This series of festival previews and author profiles first ran in the Yancey Common Times-Journal and the Tri-County News.

ROBERT MORGAN: HARD WORK PAYS OFF
By Janice Willis Barnett

Picture a sixth-grade boy sitting at his desk in a Henderson County, North Carolina classroom in the early 1950s. The boy is the only child in class because he did not have the three dollars needed for the class trip to Biltmore Estate. While the other students are away, his teacher asks him to write a story about a man lost in the Canadian wilderness. This is the first story the boy has ever written. 

Fast forward to the year 2000, and see this boy as Robert Morgan, acclaimed poet, short story writer, and novelist on the Oprah Winfrey show, receiving the royal treatment accorded authors whose books are selected for her book club. The Carolina Mountains Literary Festival is pleased that Morgan will be one of its featured authors this September 14-15 in downtown Burnsville.

This past May in New York City, Morgan also received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Through the years, he has garnered countless honors, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. Since 1971, he has taught English and creative writing at Cornell University. 

Morgan grew up on a mountain farm helping kill hogs, cut pulp wood, and work the fields. On his last day at home before leaving for college, he “plowed the late bean field with a horse.” Considering this, it is easy to see why he writes with such insight about farm life in the Blue Ridge Mountains. “As I wrote more and more about work on the small mountain farm, I began to see that our work defines us,” Morgan says. “It is our work that gets us through our lives, and perhaps gives us our greatest satisfaction.”

This is certainly true of Julie Harmon, the heroine of Gap Creek, Morgan’s novel selected for Oprah’s Book Club. In the novel, Julie has been “working like a man” for as long as she can remember, and when she marries her life is filled with more work than ever. The novel is set in 1899. In fact, much of Morgan’s work is set in the past.

“At this moment in history we seem hungry to connect with our past to get a firmer sense of ourselves through knowing what has gone before,” Morgan says. He believes this “is the moment when we want to catch in words an Appalachia that is gone,” though he is quick to explain that he does not want to present Appalachia’s past “through rose-colored glasses.” However, he does want readers to see the good in it.

“It’s hard for people looking from outside to understand the intensity of the spiritual lives that people of that time had,” Morgan says. “Looking at the Appalachian communities in the past, visitors often saw only poverty and backwardness. The mountain people did not view their lives that way. In fact, they often felt rich on their own land, with their families around them, with a cold poplar spring nearby. . .” 

In Gap Creek, Morgan notes that he wanted to show how the young couple “could survive the adversity they were confronting and the difficulties of marriage and actually learn from it.” He emphasizes that Julie and Hank “learn the most difficult thing of all . . . forgiveness.”

Having Gap Creek selected as an Oprah Book was a complete surprise to Morgan. After Oprah called and said she had chosen Gap Creek, his wife asked him how many extra copies that would help sell. He guessed “maybe 10,000, 20,000.”  The next day his publisher called and said they already had orders for 650,000 copies. 

Soon, Gap Creek hit the New York Times best seller list. It was as if “all heaven busted loose at once,” Morgan says, noting how thrilled he was to receive thousands of letters from readers all over the country. Almost all the readers told him that reading the book brought back memories of their grandmothers. Many said their grandmothers were from Russia. Reading about the struggles and strength of Julie Harmon in Appalachia helped validate their own ancestral heritage even though they were from a different place and culture. 

Morgan is still writing about Appalachia, however, his latest book is a venture into a different genre – nonfiction. His biography of frontiersman Daniel Boone will be released in October. In the introduction to the forthcoming book, he notes, “My fascination with Boone goes back to boyhood. My father, who was a wonderful storyteller, had a lifelong interest in Daniel Boone and loved to quote the hunter and explorer. Since Daniel’s mother was Sarah Morgan, my father thought we were related by blood. Though I have not found more than a distant family connection, I always felt a kinship with the hunter and trapper and scout.” 

More information regarding his work can be found at robert-morgan.com. Quotes in this article are from Morgan’s website and from an interview with him on the Recorded Books edition of Gap Creek.

Transportation at the Festival

A strong interest in literacy and the language arts has led Barbara Robinson, owner of Southeastern Transportation Services to assist the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival by providing complimentary shuttle service between the Town Center and other locations where Festival sessions are being held. While the primary site of Festival events is the Town Center, several sessions are being held in other locations around town including Laughrun House at the First Presbyterian Church, the History Museum, Appalachian Java, D K Puttyroot and the First Baptist Church.  Barbara will operate her van between these sites during both days of the Festival.  Those who do not wish to walk between locations may take advantage of this service. 

Southeastern Transportation Services was established in April 2006.  They provide busses for the U. S. Fire Services bringing fire crews to fires.  They also are available for charter and offer day trips to places of interest, or  out of town events  using the busses, or their six passenger van. 

Organizers of the Festival appreciate Barbara’s contribution to the success of the Festival. 

Vicki Lane to Read at Upcoming Literary Festival

by Alessa Leming 

Vicki Lane is one of over forty authors scheduled to appear at the 2nd annual Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, which will be held on September 14 & 15, 2007 in Burnsville, NC. She will be reading from her latest Elizabeth Goodweather novel, Old Wounds, released June 26th, 2007. She will also answer questions about her works and her writing techniques in a separate session at the festival. 

Vicki Lane moved to Madison County in 1975 with her husband and eldest son. They wanted to escape the suburbia ballooning around them in Florida. They threw camping gear into their Chevy Blazer and drove in search of land in the country, where they could raise their new family. Visiting friends in Madison County, they fell in love with the area and it’s residents. On her website, she writes of herself and her husband: “We both came from pioneer families down there [in Florida] -- my father’s people (all horse thieves, Daddy said) were of the same Scotch-Irish stock that settled western North Carolina.” Those same Scotch-Irish residents initially helped them learn the farmers' life in rural North Carolina, a life that imbues the mysteries she writes. 

To most, it would seem that Vicki Lane has put down strong roots in Madison County, between the family farm and the sons who inhabit it along with her and her spouse.  But when compared to the families who have lived in these mountains for seven or more generations, the thirty-two years Lane and her family have lived in western North Carolina seems brief. But it’s her outsider’s eye that enables her to capture the scenes and the language of the area that took both her and her family into its fold. 

Vicki Lane’s novels decidedly fit the theme of the 2nd annual Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, which celebrates history as literature in fiction and non-fiction. Her books are set in contemporary western North Carolina, but have subplots which pull the reader back to 1901 in Signs of the Blood, and to 1934 in Art’s Blood. The recently released Old Wounds is the third installment of the Elizabeth Goodweather series, pairing Elizabeth with her mother to solve a mystery from her own past, a mere twenty years earlier. 

Sheila Kay Adams, a seventh generation Madison County resident herself, wrote this about the initial Elizabeth Goodweather novel Signs in the Blood: “Vicki Lane captured my ear on the first page. Her dialect is right on the money. Her characters live and breathe and hold their secrets close…” 

Pat Riviere-Seel: Getting to the Good Stuff

By Bethany Roundtree 

When Pat Riviere-Seel entered undergraduate school at NC State University, her first ambition was to become a veterinarian.  After a few creative writing classes with particularly good teachers, she changed her mind.  She graduated with a degree in English, had a poem published and won first place in a poetry contest. 

For a while, Pat’s writing career stopped there.  Soon after college she married and moved with her husband to New Jersey. The marriage did not work out, and four years later she found herself divorced and in need of a way to support herself.  She turned to the only thing she thought she could do.  “I started knocking on the doors of newspapers, telling them I was a journalist looking for work.”  This bold and courageous move landed her a job and she quickly learned the ropes of journalism. 

Over the years Pat’s journalism adventures led her to cover topics such as health education and social concerns.  Much of her time was spent as a political reporter covering state legislature.  Later, after leaving journalism she began her own business called, For the Record, based in Maryland, doing freelance work for newspapers.  Her business led her to the state legislature where she lobbied for funding for NOW and the Woman’s Alliance of Maryland, and made headway on issues concerning family leave and rape crisis. 

But as a native to Shelby, Pat longed to return to what she termed, “the generous people of North Carolina.”  When her mother died in 1990, she left Maryland to move closer to her father who still lived in North Carolina.  She found her way to Yancey County where she resided in South Toe and was editor of the journal “Rural Southern Voice for Peace.”  After her time at RSVP, she worked at Mayland Community College and wrote a column for the Asheville Citizen Times. 

Pat still felt pulled to poetry, and she continued to write creatively.  Life took another turn when she reconnected with her old friend, Ed Seel.  They married and she accompanied him to Germany for two years where she soaked up the German culture, made friends, traveled, and also attended her first writer’s workshop. 

When Pat and Ed returned to the states and settled in Asheville, Pat was determined to focus on her poetry.  She attended Queen’s University of Charlotte, took classes with such writers as Cathy Smith Bowers and Ron Rash, and graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing.  Her first book of poetry, No Turning Back Now, was published in 2004 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Cathy Smith Bowers said this of Pat’s work, “As I got to know Pat’s poems, I knew this was a voice to be reckoned with.  Her poems were both sensuous and sensual, poems that talk and sing.  And always there is that moment in each poem when whatever happens next could be both life-giver and destroyer.”  Pat’s poems have since appeared in various journals including Asheville Poetry Review, Crucible, Main Street Rag, and the NC Poetry Society’s Pinesong Awards and Award Winning Poems.  She has taught in the Great Smokies Writing Program and at the College for Seniors at UNC-Asheville.  Pat recently completed her second term as President of the NC Poetry Society. 

Pat likes to set her alarm early and write in the morning.  She begins with pen in hand to feel the personal connection with the words on the paper.  Later, when a poem begins to take shape, she uses the computer for revision.  “Poetry is so personal.  You make it out of your very being.  What goes out stops being mine and goes to the audience for interpretation.”  When Pat shares her poetry she hopes that the audience will connect with her poems and bring their own experience and meaning to them.  She participates in several different writing groups, which she believes is important for support and guidance.  When she experiences periods of self-doubt, she gains inspiration from the work of other writers and her husband.  “Ed has become quite a savvy critiquer of my work,” she says laughing. 

Writers need to continue writing, Pat believes.  They have to like to write well enough to write lots of bad stuff.  “The good stuff and the bad stuff – its all part of the stuff,” she says, quoting poet Marvin Bell.  Eventually, with patience and practice, writers get to the good stuff. “The poem is usually smarter than I am.  I will shape the poem and choose words for sound that can sometimes change the whole meaning of the poem.  If I’m lucky and can let go of control, the poem takes on it’s own direction.” 

When Pat is not writing, she finds therapy in running.  She runs 5k and 10k races and is considering training for a marathon.  She loves to run long distance and has run three marathons in the past.  “Sometimes I’m able to solve problems in poems when I run, or write poems even.” 

Pat is working on two projects now: a book of poems based on the South Toe area and another book whose poetry speaks the voice of the daughter of a serial killer.  “Sometimes unexpected things happen to people and they find that their old world no longer exists.”  These poems delve into the daughter’s life and how she deals with her family suddenly forced into the public eye. 

Pat feels fortunate to be able to do what she loves and make her living as a writer.  The Carolina Mountain Literary Festival is pleased to have her back this year.  Pat’s workshop, From Roots to Wings, will be on Saturday afternoon.

In Pursuit of Poetry: Glenis Redmond

by Victoria Rubley 

Glenis Redmond is an award-winning performance poet, praise poet, educator and writer living in Asheville, North Carolina. More about Glenis can be found at her web site, www.glenisredmondstore.com. She will appear at the upcoming Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, September 14 & 15.  The following was adapted from a recent conversation with local poet, Victoria Rubley. 

“I think I was born a poet, at least in spirit. I was the highly sensitive one in my household from the very beginning. My family thought I was a bit on the odd side, because I took things to heart. I loved to daydream and always had my nose in a book. I began taking writing seriously at age 28 when I left the counseling profession. Maya Angelou influenced me early in my writing career. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings impacted me for many reasons. Dr. Angelou’s story gave me wings. I also enjoy Pat Conroy. He was the first white, male southern author that really made sense to me. We also shared a military father. I loved his sensitive observations. Lucille Clifton has also influenced me heavily as well as Benjamin Zephaniah. I began writing on a daily basis and I was also reading a book called The Artist Way by Julia Cameron. 

“Around that time I received a flyer in the mail announcing a Poetry Slam in Asheville, N.C. I attended and quickly became drunk with words. It took me a few months to start winning Slams, but eventually I did. I loved preparing all week for the Slam and listening to what others had cooked up poetically as well. I didn’t want to be anywhere else; I had found my tribe. It took awhile for me to begin winning, but I did. Eventually, I won the Asheville Festival Poetry Slam, and made my presence known in the Slam world. I spent five years involved with the Slam as an extended performance poetry lab. I slowly developed performance skills that only come from stage life and started my own slam at the Village Café in Greenville, South Carolina. We had mostly sell-out crowds and were one of the most diverse venues in the city. We had young, old, black, white, professional, working class, protestant, atheist, Jewish, gay, and heterosexual poets stepping up to the mic. I also took the first all-women Slam Team to the Nationals in Middletown, Connecticut. 

“So as time passed, I became a full-time performance poet traveling across country, performing at churches, conventions, old folks homes, theaters, conferences, clubs, shopping malls, festivals, non-profits, rallies, schools and colleges. However, I still wanted to tend to the poetry on the page. So, I studied at the Vermont Studio Center and the Atlantic Center for the Arts throughout the years, as well as attending writing conferences.

“I am celebratory poet. I know struggle is inherent in this human condition, yet I like the elements that allow us/me to overcome. I expect a poem to address an unknown for me, not that it has to have an answer, but to bring it to the forefront. My own poetic creativity has empowered me as a human being because it makes me feel like I have something to give others, the community. It feeds and nourishes me daily. A poem is finished when it becomes animate - kind of like a child when it grows up. It becomes whole. It has a whole body, arms, legs and mouth that speak for itself. 

“I have created my own niche in the performance poetry world and am a poetic road warrior traveling about 120 days out of the year. I feel honored and blessed to have made a living doing poetry. I will always be in pursuit of poetry.”

Announcing the 2007 Carolina Mountains Literary Festival
By Britt Kaufmann and Katey Schultz

  “Good parents give their children roots and wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what’s been taught them.” This statement from Dr. Jonas Salk is the guiding quotation for the 2007 Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, which will take place in downtown Burnsville September 14 & 15.  The intent is to infuse excitement into the study of history, our country’s and our mountains’, through fiction and non-fiction, poetry, music, and storytelling.
      Last year, more than 350 people attended the event and more than 35 authors presented, read, and enjoyed the festivities. The Rotary Club of Burnsville raised $400 for the Imagination Library through food sales at the festival and Malaprop’s, the official bookseller at the festival, donated $700 from sales to the Yancey County Library Building Fund.
      This year, more than 40 authors will present, read, lead workshops, and be available for book signings. 
      Festival highlights for 2007 include an entire Saturday of literary activities for children, a Java Jam in cooperation with the festival, continuing education credits for teachers, and a three-hour panel of noted historians on making history come to life through literature. The steering committee is also working with local schools to organize a writing contest for fifth grade students and to bring authors into the schools so that more of the community can benefit from this celebration of the written arts.
   Many people from outside the region were astounded that the festival was completely funded by community support in its first year.  Everyone involved is very proud of our counties for their commitment to the festival and as a result, continues to try to benefit the larger community with the festival.
      Many businesses around the Burnsville Town Center have already volunteered their spaces to host festival events. The festival’s steering committee, comprised entirely of volunteers from Yancey and Mitchell counties, is committed to creating a literary community that fosters dialogue about the craft of writing and the literary significance of regional writers. The mission of the festival is to bring authors, avid readers, novice writers, and fans together in an intimate setting.   Further, it hopes to foster the love of reading in our children, the true key to success and life long learning.
      Festival planners are hard at work, but there is still a need for volunteers to prepare for the event, as well as during the festival itself.  To volunteer send an email to cmlitfest@gmail.com.
   There is also a need for sponsorships.  Individuals who would like to support the event and businesses that might care to sponsor/advertise can find a sponsorship form at the bottom of the first page on the website cmlitfest.org or email cmlitfest@gmail.com.

Understanding Our Roots: Literary Festival Brings History to Life
By Charles F. Price 

     An awareness of history is vital to the sinking of firm roots in home ground, where history has happened in the time before ours.  But in most of our schools history has forfeited much of its audience owing to uninspired teaching.  Its texts are often so dully written that its lessons are lost. The way to make it vital, to sink those roots, is to make it live again—to show that history happened to real people like ourselves, happened in the very places where we make our homes; and that it offers lessons that are relevant today. 
     One way to do this is through written history that rises to the level of literature even as it educates.  Literature tells stories with a vividness and immediacy that spur imagination.  And it is by way of imagination that we, the readers, can begin to see the life of the past and learn the meaning it has for us. 
     The 2007 Carolina Mountains Literary Festival September 14-15 will celebrate history as literature by offering two panels on the topic.  The panels will examine well-written history both as nonfiction and as fiction.  They have a common theme:  That history as nonfiction offers us truth as fact; that history as fiction offers us truth as human experience; and that if the writing is fine enough, each kind can give us something approaching the whole truth of the past. 
     The chosen topic of both panels is the American Revolution, the event that planted our nation’s roots and on whose wings we fly today as a people.  It is the most vital event in our history but at the same time it is the least generally understood.  Post-9/11 Americans have been engaged in a contentious debate about the nature of democracy and our governmental system, the value of our civil liberties, and many other issues that the Founders also cared about, argued over, but struggled and bled to find ways to establish.  To discuss these matters is to demonstrate how the lessons of our past can inform our present and our future as a nation and as a people. 
   Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution, an online magazine for both scholars and armchair historians, has teamed with the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival to organize two panels of experts in the American Revolution who are also superb writers. 

Panel #1, “Making History Live Through Literature” includes panel members such as Dennis M. Conrad, Seabrook Wilkinson, John Buchanan, Greg Massey, and Charles Price. Authors will discuss the extent to which they consciously aspired to art in the act of writing history and what value they think fine writing adds to the utility of scholarly works.  A literary critic and the nation’s leading expert in documentary editing discuss the challenges and opportunities faced by the historian who wishes to transmute the factual record into literary art. 

Panel #2, “So You Thought the American Revolution was Boring?” will include such authors as Charles B. Baxley, Christine Swager, Dennis M. Conrad, and Preston Russell. The panel will examine the power of well-written historical materials to popularize history and foster enthusiasm for the learning of history among young readers and a general readership. 

Award-Winning Author Michael Parker
By Beth Browne

One of over forty authors scheduled for the 2nd annual Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, Michael Parker’s reading and book signing on Saturday, September 15th is expected to be a highlight of the weekend. 

It’s the titles that draw you in:  Go Ugly Early, Results for Novice Males, Hidden Meanings, and the intriguing Treatment of Time.  But it’s the quality of the writing that keeps you reading.  Author Michael Parker’s latest book, Don’t Make Me Stop Now, is a collection of short stories about a variety of motley characters that just don’t want to stop loving their errant partners. 

Born in Siler City and raised in Clinton, most of Parker’s stories are set in the region, but he doesn’t consider himself to be a regional writer. “My characters could be anywhere, really,” he says. “The stories are about the people and what happens to them.” Parker has fond memories of visiting his parents in Burnsville, where they lived for twenty years.  An avid bicyclist, Parker particularly enjoys riding his bike on the Blue Ridge Parkway. 

Parker, a professor in the MFA Writing program at UNC-Greensboro, has written four novels and published two short story collections.  He was the 2006 recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature. Parker’s most recent novel, If You Want Me to Stay, was a Book Sense Pick for 2005 and winner of the Goodheart Prize for fiction.  His novel, Hello Down There, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award.  His first collection of short stories, The Geographical Cure, won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award. 

Music figures prominently in many of Parker’s stories and the title of his latest book comes from the Otis Redding song,  “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now).”  Parker says he loves music because it “expresses the inexpressible” and his characters often seem to share that attachment to music. 

The New York Times Book Review says Parker has a “bone-deep affection for his characters.” There is a subtle simplicity to the characters in Parker’s stories that can be deceiving.  The characters seem so familiar they could be our neighbors, and yet they lead us to some unexpected and fascinating places.  Parker takes us straight into the hearts and minds of each character so that their bizarre circumstances seem completely plausible. 

In his Pushcart Prize-winning story, Off Island, Parker uses the first person perspective of an aged African-American man who is one of three remaining occupants of a remote island in the Outer Banks. Parker read from this story to an enthusiastic standing-room-only crowd at last year’s Carolina Mountains Literary Festival. He says Burnsville is “very beautiful” and “a great place to have a literary festival.”

Writing Contest Open to Fifth Graders
 

Who told King George III of England to "Buzz off!"after overthrowing his men at the Battle of King's Mountain? And who, after this defeat of supposedly "superior forces," was credited with changing the course of the American Revolution? 

The Overmountain Men, that's who! 

Any fifth grader in Mitchell, Avery or Yancey County who would like to find out more and write a story about the role of the under-experienced, under-dressed, and under-fed Overmountain Men at the Battle of King's Mountain on October 7, 1780, could end up winning a prize and having his or her story published in local newspapers. 

The writing contest is sponsored by the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival and is open to all fifth graders in public and private schools, as well as home-schooled students. Parents and teachers may assist, but the content and writing must be the student's own. 

The story should be 150-200 words in length, hand-written or typed (double-spaced) with source material of at least three references. Stories will be judged on historical accuracy, creativity, and good grammar and structure. 

The deadline to enter this writing contest is Friday, May 25, 2007. Stories can be submitted to any regional library in the three county area. 

The winner of the writing contest will be recognized and presented with an award at the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival banquet on Saturday, September 15, 2007 in Burnsville. 

Email questions to rneuberg@ccvn.com