder if they were at the same place at the same time. The contrasting views of the same events are hilarious! To reserve copies of these memoirs please call City Lights Bookstore at 828-586-9499

Be Persistent say John Jakes and Nancy Purcell

“Be persistent. Editors change; tastes change; editorial markets change.  Too many beginning writers give up too easily.”  — John Jakes, Author of the North and South Trilogy

Do you get a rejection and mark that poem or story off your list to submit? Do you have spurts when you send out work and then submit nothing for months? 

One of our NCWN-West members, Nancy Purcell, submitted a short story over 100 times before it was accepted. Nancy is an excellent writer, but that is not the only thing required to have your work accepted in magazines and journals. Nancy is persistent also. She had to find the right editor, the one who liked her story or needed her story for their next issue. This is what Nancy told me:

The story, "The Unwrinkled Heart," is online now at Valparaiso Fiction Review. It's the Winter 2015 edition. They only publish 6 stories a season. 

It was invigorating to receive the editor's letter saying, "I pray you have not accepted any other Review for this work. I love your writing and this is a great story. By the way, it's a pleasure to read a manuscript that is clean." 

Nancy has published 26 pieces of short fiction and is working on a collection of short stories she hopes to publish in the coming year. 

Some gifted poets give up writing or submitting when they receive a few rejections. It often takes hours of our time to search for markets and submit to publications. That is all part of being a writer. As someone said to me after our panel discussion at the Moss Library recently, "I understand now. Writing and publishing is hard work." Yes, it is and only those who are determined and who grow a thick skin will continue to submit. 

If you are an experienced writer, what is your advice to new or beginning writers and poets who want to see their work published? Tell us in our comments section.




Nancy Purcell served as a North Carolina Writers Network/Elizabeth Squire Daniels Writer-in-Residence, Peace College, Raleigh, NC, teaches Creative Writing in the Brevard College Community Education program, and Quick Coaches aspiring writers. Studied Creative Writing at the Iowa Summer Program. Seven years as County Representative for the NCWN-West Writers. Presently serves as the Prose Judge for the Board of the Carl Sandburg Home Writer-in-Residence Program,
Publications: 26 Short Stories to include: RiverSedge, The MacGuffin, Pangolin Papers, Troika, LongStoryShort, The Square Table, DiverseVoicesQuarterly, The Final Draft and RCVRY among others.

Five Brothers in the Civil War

Brenda Kay Ledford and Barbara Ledford Wright's essay, "Five Brothers in the Civil War," was published online at the North Carolina Civil War Center.

You may view their story at:  www.nccivilwarcenter.org/stories

A Christmas Poem

Snow at Christmas
by Glenda C. Beall

Silent December snow covers
grey mountain forests, clings
to thin bare branches of oaks,
poplar and ash.

It mounds on brown wide leaves
still hanging on to stubborn trees
that, until now, denied winter’s presence.
Holly bushes crowned with snow

create photo ops for Christmas cards.
Rooftops iced in white, frosted
gingerbread houses, await
Santa's footsteps.

Red ribbons on our mailbox
collect crystal flakes
within curving bows,
on bunched pine boughs.

Kayla hangs her stocking, dreams
of Barbie dolls, gift wrapped boxes
piled high beneath her brilliant
Christmas tree.

We light a candle in the snow.
Pray for children around the world,
who long for peace, a cup of soup,
an end to fear -- an end to
war.

http://netwestwriters.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-christmas-poem.html

Marketing/Selling a Poetry Book: 3 Ideas

Unfortunately, poetry can be a hard sell...

especially to audiences who don't read it because they think it is stuffy or impossible to understand. 

My book, Untying the Knot (Aldrich Press, 2014) came out 19 months ago, but it is just now picking up speed from a marketing perspective. What have I learned? Here are three ideas you might try:


1. Belong to special interest groups on Facebook or other social media. I don't really know much about social media except Facebook (FB) and LinkedIn. But I have found FB to be invaluable. I belong to poetry groups where I've made connections with poets and editors who have blogged about my book/poems and/or published reviews or interviews with me. See number 2 for other opportunities that resulted from FB. 

Me at a reading from 

Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems

2. Grab every opportunity to read from your book. Besides the usual poetry reading opportunities and open mics, I have read at a senior citizen's residential community, a women's event at a synagogue (a connection made through my neighborhood's FB, though I'm not Jewish), and a professional women's networking luncheon (also a neighborhood FB connection).

3. Promote yourself as a subject matter expert, and as such, find opportunities to guest blog for national publications. Your subject could be writing, which would be fine. But because my book is the story of my divorce and healing, I wanted to reach a broader audience, one that doesn't necessarily read poetry. I was prompted to do this because people kept telling me that my book helped them and that they bought it for friends who were going through divorce.  I found a way to reach non-writer audiences by connecting with divorce groups on FB and reaching out to the editors with my idea of sharing my story -- each article I wrote would include a poem and the true story of how the poem came about. DivorceMagazine.com said yes, so I have posted three articles now. They were the first divorce related publication on the internet -- 17,000 people follow them on Twitter, and their FB page has 6300 likes. 

And... the exciting thing is that my last article was picked up by Huffington Post and re-published in the divorce section of their online news site. Their site has 79 million unique monthly users. I don't know how many book sales this will result in (I know of 2 that happened immediately), but I'm happy for the wide reach, and if I can help people who are suffering, that's a wonderful thing. Secondly, if I can promote poetry (in general, not just mine) to an audience who thinks they don't like poetry and change a few people's minds about that... then I've done a good thing for all poets, and that makes me very happy.

Here's a link to the Huffing Post article: Forgiving the Other Woman

Good luck to you with your writing and the promoting of your work!
________

Untying the Knot by Karen Paul Holmes is a "courageous, deeply human" book, according to internationally known poet, Thomas Lux, told with "grace, humor, self-awareness, and without a dollop of self-pity." Available on Amazon 

 

Karen's website

 

Karen's poetry Facebook page

Sylva NC, Coffee with the Poet - City Lights Bookstore

Coffee with the Poet Featuring Randi Janelle

The Coffee with the Poet series continues on Thursday, December 17th at 10:30 a.m. at City Lights Bookstore. The December gathering will feature performance poet and novelist Randi Janelle. She will share her poetry and also read from her novel, The Story: Deviation. She has performed her poetry in New Zealand, Australia and regularly performs in Asheville.

The Coffee with the Poet series is cosponsored by NCWN-West, a program  of the North Carolina Writers Network and gathers on the third Thursday of each month. For more information about Coffee with the Poet please call City Lights Bookstore at 828-586-9499.

 

Event date: 

Thursday, December 17, 2015 - 10:30 a.m.

Event address: 

3 East Jackson St.

Sylva, NC 28779

December 16, 2015, 10:00 AM – Coffee with the Poets and Writers – Moss Memorial Library, Hayesville, NC

 

Coffee with the Poets and Writers will have their annual holiday program on Wednesday, December 16, 2015, at the Moss Memorial Library, Hayesville, NC. It will be open mic, so bring your Christmas or holiday poems, short stories, or essays of your original work.

Refreshments will be served.

Everyone will take home a gift. This is the time our members can sign up to read for next year. We will not meet in January and February.

BOB GROVE PERFORMS A CHRISTMAS CAROL AT THE JOHN C. CAMPBELL FOLK SCHOOL

Bob Grove, author and member of NCWN-West is quite the performer. Wednesday evening at the John C. Campbell Folk School, he will gift us with his annual reading of A Christmas Carol.
 Bob always gives a wonderful performance. Come out and enjoy. See Bob's announcement below.

Just a reminder that tomorrow night (Wednesday) at 7 p.m. at the Folk School I wil be doing my annual performance reading of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. I will be in period costume and do the best I can with a wide variety of character dialogues. This one-hour abridged version of his popular volume was actually written by Dickens himself to facilitate such readings.

My performance will be followed by a musical treat from the Folk School dancers. I hope to see you there.

Bob

BOB GROVE PERFORMING A CHRISTMAS CAROL