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Writers and poets in the far western mountain area of North Carolina and bordering counties of South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee post announcements, original work and articles on the craft of writing.
Thursday, June 20, 2019
Announcement of newest Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
DAVID JOY - novelist speaks in Waynesville, NC at Blue Ridge Books June 22nd
Saturday, June 22nd, 3:00 PM - BLUE RIDGE BOOKS - WAYNESVILLE, NC
Each year books are sold at the Friends of the Library Annual Meeting. This year’s speaker is a local author with international acclaim—David Joy.
Each year books are sold at the Friends of the Library Annual Meeting. This year’s speaker is a local author with international acclaim—David Joy.
David has published 3 novels and a memoir, as well as numerous essays and stories for national publications such as The New York Times Magazine. Joy’s most recent novel, The Line that Held Us won the Southern Book Prize for fiction.
An excellent interview about David Joy who is a presenter for A Day for Writers.
Thursday, June 13, 2019
SUCCESSFUL MOVE TO COMMUNITY ROOM AT JCCFS FOR LITERARY HOUR
We had a good audience at the Literary Hour in the Community Room of the John C. Campbell Folk School Wednesday evening. With a larger venue there is more seating available and it is more comfortable than the chairs in the Library. We hope this will entice even more visitors to our monthly reading.
I could see that more JCCFS students attended, and we hope that trend will continue. Mary Ricketson was host and the three readers, Maren Mitchell, Ryvers Stewart and Richard Cary, all members of NCWN-West, were entertaining as they read their poetry.
As always we thank the John C. Campbell Folk School staff for setting up chairs and making us welcome.
We also appreciate the support of the Folk School through their advertising on our website and our blog. We reach out to writers around the world with our online presence including our Facebook Page.
We ask our readers to click on the John C. Campbell Folk School logo on the sidebar of this blog post. There you will see the writing classes offered at this venerable campus that attracts students from our local area, our state and from other continents.
Some of the best writers have taught at John Campbell Folk School for many years including the late poet laureate of NC, Kathryn Stripling Byer. Other poets were the late Nancy Simpson, outstanding poet and first Program Coordinator of NCWN-West. Dr. Gene Hirsch taught poetry at the school for many years and is responsible for the Writing Program at JCCFS. Dr. Hirsch will be in Hayesville, NC on Wednesday, June 19, 10:30 AM at the Moss Memorial Library. Everyone is invited to come and hear him read at Coffee with the Poets and Writers.
Dana Wildsmith, Valerie Nieman, Karen Holmes, Rosemary Royston, Ruth Zehfus, R.T. Smith, Carol Crawford, and so many others have brought inspiration and knowledge to those of us who create with pen on paper or with a keyboard and monitor. I, personally, owe my writing career to those teachers who have come here to the far western mountains of North Carolina, to the little town of Brasstown, to share their wisdom with us.
Valerie Nieman will teach a three hour session on Under Pressure: Creating Complex Characters at Moss Memorial Library, Hayesville, NC on Saturday, July 6, 1:00 - 4:00 PM.
Fee: $40 - pay to NCWN-West. Mail to PO Box 843, Hayesville, NC 28904
Read more from Val Nieman Here.
I could see that more JCCFS students attended, and we hope that trend will continue. Mary Ricketson was host and the three readers, Maren Mitchell, Ryvers Stewart and Richard Cary, all members of NCWN-West, were entertaining as they read their poetry.
As always we thank the John C. Campbell Folk School staff for setting up chairs and making us welcome.
We also appreciate the support of the Folk School through their advertising on our website and our blog. We reach out to writers around the world with our online presence including our Facebook Page.
We ask our readers to click on the John C. Campbell Folk School logo on the sidebar of this blog post. There you will see the writing classes offered at this venerable campus that attracts students from our local area, our state and from other continents.
Some of the best writers have taught at John Campbell Folk School for many years including the late poet laureate of NC, Kathryn Stripling Byer. Other poets were the late Nancy Simpson, outstanding poet and first Program Coordinator of NCWN-West. Dr. Gene Hirsch taught poetry at the school for many years and is responsible for the Writing Program at JCCFS. Dr. Hirsch will be in Hayesville, NC on Wednesday, June 19, 10:30 AM at the Moss Memorial Library. Everyone is invited to come and hear him read at Coffee with the Poets and Writers.
Dana Wildsmith, Valerie Nieman, Karen Holmes, Rosemary Royston, Ruth Zehfus, R.T. Smith, Carol Crawford, and so many others have brought inspiration and knowledge to those of us who create with pen on paper or with a keyboard and monitor. I, personally, owe my writing career to those teachers who have come here to the far western mountains of North Carolina, to the little town of Brasstown, to share their wisdom with us.
Valerie Nieman will teach a three hour session on Under Pressure: Creating Complex Characters at Moss Memorial Library, Hayesville, NC on Saturday, July 6, 1:00 - 4:00 PM.
Fee: $40 - pay to NCWN-West. Mail to PO Box 843, Hayesville, NC 28904
Read more from Val Nieman Here.
Thursday, June 6, 2019
Joan Howard and Gene Hirsch are featured at CWPW June 19
Coffee
with the Poets and Writers (CWPW) will feature poets Joan M. Howard and Eugene
Z. Hirsch, MD, on Wednesday, June 19, at 10:30 a.m. at the Moss Memorial
Library in Hayesville, NC. The event is free and open to the public. An open
mic will follow their presentations. Bring a poem or a short prose piece to
participate. CWPW is sponsored by North Carolina Writers’ Network-West (NCWN-W)
which also includes writers in Towns, Union, Fannin, and Rabun Counties in
Georgia.
Howard is a former teacher with an MA in German and English literature. She is a 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.
The Literary Hour Readings at John C. Campbell Folk School to feature poets Richard M. Cary, Maren O. Mitchell, and Ryvers Stewart, on Wed., June 12, 2019, in the Community Room
On Wednesday, June 12, 2019, at 7:00 PM, John C.
Campbell Folk School (JCCFS) and NC Writers' Network-West (NCWN-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. This event is now held in the community room. 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
Richard Cary, Maren O. Mitchell, and Ryvers Stewart.
Richard Montfort Cary began writing poetry in high
school and continues to this day. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University
in 1964 with a BFA in Theatre Arts. He spent six years in regional theatres,
before moving year-round to Nantucket Island MA, as a designer & builder of
custom homes. In 1985, he founded Actors Theatre of Nantucket and served as
Artistic Director for twenty years. Richard and his wife Cheryl moved from
Asheville NC to Hayesville NC in 2017.
Cary’s claim to fame is that his Great Aunt, Olive Dame
Campbell, founded The John C. Campbell Folk School. Cary is currently editing
over 60 years of his poetry for a collection.
Maren O. Mitchell,
a North Carolina native, lived in Bordeaux, France, in her childhood, and in Kaiserslautern,
Germany. She now lives with her husband
on the edge of a national forest in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia.
Mitchell has taught poetry at Blue Ridge Community College,
Flat Rock, NC, and catalogued at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site.
For over thirty years, across five southeastern states, she has taught origami,
the Japanese art of paper folding.
Mitchell’s poems appear in The Cortland Review, The
MacGuffin, POEM, The Comstock Review, Tar River Poetry, Poetry East, Hotel Amerika, Appalachian
Heritage, The South Carolina Review,
Southern Humanities Review, Appalachian Journal and elsewhere. Work
is forthcoming in POEM, Slant, The
Comstock Review, Poetry East and Chiron
Review. Two poems, “X Is a Kiss on Paper” and “T,
Totally Balanced,” have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. In 2012 she
received 1st Place Award for Excellence in Poetry from the Georgia
Poetry Society. Her nonfiction book, Beat Chronic Pain, An Insider’s Guide,
(Line of Sight Press, 2012), www.lineofsightpress.com is on Amazon.
Ryvers Stewart has been writing poetry since middle
school, but it was in high school she truly fell in love with it (and acting). She
is in the graduating class of 2019 at Tri-County Community College with an
Associates in Arts degree, she plans on graduating 2020 with an Associates in
Fine Arts.
On the weekends Stewart can be found playing D&D and Pathfinder.
She is currently working on her first poetry book.
For more information on this event please contact Mary
Ricketson at maryricketson311@hotmail.com.
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
Barren Magazine Poetry Contest
Ben Cutler, poet and rep for NCWN-West in Swain County won second place in the Barren Magazine poetry contest.
https://barrenmagazine.com/to-my-eldest-at-the-age-of-burning/
Benjamin Cutler is our NCWN-West Rep for Swain County.
Learn more about Ben here,
Book release for Brent Martin June 17
Brent Martin's new collection The Changing Blue Ridge Mountains: Essays on Journeys Past and Present is being released by History Press on June 17th.
He will be reading from this book on Friday, June 21st at 7:00 PM at the Macon County Public Library in Franklin, NC, 149 Siler Farm Road, Franklin NC - 28734
Brent will be leading a three day Power of Place workshop at the new Alarka Expeditions office in Franklin, beginning Monday June 10th.
"We'll have readings and discussions on the role of place in writing, along with field trips each week to a different location for exercises in creativity. Cost is $35 per session."
Anyone interested can email Brent directly at alarkaexpeditions@gmail.com or visit this website: https://www.alarkaexpeditions.com/upcoming-events
Tuesday, June 4, 2019
City Lights Bookstore, Sylva, NC announces Jacar Press' publication of Kathryn Stripling Byer's "Trawling the Silences," and hosts opening reading June 8, 2019
It is with great joy and sorrow that Jacar Press announces the posthumous publication of Kathryn Stripling Byer's Trawling the Silences. The book should be available late May, and City Lights Bookstore in Sylva will host an opening reading on Saturday, June 8, 2019, at 6:30. Please join us if you can.
Jacar Press will be donating proceeds from sales to a cause Kay valued. We are in the process of narrowing that down and will have a decision on that soon.
When she died suddenly from lymphoma in June 2017, Kathryn Stripling Byer had just completed her 7th, and what would be her last, collection of poetry, Trawling the Silences. It is a book of great beauty and heartbreak, revisiting all her important themes - family and ancestry, the natural world, the inevitable process of aging and death, and the pressing issues of environmental degradation, racism, and international conflict - with an urgency that seems, in retrospect, to have come from an awareness about what fate awaited her. Kay loved the craft of poetry and the expressive possibilities of intricate poetic structures. She wrote free verse, metrical verse, syllabic verse, and used forms as diverse as the sestina and the ghazal. Though often dense with meaning and allusion, her work remains accessible to any careful reader.
During her writing career, Kathryn Stripling Byer received many honors and awards, including the Lamont prize for her second book, Wildwood Flower, the North Carolina Governor’s Award for Literature, in 2001, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She was the first woman to be selected as the North Carolina Poet Laureate and served from 2005 to 2009. In 2012 she was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.
For more information, contact City Lights Bookstore at: 828-586-9499
Jacar Press will be donating proceeds from sales to a cause Kay valued. We are in the process of narrowing that down and will have a decision on that soon.
When she died suddenly from lymphoma in June 2017, Kathryn Stripling Byer had just completed her 7th, and what would be her last, collection of poetry, Trawling the Silences. It is a book of great beauty and heartbreak, revisiting all her important themes - family and ancestry, the natural world, the inevitable process of aging and death, and the pressing issues of environmental degradation, racism, and international conflict - with an urgency that seems, in retrospect, to have come from an awareness about what fate awaited her. Kay loved the craft of poetry and the expressive possibilities of intricate poetic structures. She wrote free verse, metrical verse, syllabic verse, and used forms as diverse as the sestina and the ghazal. Though often dense with meaning and allusion, her work remains accessible to any careful reader.
During her writing career, Kathryn Stripling Byer received many honors and awards, including the Lamont prize for her second book, Wildwood Flower, the North Carolina Governor’s Award for Literature, in 2001, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She was the first woman to be selected as the North Carolina Poet Laureate and served from 2005 to 2009. In 2012 she was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.
For more information, contact City Lights Bookstore at: 828-586-9499
Address:
3 East Jackson Street
Sylva, North Carolina 28779Monday, June 3, 2019
Writers' Night Out June 14 with Prose & Poetry
Join us in Blairsville at the Union County Community Center
Local writer James Davis teams up with 2013 Georgia Author the Year (in poetry) and former Atlanta Review editor Dan Veach
Followed by Open Mic
Kathryn Stripling Byer's last book posthumous publication by Jacar Press
Please keep this date - Saturday, June 8, 6:30pm at City Lights Bookstore, Sylva, NC
It is with great joy and sorrow that Jacar Press announces the posthumous publication of Kathryn Stripling Byer's Trawling the Silences. The book should be available late May, and City Lights Bookstore in Sylva will host an opening reading on Saturday, June 8, at 6:30. Please join us.
Jacar Press will be donating proceeds from sales to a cause Kay valued. We are in the process of narrowing that down and will have a decision on that soon.
When she died suddenly from lymphoma in June 2017, Kathryn Stripling Byer had just completed her 7th, and what would be her last, collection of poetry, Trawling the Silences.
It is a book of great beauty and heartbreak, revisiting all her important themes - family and ancestry, the natural world, the inevitable process of aging and death, and the pressing issues of environmental degradation, racism, and international conflict - with an urgency that seems, in retrospect, to have come from an awareness about what fate awaited her. Kay loved the craft of poetry and the expressive possibilities of intricate poetic structures. She wrote free verse, metrical verse, syllabic verse, and used forms as diverse as the sestina and the ghazal. Though often dense with meaning and allusion, her work remains accessible to any careful reader.
During her writing career Kathryn Stripling Byer received many honors and awards, including the Lamont prize for her second book, Wildwood Flower, the North Carolina Governor’s Award for Literature, in 2001, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She was the first woman to be selected as the North Carolina Poet Laureate, and served from 2005 to 2009. In 2012 she was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.
Text above from Jacar Press Facebook page.
It is with great joy and sorrow that Jacar Press announces the posthumous publication of Kathryn Stripling Byer's Trawling the Silences. The book should be available late May, and City Lights Bookstore in Sylva will host an opening reading on Saturday, June 8, at 6:30. Please join us.
Jacar Press will be donating proceeds from sales to a cause Kay valued. We are in the process of narrowing that down and will have a decision on that soon.
When she died suddenly from lymphoma in June 2017, Kathryn Stripling Byer had just completed her 7th, and what would be her last, collection of poetry, Trawling the Silences.
It is a book of great beauty and heartbreak, revisiting all her important themes - family and ancestry, the natural world, the inevitable process of aging and death, and the pressing issues of environmental degradation, racism, and international conflict - with an urgency that seems, in retrospect, to have come from an awareness about what fate awaited her. Kay loved the craft of poetry and the expressive possibilities of intricate poetic structures. She wrote free verse, metrical verse, syllabic verse, and used forms as diverse as the sestina and the ghazal. Though often dense with meaning and allusion, her work remains accessible to any careful reader.
During her writing career Kathryn Stripling Byer received many honors and awards, including the Lamont prize for her second book, Wildwood Flower, the North Carolina Governor’s Award for Literature, in 2001, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She was the first woman to be selected as the North Carolina Poet Laureate, and served from 2005 to 2009. In 2012 she was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.
Text above from Jacar Press Facebook page.
Friday, May 31, 2019
Dream Take Flight by Lisa Turner now on Amazon
Lisa Turner sent us this news:
My new book Dream Take Flight just went live on Amazon! The official release date is June 3rd, my husband's birthday, he was such a supporter.
A Shy Girl Breaks the Rules
Refusing to follow the traditional career path for girls, Lisa Turner sets out to fulfill a promise she makes to her dying mother, disrupting the status quo every step of the way. When Lisa decides to build an airplane in the garage at the age of 45, her family thinks she has gone too far . . .
She says it is available in June on Kindle for 99 cents. What a bargain!
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Where I’m From
We are happy to have Valerie Nieman, author of fiction and poetry as our guest blogger today. She has written an interesting post for our blog. I hope you will leave comments for Valerie, and remember she will be in Hayesville, NC July 6, at the Moss library. See sidebar for more information.
Where I’m From
by
Valerie Nieman
I’m
from New York. And I’m an Appalachian. Born,
bred, educated, lived, worked there. Only in recent years have I slipped out of
the mountains, living now just a few miles from the “official” border of the
region. That world was my world, and still is, appearing in my poems and novels
all along, but most strongly in my latest, To the Bones.
Appalachia, as
defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission, takes in more than 200,000
square miles, encompassing West Virginia and parts of 12 other states. Despite
the stereotypes about “hillbillies” and “mountain people,” there’s no single
culture. It’s still heavily rural, more than 40 percent of the population
living in rural areas compared with 20 percent nationally, but accents, food
ways, ethnic makeup, and economies vary greatly across the region.
I
grew up in Cattaraugus County, NY, one of 14 counties that make up the
“Southern Tier” along the border with Pennsylvania. The hills there are low and
soft, the Allegheny Plateau, good land for dairy farming. Memories from my
growing-up days — maple sugaring, Amish neighbors, big gardens, harsh winters —
were superseded by the three decades I lived in West Virginia, yet they
continue to crop up in my writing. Darrick, one of the main characters in To the Bones, went to school at St. Bonaventure. Oil City, PA,
makes an appearance in a poem in Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse.
In
1976, I headed south to Morgantown, WV, to get my journalism degree at West
Virginia University. The Mountain State caught my heart when I camped with my
then-boyfriend at Cooper’s Rock State Park, waking after a late arrival to a
glory of dogwoods and bird song.
It’s a different
kind of hills from the ones where I grew up, most notably in the presence of
coal mining. The culture, too, was different. Soup beans and cornbread.
Pepperoni rolls. But many things were the same—both areas had seen much
immigration from Italy, and excellent Italian food was celebrated in both
western New York and north central West Virginia. And in both places, I
gathered wild berries and apples gone feral, though it was in West Virginia
that I came to know the despised wild leek of my childhood as “ramps,” and a
really fine food when properly prepared.
I
came to North Carolina in 1997, to the land of barbecue, tobacco, and
restaurants offering “meat and three.” Grits replaced home fries on the
breakfast menus. Collard greens and pinto beans are Southern kin to creasy
greens and soup beans. North Carolina is Appalachian—Gov. Roy Cooper is
co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission.
Appalachia today is a diverse
place, but it always was. Native Americans, Spanish and French and English
explorers, Irish and Scot and Scots-Irish settlers. African-Americans brought
forcibly as slaves and whose descendants came north to the mines and mills in
the Great Migration. Germans who came to work in the glass plants of the Ohio
Valley. Peoples from all over Europe, Polish and Italians and Welsh and
Hungarians and many others, whose emigration landed them in the coal camps. “Lebanese” peddlers who offered goods to isolated farms and
to miners’ wives. And so on, to new arrivals from all over the globe who come
to start new lives or attend college or work in the High Technology Corridor.
The ill-educated, ill-clothed
mountaineer with a jug and a hound? That media creation proved useful in
denying residents a say in their lands, resources, politics, future. They just
weren’t suited to such things,
went the standard line, and so needed to be corralled and cozened. When I
arrived in West Virginia University in 1975, you could still get souvenirs
depicting that hillbilly stereotype in the university bookstore, but the WVU
mascot has been for nearly a century the Mountaineer. A heroic bronze figure of the buckskin-clad pioneer has
stood on the campus since 1971.
To the Bones satirizes stereotypes and as a genre mashup, plays with the
tropes of mystery, horror, tall tale, even a bit of romance. The stranger comes
to town is a recurring theme in Westerns, but is also what John Gardner called
one of the two great stories. (The other is a man (woman) goes on a journey—Peer
Gynt, Odysseus, Harry Potter, and the list goes on.) But the deep story in this
novel is one of love and despair, people who deeply love the land of their
birth and rearing, yet who clearly see the despoiling and destruction wrought
by the extractive industries that put food on the table.
Too much has
been taken out and too little given back. My place back in West Virginia had a
capped gas well in the field, a mine crack in the back field, and no water—the mines had cut off the aquifer. But I loved it.
Appalachian I
was, and remain. You can see it right there in the stories and poems.
Writing Magazines - Which ones do you read?
When I was a beginning writer, in south Georgia, I subscribed to Writer's Digest Magazine. I took a course offered by the magazine and it was taught by a North Carolina author. He was an excellent teacher and helped me keep my eye on writing when I was about to give it up.
I learned from the articles in the magazine on fiction, poetry and nonfiction. I saved all the copies for years and reread them.
After I moved to NC and met more published writers, I subscribed to Writer Magazine and Poets and Writers, but I still enjoy and use the articles in Writer's Digest for teaching beginning writers.
I met Robert Brewer, WD's poetry editor at the Blue Ridge Writers' conference a few years ago. I began to follow his poetry column. His readers interact with him on his blog which is part of Writers' Digest site.
Later he published my article:
https://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/interviewing-poets-why-and-how
I recommend writing magazines to aspiring writers. The articles are usually short but have a point. Great writing tips.
Do you take any magazines on writing and what do you think?
Do you subscribe to online magazines that are helpful for your writing?
Other posts on writing: https://netwestwriters.blogspot.com/2019/03/guest-post-by-c-hope-clark-award.html
https://netwestwriters.blogspot.com/2017/06/interview-with-rosemary-rhodes-royston.html
I learned from the articles in the magazine on fiction, poetry and nonfiction. I saved all the copies for years and reread them.
After I moved to NC and met more published writers, I subscribed to Writer Magazine and Poets and Writers, but I still enjoy and use the articles in Writer's Digest for teaching beginning writers.
I met Robert Brewer, WD's poetry editor at the Blue Ridge Writers' conference a few years ago. I began to follow his poetry column. His readers interact with him on his blog which is part of Writers' Digest site.
Later he published my article:
https://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/interviewing-poets-why-and-how
I recommend writing magazines to aspiring writers. The articles are usually short but have a point. Great writing tips.
Do you take any magazines on writing and what do you think?
Do you subscribe to online magazines that are helpful for your writing?
Other posts on writing: https://netwestwriters.blogspot.com/2019/03/guest-post-by-c-hope-clark-award.html
https://netwestwriters.blogspot.com/2017/06/interview-with-rosemary-rhodes-royston.html
Sunday, May 19, 2019
Charley Pearson, NCWN-West member, was featured guest at CWPW
Charley Pearson, author, and retired nuclear engineer, was featured at our recent Coffee with the Poets and Writers. I visited his Facebook page and his website today. He has a great sense of humor and his information on his page is made more interesting because of his wit. Charley's medical thriller, Scourge, is out now and available online and in bookstores.
I liked the page, Writer-Aids, on his website. Lots of good advice for writers from someone who knows.
http://charleypearson.com/writer-aids/
I think you will like it, too.
If you could not be at CWPW this month, you missed a great program, but you can get a taste of what Charley is all about and read about his latest book on his website. http://charleypearson.com
Charley along with Merry Elrick head up the Mountain Writers group in Waynesville that meets each month at Panacea restaurant.
I liked the page, Writer-Aids, on his website. Lots of good advice for writers from someone who knows.
http://charleypearson.com/writer-aids/
I think you will like it, too.
If you could not be at CWPW this month, you missed a great program, but you can get a taste of what Charley is all about and read about his latest book on his website. http://charleypearson.com
Charley along with Merry Elrick head up the Mountain Writers group in Waynesville that meets each month at Panacea restaurant.
Friday, May 10, 2019
WRITERS' NIGHT OUT FRIDAY, MAY 10, 7:00 PM
WRITERS' NIGHT OUT
FRIDAY, MAY 10, 7:00 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 10, 7:00 PM
Mary Mike Keller |
Glenda Beall |
On May 10 Glenda Beall and Mary Michelle Keller will read their poetry and prose. The reading begins at 7 p.m. and is followed by an open microphone where audience members can share their own poetry or prose. The free event takes place at the Union County Community Center in Blairsville, GA, and is open to the public.
Beall has been writing and publishing poetry, short stories, and personal essays since 1995. Her latest book, Paws, Claws, Hooves, Feathers and Fins; Family Pets and God’s Other Creatures, was co-authored with local writer Estelle Rice in 2018. Other books include a family history, Profiles and Pedigrees, Descendants of Thomas Charles Council (1858 – 1911), and her poetry chapbook, Now Might as Well be Then (Finishing Line Press). Beall is owner/director of Writers Circle Around the Table in Hayesville, NC, where she teaches and invites writing instructors to hold workshops. She is also Program Coordinator for the North Carolina Writers’ Network-West.
Keller lives in Young Harris, where she began writing over twenty years ago. She finds inspiration in the happenings around her and her life experiences. She is also a painter and finds writing and painting go hand-in-hand as each demands the expression of emotion. She writes for the pure pleasure of creation. She has been published in several places, but does not strive to do so. She enjoys reading her work to others and finds satisfaction in sharing.
Writers’ Night Out is sponsored by North Carolina Writers’ Network-West on the second Friday of every month through November. Anyone wishing to participate in the open mic can sign up at the door to read three minutes of poetry or prose.
The Union County Community Center is located at Butternut Creek Golf Course at 129 Union County Recreation Rd., Blairsville, Georgia 30512, off Highway 129 near the intersection of US 76, phone (706) 439-6092. Food and drinks are available for purchase in The View Grill, but please arrive by 6 pm to get served. For more information on Writers’ Night Out, contact Karen Paul Holmes at (404) 316-8466 or kpaulholmes@gmail.com.
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