“Filled with poetry, working-class grit, and undogmatic spirituality, this novel shows us what we gain when we become outlaws in our own lives.” —John Englehardt
“Jessie van Eerden manages, in prose so luminous it feels backlit by the golden hour, to give familiar topics—family, history, grief—their monumental due. But as exact are its descriptions of Appalachian bog and the dusty canyons of West Texas, Call It Horses locates its mystery in the liminal. The westward journey these three women take is filled with take-out meals and cheap hotel rooms, but the novel’s most illuminating route is an unsettling and compassionate search for solace.” —Michael Parker
“Traversing the full range of human experiences with grace, The Long Weeping insists that solace awaits on the other side of even the blackest tumult, if only it can be perceived and grasped.” —Foreword Reviews, starred review
“DOWN BY THE ENO, DOWN BY THE HAW is so rhythmic and rhymed, so riddled with light and webbed with spidery strands of connection, it moves the mind right past the obvious praise—that this prose sounds like poetry—to a stance of truer wonder. Moeckel is not the kind to let us be distracted by categorization, remarking about a bird, ‘If I knew its name, I wouldn’t say it. If I didn’t know its name, I’d make one up.’ His humility is earnest as his lyricism is grand, and Moeckel does intimately know the inhabitants of Piedmont environment to which he has committed himself, observing the compromised landscape with an awareness so enamored of every detail it is also ‘promiscuous.’ In the moments you are able to spend with these pages, you too will be let in, on the beauties tucked into the woods behind shopping plazas, and to a way of thinking and seeing that can, with what is gathered in some short lunch break walking, make the troubled-of-heart believe again that this world’s tangles are where we are blessed to be ensnared.” —Rose McLarney
“The word I think of with this stunning almanac is range. Moeckel ranges far and deep, farther and deeper than he has ever gone, while mostly ‘sitting and looking around’ the Piedmont of North Carolina. And this wondrous epic expands his range as a poet, the language in these prose poems facile, playful, breathtaking. The sure-footed Moeckel torques poetry out of wandering in place, with breath itself a dance and an exploration. ‘There are roots in my lungs,’ he writes. And ‘I turtle on a fallen pine.’ One of my favorite poets has outdone himself. This book is delicious, inspiring, impressive.” —Janisse Ray
FREE and open to the public
DATE
Thursday, March 2
SCHEDULE
Craft Talk: TBD
Reading: 6-7:30pm
Book sales will follow each event.
LOCATION
Plemmons Student Union 201B, Table Rock Room
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Susan Weinberg at weinbergsc@appstate.edu
PARKING is free on campus after 5pm. We recommend the College Street Deck (from King Street, turn down College Street at the First Baptist Church). To reach the Student Union, cross College Street and follow the walkway between the chiller plant and the University Bookstore, passing the Post Office and entering the Student Union on the second floor. For further parking information or a map, please see www.parking.appstate.edu.
The Visiting Writers Series is named in honor of the late Hughlene Bostian Frank (class of 1968), a 2013 Appalachian Alumni Association Outstanding Service award recipient, past member of Appalachian’s Board of Trustees and ASU Foundation, long time member of the College of Arts and Sciences Advancement Board and generous supporter of Appalachian State University.