Valerie Nieman v. 3.0

It was the long way around, but I got there. On Saturday, I was driving to the Literary Bookpost in Salisbury, using the car's navigation system for directions. When I got off I-85, the sign pointed right to downtown - but the nav system sent me left. Hmmmm .... well, maybe it was the back way around a lot of traffic lights. So I followed. Out into the country. Really into the country. Three miles, four miles. Then I saw the sign, "Welcome to Faith." The nav system came alive and told me I was approaching my destination, 110 S. Main St. And there it was, in the tiny downtown of Faith, a house on the lefthand side. And the nav system insisting that I was in Salisbury. So I tried the GPS on my phone, and it sent me back the way I'd come, toward the downtown, and to 110 S. Main St., the Literary Bookpost. A few minutes lost, no more. One of the folks attending the workshop said it was meant to be, that taking the detour had perhaps prevented an accident, had taken...

I've been re-reading a classic novel that I knew as a girl. Gene Stratton Porter wrote "A Girl of the Limberlost" about Indiana's great wooded swamps, thick with moths and mysteries. It appealed to me because I, too, was a solitary child wandering the woods, exploring the patch of second-growth woods below our house, chasing butterflies in the hayfields. The book (I remember it with pale green covers, the color of a luna moth) seems antique now, the sentiments labored and the transitions often choppy, yet the old allure is there, like the music of the Limberlost. The poor country girl facing the challenges of a city school, her hunger for knowledge, the dangerous beauties of wild places - those remain fresh. Each chapter is titled with a promise of what lies ahead, "Wherein Elnora has more financial troubles, and Mrs. Comstock again hears the song of the Limberlost." These titles are an enticement, but also a pledge - you will experience this, you will l...

Press 53 has announced the winners and finalists of its Open Competition , and it's exciting to welcome these authors into the family. One thing about being part of an Indie publisher like Press 53 is that, year by year, you see the community grow and make connections with other writers from coast to coast - and beyond. Among the winners and finalists this year were friends from the Triad - Michael Gaspeny, Ray Morrison and others. Their work emerged from blind judging, along with that from writers from as far away as Bellingham, WA; Watsonville, CA; Brooklyn, NY; and British Columbia, Canada. It will be fun to get to know them through their work in the 2012 anthology. Publisher Kevin Morgan Watson often speaks about choosing his first two poets, without knowing where they were from, and finding after he decided on the manuscripts that they were from Greensboro (me) and Winston-Salem (Joseph Mills.) Although the press publishes North Carolinians, its reach is nationwide, with a r...