Former Lower Columbia College instructor and poet Joseph Green and LCC counselor Mary Stone will be launching their books at WordFest on Tuesday, February 7.
That Thread Still Connecting Us, Joe’s first book since The End of Forgiveness in 2001, is a “chapbook,” a unified collection of poems under 48 pages. “I’ve come to think of the chapbook as a nearly ideal format for grouping poems,” says Joe. “Like most poets I know, I spend an obsessively long time working out the order of poems, and I almost think of the collection as one long poem, from beginning to end.”
Joe’s poems have appeared in magazines since 1975 and have been collected in His Inadequate Vocabulary (1986), Deluxe Motel (1991), Greatest Hits: 1975—2000, and The End of Forgiveness, which won the Floating Bridge Press Poetry Chapbook Award. He was PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writer for 2000, in residence at the Dutch Henry Homestead in Oregon’s Rogue River Canyon; and in 2002 he held a residency at Fundación Valparaiso, in Mojacar, Spain. He lives in Longview, Washington, where he retired from teaching in his twenty-fifth year at Lower Columbia College. Through his own printing operation, The Peasandcues Press, he collaborates with his wife, Marquita, to produce limited-edition, letterpress-printed poetry broadsides, using hand-set metal type.
Mary Stone draws on her expertise as a Licensed Mental Health Counselor at Lower Columbia College and her life in Christ to present principles and techniques in her non-fiction book, Run in the Path of Peace–the Secret of Being Content No Matter What. Mary writes with openness and sincerity seasoned with humor as she shares vignettes from her own life. Also included in the book are stories from contemporary women who share how they have overcome tragic events.
In January of 2011, Mary retired from almost 30 years on the faculty at Lower Columbia College, at which time she was conferred Faculty Emeritus.
WordFest is a gathering of local writers and readers who meet on the first Tuesday of each month at The Brits, 1427 Commerce Avenue, in Longview, 6:00-8:00 PM.
The events are free and open to the public.