Check out the NCB calendar to see a list of literary events that are coming up this month!
Due to the recent pandemic, some events may have been cancelled, postponed, or shifted to an online format.
Dates, locations, and times are subject to change. Some workshops or events may charge a fee. Contact us to submit your event!
Don’t forget that June is Audiobook Month! Who doesn’t love listening to a good book every now and then? This month is all about celebrating this growing format. Let us know what you’re favorite audiobooks are!
Grand Island, NE – Poets, in celebration of the Guild’s 95th year, we want you to show us your best work. You can enter up to six poems free of charge. Guild Membership is not required. Our judges ask that you please familiarize yourself with submission guidelines and links found on Nebraskawriters.org under News and Events, 2020 Poetry Chapbook. Selected poems will be published fall of 2020 in the NWG’s Verses from the Plains: A Poetry Collection.
Submission deadline:May 30, 2020
Calling All Designers! Are you interested in a chance to design the chapbook covers? Please contact us at nwgpoetrychapbook@gmail.com for more information or submission questions.
About Nebraska Writers Guild:
What do Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, and John Neihardt have in common? They were all members of the Nebraska Writers Guild, one of the oldest writers’ organizations in the country.
MISSION: Nebraska Writers Guild is a nonprofit (501c3) organization dedicated to empowerment and individual growth through involvement with a community of writers and related professionals; promoting authors and the craft of writing through events and publications; and advancement through professional development. For more information please visit nebraskawriters.org or facebook.com/nebraskawritersguild.
For more information contact: Poetry Chair, Charlene Pierce Phone: 402.594.1917 Email: Charlene_pierce@icloud.com
There is mystery here, in the shapes of grass, in the dim movements of an inland sea, connections to an earlier time. Wander barefoot, hypothesize the dance of millennia, the unbearable carvings of the built environment, this ragtag escape.
Let its divine simplicity ooze into your pores. Comb the steel from your hair, blanket your tongue with orange. Your breathing will slow. Breathing slow, unbutton the child within. Give her permission to fly like a kite.
From Prairie Suite: A Celebration, Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center, 2006.
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As part of #NationalPoetryMonth, we’re highlighting some of our favorite poems by Nebraska authors. If you have a favorite, feel free to send it to us!
Hard to know which is more gnarled, the posts he hammers staples into or the blue hummocks which run across his hands like molehills.
Work has reduced his wrists to bones, cut out of him the easy flesh and brought him down to this, the crowbar’s teeth
caught just behind a barb. Again this morning the crowbar’s neck will make its blue slip into wood,
there will be that moment when too much strength will cause the wire to break. But even at 70, he says,
he has to have it right, and more than right. This morning, in the pewter light, he has the scars to prove it.
From Gutter Flowers, Logan House, 2005.
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As part of #NationalPoetryMonth, we’re highlighting some of our favorite poems by Nebraska authors. If you have a favorite, feel free to send it to us!
The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.
An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.
I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Stills
And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.
From The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, University of Nebraska Press, 1962.
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As part of #NationalPoetryMonth, we’re highlighting some of our favorite poems by Nebraska authors. If you have a favorite, feel free to send it to us!
Dad would come home after too long at work
and I’d sit on his lap to hear
the story of Ferdinand the Bull; every night,
me handing him the red book until I knew
every word, couldn’t read,
just recite along with drawings
of a gentle bull, frustrated matadors,
the all-important bee, and flowers—
flowers in meadows and flowers
thrown by the Spanish ladies.
Its lesson, really,
about not being what you’re born into
but what you’re born to be,
even if that means
not caring about the capes they wave in your face
or the spears they cut into your shoulders.
And Dad, wonderful Dad, came home
after too long at work
and read to me
the same story every night
until I knew every word, couldn’t read,
just recite.
From The Baby That Ate Cincinnati, Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2013.
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As part of #NationalPoetryMonth, we’re highlighting some of our favorite poems by Nebraska authors. If you have a favorite, feel free to send it to us!
He was a big man, says the size of his shoes on a pile of broken dishes by the house; a tall man too, says the length of the bed in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man, says the Bible with a broken back on the floor below the window, dusty with sun; but not a man for farming, say the fields cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.
A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves covered with oilcloth, and they had a child, says the sandbox made from a tractor tire. Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole. And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames. It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.
Something went wrong, says the empty house in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste. And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard like branches after a storm—a rubber cow, a rusty tractor with a broken plow, a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.
From Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980
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As part of #NationalPoetryMonth, we’re highlighting some of our favorite poems by Nebraska authors. If you have a favorite, feel free to send it to us!
Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take ya to #BookFaceFriday!
Since it snowed yesterday in much of Nebraska, this title couldn’t be
more right. But unlike the fickle ways of Nebraska weather, NLC Book
Club Kits never let you down. The Commission’s Book Club Kit service is
still running like clockwork, and sending out titles like “This Is Not the Tropics: Stories”
by Nebraska author, Ladette Randolph (University of Wisconsin Press,
2005.) While many library services have changed, we realize your book
club groups may be functioning a little differently right now. But with
book pick-ups and online group discussions, book clubs are still going
strong. Of course with your health in mind, we strongly encourage you to
keep any in-person book club meetings to ten people or fewer.
“Ladette Randolph’s stories sink
their teeth into the deep Nebraska Midwest the way that Flannery
O’Connor tore into the heart of Georgia. There’s a wonderfully sly,
deadpan sweetness at work here, so that it may take a moment to realize
how odd and twisty the stories are. Randolph seems like such a nice,
earnestly polite young woman—and then suddenly your wallet is missing
and she’s driving away in your car! These are beautifully crafty,
beguiling stories: witty, wise, and wicked.”—Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me and Among the Missing
This week’s #BookFace model is one of our NLC Commissioners, Lois Todd-Meyer!
You know all those classics you always have to lie about having read? Well now’s your chance to really read them! Nebraska OverDrive Libraries just added a huge selection of classic novels, 1,010 classics including this week’s #BookFaceFriday! “Alexander’s Bridge” (Duke Classics, 2012) by Willa Cather just one of many Cather titles available to all Nebraska OverDrive Libraries in eBook and Audiobook format. 173 libraries across the state share this collection of 16,670 Audiobooks and 28,473 eBooks, with new titles added weekly. As an added bonus it includes 130 podcasts that are always available with simultaneous use.
If your library is a part of it, ask your librarian for more information about participating in Nebraska Overdrive Libraries!
From the book jacket
“Construction engineer and world-renowned bridge builder Bartley Alexander has everything in mid-life: wealth, good looks, and fame. Yet he finds himself restless and discontented with life—until he meets a former love from his student days and resumes his relationship with her. Living a double life, Alexander is torn between Winifred, his American wife—a cold woman with clearly defined standards—and Hilda Burgoyne, his alluring mistress in London who helps him recapture his youth and sense of freedom. Alexander’s affair, which eventually gnaws away at his sense of propriety and honor, proves disastrous. Willa Cather’s first novel—a fascinating study of a man’s growing awareness of the breach in his integrity—is essential reading for fans of this great American novelist.” ” … exceptionally well-conceived and well written.”—Outlook ” … told with a good deal of charm and skill.”—New York Times Book Review ” … a story of brilliant and unusual power.”—McClure’s
This week’s #BookFaceFriday model is Rod Wagner, the Director of NLC!
We visited Omaha in October 2018 and stayed with Dave, my law partner from 1987 to 2016, and his wife Chris at their Waterloo lake house. We’re all retired. Their study with a sofa bed doubles as a guest room. We felt at home; the duvet and book ends came from our house. The shelves held several books Karen and I gave them for birthdays, the holiday season and other opportune occasions. I purchase several copies of irresistible books for friends. I still have two copies of The Pun Also Rises (2011) by John Pollack who did a reading at the Bookworm, and Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (2002) by Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.
I inscribed A Mirror of the World, Three Thousand Years of Books and Manuscripts (2001), acquired at the Schiller-Nationalmuseum, German Literature Archives in Marbach am Neckar, Germany:
July 19, 2002 Dear Chris & Dave When books matter And cooking meet We don’t cook the books We eat Love Oliver
The cover of A Mirror of the World is a 1913 galley with Marcel Proust’s corrections of “A la recherché du temps perdu,” (In Search of Lost Time and Remembrance of Things Past). The editor wrote, “Proust was among those writers who continually changed and improved their text, much to the distress of their printers.”
Silent Hills Speak, A
History of Council Bluffs, Iowa (2002), by William E. Ramsey and Betty Dineen
Shrier, a 7 pound 7-ounce coffee table book, would be heavily out of place in
California. I shifted the burden…
To Chris and Dave This will weigh down your carpet bag I am sure it has many uses. Look to the East And lets all feast. Love and best wishes
Karen and Oliver December 14, 2002
Aprons, A Celebration (2001) by Joyce Cheney, A miniature from a UNO exhibition of Aprons.
To Chris 3/30/03. Here’s to our aprons.
Karen & Oliver
A Year at the Sorbonne, A
Proustian Life (2002) by Oliver B. Pollak.
To Chris and DaveInscriptions, epigrams, epitaphs, epithets, and epitomes. You grow in our estimation daily.
Love, Karen & Oliver 4/7/06
Jim Harrison, The English Major (2008)
To Dave The curious road ahead Navigating between Valentines and rattlesnakes Seasons greetings as 2008 turns into 2009
Oliver
Dave gave a copy to his daughter-in-law Bethany, an Omaha English
teacher.
The New World Guide to Beer
(1988) by Michael Jackson, another coffee table book.
Dear Chris Dare we say Happy Beerthday All our love
Karen & Oliver Sept 1, 2016
Moving to California meant downsizing, shedding books. Our
retirement home would not house all our books. Storage was out of the question.
I sold to Jackson Street Booksellers, students and Lincoln’s Lee Booksellers. We
invited Chris and Dave to browse our shelves. Chris picked The Grapes of Wrath. I wrote, September 10, 2016
Dear Chris, I am so glad you picked this book voluntarily. The book and movie merge in my mind’s memory. It is moving. Class warfare. Climate change. People helping each other. Noble sentiment and deeds. I must have read it in the 1960s. It goes to a new loving home.
Oliver & Karen
My Budapest Diary, In Search
of the Motherbook (1997) by Susan Rubin Suleiman and Dinner with
Churchill (2011) by Cita Stelzer also graced Dave and Chris’s
shelves.
Dave favored me with numerous books, especially at Hanukkah. In December 1995 he supported my interest in George Orwell with the Brothel Boy and Other Parables of the Law (1992) by Morris Norval. It took me until 2015 to read this thoughtful book. I went from my Orwell shelf with gratitude back to Dave in 2016. The gift of Various Positions (1996) a biography of Leonard Cohen, by Ira Bruce Nadel, dramatically expanded my musical tastes. It sits on a shelf in Richmond. Karen and I enjoyed Cohen concerts in Toronto and much closer, in Oakland.
Dave and Chris love camping, first with a trailer and now an RV. They visit national parks including Presidential Libraries. Books need bookmarks, papyrus, leather, or post-its notes. Dave and Chris bought this bookmark at the William J. Clinton Library and Museum in Little Rock.
Dave recalls we occasionally purchased books together, such as On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt (Princeton University Press, 2005, 68 pages, $9.95), which has been translated into at least sixteen languages.
Giving books at joyous junctures reveals regard for one another, friendship and shared interests; food and drink permeate the titles and inscriptions. These association copies may be on the used book market sooner than mid-century.
