Check back for next meeting - September 2nd, 2008
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Thursday, May
108 S. Main Street, Davidson
7:00pm-9:00pm
This month marks
the completion of the first year of Charlotte Writers’ Club-North.
The first presentation in September “Riding Out, Poems of Grief and
Redemption,” by Ann Campanella and Terri Wolfe has continued to be
performed throughout the area. In October, Brenda Flanagan,
creative writing teacher and author, from Davidson College read from
her fiction and filled the evening with joy. Among other gatherings
we celebrated the holidays with a new award-winning book by Joe
Bathanti, author and editor, Lisa Kline arranged readings by writers
in the CWC Anthology, “Only Connect.” Gilda Morina Syverson spoke
about “Writing from the Body” and about her art work, which later
became an exhibit in the gallery in which we meet. Tony Abbott lead
a discussion on the evolution of his second novel, “The Three Great
Secret Things,” Don Mager read from his newly published book of
sonnets, “Drive Time.” The April presenter, Rosie Molinary,
kept us in stitches as she related family stories and introduced us
to her new book, Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and
Growing Up Latina. Our final meeting will present the winners
of the 5th annual Anthony Abbott Poetry Competition, and
we will have the opportunity to meet Jason Koo, guest teacher at
Davidson College and listen to his poetry. Jason Koo will
be reading from his work and saying a few words about the prize
winning poems in the Anthony Abbott Competition. His poems have
appeared or are forthcoming in The Yale Review, North American
Review, Verse, Another Chicago Magazine, Bellingham Review, Green
Mountains Review, on Verse Daily, and elsewhere. His
reviews and interviews have appeared in Gulf Coast, Center
and The Missouri Review, where he served as Poetry Editor. He
is now Poetry Editor for the new literary journal, Low Rent.
Koo holds a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the
University of Missouri-Columbia, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from
the University of Houston, and a B.A. in English from Yale
University. He is a visiting assistant professor of English at
Davidson College. The committee of
Charlotte Writers’ Club-North would like to extend our thanks to the
members, the readers, and in particular the Davidson Library who
allowed us (at the last minute) to use their conference room the
night we were locked out of our gallery space. It’s been a grand
year, with more to come!
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Thursday, April
108 S. Main Street, Davidson
7:00pm-9:00pm
WHAT
DEFINES US?
HAVE YOU EVER, IN
THE INTEREST OF THE WORLD'S COMMON GOOD, WANTED TO WORK FOR, AND IN,
YOUR COMMUNITY? IF SO, LET'S TALK!
Please come join
us Thursday, April 3 at 7
PM, 108 S. Main Street in Davidson, when the CWC-North's speaker is
the author,
ROSIE MOLINARY, WHO, THROUGH HER
WRITINGS ASKS,
WHAT DEFINES US?
Her new book is
HIJAS AMERICANAS: BEAUTY, BODY
IMAGE, AND GROWING UP
LATINA.
Rosie came to
Davidson College with a four year Bonner Scholarship. She was a
Center
major with emphasis on African American Studies and Urban
Issues. Her work as a Bonner Scholar was primarily in education and
specifically in alternative education settings, alternative high
schools for violent and youthful offenders and also youth programs
that worked with gang-affiliated young men. Her senior thesis
concentrated on youth gangs and what roles schools can play in
minimizing youth violence. In 1996, upon graduation from Davidson
College, she received her teaching certification and went to teach
and coach at Garinger High in Charlotte, a job she says,
she loved. She returned to
Davidson College as Director of Community Service and Bonner Scholar
Programs in 1999 and began her MFA program in creative writing in
2000. She completed that program and received her MFA from Goddard
College with a concentration on poetic and nonfiction forms. While
working at Davidson College for the next six years, she also served
as an adjunct lecturer for the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies,
teaching a seminar on the creative process. A freelance writer,
she contributes features and articles regularly to
Lake Norman,
University
City,
Charlotte,
Philanthropy
Journal,
Our State, and
North Carolina
Signature magazines. She edits and writes for
Charlotte Medical
News. Her national bylines include
Lifetimetv.com,
Health,
Women's Health,
Ms.,
and Teen
Vogue. Rosie says,
I love sports. I
usually say yes to most any opportunity (both a strength and a
flaw). I have no rituals with writing and wish that I did. I haven't
written a poem since graduate school. I still want to be Harriet the
Spy.
Thursday, March
6,
2008
108 S. Main Street, Davidson
7:00pm-9:00pm
Don Mager In a time when
energy consumption strains the earth’s resources and degrades the
environment in drastic, perhaps catastrophic ways, the American
automobile industry aggressively promotes products with glamorous
fantasies of testosterone rushes about speed and rugged adventure.
Meanwhile, suburban sprawl creates a daily diet of long commutes,
gridlock, road rage and parking nightmares. Somewhere between the
myth of the car and the reality of drivers, fall small unexpected
epiphanies.
Don
Mager’s
Drive Time
captures and honors thirty such moments.
Poet Helen Frost
(author of Keesha’s House, Braids, and Spinning through the
Universe) remarked that these
“affectionate” poems capture “a kind of wry enjoyment of the world .
. .”
January 3, 2008
Guest Speaker -Gilda Morina Syverson
Writing From The Body Gilda Morina Syverson’s journaling and writing
knew long before she did about her ardent interest in the body. Come and
face any distress you’ve put your own bodies through over the holidays,
whether it be food or the emotional talk across the table that set off
the headache, indigestion, sciatic nerve, aching back. Syverson’s
poetry will inspire you to transform your experiences through your
writing life. She is sure to trigger at least one event (have paper &
pencil on hand) that will send you home with an idea for your next poem
or story. Syverson is the author of the chapbook “In This
Dream Everything Remains Inside.” Her award winning poems have been
published in various Literary journals and magazines in the United
States & Canada. She is also a non-fiction writer and visual artist and
has taught both writing and art classes in the Charlotte area for over
28 years. She presently teaches “Rewriting Family Stories” at Queens
University’s Continuing Education Department of Life Long Living. In
2004 Syverson became a Healing Touch Practitioner and integrates
concepts of energetic healing into her creative life of poetry, writing
and art. 2008
Schedule January 3, 2008 February 7, 2008 March 6, 2008 April 3, 2008 May 1, 2008 Charlotte Writers' Club - North
Thursday, December
6,
2008 7-9:00 108 S. Main Street, Davidson December's meeting will offer
two points of focus. Local authors will be on hand to sign their books
for holiday gifts, and Joe Bathanti will talk about his newly published
collection of stories. Joseph Bathanti grew up in Pittsburgh and came back
to North Carolina in 1976 as a VISTA volunteer to work in the state's
prison system. He is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent
of which, This Metal, was nominated for the National Book
Award, as well as two novels, East Liberty and Coventry,
for which he received the 2006 Novello Literary Award. The
recipient of numerous other honors, among them the Linda Flowers Prize,
the Sara Henderson Hay Prize, and the Sherwood Anderson Award, he
teaches creative writing and Appalachian State University. The High Heart
is a gripping, soulful collection of linked stories...The
main characters are indelible-the young protagonist, Fritz, his
passive-but-sweet father, Travis, and his explosive mother, Rita, whose
dark sexuality and dissatisfaction loom like storm clouds over these
stories. The writing can be fierce, funny, and touching...The
High Heart satisfies that mysterious quality of
great fiction by managing to be both truthful and artful at the same
time." -Jess Walter, author of
The Zero and final judge for the 2006
Spokane Prize
******************************************************************************* November Charlotte
Writers’ Club—North Thursday, November 1,
2007 108 S. Main Street,
Davidson 7:00pm-9:00pm
Only Connect: The Charlotte Writers’ Club Anthology This month we will present
Lisa Kline and Lou Green:
Lisa will speak about the
process of putting together an anthology - decisions that need to be made including
theme, publisher, choosing and working with the editorial committee, and
communicating with contributors, deciding on issues such as price, release
date, publicity, and so on. Lou Green, the designer of the book, will
discuss decisions and issues surrounding the design. Then the following
contributors will read from their pieces: Ann Campanella, Lou Green,
Caroline Castle Hicks, Lisa Kline, Tootsie O'Hara, Kristine Mossinghoff,
Louise Rockwell, Richard Allan Taylor, and Terri Wolfe. WRITE BEFORE YOUR
EYES, due out from Delacorte Press in 2008, will be Lisa Williams
Kline’s third novel for middle-grade readers. Her first novel, ELEANOR
HILL, was winner of the N. C. Juvenile Literature Award,
and her second, THE PRINCESSES OF ATLANTIS, is in its fourth
reprinting. Her stories for young people have appeared in Spider,
Cicada, Odyssey, and Cricket. Her stories for adults
have appeared in a dozen or so journals and anthologies. She is earning an
MFA in fiction from Queens University, and has just completed her first
novel for adults. She is an Associate Editor for Novello Festival Press in
Charlotte, and reads and evaluates manuscripts for iUniverse. She edited
Only Connect, the Charlotte Writers' Club Anthology, Volume
3. L.B. Green is a
freelance writer, essayist, painter, photographer and teacher. She lives in
Davidson, NC. Her poetry book Judas Trees North of the House was
published in 2003. She was awarded recently a Fellowship of Literature by
the North Carolina Arts Council and also a residency at the Virginia Center
for the Creative Arts. Her visual work has been exhibited in North Carolina
museums and galleries. Her drawings, paintings and photographs are in
private collections across the United States.
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October Charlotte Writers’
Club—North
Thursday, October 4, 2007
108 S. Main Street, Davidson
7:00 PM-9:00 PM
This month we will present
Brenda A. Flanagan: Known
internationally for her dramatic presentations of her stories and poems,
Brenda Flanagan teaches creative writing, Caribbean and African-American
literatures as well as literary analysis. In May 2006 she was named the
first Armfield Professor of English. Professor Flanagan has won
numerous awards for her fiction and drama in the United States and
serves frequently as a cultural ambassador for the US Department of
State, with recent visits to Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia,
Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Chad, Panama and India. Flanagan has won
three National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, four Global
Partners to work with Czech surrealist writers, a Mellon Foundation
Grant, a James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Michigan
Grant for creative writing.
Among the many
journals in which her fiction and poetry have appeared are the Haight
Ashbury Literary Journal, SABLE (England), Caliban, KONCH,
Witness, The Indiana Review, The Bridge, Caribbean
Studies Journal, and Caribbean Review. Her essays have
appeared in American Legacy and Callaloo. When the Jumbiebird
Calls, one of her plays, was successfully staged at the Bonstelle
Theatre, Detroit. Her new collection of stories, In Praise of Island
Women and Other Crimes (KaRu Press 2005) is available, as well as
her prize-winning novel, You Alone Are Dancing (University of
Michigan Press 1996.) Her work is also available on cd. A 2006 winner
of a residency award from the North Carolina Writer's Network, Flanagan
spent summer 2006 at Headlands in California completing a novel. She is
also at work on a book featuring the fiction of Czech surrealist, Eva
Svankmajerova. Flanagan is the Fall editor for the Caribbean issue of
SABLE.
We
meet at
108 S. Mainstreet in Davidson. 7:00 to 9:00 PM.
* * * Pens and calendars, please.
This is to announce Charlotte Writers’
Club—North will commence Thursday, 6
September 2007. We will be meeting in Davidson at 108 Main Street, next to
The Village Store, and perhaps, more importantly up the street from Main
Street Books, Summit Coffee House, and Ben & Jerry's. The meetings will begin at
7:00pm and end around 9:00pm. After a short orientation
about CWC membership, critique groups, competitions, and the wonderment of our
new group, there will be a reading by poets Terri Wolfe and Ann Campanella.
Flyers will be available with the information spelled out. Terri Wolfe
lives in Charlotte and was educated at the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte (B.A.) and Queens University of Charlotte (M.F.A.). Winner of the
Charlotte Writers Club Poetry Contest in 2003 and 2001, her poems have appeared
in Iodine, The Wild Goose Poetry Review, Main Street Rag,
and Independence Boulevard and are forthcoming in The Charlotte
Writers Club Anthology 2007 and in The Poetry of Recovery Anthology.
She currently teaches creative writing in the Center for Lifelong Learning at
Queens University. Ann Campanella,
formerly a magazine and newspaper editor, turned to creative writing to nourish
her soul. Her poetry collection, What Flies Away, was published by Main
Street Rag in 2006. This book weaves together the story of her mother’s descent
into Alzheimer’s, her father’s death and, finally, the miracle of her daughter’s
birth. With nature and animals as her backdrop, Campanella’s writing seeks to
illuminate the many ways in which we, as humans, are connected. Twice, she
received the Poet Laureate Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. She was
also selected for the Blumenthal Readers & Writers Series by the North Carolina
Writers’ Network. She lives on a small farm in Huntersville, NC, with her
husband, daughter and animals. Future dates are as
follows, they will be on the first Thursday of the month:
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She was the first Afro-Caribbean writer to be sent to Libya in 25 years,
and the first speaker there since America and Libya resumed relations.
She was also the first American writer to be sent to Central Asia since
the demise of the Soviet Union. She holds a PH. D from The University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she won three major Hopwood
awards—fiction, drama, and short story.