Congrats to Randy Maxie. Two of his poems have been published in the latest edition of The MacGuffin, Fall 2020, Vol XXXVI, No. 3.
The poems are: The Buck Stops Here (a clerihew) and If Subtlety Is Worth Its Weight in Gold (a sonnet). This particular MacGuffin was dedicated to various traditional poetic formats.
Here at Netwest Writers, we are happy to see what our members are publishing. Send us your news about your writing.
Join us Friday evening, 7:00 PM, January 8 online for Writer's Night Out. While you are home all comfy and warm, click on Zoom and meet Karen, a writer of prose and poetry. Her work has been widely published.
She did not let the pandemic slow her down. Karen has made appearances online all over the state of North Carolina. She read on Six Minute Stories a podcast with Randell Jones.
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to our readers.
Where ever you are and whoever you are with this holiday season, we wish you joy, peace, and good health.
As we all look forward to a new and better year, I am grateful that some of our members persevered even in a pandemic and published books, won contests, and entered contests in 2020.
We appreciate the NCWN staff for all the opportunities offered online because we could not meet face-to-face.
Carroll Taylor and Karen Holmes have done a fine job of hosting Writers' Night Out and I am glad to be there to help. We will be online again in January with Karen Jackson as our special guest.
Until then, Write on!
It is a one-hour presentation done in costume and British accent. Bob says it is exhausting, but he loves doing it.
This year, for community health reasons, he will be doing it live on Facebook. You can watch it this coming Wednesday, December 16, at 5:00 p.m.
appeared in "West End Poet's Newsletter," (December, January, February, 2021 issue).
www.westendpoetsweekend.com.
Robert Lee Brewer gives us some grammar tips:
https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/shook-vs-shaked-vs-shaken-grammar-rules
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes editing Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. He's the author of Solving the World's Problems, Smash Poetry Journal, and The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets.
Bobbie Christmas in her book, Purge Your Prose of Problems says:
We say ice tea, but the correct word is iced tea. Jane sipped iced tea.
Today in movies and on television, people often use the wrong pronoun and in the wrong order. Bobbie Christmas explains this in Purge Your Prose of Problems.
Incorrect: Send the letter to George and I. (This is often used wrong in media)
Correct: Send the letter to George and me. (Think - Send the letter to me.)
Incorrect: Us women believe in liberation.
Correct: We women believe in liberation.
Incorrect: Send the letter to me and George.
Correct: Send the letter to George and me.
Readers, do you have any writing tips you will share? Email, post on blog, or leave a comment. Help your fellow writers.
Tonight, December 3rd, at 7:00 p.m. EST, poet and editor Malaika King Albrecht and the journal Red-Headed Stepchild host a virtual book launch via Facebook and Zoom. The event is listed on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/events/1083638252032460/ and the direct Zoom link is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83281179470 The event is followed by an Open Mic.
On Sunday, December 6, at 3:30 p.m. EST, poet and
editor Rose McClarney and the North Carolina Arboretum host a reading of
various authors from the collection A Literary Field Guide to Southern
Appalachia (UGA Press), a new literary and natural history anthology. The
book combines natural history information, original art, and poems commissioned
from some of the writers who make up another Southern Appalachian wealth, as
great, perhaps, as its biodiversity—its rich literary community. This special
programfeatures readings by a diverse group of poets who composed original work
for the field guide and conversation about how the natural world inspires and
informs their craft.
Marsha Warren was executive director of the North Carolina Writer's Network when Nancy Simpson and Kathryn Byer began efforts to include the mountain counties in the literary community of North Carolina. Nancy Simpson gave the credit for our present NCWN-West Program to Marsha Warren.
After thirty years, Warren is retiring from heading the Paul Green Foundation where she moved on to after leaving the NCWN.
This is an excellent article about Marsha Warren:
https://www.ncwriters.org/whitecross/2020/11/17/happy-trails-marsha-warren/
We wish Marsha the very best in her retirement years and we thank her for helping to create NCWN-West all those years ago.
To read more about the history of our program here in the mountains, click on https://www.netwestwriters.blogspot.com and select the Founding of NCWN West page.
December 11, Friday, 7:00 PM - Join Writers' Night Out on Zoom when our award-winning guest will be:
Joseph Bathanti , former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and recipient of the 2016 North Carolina Award for Literature. Bathanti lives in Vilas, North Carolina, with his wife, Joan, and two children. Bathanti and his wife met while both were working with the VISTA program.
· He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Communion Partners; Anson County; The Feast of All Saints;
· This Metal, nominated for the National Book Award, and winner of the Oscar Arnold Young Award;
·
Land of Amnesia;
·
Restoring
Sacred Art, winner of the 2010 Roanoke Chowan Prize, awarded
annually by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association for best
book of poetry in a given year;
·
Sonnets
of the Cross;
·
Concertina,
winner
of the 2014 Roanoke Chowan Prize;
·
The
13th Sunday after Pentecost, released by LSU Press
in 2016.
·
His novel, East Liberty, won the
2001 Carolina Novel Award. His novel, Coventry, won the 2006 Novello
Literary Award.
·
His book of stories, The High Heart,
won the 2006 Spokane Prize.
·
They Changed the State: The Legacy of North Carolina’s Visiting Artists,
1971-1995, his book of nonfiction, was published in early 2007.
·
His more recent book of personal essays, Half of What I Say Is Meaningless,
winner of the Will D. Campbell Award for Creative Nonfiction, is from Mercer
University Press.
·
The novel, The Life of the World to Come, was released from University of
South Carolina Press in late 2014.
A new volume of poems, Light at the Seam, is forthcoming in 2022 from LSU Press. Bathanti is the McFarlane Family Distinguished
Professor of Interdisciplinary Education & Writer-in-Residence of
Appalachian State University’s Watauga Residential College in Boone, NC.
He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center
Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical
Center’s Creative Writing Program.
We will post more in coming weeks.
Attention all writers
Want to enter a contest? How about 44 contests in November? Prose, poetry, short story, memoir, -
some thing for all of us. Check them out at the link below.
We are thrilled to see an interview
with Karen Paul Holmes in an Atlanta publication, Shout Out Atlanta.
Karen came
to success in writing poetry when she took a poetry class sponsored by
NCWN-West. The late Nancy Simpson, co-founder of the mountain program, taught
the all day workshop in Blairsville, GA. Many of our members live in North Georgia. Karen
has a vacation home on Lake Chatuge where she spends much of her time. She
attended our poetry critique meetings at Tri-County Community College where she
honed her skills with published writers like Janice Moore and Nancy.
This is the
link to this outstanding interview.
Leave a
comment below, please. Support your fellow writers with you words.
Marcia Hawley Barnes writes reviews for the Clay County Progress Newspaper. Recently she has been reading and writing books by local writers.
I was delighted when she chose my poetry book, Now Might as Well be Then, published by Finishing Line Press for her October choice. Thanks to Marcia for this wonderful review.
I want to thank those who wrote such nice reviews on Finishing Line site for my poetry book. This book was available on Amazon.com but is no longer available there. The book can be ordered from Finishing Line Press or from me, Glenda Beall.
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.
www.yourdailypoem.com
The crew of the Reba Jean, a B-17 bomber in the U.S. Eighth Army Air Corps, take to the skies above WWII Europe. Flying at an altitude of twenty-five thousand feet (twenty-five angels), the crew, including a pilot with an overly acute sense of responsibility for his men, a Jewish officer, and an anti-Semitic non-com, strive to achieve victory over the elite German Luftwaffe, and survive. The events that occur along the way make for a compelling story, culminating in a breathtaking ending sure to leave you on the edge of your seat.
 |
| Tom Hooker |
Tom Hooker was born and raised in North Mississippi, receiving a degree from the University of Mississippi. He and his family have lived in Hendersonville, North Carolina since 1988. Tom has had short stories and poems published in a number of literary journals across the nation. He and Gary Ader co-authored a novel entitled, THE WAR NEVER ENDS, and he has also written a non-fiction work entitled, CALVARY’S CHILD: THE LIFE OF AMANDA CAROL HOOKER.
Writers' Night Out - 7:00 pm 2nd Friday of each month - Join us on Zoom
October – Scott Owens - Host Glenda Beall
November - Paul Higdon - Host Karen Holmes
December – Joseph Bathanti – Host Carroll Taylor
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.
