Loose Leaf Notes

AKA: Come to Spout or Hear Others Out.
Our monthly spoken word open mic, hosted at the Café del Sol, is spearheaded by the Writers’ Circle I belong to. The idea is to promote the spoken word and create a local forum for all voices. Kathleen, a founding member of our Writers’ Circle, makes up the flyers. I submit the blurb to The Floyd Press and The Museletter, the homespun local newsletter that I co-edit.
This month Fred First, longtime blogger at fragmentsfromfloyd.com and new author of “Slow Road Home,” will be reading excerpts from his book, and I will be reading my Mother’s Day essay that recently aired on WVTF public radio. Fred is also a member of our Writers’ Circle, a WVTF radio essayist, and a Floyd press columnist. The below excerpt is from the back cover of Slow Road Home. It describes how Fred came to write the book and what it is about:
With a naturalist’s curiosity, a photographer’s eye, and the heart of one who knows that he is living at last where he belongs, Fred First, in Slow Road Home, invites the reader to join him on a field trip through time and place.
Following the sudden realization at fifty-four that his working life had left him unfulfilled in those needs that mattered most, First leaves that world behind. Tracking the quiet turns of solitude’s seasons, these short essays capture the daily miracles of an extraordinary time in a beautiful place.
First finds himself home at last in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, and most especially, in one narrow valley along Goose Creek in Floyd County. Why, he wonders do some places call to us so strongly that we cannot ignore their pull? What does belonging to place mean? Can it be felt fully apart from a reverence for and deep connection with the ordinary just outside the back door?
It is that connection you will find in the particulars here, in a book best read the way it was lived: slowly, a day, a moment at a time.
Post note: You can read about April’s Spoken Word Open Mic here. Learn more about Fred’s book, here. Floyd’s Spoken Word at the Cafe Del Sol normally happens the third Saturday, 7-9 pm, of each month, but this month it was changed to Sunday due to a scheduling conflict.