This October, the Alabama State Poetry Society will host its annual mid-fall meeting in Pell City, Alabama.

Both members and non-members are encouraged to attend.  

Round Robin Readings & Meal
Friday 10/27 from 3:00-5:00 pm
(reservation required)
River Cruise: Coosa Queen Riverboat
Riverside Landing, 230 Depot Street, Riverside AL 35135

Round Robin Readings Extended
Friday 10/27 from 6:00-8:30 pm
(coffee and wine served)
Artistic Creations
2111 Cogswell Avenue, Riverside, AL 35135

ASPS Conference
Saturday 10/28 from 9:30 am - 2:00 pm
Pell City Library
1000 Bruce Etheridge Parkway
Pell City, AL 35125

We hope attendees will bring their families to Pell City as it is Avondale Mills Day in the town. Also, St. Simon Peter Episcopal Church will host it’s Fall Festival with arts, crafts, and more fun for children.

Enter the Poetry Contests for Cash Prizes

Winners for the Poetry Contests will be announced at the October Meeting. Deadline for entry is August 18, 2017. Everyone on the planet is encouraged to submit to these contests. Learn more from the ASPS website.

How to Register for the Meeting

The cost for the conference is $20 for ASPS members and $35 for non-members. Additional and optional costs include:
- $15 for Friday Paddle Boat dinner
- $15 for Saturday catered lunch

You can register for the for the Paddle Boat Tour, Fall Meeting, and catered lunch in one of two exciting ways:
1) online: send Paypal payment to alabamapoets@outlook.com and make sure to include your full name. 
2) sending a snail mail check to ASPS, P.O. Box 2, Pell City, AL 35125.

Email Treasurer Myra Ward Barra at Treasurer@alpoets.org for more information.

What is your favorite novel?

Annie Dillard’s memoir, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is one of my favorite books. Dillard reminds the reader to look for the extraordinary in every day living and that life is a continuum of beginnings and endings. One of my many memories of this book occurs when Dillard remembers hiding a penny as a young child, and drawing arrows on the sidewalk for a stranger to find it.

What inspired you to start writing?

My grandmother encouraged my creativity. She died when I was eleven. I started writing poetry to work through the grief and depression that I experienced as a result of her death.

Do you have (or have you ever had) a muse? If so, who/what?

I don’t have a particular muse. In my opinion, creative inspiration can be found through any experience in daily life.

Are there any poems that are especially important to you?

The poems in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass remind me of how we are all connected to each other and our surroundings.

“To have that feedback reinforces and helps you keep going. That’s my ultimate goal, to share my poetry.”

Carey Link

What is your favorite Alabama plant?

I love the brilliant red maple tree.

Off the top of your head, tell me five words that describe you.

Determined, insightful, curious, genuine, old soul.

Is there any way in which the Alabama Writer’s Conclave has changed or impacted your life?

The AWC community has helped broaden my connection to other Alabama poets and writers. My faith in myself as a poet has been strengthened by the invaluable encouragement and insight of other AWC members.

What are you working on right now?

My poetic sequence, I Walk a Frayed Tightrope Without a Safety Net, about my experience with advanced breast cancer. Poetry has helped to heal my spirit and given me a medium to share my journey with others. I plan to develop my literary sequence into a chapbook.

What is your favorite place in Alabama and why?

My favorite place in Alabama is to be among the trees on Montesano Mountain in Huntsville. I use a wheelchair and have never physically climbed a tree. Climbing trees in my mind gives me peace, freedom, and faith in unlimited possibilities.

As a poet, what do you find yourself needing right now?

Writers should never stop developing their craft. The support and encouragement AWC members give each other is deeply valuable important to me.

You can learn more about Carey and her poetry at the Alabama Writer’s Forum or the Arts Huntsville website.

As first prize winner of the short story contest, what inspired this story? Any particular images, sights, or sounds? Why?

“A Tale of First Love” is very autobiographical, the same thing actually happened to me. I just retold it.

Dad’s hand on my back while I laid on the bed is something I will never forget. I wrote this because I believe that human love should be honored at all stages of life.

Many fiction authors maintain the line between fiction and nonfiction is a permeable one. Is this true for you? How do you decide when a memory or essay has crossed the line from nonfiction to fiction?

For me, the line is ever so vague and blurry. I use a lot from my own life in my fiction, after all, no one knows me any better!

What short stories do you admire the most? Why? What have you learned from them?

I love Eve’s Diary by Mark Twain, to me he’s a brilliant writer. He goes past what we know and expect, without us even noticing.

Do you have any current projects we should know about? Explain.

I have a novel with agent Rena Rossner with the Deborah Harris Agency in Jerusalem, we just submitted it to publishers. it is about a fifteen-year-old Muslim boy in love with a Christian girl during the civil war in Syria. I want people to stop labeling each other and just love.

What Syrian writers do you admire and wish you could share or translate?

The Syrian writer I admire the most was my father, Kherridean Shamsi-Basha. he was a noted poet in Damascus. Unfortunately translating his work would not work. In Literature, you lose many language merits.

Learn more about Karim from his unique blog, Arab in Alabama, as well as his columns and photographs for various media outlets.

What inspired your prize-winning flash piece?

The Unopened Present was inspired by a lonely night during the Christmas season when I was sitting alone drinking. My only decoration was the little Christmas tree I had bought in Key West almost 25 years ago on a Christmas trip with my late wife. The trip’s primarily purpose was to try and patch up a marriage that was a very bad state of disrepair. I’m not sure where the idea for the unopened present came from, but I often think of my daughter who died some four years ago, during the holiday season. The story is very much rooted in my own life.

Did the piece start as a flash or did it morph from a short story or poetic form?

The original draft was something over 1000 words and I had written it for our writing group in Montgomery. I decided to see if I could cut it down to 500 words for the flash fiction category and it turned out, as things often do, that less is more.

What writers inspire you to write flash and how?

My primary writing interest has always been the short story and I find writing something that really affects people in a small number of words a challenge. I have always been a big fan of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories and just recently I was introduced to Sonja Livingston at a Tennessee Mountain Writer’s convention. Sonja’s presentation and her book, Ghostbread inspired me to concentrate more on writing even shorter fiction. I recommend her book to anyone who is interested in flash fiction and creative nonfiction.

When did you begin writing fiction?

I started writing fiction casually in high school and college and then took a long hiatus during my working career. After retirement I joined the Montgomery creative writers group and rekindled my writing. I write because I truly enjoy it and have little interest in commercial success; however, winning a prize in the Alabama Writers Conclave competition is a wonderful ego boost. It is great to be recognized by your peers.

What two short stories or flash pieces do you think every aspiring fiction writer should read?

I highly recommend two of Hemingway’s short stories, Hills like White Elephants and A Clean Well Lighted Place, to all aspiring writers. Not only are they wonderful examples of brevity and show, don’t tell, but there are critical discussions of both stories online just a Google away.

1. What led you to write your first place winning nonfiction piece, “The Stray Cat?”

“I think a lot about memory, not because I have a lot of memory to think about but because my memory bank is so shallow, as shallow as a pond on the pavement after a spring shower. I was trying to remember my earliest memories, and I think my earliest memories were of my age four. This story is perhaps the only memory that stood out as something more than a moment, something that might support a story. So I wrote it recently and I liked it, I liked how I could tell the story and express what I learned from the story, how I grew from what I learned, and to me that is the beauty of the memoir as a form of writing art.”

2. Are you inspired by a particular nonfiction writers or essayists?

“I love the memoirs of Patricia Hampl. She wrote at least four memoirs, each following a different arc or theme of her life. She proved to me that a non-fiction writer could have an impact in creative writing even more than a writer of fiction, and could be just as effective.”

3. How do you balance the need to protect the privacy of loved ones against the passion for telling a good story?

“In my memoir, The Newspaper Boy, I put a note or disclaimer in the front of the book indicating that I had changed some names for obvious reasons. I think that’s all you can do if you want to write about those characters.”

4. What inspired you to write your beautiful first-place-winning poem (which is also, uniquely, a prose poem)? Is poetry a new medium for you? What do you like about it? Why?

“Maybe I’ve spent too many years focused on my work and never opened up my trunk of memories until now… When I lift the lid all I find are scraps of thread scattered here and there, the fabric of the memory having long before dissolved. I have only skeletal memories and I’ve tried to write about a few of those things. Poetry is an ideal medium for skeletal memories, particularly if there is a lesson to be learned or a question to be explored.”

5. What poets have freed or inspired you to write in earnest, or, borrowing Emily Dickinson’s expression, to “tell it slant”?

“My friend Barry Marks is a fine poet and his poems come in all forms and styles and cover a broad range of topics, both mundane and philosophical. I’ve learned a lot from him and his discipline in writing about every conceivable experience. As for a historical poet, I think Emily Dickinson is most impressive. She wrote for years with no publicity and, so far as I know, no encouragement or social contact with other poets for support. Yet her poetry is fresh and original and uniquely inspiring.”

6. Why does poetry matter in our modern commercial culture?

“Poetry is the medium for expressing the truth in a few well selected words designed to please the hearer’s ear, to seize the hearer’s heart, to squeeze tears from the hearer’s eyes. The truth, the emotional truth, that is what matters, and poetry is the medium to achieve it.”

Judge and filmmaker Heidi Carroll selected “Keepin’ It Mighty Hot,” co-written by David M. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, as the first prize winner of the first ever 2017 Screenwriting Competition of the Alabama Writer’s Conclave. The script focuses on T.R.M. Howard’s role in the Emmett Till case. We look forward to seeing it produced.

A workshop with Kimberly Cross Teter.

You know those characters living in your head? You think you know them, but do you really? Maybe they have a few surprises for you! We’ll take a look at not only putting flesh on the bones of the characters in your work but also putting meaning and motivations in their hearts and minds. Interactive writing exercises will bring you to a deeper level of creating multi-dimensional characters who will come alive for your readers. Whether you have a work in progress or a brand new idea, this workshop will help you strengthen your character development.

KIMBERLY CROSS TETER, a proud Texas native, is a teacher and traveler by nature and a writer by happy choice. Kim completed her debut novel, Isabella’s Libretto, in the Middle Tennessee State University Write program (then known as The Writers’ Loft) in 2013. The next year this YA historical novel was published by longtime AWC member Linda Busby Parker and Excalibur Press of Mobile, AL. Since then, Kim has traveled from coast to coast to speak at literary festivals, conferences, and special events. Visiting schools, however, is her favorite gig!

Kim is an active member of the AWC, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and the Historical Novel Society. She is a graduate of West Texas A&M University and now lives in Franklin, Tennessee, with a wonderful husband and two feisty canine kids. Three grown human kids have brought her immeasurable happiness — and two grandbabies!

Learn more about Kim at her website.

To attend this workshop — and many others — please register for the 2017 AWC Writer’s Conference. We look forward to seeing you there!

Join us at Grace Aberdean / This Ol' Thing, Sunday March 11, at 6:30pm, as we celebrate 3 published writers! Shanti Weiland Laura Hendrix Ezell and Jessica Kidd will all read from their selected works!

Shanti Weiland
Shanti Weiland’s book Sister Nun is the 2015 winner of the Negative Capability Press Book Competition. Weiland received her BA in English from the University of California, Davis and later moved to the desert, pursuing a Creative Writing MA at Northern Arizona University. She then traveled to the humid and friendly south, where she earned a PhD in Poetry from the University of Southern Mississippi. She currently teaches writing and literature at The University of Alabama and lives in Birmingham with her wife and pets. 

Laura Hendrix Ezell
Laura Hendrix Ezell's story collection, A Record of Our Debts, was winner of the 2015 Moon City Short Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in McSweeney's, Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She received an MFA in Fiction from The University of Alabama, and currently works as a school librarian in Birmingham.

Jessica Kidd
Jessica Fordham Kidd is a lifelong Alabamian. She is the associate director of first-year writing at the University of Alabama, and her poems have appeared in Drunken Boat, Storyscape, Tinderbox, and The Paris Review among

Listen to the music picked by the author's that inspired their works and characters:

https://open.spotify.com/user/graceaberdean/playlist/3fom3ntocSZj9ZOBwA46Ok

Good & Refreshments will be provided!

We’re looking to reel in some authors! 
 The 3rd Annual Catfish Literary Festival will be held on Saturday, May 27th, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at Athens-Limestone Public Library. This one-day literary festival will feature panel discussions and book readings. Each author and vendor who signs up will have their own tables-space to display books and meet their audience.

How you can get involved:
For $5.00, authors and other vendors share a seven-foot table with one other vendor. They can reserve an entire seven-foot table for themselves for $10.00. The Library provides table-space, seating, and light refreshments. In addition, we will promote the event through social and traditional media. We also have free wi-fi available throughout the library. Authors and vendors are responsible for bringing books, point-of-sale devices, money to make change, and any other items. Displays are encouraged, provided they don’t cause unnecessary distraction or impede on another vendor’s space.

Registration and Payment:
Space is limited, and authors must register in advance through the following web-form: https://goo.gl/je8CBx. Paper copies of the form are available at the library if needed.
Payment must be made by 4:00 p.m., May 20th. Payment can be made with cash, check, or credit card in person at the library, by mail, or over the phone.

Make checks out to Athens-Limestone Public Library. Payments can be mailed to Athens-Limestone Public Library, 603 South Jefferson St., Athens, AL 35611. (Please mark “Attn: Catfish Festival Committee.”)

If you have any questions, please email Kristopher Reisz at KREISZ@ALCPL.ORG or call (256) 232-1233.

We hope you can join us for Limestone County’s only literary festival.

Kristopher Reisz
Head of Reference
Athens-Limestone Public Library
(256) 232-1233

The Alabama State Poetry Society is Accepting Submissions for the Annual John and Miriam Norris Memorial Chapbook Competition. Deadline is May 31, 2017. Winner receives $100 and 25 copies of their winning chapbook. 

Poems may be previously published if poet retains all rights. Send 16-24 total pages of poetry, (poems may be longer than one page, but total page count must be 16-24, and no more than one poem per page) with two (2) title pages: one with author identification, and one with NO author identification.

Please send manuscript with a $15 reading fee payable to New Dawn Unlimited, Inc. Mail to: 
NEW DAWN UNLIMITED, INC.
ASPS 2017 Morris Memorial Chapbook Competition
1830 Marvel Road
Brierfield, AL 35035