About Me
- Nancy Simpson
- Nancy Simpson's LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE, New and Selected Poems was published by Carolina Wren Press (N.C. Laureate Series, 2010.) She is the author of ACROSS WATER and NIGHT STUDENT, State Street Press, still available on WWW at Alibris and Books Again. Her poems have been published in Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review and other literary magazines. "Carolina Bluebirds" was published in THE POETS GUIDE TO THE BIRDS, Anhinga Press). "Grass" was reprinted in the 50th Anniversary Issue of Southern Poetry Review: DON'T LEAVE HUNGRY ( U.of Arkansas Press.) Seven poems were reprinted in the textbook, SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN POETRY,(McFarland.) Two poems were published in SOLO CAFE, Two more poems were published in SOLO NOVO."In the Nantahala Gorge" was published in Pisgah Review. "Studying Winter" was reprinted in Pirene's Fountain Anthology and "The Collection" in Collecting Life Anthology. Most recently, Southern Poetry Review Edited by James Smith, published "Our Great Depression," and The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol. VII: NORTH CAROLINA,Edited by William Wright, reprinted "Leaving in the Dead of Winter."
Monday, December 30, 2013
Friday, December 27, 2013
CITY LIGHTS BOOKSTORE HAS 30% DISCOUNT SALE NOW
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Pre-Inventory Sale!
Begins Friday, December 27th
It is that time of year again. Time to count our inventory and get set for 2014. Between December 27th and December 31st receive a 30% discount on most anything in the store. Special orders and gallery items are excluded from the sale. Come by the store and grab that book that you have had your eye on.
New Years Hours
December 31st: 9 a.m. - 4 p.m.
January 1st: Closed
January 2nd: Closed for inventory
January 3rd: 9 a.m.-9 p.m.
January 3rd: 9 a.m.-9 p.m.
City Lights Bookstore carries my book Living Above the Frost Line and also the book I edited with writing by writers living in and inspired by the southern Appalachian mountains -- ECHOES ACROSS THE BLUE RIDGE.
It's the best bookstore to quickly get gift books, signed copies of books by Kathryn Stripling Byer and other notable North Carolina authors.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Poet Kathryn Strilping Byer wins NC Book Award ( Roanoke Chowan )
Congratulations to poet Kathryn Stripling Byer for winning the Roanoke Chowan Book Award for her recently published book Descent. NC Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti also in photo presented the award.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
COFFEE WITH THE POETS With Open Mic DECEMBER 11, 2013
Hello Fellow Poets, There seems to be a lot of activity these days to distract you from your writing. Still, if you are a member of NCWN West or hope to be, I encourage you will come to Coffee With the Poets and Open Mic Poetry Reading. We're open to all poets and writers and we are the best professional support group for writers in the mountains. (Details for Coffee and info about our blog below)
Meanwhile, keep writing and keep in touch, Nancy Simpson
Tuesday, December 3, 2013 (copy of post by CWP Founder Glenda Beall)
Meanwhile, keep writing and keep in touch, Nancy Simpson
A blog for and about the NC Writers' Network-West
All Open Mic in December for Coffee with the Poets and Writers
Coffee with the Poets and Writers meets Wednesday, Dec. 11, 10:30 a.m. at Blue Mountain Coffee and Grill in Murphy, NC.
This monthly reading series is sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network West, and is open to interested writers and poets. The community is invited to participate.
Bring a poem or story, holiday theme if you have one. There will not be a featured reader this month. The program will be all Open Mic. Sign in for a chance to win a door prize. We will begin scheduling readers for next year.
Stay for our social time when we pull tables together and have lunch.
This event will not take place in January and February, but will resume in March, 2014. Contact Glenda Beall, Clay County Representative for NCWN West, 828-389-4441 or nightwriter0302@yahoo.com for information.
What Do They Do In Hayesville at Christmastime?
Hayesville Holiday Tour of Homes
Need a little help getting into the Christmas spirit?
Looking for decorating ideas to make your home a Christmas showcase?
You will get this and more at the Christmas Holiday Tour of homes this weekend—Saturday, Dec. 7 and Sunday, Dec.8. Homes will be open 1:00 – 5:00 both days.
Tickets are $15 each and may be purchased early at the Library, Morning Song Gallery, Molly and Me, the Rustic Rose, and the 100 Exhibit. Tickets may also be purchased at the Old Jail Museum on Saturday or Sunday. If you are unable to purchase your ticket early, you may purchase it at the first home you visit on the tour.
The Clay County Historical and Arts Council sponsors the tour. All proceeds help operate the Old Jail Museum and provide art opportunities for children and adults.
Friday, November 22, 2013
FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY
Fifty years ago to the day, shortly before my 25th birthday, I was a young wife and mother in my Tampa, Florida home, caring for my sons aged four and five. We were playing in our front yard, when a neighbor yelled from across the street that President Kennedy had been shot. I hurried my sons into the house and turned on the tv. Yes, shot and we soon learned that he was dead. President Kennedy had recently been to Tampa and I remember how I feared for his life while he was there. I admired the president, but I knew there were many who greatly hated him. Still, when I heard that he was dead, it was unbelievable. I called my husband at his office and told him. When he repeated my message to others there, I heard the office secretary shout, “Yaaaay!” It hurt me deeply that anyone would cheer at the death of our president.
He had been a good and inspiring leader. I loved and revered President Kennedy and remembered how he handled the Cuban Missile Crisis a few years earlier while we were living in our Miami home. My own family discovered missiles mounted along a canal where we sometimes walked. I remember the day we were led there by my young nephew who had first discovered the missiles. They were situated a distance away from us, and at first I could see nothing. My nephew kept saying, “Wait. Wait.” While we stood there, looking, the missiles rose from underground. My husband and I finally determined they were on a US military base north of Miami that was carefully guarded. Within days of seeing the missiles, Russia was found to be mounting missiles in Cuba aimed at the USA, aimed at Miami where we lived. It was a fearful time. It was during the height of the cold war, and most US citizens knew there were nuclear missiles on earth enough to kill every man, woman and child three times over.
On Television photos of the Russian missiles in Cuba where shown over and over. I remember well those days riding the bus to my job at The Credit Bureau of Greater Miami downtown, my toddler and infant son at home with the baby sitter who was my sister. In Miami, whether on the bus headed to work or at lunch break with my fellow workers, because of the Cuban Missile Crisis, people carried transistor radios. Everywhere on the streets of Miami we saw convoys of American soldiers. Only four blocks from my father’s house, the US military camped out in the Orange Bowl for weeks. It was scary. On tv, President Kennedy declared that the US would board the Russian ships that were known to be carrying more missiles to add to the ones already set up in Cuba. I feared war would come at any moment.
Finally one evening we watched President Kennedy on tv telling the Russians they could not bring any more missiles to Cuba. He told them to turn their carrier around. Back at work the next day, everyone said how much they admired President Kennedy. On transistor radios we learned our US Military boarded the Russian carrier and ordered them to turn around. In the evening, back in our own homes, on tv we watched film of the Russian ships turning around headed back to where they had come from. We were told the Russians dismantled their missiles already in Cuba that were aimed at the USA. I never heard one word about the American missiles I had seen with my own eyes lined up along the canal bank north of Miami which I assumed were aimed at Cuba. I always believed President Kennedy was a good president. He stood strong against the Russians.
Most of all, I saw his greatness in his effort to lay the groundwork for justice among the races. He was drawn into the Civil Rights Movement as we all were by the sight of bloody demonstrations, black citizens being downed by large fire hoses, women beaten my policemen, dogs turned loose on black protestors wanting only equal rights in America. On tv I heard President Kennedy speak in his plea for justice. He called for Congress to pass new civil rights legislations banning segregation. Only five months later, he was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. I was stunned for a long time over the loss of our great and inspiring leader.
Today, it all came rushing back, every memory. Fifty years have passed and I am not that young woman now, but I remember as if happened today.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
AT THIS TIME OF YEAR
At this time of year, like a litany, I access and celebrate four
major treasurers of my life:
I am thankful for my family, my amazing family--Tim, Lynn, Jeremy, Sarah and Savannah, Pearson, Becky and Amanda. What a blessing you are to me. I am thankful for how you care for me. At this particular time of year we celebrate the addition to our family of Jeremy, who arrived from Vietnam on November 20, 1975 at age six. We traveled to New York to meet him, flew him back to Georgia our ancestral home, and drove him to our home on Cherry Mountain. What a blessing Jeremy has been and a true son and brother, as if born into the family. I admit I thought back then that we were saving him from war. How mistaken I was, how arrogant that thought turned out to be, for we all know now Jeremy came to save us, each one of us, one by one in some way or the other.
I’m thankful for my friends, you who have given me your love and friendship, you who unconditionally and unselfishly have stood by me during all kinds of heartache and during unbearable situations--those who have visited when I was sick, brought food or sent or brought crates of cooked food when I could not prepare my own. Thanks for your calls, flowers, Emails, cards, and for regular comments you left on my site. Your care is paying off, for I have been blessed with health and strength.
The Victory Rose
At this time of year, and daily I am thankful for my beloved pets--Queen of the Mountain Sasha (13 years of pure love) and young Roxy who has enough love to go around and much energy to share. They are most responsible for keeping me daily up and moving--saying “Let me out”, “Let me in,” Feed me, “Bath me,” “Give me my Frontline,” “Spray my wounds,” and “Where is my “candy?”
Here at the end of the year, each year,I also celebrate my writing and acknowledge how much writing (both mine and yours) sustains me. This year, I especially appreciate having had my poem “Our Great Depression” included in the Georgia edition of Southern Poetry Review, chosen by James Smith, Editor, and having my poem “Pink Pantsuit” featured in Ted Kooser’s wide reaching newspaper column, and having my book LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE with a number of poems included by Michelle Aldredge in the Sunday poetry feature of GWARLINGO.
Life is good, and I am thankful.
http://www.gwarlingo.com/2013/the-sunday-poem-nancy-simpson/#comment-35562
Monday, November 4, 2013
WORKSHOP - PULLING POEMS TOGETHER INTO A COLLECTION READY FOR PUBLICATION
Hello Poets,
I received a newsletter from City Lights Book Store.
They are announcing Coffee With the Poets, Thursday Nov 21
at 10:30 -- 12:00, a special event with Kathryn Stripling Byer
leading a workshop on pulling poems together into a collection
ready for publication. She will read some of her poems.
Coffee with the Poets gathers every third Thursday at City Lights
Bookstore in Sylva, NC, and it is sponsored by North Carolina
Writers Network WEST. If you are working on putting a poetry
manuscript together, you might want to attend this special event.
Kathryn Byer has published six books of poetry and served
as N.C. Poet Laureate 2005-2009.
More information about Coffee With the Poets in Jackson
County, contact Eon Alden at City Light Bookstore
828 586-9499.
Saturday, November 2, 2013
LEAF SEASON HITS ITS GOLDEN PEAK IN THE SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS
A Message from Charles Simic, Former US Poet Laureate
POSTED by Charles Simic, former Poet Laureate
Bleak House
“They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for bread?”
—Bing Crosby, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” (1931)
Some of us notice them, while others don’t seem to, even though there are 46.5 million of them according to the latest census and they are everywhere if one cares to look. A tall man in his late fifties, whose portrait might have once hung over the boss’s desk in some company office, packing grocery bags in a supermarket with grim efficiency; a meek-looking old couple in a drug store waiting their turn at the cash register with a bottle of generic ibuprofen and a box of tissues, who, upon learning the price for each put the tissues aside and pay with small change for the painkiller; a handsome, middle-aged father, unshaven and looking unkempt, waiting with his small son for a school bus outside a modest home in the suburbs; the tired and resigned look of fast food workers and store clerks in a mall, some of them young, but many of them middle-aged and even older, most of them being paid minimum wage for their work and needing an additional job, food stamps, or some other form of government assistance to support their families; a soup kitchen in New York with people who could be one’s relatives waiting patiently in line.
Anyone who averts his eyes from the hopeless lives many of our fellow citizens lead and tells himself and others that these men and women only have themselves to blame, is either a fool or a soulless bastard.
Not that those who still call themselves middle class are in great shape either. As one travels around the country, one is struck by how poorly dressed many Americans are and how run-down their cities and towns have become. Everyone knows what bankrupt Detroit looks like, but there are many other towns whose air of complete defeat is just as palpable. I once asked a taxi driver in one such place what people do there and he gave me a long list of all the big name manufacturers and businesses that have closed their doors over the past decade or two, confessing that he had no idea how his neighbors managed to make ends meet. I’ve no idea either.
Even for people with impressive past work experience and a range of skills, finding a job that pays a wage one can live on and that comes with healthcare benefits has become extremely difficult. It’s especially hard for young people. It’s been years since I’ve heard of any of my graduate students getting a decent job. Working as a waiter or a waitress in a trendy restaurant where tips are good is often the best they can hope for. For many others, it’s much worse, of course. Fifty years after Lyndon Johnson declared a “War on Poverty,” the richest country in the world no longer cares if millions of its less fortunate citizens live or die.
Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos
Rochester, New York, 2012
If one needs proof, one can start with what happened to food stamps in Congress, the so-called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that goes to 47 million Americans every month, almost half of them children and teenagers. Some of those benefits, approved in 2009, will be terminated on October 31. With fuel prices expected to increase this winter, this means, for many families in cold states, choosing between staying warm and having enough to eat. According to The Boston Globe, former US senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire said that the stimulus was never intended to be a permanent source of money. “All stimulus funding was to be temporary,” said Gregg, an immensely wealthy man and now the chief executive of a banking industry group. John Cochrane, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, also opposed the stimulus, arguing that it advanced the false assumption that “completely wasted federal spending helps the economy.” Worries about people who need help are a legitimate concern, he said, but food stamps discourage people from finding better jobs because recipients are worried they’ll lose the benefit. “At some point,” he said, “you have to be a little bit heartless.”
Of course you do. Just consider the effort of the Republicans in the House to overrule the Affordable Care Act, a legislation ratified by the majority of elected representative of the people and signed into law by the president. Bettering the lives of anyone but the wealthy, as we know, has ceased to be a concern of the Republican Party. But millions of Americans are on the brink of buying affordable health insurance and freeing themselves from a worry that makes their lives utter misery; the concerted effort backed by some of the richest men in this country to deprive them of that chance may be without precedent for sheer malice. Indifference to the plight and suffering of human beings of one class or another by some segment of the population is a universal phenomenon, but spending millions of dollars to deepen the misery of one’s fellow citizens and enlisting members of one political party to help you do so is downright vile. It must be motivated as much by sadism as by the political calculation that if these uninsured were to get insurance, they would give the Democratic Party a governing majority simply out of gratitude for letting them see a doctor.
Organized, by what The New York Times calls “a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III,” the backers of the government shut-down are ensconced in organizations like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Works, Club for Growth, Generation Opportunity, and Young Americans for Liberty, their names as fake as those of Communist front organizations in the 1930s and 1940s and as venal as their forerunners. These groups spent more than $200 million last year to spread disinformation and delude the gullible among the populace about the supposedly catastrophic harm giving health care to the uninsured would do to the economy. Using them as a model, Americans should look out only for themselves. We have forgotten what this country once understood, that a society based on nothing but selfishness and greed is not a society at all, but a state of war of the strong against the weak.
October 16, 2013, 10:53 a.m.
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Saturday, October 26, 2013
WRITERS’ NIGHT OUT IN CONJUNCTION WITH NCWN WEST
KAREN PAUL HOLMES ANNOUNCES:
Our last Writers’ Night Out for 2013 features
Katie Chaple & Travis Denton (highly accomplished and entertaining poets)
Writers’ Night Out
Friday, Nov 8, 2013
Friday, Nov 8, 2013
Brothers Willow Ranch Restaurant, Young Harris, GA
Private Room upstairs (can access by ramp from upper parking lot)
6:00-7:00 eat dinner or munchies and socialize (come early to order dinner)
7:00-ish announcements and featured reader
Break
7:45-ish Open mike, sign up at door, limit 3 minutes per poetry or prose reader (Please time yourself at home, let's make it fair to everyone. Prose readers can often eliminate some details and still captivate the audience with their piece).
Travis and Katie are husband and wife who both teach at universities: Katie at Univ of W. Georgia and Travis at Georgia Tech, where he's poet Tom Lux's right hand man.
Please see press release attached for their bios.
More Information
Food and beverage service begins at 6:00 p.m. (optional and self-pay) with the free program following at 7:15. The public is welcome, and can sign up at the door for the open microphone.
GUEST READERS:
Chaple is the author of Pretty Little Rooms (Press 53, August 2011), winner of the 2012 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Poetry through Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She teaches poetry and writing at the University of West Georgia and edits Terminus Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Antioch Review, Crab Orchard Review, Mead, New South, Passages North, StorySouth, The Rumpus, Washington Square, and others.
Denton is the Associate Director of Poetry @ TECH as well as a McEver Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech. He is also founding editor of the literary arts publication, Terminus Magazine. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, such as Mead, The Atlanta Review, The Greensboro Review, Washington Square, Forklift, Rattle, Tygerburning, Birmingham Poetry Review, and the Cortland Review. His second collection of poems, When Pianos Fall from the Sky, was published in October 2012 by Marick Press.
Writers’ Night Out is sponsored by NC Writers Network-West and takes place monthly from March through November on the second Friday at Brother’s Willow Ranch Restaurant, 6223 Hwy 76 West, Young Harris, phone 706-379-1272. The event takes place in the private room upstairs, accessible via stairs inside the restaurant or ramp (no stairs) from the upper parking lot. For open microphone, each reader of prose or poetry has three minutes (strictly enforced to allow for everyone). For more information, please contact Karen Holmes at (404) 316-8466 or kpaulholmes@gmail.com.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
FULL SUN GARDEN PATHWAYS IN THE MIDDLE OF A FOREST
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
WRITERS NIGHT OUT with Open Mike Reading WILL FEATURE AUTHOR MAREN O MITCHELL
Friday, September 13
7 p.m.
Brothers Willow Ranch Restaurant, Young Harris, GA
Writers’ Night Out
Featured Reader:
Maren O. Mitchell
award-winning poet
and author of Beat Chronic Pain
Open Mike:
poetry or prose
limit 3 minutes per reader
sign up at door
Second Friday of each month
Brother’s Restaurant at Willow Ranch
6223 Hwy 76 West, Young Harris, GA
(706) 379-1272
wOpen to the public w Come early to order dinner w Sponsored by NC Writers’
Network West. for more info, contact Karen Paul Holmes, Event Coordinator
(404) 316-8466.
More about Maren O. Mitchell
Maren O. Mitchell’s poems have appeared in Southern Humanities Review, The Classical Outlook, Town Creek Poetry, Appalachian Journal, Red Clay Reader #4, The Arts Journal, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, Wild Goose Poetry Review, and Pirene’s Fountain and elsewhere. Her work is included in The Southern Poetry Anthology, V: Georgia; Sunrise from Blue Thunder; Nurturing Paws; and Echoes Across the Blue Ridge, and is forthcoming in Hotel Amerika. Her nonfiction book is Beat Chronic Pain, An Insider’s Guide (Line of Sight Press, 2012), and is available at the Curiosity Shop bookstore in Murphy, NC, and on Amazon.
Mitchell has taught poetry at Blue Ridge Community College, Flat Rock, NC, and catalogued at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. In 2012 she received 1st Place Award for Excellence in Poetry from the Georgia Poetry Society. For over twenty years, across five states, she has taught origami, the Japanese art of paper folding.
A native of North Carolina, in her childhood Mitchell lived in Bordeaux, France, and Kaiserslautern, Germany. After moving throughout the southeast U.S., she now lives with her husband in Young Harris, Georgia.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
TRIBUTE TO SEAMUS HEANEY 1939-2013
WORLD'S GREAT POET HAS DIED.
WE REMEMBER TRIBUTE TO SEAMUS HEAVEY Given When He Was Still Living
WE REMEMBER TRIBUTE TO SEAMUS HEAVEY Given When He Was Still Living
Otherworldly hush descends for Seamus Heaney’s readings in Paris
Irish poet’s 90-minute performance the highlight of month-long Marché de la Poésie festival
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