- Details
- Category: Network News
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.
- Details
- Category: Network News
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.
- Details
- Category: Network News
ASHEVILLE—Alli Marshall is the author of the novel How to Talk to Rockstars and the arts editor for Asheville's alt-weekly, Mountain xPress.
She's also a performance poet: her most recent collaborative show, “Flyer in a Dark Chamber,” debuted at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in August. She has performed theatrical spoken word at Asheville Fringe Arts Festival, Asheville Percussion Festival, and the {RE}Happening. In May, she curated the inaugural Dear Satyr: An Evening of Erotic Spoken Word. Alli was the 2016 winner of the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize for her short story “Catching Out.” She holds an MFA from Goddard College.
At the North Carolina Writers' Network 2019 Fall Conference, Alli will moderate the panel "Writing Out Loud" with Kevin Evans, Lockie Hunter, and Steve Shell.
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, Alli generously allowed us to print her poem, "Petaluma Regional Library." As follows:
PETALUMA REGIONAL LIBRARY
In the endlessness of ’91 I — who had only
just arrived to Northern California, to
the West Coast, to college — longed for escape.
Sometimes I’d skip class to hitchhike
into town, dreaming down dusty roads
of the future to which I’d eventually wake. Dreaming
of a California that was already slipping
through my hands. I only knew
of the sunflower farms and the cliffs
of Big Sur and the drugs I’d take, maybe,
in Golden Gate Park, if I could scrape together
bus fare. In the library I’d pore over books
on macrame and permaculture. Treehouse
design. How to renovate a VW camper. How
to live off the land (though I was still living
off my parents). A picture was taking
shape. The hazy, over-exposed Polaroid
of it, edges blurred, blond bleached
to white. Thinking if I could read up
on Sonoma County, circa 1972, I could somehow
will it back into being. An education in fiction,
in the nonfiction section. I studied bead craft
and the brief-but-irrefutable rise of Janis Joplin
like a senior seminar, like an extra-credit course.
My library card was a litany of fantasy,
a catalog of childhood intersecting
real life. Autumn only grew more golden, the coast
more restless, the bay trees more
perfumed. Everything was calling. Everything
was a dissertation on desire and how to name it.
During the panel discussion "Writing Out Loud," Asheville-based writers will discuss the adventures, challenges, and best practices of performative work, such as live readings, poetry slams, radio appearances, and the theatrical applications of spoken word. The conversation will also include thoughts on curating literary events, from the selection process to marrying diverse voices onstage, to marketing the event. Panelists have worked in radio, print media and education. Their combined experiences include organizing and performing at events such as The Moth StorySLAM, the Asheville-Biscuithead Slam Poetry Series, WordPlay Radio Show, the Juniper Bends Reading Series, Asheville Poetry Cabaret, and HomeWord Youth Poetry open mic.
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. Master Classes will be led by Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs (Poetry) and Jeremy B. Jones (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.