Author Appearance

Highlands resident, Diane C. McPhail will visit City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, July 2nd at 3 p.m.  Her new novel, The Seamstress of New Orleans is set against the backdrop of the first all-female Mardi Gras krewe at the turn of the century, the acclaimed author's mesmerizing historical novel tells of two strangers separated by background but bound by an unexpected secret--and of the strength and courage women draw from and inspire in each other.

Diane C. McPhail is an artist, minister, and acclaimed author of The Abolitionist's Daughter and The Seamstress of New Orleans. A graduate of Ole Miss, Duke Writers, University of Iowa Distance, and the Yale Writers' Conference, she is a member of NC Writers Network and the Historical Novel Society.

Sharon Wallen will visit City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, July 9th at 3 p.m.  She will present her book, Hatched: How Nine LIttle Chicks Cracked My Shell.  Imagine yourself in the midst of your busy, modern life. There you are - overwhelmed, perhaps even teetering on the edge of exhaustion - when your child asks to hatch a bunch of chicken eggs. Your blood pressure instantly skyrockets when you think of adding even one more thing to your list ... and a quick No falls from your lips.

But what sort of miracles might spring forth if you said Yes! instead?

In this memoir, the author shares 12 powerful lessons that flowed from a transcendent moment of Yes! Join her as the first cracks appear in the confining shell of her normal routines, preprogrammed expectations, and limiting beliefs. Share in a refreshing shift of perspective as the story unfolds, one that allows her to create a new life of greater presence and purpose.

Be prepared for these insights to wake you up to new choices in how you think, how you show up, how you parent, how you eat, how you love, how you make decisions, and how you let go. Formerly published as What I've Learned From Chickens, this expanded edition also tackles the tough issues of addiction and divorce.

We all have more power than we think to live our best life. Let this delightful and authentic story inspire you to begin to live yours.

 CoreyPine Shane will visit City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, July, 30th at 3 p.m. He will present his book, Southeast Medicinal Plants: Identify, Harvest, and Use 106 Wild Herbs for Health and Wellness.  In this book, herbalist CoreyPine Shane is your trusted guide to finding, identifying, harvesting, and using 106 of the region’s most powerful wild plants. Readers will learn how to safely and ethically forage, and how to use wild plants in herbal medicines, including teas, tinctures, and salves. Plant profiles include clear, color photographs, identification tips, medicinal uses, herbal preparations, and harvesting suggestions. Lists of what to forage for each season make the guide useful year-round.

Thorough, comprehensive, and safe, this is a must-have for foragers, naturalists, and herbalists in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

CoreyPine Shane is the founder of the Blue Ridge School of Herbal Medicine in Asheville, North Carolina, and has been seeing clients, teaching classes, and presenting lectures for more than 25 years.

Relationship coach, educator, and speaker, Terry Crosby, will visit City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, June 11th at 3 p.m. She is the author of How to Save Your Fourth Marriage and 100 Words: Small Servings of Whimsy and Wisdom to Calm the Mind and Nourish the Heart.  

Whether you're having difficulty in your first relationship, or you're heading into marriage number eight, How to Save Your Fourth Marriage is for you. It's not so much about how many times you've tried, but rather, do you want your relationship to work or work better? Do you wish to be happier together? If you love each other and don't know how to get along or how to become closer, this information is especially for you. Even if you've given it your best shot and have thrown your hands up, there is still hope.

100 Words is a collection of thoughtful and thought-provoking writings accompanied by beautiful photography. From a tiny bird's song to the death of a spouse, the subjects of these poems and writings will touch you and encourage you. You'll undoubtedly laugh, and probably cry, as you make your way through the pages. You'll be invited to look at life, nature, and relationships differently, more positively, and more hopeful. You'll certainly be reminded of the gift of appreciating small moments.

 Bat Cave, NC author, Mindi Meltz will visit City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, June 18th at 3 p.m. She will present the final book in her After Ever After Trilogy, The Queen’s Rain. Book III entwines the threads of animal and human, feminine and masculine, city and wild, future and past, to integrate that forbidden magic that the heroines first encountered in Book I, then faced more deeply in Book II. Now they must heal their children’s traumas and return this magic to their kingdoms and queendoms, in the hopes that their peoples will evolve and unite, rather than condemn them.

 In addition to the After Ever After Trilogy, Mindi Meltz is the author of two more novels, Beauty and Lonely in the Heart of the World, all published by Logosophia Books. Originally from the coast of Maine, she lives in an off-grid home in the mountains of Western North Carolina with her husband, cats, and goats.

Join us as Jean Hargadon Wehner presents her memoir, Walking with Aletheia on Saturday, June 4th at 3 p.m. at City Lights Bookstore.  Walking with Aletheia relates the author’s experiences of sexual abuse by, at first, a great-uncle, then by a network of priests and others who worked at her Catholic high school in Baltimore, MD. Walking with Aletheia is also about hope and survival. 

“An astonishingly vivid “survival document” by a courageous writer who spent several decades healing from numerous rapes by Catholic priests and cops at a Catholic girl’s high school in Baltimore. This shocking memoir is a “must-read” for all those who are determined to stop the sexual abuse of children.”      — Tom Nugent, author of Death at Buffalo Creek, and a reporter on the Emmy-nominated docuseries The Keepers.

Jean Hargadon Wehner, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, is an advocate for sexual abuse survivors, their families, and the people who work with them. Jean has experience working, educating, and communicating with diverse populations, including faith groups, student groups, and professional associations. She is also a contributor to the Emmy-nominated Netflix documentary series The Keepers. In addition to her advocacy work, Jean, originally trained as a Spiritual Director, is now a Nationally Certified Reflexologist, Certified Life Coach, and Reiki Practitioner.  

 Poet and naturalist, Brent Martin will present his new book at City Lights Bookstore on Thursday, June 23rd at 6 p.m.  In George Masa's Wild Vision, Martin explores the locations Masa visited, using first-person narratives to contrast, lament, and exalt the condition of the landscape the photographer so loved and worked to interpret and protect. The book includes seventy-five of Masa's photographs, accompanied by Martin's reflections on Masa's life and work.

Charles Frazier, the author of Cold Mountain, said "If I were making a personal top ten list of important Appalachian artists, writers, and musicians, I'd include--along with more well-known names like Doc Watson and Nikki Giovanni--photographer George Masa. Brent Martin's introduction splendidly places Masa and his work in the context of the mountains they both love so much--a perfect match since Martin, like Masa, has spent most of his adult life studying the southern mountains, protecting them, exploring them."

Brent Martin is the author of three chapbook collections of poetry and of Hunting for Camellias at Horseshoe Bend, a nonfiction chapbook published by Red Bird Press in 2015. His poetry and essays have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, Pisgah Review, Tar River Poetry, Chattahoochee Review, Eno Journal, New Southerner, Kudzu Literary Journal, Smoky Mountain News, and elsewhere. He has recently completed a two-year term as Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the West. He is also the author of The Changing Blue Ridge Mountains: Essays on Journeys Past and Present. He lives in the Cowee community in Western North Carolina, where he and his wife, Angela Faye Martin, run Alarka Institute. 

Join us for a conversation between authors, Luke Manget and Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, on Saturday, April 30 at 3 p.m. Manget will be presenting his new book, Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia. The harvesting of wild American ginseng ( panax quinquefolium), the gnarled, aromatic herb known for its therapeutic and healing properties, is deeply rooted in North America, but nowhere has it played a more important role than in the southern and central Appalachian Mountains. Made possible by a trans-Pacific trade network that connected the region to East Asian markets, ginseng was but one of several medicinal Appalachian plants that entered international webs of exchange. As the production of patent medicines and botanical pharmaceutical products escalated in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, southern Appalachia emerged as the United States' most prolific supplier of many species of medicinal plants. The region achieved this distinction due to both its biodiversity and the persistence of certain common rights that guaranteed widespread access to the forested mountainsides, regardless of who owned the land.

Following the Civil War, root digging and herb gathering became one of the most important ways landless and smallholding families earned income from the forest commons. This boom influenced class relations, gender roles, forest use, and outside perceptions of Appalachia, and it began a widespread renegotiation of common rights that eventually curtailed access to some plants such as ginseng.

Based on extensive research into the business records of mountain entrepreneurs, country stores, and pharmaceutical companies, Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia is the first book to unearth the unique relationship between the Appalachian region and the global trade in medicinal plants. Historian Luke Manget expands our understanding of the gathering commons by exploring how and why Appalachia became the nation's premier purveyor of botanical drugs in the late nineteenth century and how the trade influenced the way human residents of the region interacted with each other and with the forests around them.

Luke Manget is an assistant professor of history at Dalton State College in Dalton, Georgia. He is a contributor in Southern Communities: Identity, Conflict, and Memory in the Nineteenth-Century American South, edited by Steven E. Nash and Bruce E. Stewart. Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary. Her work Going to Water won the Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native American Literature Symposium and was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. She is co-editor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies and serves on the board of trustees for the North Carolina Writers' Network.

Join us on Thursday, May 12th at 6:30 p.m. for a conversation with John Lane and Hal Herzog.  They will discuss a number of topics, including John’s latest book, Still Upright & Headed Downstream. These collected river writings encompass all of  John Lane's river writing outside his two book-length narratives Chattooga: Descending into the Deliverance River and My Paddle to the Sea: Eleven Days in the River of the Carolinas. 

John Lane is emeritus professor at Wofford College where he taught creative writing, environmental studies, and directed the Goodall Environmental Studies Center. There he helped imagine and direct the Thinking Like a River Initiative. In the past decade, Lane has been named one of seven regional Culture Pioneers by Blue Ridge Outdoors and he has been honored with the Water Conservationist Award from the South Carolina Wildlife Federation, the Clean Water Champion by South Carolina's Upstate Forever, and inducted in 2014 into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. One of the founders of the Hub City Writers Project, Lane lives near the banks of Lawson's Fork outside of Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Hal Herzog is the author of the highly entertaining and illuminating journey through the full spectrum of human-animal relations, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. Herzog is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on human-animal relations. He is professor emeritus at Western  Carolina University and lives near Asheville, North Carolina.

Gardening expert, Peter Loewer will present his new book, The Last of the Swindlers at the Jackson County Public Library on Saturday, April 16th at 3 p.m. The author of more than two dozen books on gardening and garden design, Loewer now turns his pen to the genre of a small-town murder mystery. The Last of the Swindlers follows New York book editor Oliver Swindler as he returns to his hometown as editor of the local newspaper, The Fernglade Republican. Within a day of his arrival, he encounters murder, fraud, deceit, and corruption, and as soon as Oliver begins to solve one mystery, another layer of crime emerges.