Write What You Know
Last year, WCU student Craig Buchner mined a painful personal experience to write “Good Night,” a story about a son’s last chance to bond with his aging father who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s. Enter the Association of Writers & Writing Program, which recently honored the piece, awarding Buchner its annual Intro Journals Project literary prize. In addition to a dab of academic credibility, Buchner will receive a $50 honorarium. “Good Night” will be published in the May 2007 literary journal Puerto del Sol.
If It Didn’t Work For Oliver Stone …
This is an outrage! There’s a new “gay musical fantasy” featuring a resurrected Alexander the Great who hooks up with the director of a campy Off-Off-Broadway show about the Hellenistic hero’s love life. Yet, somehow it doesn’t take home top honors at the Joseph Jefferson Awards? What kind of world are we living in? Well, it’s not like they didn’t try. A Kiss From Alexander, written by recent Asheville transplant (via D.C.) Stephen De Ghelder (along with composer Brad Simmons), debuted last summer at Bailiwick Repertory in Chicago. The show’s positive critical reaction cemented its four nominations at the “Jeff Awards” (including “Best New Musical”) — but at the ceremony earlier this month, the production came home with not even so much as a high-five for its trouble. No word yet on whether De Ghelder plans to stage a local production of Alexander in rainbow-flag-wrapped Asheville. Get more details at akissfromalexander.com.
Plowing Ahead
Local rising stars The Green Fields recently recorded a cover of Gene Clark’s “Here Tonight” for The World Turns All Around Him: A Tribute to Gene Clark. The indie-folk group recorded their track at Silvermine Studios in Marshall, but the album will be anything but local, seeing release this September on Stockholm-based Groover Recordings. To hear it for yourself (and without having to give those rotten Swedes any more of your hard-earned Yankee cash), visit myspace.com/thegreenfields.
Props To The Lark
Meanwhile, listeners of WPVM Radio appear to still be wearing their local-love on their sleeve, recently voting the Asheville-produced “Tuesday Night With The Lark” (hosted by DJ Scott Sessoms) as their second-favorite show after the nationally syndicated progressive juggernaut “Democracy Now.”
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