Mary Ickes praises Echoes Across the Blue Ridge, edited by Nancy Simpson, an anthology which features stories, essays and poems by 62 authors who live and write in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Ickes said, "It would make the perfect holiday gift for anyone who loves great writing or who is interested in North Carolina’s culture and history."

NORTH CAROLINA WRITERS'NETWORK getting out the news reported:

Echoes Across the Blue Ridge Reviewed in WNC Women

We just heard a rumor that the December 2011 issue of WNC Womenwill feature an ebullient review of Echoes Across the Blue Ridge: Stories, Essays, and Poems by Writers Living in and Inspired by the Southern Appalachian Mountains (Winding Path Publishing, 2010). In a sneak peak, reviewer Mary Ickes said, “In all sincerity, I’ve never read a collection in which I liked every piece. Deciding which authors to include proved frustrating, because I wanted to mention everybody! GO NETWEST!”

From the book’s description:

Echoes Across the Blue Ridge consists of the work of 62 authors: members of North Carolina Writers’ Network West. The volume includes stories and poems reflecting the everyday lives of mountain people, their experiences, their outlook on life, and their overall philosophies. The subjects range from the mundane to hilarious comic sketches. The reader will laugh, cry, and feel the heart and soul of these writers.

Contributors include former North Carolina Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer of Cullowhee; Gary Carden of Sylva; and an introduction by Robert Morgan, among many more.

This collection was edited by Nancy Simpson and received blurbs from acclaimed NC authors Ron Rash and Lee Smith. It would make the perfect holiday gift for anyone who loves great writing or who is interested in North Carolina’s culture and history.

Echoes Across the Blue Ridge is available anywhere books are sold, through the NetWest website, and throughwww.ncwriters.org.

Congratulations to NetWest and all who contributed to this important piece of North Carolina heritage.

Byron Herbert Reece Society Held Their 8th Annual Meeting on June 4, 2011, at The Restored Reece Farm and Heritage Center in the North Georgia Mountains

The crowd numbered about one hundred, including
poet and Young Harris College English Professor Janice Townley Moore.

James Clark and friends sang Byron Herbert Reece's poems set to music.  My favorite of the songs they sang was "Lest the Lonesome Bird" a ballad that I choose and featured when editing  the anthology Echoes Across the Blue Ridge, Stories, Essays and Poems By Writers Living In and Inspired By  the Southern Appalachian Mountains, published last summer, dedicated to the memory of Reece.

Poet Valerie Nieman of Greensboro, NC won the First Annual Byron Herbert Reece Poetry Competition,  and she read her winning poem.

STILL CELEBRATING ECHOES ACROSS THE BLUE RIDGE

A note to authors who contributed their writing to ECHOES ACROSS THE BLUE RIDGE  from your editor, Nancy Simpson

ECHOES ACROSS THE BLUE RIDGE, Stories, Essays and Poems by Writers Living in and Inspired by the Southern Appalachian Mountains is almost one year old.  Thanks to Glenda Beall and her market team, the first printing quickly sold out.  The anthology was reviewed by Scott Owens and Helen Losse. It is now in its second printing and still selling. 

Today the anthology will be presented to members of the Appalachian Studies Association meeting at the University of Eastern Kentucky. Rosemary Royston, NCWN West Program Coordinator, a graduate of the Spalding University MFA Writing Program, was invited to read her scholarly essay, “Echoes Across the Blue Ridge, Echoes of Emerson.”  

I’ve had the good fortune to read a copy of Royston’s essay. I must tell you, Rosemary Royston celebrates poetry in the anthology, focuses on four specific poets, and compares specific poems to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay published in 1846,  “Transcendentalism.” 

Two poems by Glenda Barrett are celebrated and discussed: “Echoes” which inspired the anthology title, and “When the Sap Rises.”  Eileen Lampe’s poem “Dancer” is said to be “written in the vein of Dylan Thomas.” “I Hear the River Call My Name”  by Mary Ricketson and “ Progress” by Brenda Kay Ledford are celebrated and favorably discussed in Royston’s essay. 

Fellow authors, today around four o’clock, if your ears begin to burn, it may be because scholars are talking about our anthology. Get your copy out and read along.

Rosemary Royston lives in northeast Georgia. Her poetry has been published in The Comstock Review, Main Street Rag, Mom Writer’s Literary Magazine, Public Republic, and Dark Sky Magazine. Her chapbook was a finalist in the 2009 Jessie Bryce Niles chapbook contest, and she was the 2004 recipient of first and third place in poetry, Porter Fleming Literary Awards. Her poem-- Igneous or "Of Fire" won the 2010 Literal Latte Food Verse Contest. Rosemary Royston holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University.  She is Vice President for Planning and Assessment and Chief of Staff at Young Harris College. She teaches creative writing at Institute for Continuing Learning and  will teach in 2011  at John C. Campbell Folk School and in the Writing Program at YHC.

LOOKING GLASS (a Personal Essay) by Jennifer McGaha

LOOKING GLASS 

    As  you sit down to write these pages, you close your eyes tightly,  

you hear a dulcimer playing in the distance, and you feel cool river water 

pulsing against your ankles. You smell winter approaching and hear the 

silence of snow filling the creek beds and coating the evergreens until 

the limbs begin to snap and popping sounds ring like gunshots over the 

mountains. You see the trails of Pisgah National Forest winding 
through the hills, your shaggy terrier bounding ahead on a path, 
trampling patches of pink trilliums on his way to the creek bed. You see 
a patch of May Apples scraping the forest floor, the crackle of a campfire, 
the seared edges of a marshmallow bulging from the end of a stick, its 
glossy whiteness oozing over the melting chocolate as you press the 
graham crackers together. 

    You feel Looking Glass Rock hard and cold beneath your back, 

and you are dizzy and intoxicated by the wildness of the forests below. 

You see the wheel of the corn mill spinning slowly around, and you suck 

the end of a sugar cane until the heavy syrup rolls over your tongue and 

slowly down your eager throat. You hear “Amazing Grace” a hundred 

different ways—bagpipes and choirs and trumpets and fiddles, a medley 

of voices rising over the years. You smell the sweetness of honeysuckle 

growing wild in a pasture, and you hear a soft whistle as you bite the 
end off a blossom, holding the green stem in your teeth and breathing 
in the honey. You see your great-grandmother, her long, gray hair 
pinned in a bun, stooping over the quilting loom by the black wood 
stove in her cabin, and you see her strolling in her garden, her brown, 
crinkled hands pulling a green bean fresh from the vine and poking it 
into your open mouth. 

    You see a young girl at camp, lying on the top bunk in her cabin, 

writing letters home and listening to the creek gurgling outside the 

window, to the mice running across the rafters overhead. You hear 
“Taps” rising clearly and mournfully over the hills, and you are homesick 
and at home all at once and all over again. You feel glorious, icy lake 
water hit your sunburned legs as you leap from the lifeguard stand. 
You smell the musty scent of the barn, and you are tall and wild on the 
back of a horse. You see your dad floating down the French Broad River 
on a raft, his strong arms pulling the oars through the dark water while 
lightening streaks the dark sky. You scramble together up the riverbank 
and duck into a cow pasture, and you feel that quiet moment just before 
the bull charges you. Gray and angry, he stomps his feet, and his nostrils 
flare. You turn and see your dad, stopped solidly between you and the 
bull, waving you on, toward the fence at the edge of the pasture, and you 
feel the earth hot beneath your feet and the sting of the rising wind as 
you run to safety. 

    You see the clearing at the top of Sam’s Knob and the outline of 

Devil’s Courthouse. You see a family of deer along Graveyard Fields, the 

mother’s head tilted high in the air, frozen in time. You see a skinny 

teenage boy sitting on a rock beside you at the base of Looking Glass 
Falls, the water spraying your hair and swallowing your words. He is 
eighteen, you are sixteen, and neither of you knows you’ll end up 
together. 

    You feel summer slipping reluctantly out of the air and autumn 

moving stealthily in. You see patches of yellow and purple and blue 

dotting the fields and the first bursts of colors across the green hills. 

And, then, there is an explosion of color—the reds and oranges and 

yellows and golds—through which you can see a chestnut-haired girl 

running down a wooded path toward her bold father, her young soul as 

much a part of the mountains as the leaves and the trees and the deer 

and the air. 

by Jennifer McGaha

Originally published in Smoky Mountain Living

in a slightly different form, And featured in

in the Autumn section of Echoes Across the Blue Ridge

A native of Transylvania in western North Carolina, Jennifer McGaha writes nonfiction and literary nonfiction with an edge. Sometimes humorous and sometimes quirky, but always informed by her Appalachian upbringing, McGaha's writing has appeared in numerous  regional and national magazines and literary journals. 


She teaches composition at both Blue Ridge Community College and Brevard College, where she serves as the nonfiction editor for Pisgah Review. 


More recently this month, on Nov. 18, 2010, Jennifer McGaha was the featured reader at Poets and Writers Reading Poems and Stories at John C. Campbell Folk School.


Samples of her work and a complete list of her publications are available at her website: jennifer-mcgaha.wordpress.com.

POETS AND WRITERS READING POEMS AND STORIES

Once each month, Poets and Writers Reading Poems and Stories is held at the John C. Campbell Folk School in the Keith House Living Room.(Brasstown, NC). Two members of North Carolina Writers Network West read their original work for an audience of Folk School students and the community. These writers and poets come from all over the southwestern mountain area of North Carolina, north Georgia and South Carolina. The featured readers for this month's meeting, held at 7:00 pm on September 16th were:

Glenda Barrett

Glenda Barrett, a native of Hiawassee, Georgia is an artist, poet and writer. Her paintings are on display at Fine Art America. Glenda’s writing has appeared in Woman’s World, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Farm & Ranch Living, Rural Heritage, Psychology for Living, Nostalgia, Journal of Kentucky Studies and many others. Her poetry chapbook titled, When the Sap Rises, is for sale on Amazon.com

Nancy Simpson

Nancy Simpson is one of the practicing poets who lives among us. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Across Water, Night Student, and a new book, Living Above the Frost line - Selected and New Poems (Carolina Wren Press, 2010). Living Above the Frost Line is available in the Folk School craft shop, at Phillips and Lloyd Book Shop in Hayesville, NC. and at The Book Nook in Blairsville, Georgia.

Her poems have been published in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and in anthologies such as 100 Years of N.C. Poetry, The Poets Guide to the Birds, and Southern Poetry Review’s 50th Anniversary Anthology, Don’t Leave Hungry. Seven of her poems were reprinted in the textbook Southern Appalachian Poetry, McFarland Press.

Nancy earned an M.F.A. - Writing from Warren Wilson College and is Resident Writer at John C. Campbell Folk School. She is a longtime member of NCWN and cofounder of NCWN West. She co-edited Lights in the Mountains and recently edited Echoes Across the Blue Ridge which is also now being celebrated and sold in local bookstores throughout the mountains and on Amazon.com. This collection has a foreward by Robert Morgan and includes the work of many of the area's finest writers.

Peek in on the Publication Party FOR THE authors of ECHOES ACROSS THE BLUE RIDGE

We turned right on Spring Street and drove to the top of the hill. City Lights Book Store in Sylva, NC. Believe me, the place was surrounded by cars and people. The party was hosted by Kathryn Stripling Byer, NCWN West's Program Coordinator, City Light Book Store and Spring Street Cafe.

Glenda Beall, NCWN West Marketing Manager.

Kathryn Stripling Byer welcomed Linda M. Smith from Hayesville, NC and Mary Michelle Keller from Young Harris, Georgia.

Delicious Food was spread and a champaign toast was made to the editor and contributors.

Chances are you were there, for I recall standing room only, one hundred or more writers paying their respects to one another for a job completed, a job well done.

And so once again, I felt "out of my body", beside myself with joy, with echoes across City Lights Book Store and Spring Street Cafe on the evening of August 8, 2010.

Most of these photos were taken by Peri Gordon Flohr. I'm sharing them with NCWN West Program Coordinator, Kathryn Stripling Byer, so you may see even more of them on the Netwest site.

Peri Gordon Flohr, writer (took most of these pictures, except for a few stolen by N.S. )

Janice Townley Moore of Hayesville, NC, Tipper Pressley of Brasstown, NC, William V. Reynolds of Murphy, NC, Rose Mary Royston of Blairsville, Georgia, Truman McKillip of Marble, NC and Joyce Reynolds of Murphy NC.

Poet Rose Mary Royston had three poems chosen for ECHOES ACROSS THE BLUE RIDGE:

"Dogwood Winter", "Neighbor Lady" and "The Possibliity of Snow". She read two poems in the open mic reading at the party.

Poet Clarence Lee Newton from Young Harris, Georgia, had two poems included: "Walking on Chatuge Dam at Dawn" and "Glad Hands at Lake Burton."

Glenda Beall's essay " The Trillium" found on page 31 of the anthology.

Poet Jayne Jaudon Ferrer had two poems in the anthology: "Street Scene" and "Homage."

Gary Carden is the author of an essay, " Listen to the Mockingbird" included in the anthology and also a short story: "Quincy and Rush."

Thomas Rain Crowe is the author of "Triple Negatives: Losing A Langauge" included in

Echoes Across the Blue Ridge. The essay contained two poems: "Here With Who Shot John" and"Crack Light".

Poet, Ellen Andrews authored two poems included the anthology: "Homing" and "Contradance in Brasstown".

Jennifer McGaha's essay "Looking Glass" was chosen for the anthology.

Fiction Writer, George Ivey wrote "Creekside Conspiracies".

Poet Rachel Bronnum had two poems included in the anthology: "The Goat Man" and "Emma". (here with Echoes Across the Blue Ridge editor Nancy Simpson)

Poet from Cherokee, Deborah Kinsland Foerst, authored two poems: " Corn Dance" and

"a gi li si."

Poet Joyce Foster, authored "A Taste of a Ripe Peach at Midnight."

Mary Michelle Keller recited her poem "As the Deer".

Linda M. Smith read "The Lapadry Artist", one of her poems in ECHOES ACROSS THE BLUE RIDGE.

Carole Richard Thompson recited her poem, " Returning", about twin falls returning after a long drought in the north Georgia Mountains. p 140. "I hear again/the liquid music of the mountains, spilling over ledges,/ and there, across a divide, stand two triumphant waterfalls."

Laughter. Carl Iobst read "Aunt Lucille Whups the Bear."

More Laughter: Mary Lou McKillip, story teller and writer read her anthology story, "If You Can't Run With the Big Dogs, Stay on the Porch."

Arnie Nielson read his story that made me warm all over, and made a tear roll out of my eye - "Sadie Underwood."

Robert Edward Fahey read "Mountain Journal" an excerpt from The Mourning After, a novel in progress.

Dick Michener had two short stories in the anthology: "Jesus Freak" and "The Final Gathering"

Janice Townley Moore read " Photos From Another State." She also had a second poem published in the anthology, "In September."

William V. Reynolds read "The Man on the Doorsteps." He is the author of many novels and the owner of Double Eagle Enterprises - BOOKS FOR THE COMMON MAN

http://www.doubleeagleenterprises.com/

Last but not least to read her story "The Spirit Tree" was Susan Lefler from Brevard, North Carolina.

In Memory of Richard Argo,( Feb. 21, 1944 - July 8, 2010) NCWN West's Monthly Prose Critique Group Leader for 15 years, the author of "The Apple Man" and " Turtle" . It seemed to me he was there with us at City Lights, reading his stories to us.

If you hope to see more photos from the publication party, click on the NCWN West site http://netwestwriters.blogspot.com/

Where can I buy a copy of ECHOES ACROSS THE BLUE RIDGE?

It is is available for purchase at only $16.00.

Book Stores

City Lights Books, Sylva

Curiosity Books in Murphy, NC

Phillips and Lloyd Books in Hayesville, NC

Books Unlimited, Franklin, NC

Book Nook, Blairsville, GA

Blue Ridge Books, Waynesville, NC

Malaprop's bookstore in Asheville, NC

Twice Upon A Time in Murphy, NC

Highlands Books, Brevard, NC

Fountainhead Book Store, Hendersonville,NC