Foothills Voices Book Project Presentation
Brennan LeQuire, Nancy McEntee, Jennifer W. Spirko
Blount County Friends of the Library Annual (Public) Meeting
Tuesday, June 13, 1-3 p.m., Sharon Lawson Room
After a brief business meeting, guest speakers, Brennan LeQuire, Nancy McEntee, and Jennifer W. Spirko will introduce the new book Foothills Voices: Echoes of Southern Appalachia. This book came about in June of 2016, when twelve aspiring amateur writers began the library’s first-ever research and writing class, “Foothills Voices.” The project was funded by Blount County Friends of the Library.
Foothills Voices editors, left to right: Brennan LeQuire, Nancy McEntee, Jennifer W. Spirko
A year later, the completed anthology of locally based creative nonfiction is being published by Blount County Friends of the Library via Amazon’s CreateSpace print-on-demand service. The three editors will describe what the process was like and how the finished book contributes to the history and culture of our area.
From our Between Friends Newsletter:
The annual meeting this year will introduce to you a book written by local, amateur writers from many professions, that will tickle your fancy, amaze you with some of its audacious mountain characters, including a murderer or two, and impress you with its utter professionalism.
One writer, Mary Pope, retired psychiatrist, now a renowned Tai Chi instructor in Maryville, says she took the class to learn more about professional research writing and publishing; plus, she was interested in researching native Cherokee women marrying white men. Not finding a tremendous number of these marriages she discovered her husband’s great grand-mother was part American Indian and had married a white man. Not only that, but in 1806 or thereabouts they moved into a sycamore tree, (not a typo!) in Harlan County, Kentucky, and raised a family in it. The tree was three stories high, totally hollowed out, and even became known as the Sycamore Inn.
Mary says that the stories the writers discovered are totally “amazing.”
You will not want to miss hearing about this enlightening project, enjoying homemade desserts and coffee/cold beverages, and learning about the productive Blount County Friends of the Library year.
