Fayetteville Public Library will showcase Ozark culture and regional authors and writers, Saturday, September 10th, beginning at 9am in the Walker Community Room during Ozark Writers Live!, now in its fifth year. This full day event is hosted in conjunction with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The event is free and open to the public. For more information about this event, visit www.faylib.org or call 856.7250.
Larry Foley | Screenwriting Basics | 9am
Larry Foley is a professor of journalism and an accomplished documentary film maker. His productions have earned three Emmys from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and nine Emmy nominations in writing, journalistic enterprise, history, cultural history and community service. His University of Arkansas students have been awarded three Emmys for films produced under Professor Foley’s direction. Foley’s documentary credits include Sacred Spaces-The Architecture of Fay Jones (2010 Mid-America Emmy nomination), The Greatest Coach Ever, Beacon of Hope-The Story of the University of Arkansas, Charles Banks Wilson-Portrait of an American Artist (Mid-America Emmy), The Forgotten Expedition, It Started Here: Early Arkansas and the Louisiana Purchase, 22 Straight, Arkansas’ Natural Heritage, Out of the Woods, The Keetoowahs Come Home, The Black Swamp, The Governor from Greasy Creek, Arkansas-A Special Place, Hell on the Border, and Natural, Wild & Free. His PBS credits include The Buffalo Flows (Mid America Emmy-Writer), Saving the Eagles, The Lost Squadron and When Lightning Struck: Saga of an American Warplane (Mid-America Emmy).
Screenwriting Basics will explore the fundamental and essential elements needed for great screenwriting.
Follow Foley’s current project Up Among the Hills, a Fayetteville history documentary that the library is producing : http://www.projectfayetteville.org/
Beyond Paper and Ink: Publishing with New Formats Panel Discussion | 10am
This panel discussion features veteran authors J.B. Hogan, Velda Brotherton, and Duke Pennell explaining the exploding eBook publishing market and other online publishing options for new and experienced writers.
Panelists:
Velda Brotherton
Velda Brotherton has been published since 1994 and has been writing even longer than that. Her books include Fly With the Mourning Dove, a 2008 WILLA finalist; Springdale: The Courage of Shiloh; and two new ones: The Boston Mountains: Lost in the Ozarks and Arkansas Meals and Memories. She writes both fiction and nonfiction and has 12 published novels and books. Recently, she began publishing her work as eBooks, beginning with several collections of short stories then the E-publishing of her early historical novels.
”Learning E-formatting was a challenge, but turned out to be easier than I expected,” she says. “Best of all, it gives published writers a chance to re-publish out-of-print work and fledgling writers can be published much easier in this exciting new market.”
Velda is a native of Arkansas who returned 39 years ago, after a long absence to set up housekeeping with her husband Don near Winslow, AR. The couple has two children, three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. She is a member of Ozark Writer’s League, Oklahoma Writer’s Federation, Inc., Women Writing the West, Author’s Guild and Northwest Arkansas Writer’s Workshop. She can be contacted through her website: http://www.veldabrotherton.com/. Find the Kindle edition of Dream Walker, Brotherton’s latest book on Amazon.
J.B. Hogan
J. B. Hogan is a fiction writer and poet. He plays upright bass in an acoustic Americana band and spends much of his free time doing research and writing articles on local history.
“Kerosene Heat” was nominated for a 2010 Pushcart Prize (flash fiction) by Word Catalyst. His dystopian novel New Columbia is archived at Aphelion. A contest-winning, fiction e-book Near Love Stories is online at Cervena Barva Press along with three stories in Flash of Aphelion, a flash fiction print anthology.
Over 160 of his stories and poems have been published in such journals as: The Medulla Review, Cynic Online Magazine, Istanbul Literary Review, Every Day Poets, Ranfurly Review, Dead Mule, Smokebox, Bewildering Stories, Poesia, Frontier Tales and Avatar Review.
“Ozark Beats,” read for the NPR program Tales from the South, can be heard on KUAR, Little Rock, Arkansas. A video of the reading can be seen on You Tube.
Duke Pennell
Duke Pennell traces his family tree along the ridges of the Ozark Mountains, through the Cumberlands, the Smokies and all the way back to the East Coast. He was raised on stories of the hills and their people — self reliance and independence were key themes. The original meaning of the term “ridge runner” truly comes to mind. An appropriate motto would be “montani semper liberi,” or “mountain people are always free!”
A man of wide interests and experience he is a Master Class combat shooter, avid motorcyclist, and Viet Nam veteran. He has been a factory worker, horse trainer, firefighter, police officer, long haul trucker, jewelry designer, construction worker, teacher, and computer systems engineer. Currently working as a manuscript editor, he offers assistance to both fiction and non-fiction authors. He is editor of the online Frontier Tales, a western magazine.
You can also go to http://www.dukepennell.com to learn more about his editing work.
Pat Carr | Classic Ozark Storytelling: Bridging Fiction and Memoir | 11am
Pat Carr holds a B.A. and M.A. from Rice, a Ph.D. from Tulane, and sixteen published books, including the Iowa Fiction Prize winner, The Women in the Mirror, and the PEN Book Award finalist, If We Must Die. She’s published over a hundred short stories in such places as The Southern Review, Yale Review, and Best American Short Stories. Her latest short story collection, The Death of a Confederate Colonel, a nominee for the Faulkner Award, won the PEN Southwest Fiction Award, the John Estes Cooke Fiction Award, and was voted one of the top ten books from university presses for 2007 by Foreword Magazine. She’s won numerous other awards, including a Library of Congress Marc IV, an NEH, the Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award, an Al Smith Literary Fellowship, and a Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt Writing Fellowship in Lausanne, Switzerland.
A writing text, Writing Fiction with Pat Carr appeared from High Hill Press in June, 2010, and her autobiography, One Page at a Time: On a Writing Life was published by Texas Tech University Press in December, 2010.
Carr will share writing techniques that assist with the crossover between memoir and fiction writing. She will also share writing tips from her recent books One Page at a Time and Writing with Pat Carr.
Clark Buehling of the Skirtlifters | 12pm
Clarke Buehling, 5 string banjoist and master of clawhammer and 3-finger classic style banjo, is one of Northwest Arkansas’s finest musicians. These 19th century toe-tapping tunes will keep everyone clapping for more.
Jo McDougall, Keynote Speaker | Treasures from a Delta Family | 1pm
Jo McDougall, an Arkansas native and a graduate of the University of Arkansas MFA program, has published five books, including, most recently, Dirt and Satisfied with Havoc, Autumn House Press; and a 2010 chapbook, Under an Arkansas Sky, Tavern Books. Her memoir, Daddy’s Money: a Memoir of Farm and Family, was released in July 2011 from the University of Arkansas Press. She has received awards from the DeWitt Wallace/Reader’s Digest foundation, four fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, and recently was named to the Arkansas Writers Hall of Fame. She and her husband, Charles, live in Leawood, Kansas, in the Kansas City metropolitan area.
McDougall shares her childhood and traces five generations in the Arkansas Delta with her new book Daddy’s Money: a Memoir of Farm and Family. These compelling accounts connect the power of the land with the characters that shaped her life. She will discuss the challenges of memoir writing, as well as the special obstacles she faced when shifting her writing focus from poetry to a new genre.
Learn more about McDougall’s writing at http://jomcdougall.net/
Kenneth Smith | Navigating Nonfiction | 2pm
Kenneth Smith, author of the books Buffalo River Country, Sawmill: The Story of Cutting the Last Great Virgin Forest East of the Rockies, and Buffalo River Handbook, will guide you on a journey toward successful nonfiction writing. He will showcase the unique problems and opportunities that this genre of writing presents to authors.
Kenneth L. Smith grew up in Hot Springs, and in 1952 he enrolled at the University of Arkansas, majoring in mechanical engineering. During his freshman year he joined a university hiking group; while participating in this group he developed a great love for the Buffalo River country of northwest Arkansas. Following college and graduate school, Smith worked for the National Park Service. During his twelve years in the service he worked as a civil engineer in western parks and as a park planner in Washington, D.C. In 1974 he left the service and returned to Fayetteville, where he became a freelance writer, photographer, and researcher.
During his years outside of Arkansas he retained his ties with environmentalists in the state, including members of the Ozark Society. In 1967 the society published his first book, The Buffalo River Country. It also published his second book in 1977, Buffalo River Country. Smith’s third book, Sawmill: The Story of Cutting the Last Great Virgin Forest East of the Rockies, published in 1986 by the University of Arkansas Press, received the Virginia K. Ledbetter Prize in 1988 for the best nonfiction work on Arkansas.
