Tuesday, June 19, 2012

2012 Symposium

The fourth Appalachian Heritage Writers Symposium is finished. Again it was hosted on the campus of Southwest Virginia Community College near Richlands, Virginia. This one was as good or better than the three previous conferences, in my opinion. Presenters delivered excellent sessions on fiction and nonfiction, children's literature, use of paranormal elements, poetry, illustration and internet presence. In addition a different setup of three mini workshops on Saturday morning culminated in two open mic sections. Participants delivered a variety of examples of their work. Any writer who was unable to make it this year should save the dates, June 14-15, 2013, and plan to attend the Symposium.
Sponsors of the Symposium included a number of individuals, SWCC Foundation, Appalachian Authors GuildVirginia Writers Club, Lost State Writers Guild, Dominion Resources and Barter Theater among others, in addition to a small writing contest entry fee. 

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Year half gone

Not a lot accomplished, at least not as much as I'd like. Have kept Guild's webpages updated pretty regularly and presented a program at the Lost State Writers Guild May meeting on 'Make That Scene'. Enough Life Slices columns written and sent in that I only missed a week being published since January. And I thought I had enough notes and ideas stacked around and filed that I'd have no problem getting the columns written. Hah. Not every idea I scribbled down is column potential. Around three hundred words is my goal and you really have to focus to get a coherent piece done without extraneous words. Not that I'm always successful. I cringe when I read a couple. If any possible reader of this blog has not read my columns, either in a print issue or online at the Kingsport Daily News, here's the link to my latest effort. Hope you like it.