NCWN Fall Conference: Rash Keynote Address Now Frazier Keynote Conversation
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ASHEVILLE—Due to an unavoidable conflict, the NCWN 2019 Fall Conference will not open with a Keynote Address by bestselling, prize-winning North Carolina novelist Ron Rash, who has had to cancel his appearance.
Instead, the conference will open with a Keynote Conversation with bestselling, prize-winning North Carolina novelist Charles Frazier.
This Keynote Conversation with Charles Frazier will be on Friday, November 8, at 8:00 pm, at the Doubletree by Hilton Asheville-Biltmore.
Charles Frazier grew up in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Cold Mountain (1997), his highly acclaimed first novel, was an international bestseller, won the National Book Award in 1997, and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film by Anthony Minghella in 2003. Charles's second novel, Thirteen Moons (2006), was a New York Times bestseller and named a best book of the year by The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His third novel, Nightwoods (2011), also a New York Times bestseller, is a critically acclaimed literary thriller set in a fictional Western North Carolina town in the early 1960s.
Charles's latest novel, Varina, an instant New York Times bestseller released in April of 2018, is a fictional reimagining of the life of Varina Howell Davis before, during, and after the American Civil War.
Margaret D. Bauer, editor of the North Carolina Literary Review, the Ralph Hardee Rives Chair of Southern Literature in the Department of English at East Carolina University, and a trustee of the North Carolina Writers' Network, will facilitate the conversation during Charles Frazier's Keynote Address.
The North Carolina Writers’ Network 2019 Fall Conference is a full weekend of sessions and workshops on the craft and business of writing, including fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, the business of books, and more. Additional programming includes a world premiere of poems set to music by the Asheville-based ensemble Pan Harmonia; readings by veterans from the anthology Brothers Like These, hosted by former NC Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti; faculty readings; open mics; and more.
Pre-registration for the NCWN 2019 Fall Conference ends November 1.
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.
Discovering a Reality She Wasn't Told She Was Allowed to Have: Laura Hope-Gill
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ASHEVILLE—Laura Hope-GIll, the director of the Thomas Wolfe MFA Program at Lenoir-Rhyne University and the founding director of Asheville Wordfest, will lead the poetry-prose session "Write with the Wolfe—a Poetry/Prose Poetry Rebellion" at the North Carolina Writers' Network 2019 Fall Conference, November 8-10, at the Doubletree by Hilton Asheville-Biltmore.
Conference registration is open.
Laura's collection of poems, The Soul Tree, received the first Okra Award from the Southern Independent Booksellers Association. The National Forest Service and Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation inducted her as the first poet laureate of the Blue Ridge Parkway for her poems honoring the Southern Appalachians. She received two awards from the North Carolina Society of Historians for her two architectural histories of Asheville, Look Up Asheville, I and 2. While building a graduate writing program and raising a child, she has been developing a memoir about her journey to deafness and a novel based on her grandmother's experience in a Japanese Prison Camp and the aftermath of World War II. She is a champion of the vital connection between story and medicine and launched the world's first certificate program in Narrative Healthcare. Her poems, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Parabola, North Carolina Literary Review, and other beautiful publications.
This year, NCWN has been celebrating libraries, so we asked Laura to give us her best library memory.
"I used to forge my drama teacher’s signature on library passes I photocopied at dad’s office to skip classes in high school to read Margaret Atwood’s book of poems in the back corner of the school library. The book was You Are Happy. It was filled with Atwood’s sparse, jarring images reflecting her utter impatience for romantic notions of love and harsh perceptions of an emotional reality I wasn’t told we were allowed to have. I don’t know why I never checked it out, though I do have my college’s library copy from their $1 sale. What I know is that book saved me from my life. This was in the '80s. The only other woman poet I had access to was Emily Dickinson, who of course wasn’t taught the way she should be. With Atwood you couldn’t get distracted by scansion. It was a woman’s interior life in a patriarchy, and it was terrifying and refreshing."
Thomas Wolfe inspired/obsessed Jack Kerouac, Ray Bradbury, William Faulkner, Betty Smith, Pat Conroy, and Robert Morgan. In the town made immortal in Look Homeward, Angel, "Write with the Wolfe—a Poetry/Prose Poetry Rebellion," will delve into Wolfe's poetic prose to break free of the constraints we place on ourselves. Where we might ask, “Is it too much?” Wolfe howls at us: NO! It's not nearly enough! Develop an expansive drafting-and-revision approach that can gather more, more, more of the essence of life and of your own soul. Let go of the censorship and the feeling that our poems need to be as tidy and assembled as an IKEA showroom. Cut loose, be free, write a million words. Laura will present a selection of Wolfe’s poetic passages and direct attention to technical choices that hold the work together. She'll also provide a thematic overview to show the benefits of not holding back when writing including cultural truth telling and to give non-Wolfeans entry points into Wolfe's books and stories.
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. Ron Rash will give the Keynote Address.
The Thomas Wolfe MFA in Creative Writing Program at Lenoir-Rhyne University is the sponsor of Friday night's Welcome Reception.
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.