Writer Workshops
These free writing workshops will take place in the Nick Rahall Room of the Greenbrier Valley Visitors Center.
Blues Harmonica Workshop - For Beginners and Others official Hohner endorser ~ Adam Gussow
Aug 1
6 pm
Visitor's Center
Have you always dreamed of making bluesy sounds on the harmonica? Here’s your chance to get in on the ground floor and learn the basics from a Mississippi-based pro, Adam Gussow.
Whether you’re a fan of Chicago blues players like Little Walter, Junior Wells, and James Cotton, Mississippi legends like Jimmy Reed, or country bluesmen like Sonny Terry, Gussow will help you decode what the masters are doing and take your first steps on the instrument. Topics to be covered include how to hold the harp; how to make single notes, double stops, and chords; how to play a basic chord rhythm or two; and how to bend notes for that familiar mournful wail.
No prior experience is needed to attend this combination lecture/demonstration and hands-on workshop, but if you want to participate you will need to bring a standard 10-hole diatonic harmonica in the key of C. Gussow will also have a limited number of harmonicas for sale. ($20 each; cash, check, or Venmo.)
ADAM GUSSOW, who has been teaching English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi for more than two decades, is one of the best-known blues harmonica instructors in the world, thanks to his pair of YouTube channels that together have more than 250,000 subscribers and 35 million views. As a longtime member of the blues duo Satan and Adam, working with the Mississippi-born Harlem street legend, Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee, he was featured in a 2018 Netflix documentary, Satan & Adam. His current act, blues trio Sir Rod & The Blues Doctors, features Magee’s nephew, Roderick “Sir Rod” Patterson.
Gussow is the author of many books on the blues, including Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir (1998) and Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition (2017). He is delighted to be visiting Lewisburg with his son, Shaun, to promote his new book, My Family and I: A Mississippi Memoir. (Father and son will be playing the festival’s after-party.)
“Telling the Tale: The Story in the Poem”
Val Nieman
Aug 2
9:30 am
Visitor's Center
Sylvia Plath said that prose was an open hand, poetry a closed fist. A narrative in verse lets you tell a story with access to all the poetic devices of rhyme and rhythm, concentrated imagery, the richness and denseness and musicality of sound. Even a short lyric can have a narrative drive, with characters moving toward resolution. Narrative poetry presents a story or account of events, but the stories are not necessarily linear – there are digressions, subplots, observations on life. Plot, dialogue, conflict, suspense, characterization, setting – these give the reader the pleasure and suspense of a story. In this workshop, we’ll talk about the narrative poem as it has developed, and as it is being approached by poets today. We’ll look for sources of poems that are as close as the supermarket checkout line or the photos on your phone, and use these as prompts for writing.
Valerie Nieman’s poetry and novels draw on her Appalachian heritage and deep familiarity with the natural world. Nieman is the author of three poetry collections, including Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse, a poetry novel. She has seven novels, most of them set in or connected to Appalachia, but most recently the historical novel Upon the Corner of the Moon: “Immersive, deeply evocative, and steeped in historical detail, this novel offers a richly textured reimagining of the young Macbeth and Gruach—two children torn from their families, molded by forces beyond their control, and ultimately thrust into a perilous battle for power.” She also has a short fiction collection. A graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte, Nieman was a founding editor of Kestrel literary journal. She has held regional grants and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She’s been a journalist, farmer, editor, sailor, and professor. Now retired, she gardens and fly fishes but is expert at neither.
“Writing Like Beatrix Potter”
Linda Zimmer
Aug 2
10:00 am
Visitor's Center
Ages 7 to 12.
Beatrix Potter is renowned for writing the classic children’s book: The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Many of Potter’s books, including Peter Rabbit, began as letters to children. Workshop participants will write their own stories in the form of a letter. They can also choose to include simple illustrations.
Linda Zimmer is a writer, puppeteer, and presenter for The Beatrix Potter Society. She created puppets for Mister Rogers Neighborhood and is the author of the memoir: Playing with Memory, lighting up dementia care with music, art, and a very special poodle. Linda lives in White Sulphur Springs with her husband Don and her cat and poodle muses.
“Just Like Flying a Plane”
Laura Treacy Bentley
Aug 2
11 am
Visitor's Center
Writing a novel is like flying a plane. Practical tips will be discussed to help you focus and overcome your fear of flying/beginning from the liftoff to dealing with turbulence, a non-stop flight, soaring, staying on course, and landing the plane. Take your time and enjoy the journey.
Laura Treacy Bentley is an internationally published writer who was born in Hagerstown, Maryland. She has lived most of her life in Huntington, West Virginia, and divides her time between West Virginia and a cabin in Western Maryland. Laura is the author of a poetry collection, Lake Effect, a psychological thriller set in Ireland, The Silver Tattoo, a picture book, Sir Grace and the Big Blizzard, and a poetry/photography chapbook, Looking for Ireland: An Irish-Appalachian Pilgrimage. She received a Fellowship Award for Literature from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts, and her work has been featured on the websites of A Prairie Home Companion, Poetry Daily, O Magazine, and Publishers Weekly. She served as the writer in residence for three years at the Marshall University Writing Project and taught creative writing at the 2013 West Virginia Governor’s School for the Arts at Davis & Elkins College. Her work has been published in the United States and Ireland in journals such as The New York Quarterly, Art Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Antietam Review, Rosebud, blink, Ginseng, Wind, The Stinging Fly, Kestrel, ABZ, Crannog, Now & Then, 3×10 plus, The New York Quarterly, Art Times, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Still, Goldenseal, and The Windward Review, among many others, including a number of anthologies. One of her poems is featured on a poster published by the Greenbank Observatory in Pocahontas County in West Virginia and another poem was displayed in a city bus in Morgantown, West Virginia. Laura read with Ray Bradbury in 2003 and signed her books with Nora Roberts at her Turn the Page Bookstore in 2017. Her newest novel, Glass Mountain, is a contemporary suspense novel published by Henlo Press.