Eugene Wolf
The Friends of the Washington County Public Library announce the line-up for this year’s Sunday with Friends literary series.
Events are all held Sundays at 3 p.m. in the community room at the Washington County Public Library, Abingdon, Virginia, and are free and open to the public.
Felicia Mitchell speaks Jan. 12. Mitchell’s new collection of poems “Trail Magic” is inspired by hikes around Southwest Virginia and other places. Whether you are an avid hiker, an armchair naturalist or someone who simply loves vicarious rambles through the natural world — you will find wonders and kinship in these poems. She is a professor emeritus at Emory & Henry University where she taught English and creative writing courses. Widely published in anthologies and online journals, Mitchell has published two full-length collections of poems, “Waltzing with Horses” and “A Mother Speaks, a Daughter Listens: Journeying Through Dementia.”
Quinn Hawkesworth and Eugene Wolf present “Lee Smith’s Good Ol’ Girls” Jan. 26. In a career spanning more than 50 years, from “The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed” in 1968 to “Silver Alert” in 2023, through 12 novels and four collections of short stories, Lee Smith has given voice to Appalachian women of all ages and backgrounds. Hawkesworth and Wolf use five of Smith’s women and the music so intertwined in her stories to trace a journey from childhood to life’s end. The New York Review of Books says that Smith “is nothing less than masterly. She brings to her work an ear for speech and voice that most other writers can only envy.”
Three writers talk about their books about Abingdon History, Feb. 9. Three regional writers have researched and dramatized portions of Abingdon’s history. Bonny Gable’s “The Martha Odyssey” imagines life at Martha Washington College in 1915, focusing on an aspiring young pianist who must deal with the ghosts from her past. In “Abingdon‘s Boardinghouse Murder,” Greg Lilly explores the sensational 1945 murder of a young World War II veteran by the owner of the boardinghouse where he was staying. Robert Sorrell, an area journalist and historian, includes the history and significance of Abingdon’s Barter Theatre in his “Historic Theaters of the Tennessee Tri-Cities.”
Erika Howsare speaks Feb. 23. Howsare is the author of “The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors.” In this masterful hybrid of nature writing and cultural studies, Howsare investigates our human connections with deer for millennia. In the 21st century, our relationship is still intimate, yet full of contradictions. We hunt and protect them. We cull them from suburbs, while mythologizing them as icons of wilderness. Howsare uses poetry, ecology, pop culture, anthropology and interviews with dozens of hunters, naturalists and historians as she delves into the historical roots of our tangled attitudes toward deer.
William Sikes takes to the podium March 9. Sikes is the author of “The End of Meaning: Cultural Change in America Since 1945.” Toward the end of the 20th century, many became anxious about the collapse and decline of the institutions which gave meaning to people’s lives. In this book Sikes explores the forces that have brought about the extraordinary decline in our families and communities, our universities and religious institutions, films and popular music, literature and fine arts and more. Sikes has degrees from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. He is also an artist and author of “The Psychological Roots of Modernism: Picasso and Jung.”
Mark Powell, the novelist whom Ron Rash has called “the best Appalachian novelist of the current generation,” speaks April 6. His seventh novel is “The Late Rebellion,” a dramatization of social changes that have taken place in small towns where the older generation is clinging to older social norms and the younger generation is defying them. Underlying this is the legacy of violence in the South that resonates through generations. Powell teaches creative writing and contemporary fiction at Appalachian State University. He has degrees from the Citadel, the University of South Carolina and Yale Divinity School.
The annual Celebration of Regional Poetry is held April 13. Jane Hicks, the Kingsport, Tennessee poet, speaks about her new volume of poetry, “The Safety of Small Things.” The poems in this collection juxtapose the splendor and revelations of nature and science, the circle of life, how family and memories give honor to those we have lost and how can all fit together. Her earlier collection of poetry “Driving with the Dead” won the Appalachian Book of the Year Award as well as being nominated for a Weatherford Award. Her collection “Blood & Bone Remember” also won the Appalachian Book of the Year Award. She will be joined by poets from the Appalachian Center of Poets and Writers.
Rick Van Noy, a Radford University English professor and environmental activist, speaks about his work, “Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South,” April 27. Using creative non-fiction techniques of narrative, scene, humor and dialogue, Van Noy says that in the book he wants to move climate change “out of abstraction, to bring it down to a local level in ways that that real people experience it.” He is the author of the book “A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature Through the Seasons” and of essays in “Teaching the Literature of Climate Change and Thinking Continental: Writing Local in a Global World.”
Francis Gary Powers, Jr. concludes the series May 18. Powers, Jr. is the co-author, with Christopher Sturdevant, of “Cold War Virginia.” Virginia played a central role in United States involvement during the Cold War. With doomsday operations underway for World War III during the 1950s, the Pentagon, CIA, and other federal agencies established Northern Virginia as the epicenter of decision-making. Virginia military bases readied for a potential surprise attack by the Soviet Union and research facilities worked on the Space Race. When the Soviet Union shot down the spy plane of Powers’ father, a superpower crisis of epic proportions ensued.
For more information call 276-676-6233 or visit www.wcpl.net.
TEXTING WHILE HIKING
It does happen, sometimes,
the click of my fingers
alongside the clack of my feet
on a rocky trail,
just as it did the other day
crossing Buzzard Rock.
I am not ashamed to admit it.
Silurian, that rock—
so old, millions of years old,
it can ground me
and put everything
(or almost everything)
into perspective,
and not just the panoramic vista
with big, big sky.
Even texting while hiking across it
can feel like something ordained.
Keeping spirit in sync
with a friend far removed
in our life’s journeys—
my feet taking up where his left off—
there is no judgment from sun
or sandstone or afternoon sky
when there is a way to seek each other’s company
across the ages, across some rocks,
across the miles between us.
Reprinted with permission from “Trail Magic” by Felicia Mitchell
