NEW - Poetry class beginning in June

New 

Poetry Class for beginning and intermediate poets

Texts used in this class 

The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Ted Kooser

In the Palm of Your Hand, Steve Kowit

Instructor: Glenda Beall

Mondays, 4 - 6 p.m., June 20 - July 18

Classes will be held at the studio in Hayesville, NC.

Call 828-389-4441 or  Email for directions.

Fee for 8 hours of class - $25.00

To read some of Glenda's poetry visit 

www.profilesandpedigrees.blogspot.com 

Jonathan K. Rice class is open for registration

Jonathan Kevin Rice, editor and publisher of Iodine Poetry Journal, will be a guest instructor at Writers Circle in Hayesville, NC  on Saturday, June 11. Iodine has been widely recognized, and notable poets have graced the pages over the years. 

Jonathan was born in Indiana and grew up in south Florida. He is active in the literary community around Charlotte where he now lives, and we are happy he is coming to the far western area of North Carolina. 

His  latest poetry book is Killing Time, published by Main Street Rag. The poem below is a sample of what you will find in this book.

Tea Towel

She sat at the kitchen table
late in the morning
as the sun angled
across the iron étagère.

Fruit in a bowl were beginning
to overripe. An African violet
bloomed in a small ceramic
pot by the window.

A smooth cotton towel
laid before her as she planned
to embroider black hearts
across the grain of fabric.

She slipped on the brass thimble
traced the broken lifeline
in her palm as she unspooled
soot black thread, took the needle,

and worked them together
to bring an image of permanence,
a sense of meaning through the
impermanence of the morning.

Poetry Class deadline looming. Don't wait.

NOVEMBER 2 - DEADLINE FOR KAREN HOLMES' POETRY CLASS NOV. 7

REGISTER NOW. SEE FORM ABOVE. PAY WITH PAYPAL OR WITH A CHECK. ONLY $30. 

Read more about class and instructor HERE

Visit Schedule page at link below.

http://www.glendacouncilbeall.com/p/schedule.html#.Vibs5H6rS00

Share, please.

It is time to Register for Scott Owens' poetry class, The Stuff of Poetry, September 12, 2015

Scott Owens, Award winning poet, editor and teacher

September 12, 2015 10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.     Fee: $35.00

Class description:
The Stuff of Poetry: This workshop will focus on creativity, originality, and imagery, answering the questions, "Where do we find the stuff for poetry?" "How do we know what to include?" and "How do we make it good?"

Participants should bring an object of "value" (something kept for years) with them, expect to generate several new ideas for writing, and expect to have their comfort zones challenged.

Scott Owens will read his poetry on Friday, 7:00 p.m. September 11, for Writers Night Out in Blairsville, GA.


Scott is originally from Greenwood, SC. He holds degrees from Ohio University, UNC Charlotte, and UNC Greensboro. He currently lives in Hickory, NC, where he teaches at Catawba Valley Community College, edits Wild Goose Poetry Review, owns and operates Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse and Gallery and serves as vice-president of the NC Poetry Society.
He is a Regional Representative of North Carolina Writers' Network, and Coordinator of Poetry Hickory. His 12th book of poetry, To, was released by Main Street Rag last year.

His work has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Next Generation/Indie Lit Awards, the NC Writers Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC, and his articles about poetry have been featured in Poet’s Market twice.


Scott Owens
www.scottowenspoet.com                     www.ncpoetrysociety.org

To register, send check made to Glenda Beall. Mail to 581 Chatuge Lane, Hayesville, NC 28904

Copy registration form at top of page and include with your fee.

Chat with a Poet on July 24

A few places are left in the class on Saturday, July 25, with Michael Diebert. 

Our space is limited to ten people in a class at Writers Circle around the Table, so contact me and send your fee for this most interesting class. See registration form at top of page. 

When Michael Diebert taught at Writers Circle a couple of years ago, his student evaluation sheets told me he was greatly appreciated for his work.

This class is especially interesting as it uses bits and pieces of old poems, parts that you have cut out of a poem or a line you really like, but didn't find a good way to use it.

I have many of those bits and pieces in my files and I am looking forward to seeing how I can bring them back to life, salvage them from the junk yard of used words. 

I am also looking forward to Michael's Chat with a Poet  at Joe's Coffee House, 82 Main Street, Hayesville, NC on Friday afternoon, July 24, 4:30 p.m.

We get to hear some of Michael's own poetry and talk with him about poetry, about how he selects poems for the Chattahoochee Review which he edits. Beginning poets will find his talk interesting and will be able to ask those questions you have been wondering about.

We will have some snacks furnished by Writers Circle and Joe's has great coffee and tea as well as a wine bar. There is no cost for the event, but Joe would like for you to pay for the coffee, tea or wine.

Guest Post by Michael Diebert, Poetry Editor at Chattahoochee Review

Today we are honored to have Michael Diebert as our guest on Writers Circle around the Table. He has written a most interesting post for us. Be sure to read this if you are a poet. Thanks, Michael, for taking time to guest on our blog.

Salvage and Reconstruction: Thoughts on a Poem in Progress

By Michael Diebert

Two years ago, when poet Andrew Hudgins led a workshop at the college where I teach, he showed us work he'd been doing on a poem.  He had written it in blank verse, unrhymed and rhymed iambic tetrameter, and with two- and three-beat accentual lines.  He'd even cast it as a prose poem.  As the forms dictated, he’d added words, took them out, moved them to other lines, and indeed redefined the line for each occasion.  The impulse was largely metrical and musical, but if form dictates content, he was also tinkering with meaning.  His patience astounded me.  After all that work, he concluded it was probably a failed poem, a good subject for a lecture such as the one he was giving.

Recently, I have been working on a poem modeled after Bob Hicok's poem "A primer."   Hicok's poem is a relatively succinct 44 lines.  Mine currently stands at about three single-spaced handwritten pages.  It is a shambolic stab at Tennessee facts and history, a chagrined interrogation of my hometown.  I am trying to be funny, and I'm falling flat.  I am trying to be probing and exact and fair.  I am trying to, as usual, account for the unusual and the otherwise overlooked.  In its current form, the poem is untenable; only recently have I realized this. I still like it, and I still think I'm onto something.  After my usual practice of putting the poem away for a while to let it marinate and age, what do I do now?  I have rewritten and expanded it at least twice, to little avail.  The same flailing, the same chest-beating is there. 

Within the last two weeks, though, I've started to go the other way, toward not just cutting but concision.  This is, I admit, not my usual strategy--I pride myself (and chide myself) on my masochistic desire to write through a problem, to add volume first and worry about depth later.  But fueled by a couple of other recent poems where I've striven for economy and precision, I am now trying to capture in fewer than 20 lines what I've been shooting for in 100-plus lines.  One benefit in trying to write this poem long is that I now see whole lines I want to keep!  This means the poem has probably been there all along, just not in the form I envisioned and, indeed, have labored so mightily to realize.  There are usable parts; it's just taken me a while to discover them.

If we poets are priests, marrying form to content, beauty to truth, then surely we are also scavengers, hovering raven-like over the broken bones of our failed drafts, using what's usable.  Or we are salvage artists in a junkyard, looking for an intact carburetor, a front bucket seat with fabric that hasn't faded, all for the purpose of reconstituting, of making them new and workable again.  To salvage is to save. 

Our workshop at Writers Circle on July 25 will be devoted to the art of poetic salvage.  We will work with your own failed or stuck poems, poems with usable parts or recoverable bones; we will work to identify these pieces and construct new organisms.  Please email me either 1) a whole poem or 2) a document of poem parts no later than Tuesday, July 21 and I will make copies for the group.

Michael Diebert's class on line breaks in poetry

L-R: Michael, Marsha Barnes, Karen Holmes, Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin, Joan Howard, Brenda Kay Ledford

We had six students and were happy to have Marsha Barnes, second from left below, and Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin who drove over from Cullowhee. She is in blue with scarf.

Michael Diebert, last class for the 2013 season at Writers Circle, October 12

Michael Diebert, poetry editor for the Chattahoochee Review - Saturday, October 12, 2013

10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Writers Circle Studio

Michael Diebert is poetry editor for The Chattahoochee Review and teaches writing and literature at Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta.  He is the author of Life Outside the Set, available from Sweatshoppe Publications through amazon.com.  Recent poems have appeared and/or are forthcoming in The Comstock Review,jmww, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Looking at the Poetic Line
Just as the sentence is arguably the fundamental unit of prose, the line is arguably the fundamental unit of poetry.  More than image, metaphor, concision, or imagination—all of which are also crucial elements—the line gives a poem essential force and significance.  We’ll briefly examine some theory of line, look at several poems’ uses of line, and discuss how more conscientious attention to this oft-overlooked element can inform and enrich our own poems’ potential.

Participants may email one original poem to Michael for inclusion in the discussion—preferably 30 lines or fewer.  His email address is crazyquilt67@gmail.com.  Please send poems no later than Friday, Oct. 5.

Register by sending a $40 check made to Glenda Beall and mail to 581 Chatuge Lane, Hayesville, NC 28904 or email: nightwriter0302@yahoo.com

Will Wright teaches The Sound Textures of Poetry

Will Wright 

The Sound Textures of Poetry

 Saturday, August 10,  10:30 - 1:30 p.m.

Fee $40.00

Location: Writers Circle Studio Hayesville, NC

POETRY CLASS AT JCCFS APRIL 12 - NEEDS MORE STUDENTS

Check out this poetry class at John C. Campbell Folk School on the weekend of April 12. Sounds amazing, doesn't it?

We hear it will get cancelled unless more students sign up. Take this opportunity, if you live in the local area, to get the 1//2 price fee. Here's the description:

MITAKUYE OYASIN: POETRY AND THE NATURAL WORLD 

"Mitakuye Oyasin" is a Lakota Sioux prayer translated, "We are all related." It's a prayer of gratitude for all living things. In that spirit, enjoy the poetry of Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, and others as we explore the poetic voices of the natural world. Using science and history, we'll investigate how writing poetry can reveal and deepen our relationship to this amazing planet. We'll gain inspiration from early spring in the mountains by taking our classroom outdoors on peaceful walks. All levels welcome. 

Instructor: Mary Carroll-Hackett: Mary earned her MFA from Bennington College in Vermont in 2003. She now teaches creative writing at Longwood University in Virginia, where she founded "The Dos Passos Review," edits for Briery Creek Press, and administers the Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry. Mary's fiction has appeared in "The Carolina Quarterly," "Clackamas Literary Review," "The Pedestal Magazine," and other literary journals. She is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently "The Real Politics of Lipstick" from Slipstream Press

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Writers Circle classes 2013

CreateSpace self-publishing class, October 27 cancelled due to illness of instructor

Writers Circle hopes to hold this class at a later date, possibly next year.

Writers Circle schedules no classes from November - April. If you are a writer or teacher of writing, and want to teach a class in 2013, contact us by email:  nightwriter0302@yahoo.com.

Check out the Schedule page on this blog to see classes as they are listed on the 2013 Calendar.

Will Wright will teach poetry at Writers Circle

Call for registration now 404-316-8466 or 828-389-4441 
Registration fee: $30

Will Wright, poet, editor

What makes “good poetry” good?

WritersCircle Saturday, October 13, 10 – 1 pm.  Contact kpaulholmes@gmail.com for information or visit Writers Circle

Will describes his workshop:
 In the overwhelming world of poetry publishing—the innumerable journals and editors, as well as the innumerable poets attempting to publish—it’s often discouraging, even disenchanting, to attempt to figure out how to find one’s way into publication. As an editor myself, a lot of poetry hits my desk from all over the world, and much of it, unfortunately, is little more than lineated prose; that is, there is not much, if any, attention to craft.
There are certain things poets can learn about the craft so that their work is noticed.
I will dedicate half of the WritersCircle meeting to how good poetry works in distinction to lineated prose or “flat” poetry.

The poem needs to be coherent, and it must cater—in some form—to both the heart and the intellect. 
I hope to embolden and encourage poets during this class and to help them identify ways to improve their work and more carefully attune their voice so that they stand out from the crowd. I welcome writers of all levels to join the class and what I hope will be a convivial, helpful conversation.



William Wright, Series Editor and Volume Editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, is author of five collections of poems: the full-length Night Field Anecdote (Louisiana Literature Press, 2011), Bledsoe (Texas Review Press, 2011), Dark Orchard (Texas Review Press, Winner of the Texas Review Breakthrough Poetry Prize, 2005), and the chapbooks The Ghost Narratives (Finishing Line Press, 2008) and Sleep Paralysis (Winner of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Prize, 2011, forthcoming from Stepping Stones Press). Wright recently won the Porter Fleming Prize in Poetry.