Sept. 11 and 12: Carolina Mountains Literary Festival -- schedule for my sessions

Sat. (Sept. 12):  9:00 – 11:45 a.m.   

POETRY WORKSHOP with Susan Laughter Meyers

Advance Registration Required – $30      

Sponsored by The Grapevine, 11 West Main St., Burnsville

Dear Snakeskin & Other Marvels of the Earth: 
Letter Poems & Odes  

What better opportunity to speak from the heart—to say what needs saying to wonders of the Earth—than through poetry? Whether we, on behalf of the human race, have gratitude to express or an apology to pay, here’s the chance to add our voices. We’ll read some exemplary letter poems and odes that strike up a conversation with the Earth—whether written to an atamasco lily, sunset, blackbird, or bumble bees. As readers, we expect from poems the imaginative and the relevant, the truthful and the surprising.  Always, we hope, beneath the surface of them lies urgency. Let’s immerse ourselves in both poetry and the natural world—with discussion, a writing activity or two, and a wealth of published poems to bend our ear closer to the earthly marvels we live in the midst of. Class size limit – 25.  Advance Registration Required – $30

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Fri. (Sept. 11): 3:00 – 3:45 p.m.  /  Sat. (Sept. 12): 3:00 – 3:45 p.m.

Susan Laughter Meyers  

Nature’s Neglected: Poems Celebrating the Uncelebrated  

Taking a cue from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty”—and its “Glory be to God for dappled things”—we’ll read and discuss poems that bring our attention to such overlooked wonders as the capybara, the pipefish, maybe even witchgrass and mud. Poems by Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, A. R. Ammons, and others will give us this brief opportunity to deepen our appreciation of the Earth—and learn more about ourselves—as we celebrate the uncelebrated.

See the complete Carolina Mountains Literary Festival schedule here.