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Monthly Archives: January 2025

Irene Blair Honeycutt’s New Poetry Collection

January 25, 2025 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Irene Blair Honeycutt has played a major role in Charlotte’s literary circles for many years. During her tenure as a faculty member at Central Piedmont Community College, she taught creative writing to countless students.  In 1993, she founded CPCC’s Spring Literary Festival and served as its director for fourteen years. This festival expanded into CPCC’s Sensoria Festival, a celebration of literature and the arts. Upon her retirement in 2006, CPCC established the Irene Blair Honeycutt Distinguished Lectureship in her honor.

Besides teaching and doing community engagement work, Irene has a long record as a published poet.  Her first poetry collection, It Comes as a Dark Surprise, appeared in 2001. She then brought out Waiting for the Trout to Speak (2002), Before the Light Changes (2008), and Beneath the Bamboo Sky (2017).  Her fifth and most recent poetry collection, Mountains of the Moon: Poems & Pieces, came out last month from Charlotte Lit Press. I contacted Irene and asked her for more information about her new poetry collection. Irene responded by sending me a reflective piece that she titled “Thoughts on Writing Mountains of the Moon.”

Poetry surprises us with its unexpectedness.  We have a dream that haunts itself into becoming a poem. We honor a deceased friend. Our words keep the departed alive. Then we turn the page. Write a poem to honor a living person who has graced our lives in a special way. We write of moments that are already past. This moment is already past tense. One day, we receive a call that stops the clocks: that person we wrote about not long ago has died unexpectedly in his pickup truck. Frozen in the mountains.  But unexpectedness is about more than the dying. Or the leaving.

As Annie Dillard says, “We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed.”  The heron’s wings opening to the Book of Ages. A melody pulsing beneath Serkin’s fingers and all those trout swimming. The moths. The moon. The echolocation. The orientation of stars. 

A poem at a glance is like the tip of an iceberg. What is easily discernible remains on the surface.  What lies beneath the layers of a poem ventures into the deep unknown. To scramble the metaphor for a moment, I said to my dentist not long ago, not thinking of poetry, but of a possible root canal: A lot of life has gone into that tooth!

The same is true of Mountains of the Moon. All the life that went into this book contains years of being taught by incredible teachers of literature that go all the way back to elementary school. It contains days of childhood when I sat inside my bamboo hut nurtured by nature and wrote tiny poems and hid them in the ground. Biblical stories and hymns—rich imagery was part of that childhood. In my professional life in Charlotte, opportunities to hear amazing poets came my way via CPCC’s Sensoria, including Robert Hass, Mary Oliver, Linda Pastan, Edward Hirsch, Mark Doty, Natasha Tretheway, Li Young-Lee, and Stephen Dunn.  Too many to name.  And marvelous years of mentoring students from whom I also learned came my way. The Charlotte Writers Club provided a welcoming place for leadership roles and fellowship for beginning and experienced writers.   

We live in intervals. Each poem is never at the same place in the river of Time. Mountains of the Moon, my fifth, is a hybrid collection of Haibun, mini essays, dramatic, informal and experimental forms. Two of the poems were published in 2011 and 2012. The most recent in 2024. Sections vary: Motifs highlight living during the pandemic, relying on the human and the nonhuman for inspiration, joying in playing with language in new ways, mourning the loss of my dog. And the saving moon from childhood is a constant influence.  I aimed to capture the unexpected, to allow intuition to lead.  And then I learned anew how the poem, if we trust it, becomes wiser than the poet.  

Poetry gives the breath of life to memory. I’m not the first to say that elegiac poetry is a celebration of life, not death. And I love that T. S. Eliot said “…every poem [is] an epitaph.” 

I am grateful to Charlotte Lit, to all nonprofit independent presses, to the Charlotte Writers Club and Storied Charlotte for celebrating and preserving poetry for the good of us all. 

For more about Mountains of the Moon, read Irene’s book page at https://www.charlottelit.org/press/mountains-of-the-moon  Charlotte Lit is sponsoring a launch party for Mountains of the Moon.  This event will take place on Sunday, February 16, from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. at Charlotte Hygge Coworking, 933 Louise Avenue.  Copies of Irene’s collection will be available at the event to buy and have signed, but you can also purchase it online from Charlotte Lit Press. The event is free, but seating is limited so please register here.

I congratulate Irene on the publication of Mountains of the Moon, and I thank her for her many contributions to Storied Charlotte. 

Tags: poetry collection

Celebrating Our Freedom to Read 

January 18, 2025 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

When Hurricane Helene swept through North Carolina this past September, Charlotte did not take a direct hit.  However, the heavy rain and high wind forced the cancellation of many events in Charlotte including a much-anticipated Freedom to Read Panel Discussion organized by the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.  The organizers intended for this panel discussion to coincide with the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, but book banning is not limited to one week—it’s a year-around problem. For this reason, the organizers decided to reschedule the panel discussion even though Banned Books Week has already come and gone.  The rescheduled Freedom to Read Panel Discussion will take place on Thursday, February 6, 2025, from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at the SouthPark Regional Library (7015 Carnegie Boulevard).

I contacted Meghan Anderson, one of the organizers of the event, and asked her for more information. Here is what she sent to me:

Attempts to ban books from school and public libraries are rising at an unprecedented level across the country. Join the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library as we celebrate our freedom to read with an exceptional in-person panel of experts who will engage in open conversation about the dangers of book banning and censorship and the importance of free expression and first amendment rights.

The panel consists experts with varying perspectives. Providing the author point of view is Tameka Fryer Brown. She is a picture book author whose books prominently feature inclusivity. Providing the reader perspective is David Caldwell, an active member of the Park Road Books Banned Books Club. We round out the panel with two different librarian perspectives, Abby Moore, an education librarian at UNC Charlotte, and Megan Sanford, a CMS Media Coordinator. They both will provide us community and school perspectives of the current censorship landscape. And of course, Marcellus Turner, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s own CEO, will emcee the event and provide his public library point of view as well. 

The goal of the event is to provide a space to learn about the dangers of censorship and  book challenges as well as provide information on the current climate. Each panelist will have a chance to speak and then a question and answer session for further discussion will occur.  All people curious about this topic are encouraged to attend! 

The event will take place at South Park Regional branch at 6:00 pm on Thursday, February 6th, 2025. Light refreshments will be served.  The event is free, but registration is required.  The registration link for the event is here. 

My thanks go to Meghan, the panelists, and everyone involved in making this event a reality despite the problems caused by Hurricane Helene. I urge everyone in Storied Charlotte to join the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library in celebrating and exercising our precious freedom to read.

Tags: Book Banning

Chris Arvidson on Becoming a Poet 

January 11, 2025 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

The world of creative writing can be divided into three broad categories:  fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.  When I first met Chris Arvidson about six years ago, she was known primarily as a writer of creative nonfiction. She wrote personal essays about such topics as her love of the North Carolina mountains and her passion for baseball.  Recently, however, Chris has taken an interest in writing poetry.  In 2022, she published her debut poetry chapbook titled The House Inside My Head. This month Finishing Line Press brought out Nobody Cares What You Think, her first full poetry collection. Curious about how and why Chris made the transition from creative nonfiction to poetry, I reached out to her and asked about this development in her writing career.  Here is what she sent to me:

Poetry is a relatively new genre for me. I have often tried to figure out how this MFA in Creative Nonfiction person ended up wandering into poetry. I think I have a couple of ideas about how that has happened. When I moved back to Charlotte in 2019, I started attending a weekly prompt-driven workshop at Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s Uptown branch. And, somehow, I started responding in poetry? It just started pouring out of me. I have kept a running notebook ever since, using it as a master collector of writing from every workshop I attend, which includes many with Charlotte Lit (where I now serve on the Board), Charlotte Writers Club, and Table Rock Writers Workshop at Wildacres, as well as the library. I especially find Jay Ward’s monthly Saturday series at University City Library a fun and always productive couple of writing hours.

I suspect the appeal of poetry is partly driven by my age. With a poem you can respond to a prompt or notion, play with it, revise it, and FINISH it in a reasonable amount of time. I figure that I’m naturally gravitating to things that I can finish. Call it done. Move on to the next thing I want to say something about, and know that I’ll be around long enough to do so. I also think that the poetry I am writing in this book very much runs right up into memoir, and in that way, the MFA in creative nonfiction plays a role in my thinking and writing. Many of the sort of “principles” feel the same, attention to the telling detail, the universality in personal stories, and observing the world through a unique-to-you lense.

I’m going to do a book launch for Nobody Cares What You Think at Charlotte Art League’s gallery on February 14, 6-9:00 p.m., in conjunction with a show opening there that I co-curated called “Latrina Ekphrastic” — it’s art and words from local poets and artists and it’s going to be hung in the gallery bathrooms. I think readings that night will definitely be in order, maybe not IN the bathrooms, but just outside.

For readers who want to know more about Chris and her creative endeavors, please click on the following link:  https://www.chrisarvidson.com/index.htm

I congratulate Chris on the publication of Nobody Cares What You Think, and I thank her for her many and varied contributions to Storied Charlotte’s creative side.  

Tags: poetry
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