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ASHEVILLE—Keith Flynn, whose book The Rhythm Method, Razzamatazz, and Memory: How to Make Your Poetry Swing was recently re-released by Press 53, will lead the poetry session "Capturing the Persona Poem" at the North Carolina Writers' Network 2019 Fall Conference, November 8-10, at the Doubletree by Hilton Asheville-Biltmore.
Conference registration is open.
Keith Flynn (www.keithflynn.net) is the award-winning author of seven books, including six collections of poetry: most recently Colony Collapse Disorder (Wings Press, 2013) and forthcoming The Skin of Meaning (Red Hen Press, 2020). He is the Executive Director and producer of the TV show, “LIVE at White Rock Hall,” and Animal Sounds Productions, both which create collaborations between writers and musicians in video and audio formats. His award-winning poetry and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies around the world, including The American Literary Review, The Colorado Review, Poetry Wales, Five Points, Poetry East, The Southern Poetry Anthology, The Poetics of American Song Lyrics, Writer’s Chronicle, The Cimarron Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, Word, and Witness: 100 Years of NC Poetry, Crazyhorse, and many others. He has been awarded the Sandburg Prize for poetry, a 2013 NC Literary Fellowship, the ASCAP Emerging Songwriter Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award, and was twice named the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for NC. Flynn is founder and managing editor of The Asheville Poetry Review, which began publishing in 1994.
This year, NCWN has been celebrating libraries, so we asked Keith to give us his best library memory. He generously shared two!
"Two library anecdotes stand out for me. The first was when I was in the 5th grade and my teacher, Ms. Redmon was about 5'2" inches tall, as round as a fire hydrant, with a sweet smile that seemed to cover her entire face, that was always flushed, with the tiniest purple veins like a spider's web on her neck. I was a straight-A student, driven, but bored, and my boredom caused Ms. Redmon much consternation after I had thrown another spitball or pulled another pigtail or got into another fight.
"Finally, her patience bested, she took me aside, and staring hard into my eyes, she took off the key that she kept on a chain around her neck and said, 'Look little Flynn, the next time you want to cause me some trouble, or you're bored and not being challenged, you take this key and go to the library and you start reading a book. Then you make a one paragraph report about what you've read and I'll give you extra credit, starting right now.'
"When she put the chain around my neck, I felt entirely special, as if knighted, and took to my task with a wild ambition. I would read every book in that small room, with shelves from floor to ceiling, and started with a biography of the Apache chief Cochise. I didn't get to every book that year, but that faith in me compelled a love of the written word that has never abated, and I owe that kind woman a debt that can never be repaid. Every writer has a story of some teacher whose faith in them inspired their dogged creative impulse. I'm lucky in the fact that I have had more than one of those teachers, but the lovely moon face of Ms. Redmon still occupies a place in my memory as the first in that lineage.
"The second incident occurred when I was a freshman at Mars Hill College, attending on a basketball scholarship, and starting to be called to become a poet, which for me seemed like a religious conversion, I know no other way to describe it, and everywhere I was confronted with signs and signifiers. My first foray into the library I found a book of poetry, The Far Field, by the great Saginaw poet, Theodore Roethke, and was so moved by the music and methods of these poems that I had to have the book as my own. Impetuously, I tossed the small collection from the second floor window into the bushes below and ran to my dorm room to dissect those amazing lines. It was the first thing I had ever stolen in my life; and I have carried that book with me for forty years. I imagine the library fees might pay for a new wing on that building should they ever come due."
Persona, from the Latin, means mask, and "Capturing the Persona Poem" will focus on the perspective of first person narration in composing poetry from behind the mask and the development of the poet speaking in the voice of historical figures, incorporating the poet's own personal experience into the presentation. The dramatic monologues of Robert Browning will be examined. The figures speaking through the poems of Frank Bidart, Ai, Margaret Atwood, John Berryman, Terrance Hayes, Anne Sexton, and others will be discussed, illustrating how authenticity is captured through the accumulation of specific detail and intimacy between the audience and the author. The theatrical vagaries of detachment and the manipulation of identity will be viewed as strategies in the construction of the poem's narrative.
Each participant should submit two poems in first person, prior to the workshop, for group discussion and any poems deemed exemplary will considered for publication in Asheville Poetry Review.
Fall Conference attracts hundreds of writers from around the country and provides a weekend full of activities that include lunch and dinner banquets with readings, keynotes, tracks in several genres, open mic sessions, and the opportunity for one-on-one manuscript critiques with editors or agents. Jeremy B. Jones will lead the Master Class in Creative Nonfiction. Ron Rash will give the Keynote Address.
The nonprofit North Carolina Writers’ Network is the state’s oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to all writers, in all genres, at all stages of development. For additional information, visit www.ncwriters.org.
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ASHEVILLE—Catherine Carter has published two collections of poetry with LSU Press, The Memory of Gills and The Swamp Monster at Home, with a third, Larvae of the Nearest Stars, forthcoming in fall, 2019.
Her poetry has won the North Carolina Literary Review’s James Applewhite Prize, the NC Literary and Historical Society’s Roanoke-Chowan Award, NCWN’s Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition, Jacar Press’ chapbook contest, Still: The Journal’s poetry prize, and the NC Poetry Society’s poet laureate’s prize; it has also appeared in Best American Poetry 2009, Orion, Poetry, Ecotone, Tar River Poetry, Cortland Review, and Ploughshares, among others.
She is a professor of English at Western Carolina University and a poetry editor at Cider Press Review.
At the North Carolina Writers' Network 2019 Fall Conference, Catherine will lead the poetry session "It Looks Like a Hairball: Building Short Lyrics Around Sound."
The NCWN 2019 Conference runs November 8-10 at the Doubletree by Hilton Asheville-Biltmore. Registration is open.
This year, NCWN has been celebrating libraries. As part of this year-long appreciation, Catherine shared the following:
At my very first writing workshop, a two-week seminar at Washington College, I first met other teenagers as excited about writing as I was. Though most of us didn’t drink yet, late-night conversations about reading and writing with fellow nerdy teenaged writers were intoxicating, so much so that a group of us liked to prowl the brick streets and wharves of Chestertown in the evenings, talking and giggling and sometimes singing together, feeling like the Inklings, or the New York poets, or anything except provincial kids with learner’s permits and literary ambitions.
And when we strolled into the local public library one evening, to subject it to our new-minted writerly judgment, we made enough noise that we were (wait for it) asked to leave.
As (mostly) card-carrying Good Kids, more likely to be stuffed inside our own lockers than to see the inside of a detention hall, we were on top of the world: so cosmopolitan, wandering the small-town streets at night! mistaken for bad influences! thrown out of a library!
I’d spent a lot of quality hours in my home library, but none to rival the illicit thrill of this one. And while I don’t know that that long-ago librarian is even still alive—this was thirty-five years ago—if I could find her now, I’d thank her.
In "It Looks Like a Hairball: Building Short Lyrics Around Sound," a lecture/workshop, Catherine Carter will use contemporary poems to discuss a few of the ways in which a poem can be built around the sounds of single words, model one possible process for revising a poem in this way, and encourage participants to do this with their own works. Participants should bring a hard copy of one or two of their own short poems to work on.
Fall Conference attracts hundreds of writers from around the country and provides a weekend full of activities that include lunch and dinner banquets with readings, keynotes, tracks in several genres, open mic sessions, and the opportunity for one-on-one manuscript critiques with editors or agents. Jeremy B. Jones will lead the Master Class in Nonfiction. Other poetry offerings include sessions led by Mildred Barya, Keith Flynn, Laura Hope-Gill, and Eric Tran. Ron Rash will give the Keynote Address.
The nonprofit North Carolina Writers’ Network is the state’s oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to all writers, in all genres, at all stages of development. For additional information, visit www.ncwriters.org.
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ASHEVILLE—Dale Neal, whose new novel Appalachian Book of the Dead: a Southern Buddhist Thriller is out now from SFK Press, will lead the multigenre session "Why Not Ask?" at the North Carolina Writers' Network 2019 Fall Conference, November 8-10, at the Doubletree by Hilton Asheville-Biltmore.
Conference registration is open.
Dale Neal is a novelist and veteran journalist in Asheville. His previous novels are award-winning Cow Across America and The Half-Life of Home. As a reporter, he traveled everywhere from Upper Paw Paw in Madison County to Karachi in Pakistan, covering culture, books, religion, business, science, and technology for the Asheville Citizen-Times. His short stories and essays have appeared in Arts & Letters, North Carolina Literary Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College.
This year, NCWN has been celebrating libraries, so we asked Dale to give us his best library memory. He generously shared the following:
"I grew up reading as an escape from the world, favoring Tarzan of the Apes, Bomba the Jungle Boy, Zorro, Mad Magazine, Marvel Comics.
"But it was in the library at R.J. Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem where I finally grew up in my reading.
"Here on the wall of oak shelves, in the daylight beaming through the high glass windows, stood the books that adults read. I can still remember reaching overhead, there on the top shelf at the corner, under the A’s of the Fiction section. I pulled down an old tattered hard-back, A Death in the Family, by someone named James Agee.
"Here was the book that didn’t allow me to escape this world, but showed me my own life in its pages.
"Over and over, I read that incantation of 'Knoxville Summer 1915.' Agee was writing of a world not alien to me, a suburban childhood not all that different from my own, of being with his family, loved and protected, but somehow still alone in a strange world. I didn’t know books could talk to me about my own life:
"'After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto here; and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home, but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.'"
Most writers like to think of themselves as shy introverts, wallflowers, bashful bystanders. We like to be observers, making witty notes about characters in our heads. But making up all those stories and poems all in the privacy of our own imagination can be awfully daunting task. Why not simply ask people about their stories? We may be surprised how much people are willing to talk, which can be a godsend not just to creative nonfiction writers, but to fiction writers and poets.
"Why Not Ask?" will talk about talking to other people, interviewing tips, how to conquer our own self-consciousness, and how to respectfully use other people’s stories in our own work. Come prepared to talk to others.
Fall Conference attracts hundreds of writers from around the country and provides a weekend full of activities that include lunch and dinner banquets with readings, keynotes, tracks in several genres, open mic sessions, and the opportunity for one-on-one manuscript critiques with editors or agents. Jeremy B. Jones will lead the Master Class in Creative Nonfiction. Ron Rash will give the Keynote Address.
The nonprofit North Carolina Writers’ Network is the state’s oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to all writers, in all genres, at all stages of development. For additional information, visit www.ncwriters.org.