Michael Chitwood and Michael McFee: Readings & Celebration

The Regulator welcomes Michael Chitwood and Michael McFee in celebration of their new publications. Mike Chitwood will be reading and signing his new collection, Search and Rescue: Poems, winner of the 2018 L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award. Michael McFee will be reading from his new collection of essays, Appointed Rounds.

 

In Search and Rescue, Chitwood seeks what the pagan Celts called the thin places -- the intersection of the sacred and secular -- those luminous moments we can only partially understand. Water anchors the collection with the title poem, that explores the history of a large man-made lake and how it changes the surrounding mountain community. The poems of Search and Rescue pays homage to Whitman and Dickinson, to Heaney and Wright, in pursuit of the everyday grace of Appalachian culture and the natural landscape.

 

Michael McFee's new book, Appointed Rounds, takes its title from the unofficial motto of the US Postal Service: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." All of us have appointed rounds in our lives--essential things we are given to do and must try to complete, whatever the inner or outer weather, whenever the time of day or night, however we may approach those duties. This lively and wide-ranging collection of fifty essays--many of them pointed, a page or so, in the playful manner of Robert Francis and THE SATIRICAL ROGUE ON POETRY, and others rolling on for much longer--addresses McFee's appointed rounds, subjects he has been thinking and caring about for decades: books, his native Western North Carolina mountains, writing, reading, editing, teaching, and, as the title suggests, the daily mail.

 

About the Authors:

Born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Michael Chitwood lives and works as a writer and teacher in Chapel Hill, NC.

Michael McFee has published fifteen books--eleven volumes of poetry, most recently WE WERE ONCE HERE; one collection of prose, THE NAPKIN MANUSCRIPTS; and several anthologies, including THE LANGUAGE THEY SPEAK IS THINGS TO EAT. He received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. A native of Asheville, North Carolina, he is professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Event date: 
04/12/2018 - 7:00pm
Event address: 
Search and Rescue: Poems By Michael Chitwood Cover Image
$18.95
ISBN: 9780807167359
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: LSU Press - March 14th, 2018

Appointed Rounds: Essays By Michael McFee Cover Image
$20.00
ISBN: 9780881466386
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Mercer University Press - February 1st, 2018