Skip to main content

Authors David Poyer, Joan Lablanc, Claudia Young & Dr. Henry Mason to read at Pocomoke High's Writing Center Ribbon Cutting

Writing is a discipline, and like a muscle requires exercise.  Good writing is good thinking, or so the saying goes.  This Friday, December 12th, at 3:00 PM, Pocomoke High School welcomes four local authors to read from their work, and celebrate the written word.

Best selling author David Poyer, romance writer Joan Lablanc, Dr. Henry Maxson, and Claudia Young will read from their work to commemorate the opening of Pocomoke High School's Writing Center, 1817.

1817 (the number address of the school's facilities) is a staffed writing center that aims to help students develop and hone writing skills. The center aims to help students be more successful on high stakes testing, but teaching the craft of writing eclipses standardized testing, and focuses on thinking and processing skills that will allow the student to be more successful in college, and in their career field.

The skills required to be a successful writer are developed over a lifetime.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, said once that “Prose words in their best order; poetry the best words in the best order.” Coleridge was a critic, and essayist, but best known for his nightmarish poetry. What Coleridge's quote does not state directly is that the writer must process the thoughts into writing. This process of writing requires time, patience, and a great deal of reading. Writers, like athletes, need a place to exercise their muscles.

David Poyer, best known for his military thrillers, will read from his work. Poyer's writing is required reading at Annapolis Naval Academy, and if you haven't had the pleasure of reading his taught action thrillers, you are in for a treat. Poyer's work is topical, synthesizing provocative current events with military tension. Poyer's newest work is The Cruiser, a Dan Lenson novel.


Romance writer Joan Lablanc historical novels tell the story of nurse Anna Donovan, whose life before, during and after WWII is beautifully told in her Angels series.

Lastly, but certainly not least, Claudia Young and Dr. Henry Maxson will read from Comfort, their newest historical novel which tells the harrowing tale of Comfort, a freed slave who is sold back into slavery and taken back to the south via the reverse underground railroad (for more on the reverse underground direct your browser here).

If you are in the area please come on by and celebrate the written word. For maps and directions click here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Summer Poetry Reading in Rehoboth

If anyone's interested in a mid-summer run to Rehoboth's outlet malls, consider Tuesday, July 27th, and stop by the Rehoboth Beach Librar y for the summer poetry series. Besides moi, Denise Clemmons, poet and food critic for the Cape Gazette, and Sherry Chapplle, poet and professor. Excellent company. Books will be for sale afterwards. It's a quality series, and full of surprises. Garry Hanna has done a bang-up job organizing the summer series. Bring a few quarters to ward off the meter maid. Reading starts at 7:00 PM.

Out this week: Thirty Days: Best of the 30/30 Project. Featuring my poem "Love in Reverse"

Marie Gauthier of Tupelo Press selected one of my poems, "Love in Reverse" for Thirty Days : The best of the 30/30 Project Year One.   It's one of a few anthologies to feature my work (cue haughty accent, spotlight, espresso, and French cigarettes). Hopefully you'll be hearing more from me over the next few months as projects near completion. Thanks for the support.

Vittorio Carli's work is punk rock #poetry

A Passion for Apathy: The Collected and Rejected Poems of Vittorio Carl i, a small press gem of punk rock poetry, carries poetic traditions in its teeth. Punk rock because of the in-your-face-anti-establishment irony and earnestness in Carli's presentation of his verse, traditional in the homage and muse tradition of poetry. He writes to and for those and that which enlarges his voice.  Carli's work reads like a cross between cultural commentary/homage to persons as varied as Lawrence Welk to Woody Allen, to snapshots of socio-political unrest, which are flags of protest. My favorite is the “The Trouble with Librarians (for Andrea)” where Librarians are cast as the progenitors of closed information; they are “all closed books/with a couple of pages missing.” He's a poet, and I imagine him in some stacked room typing madly, or in transit,  to and fro Chicago, scribbling on the back of brown paper bags. He works it. He's out there living poetry.  Proof. My copy of t...