Event

The Erie Wire Calendar

See our schedule and events through this link: http://sandusky.ning.com/page/calendar-1

A Sandusky Bay Journal

Sandusky Sailing Club

BGSU Firelands

Green Drinks Event Calendar

Erie Solid Waste Calender

Coffehouse Reading Series

Message from Larry Smith of the Firelands Writing Center:

The Firelands Writing Center will move their featured and open-mic readings to Saturdays during January and February. Mr. Smith’s Coffeehouse, 140 Columbus Ave., Sandusky, will not be open on Sundays during those months, and so the group will move to a 2:00 time on Saturdays. The Coffeehouse Readings is an ongoing reading series to promote writing in the area. It has been going continuously since 1990.

Imagine Peace,
Larry Smith
Bottom Dog Press
http://smithdocs.net

Every Tuesday | Converging Paths Meditation Center

Celebrating over two years of being open, the Converging Paths Sandusky Bay Meditation Center is located in room 405 of the Feick Building at 158 East Market Street in downtown Sandusky. According to the founders, the center honors all wisdom traditions and seeks to establish a better understanding of self and others through clearing the mind, lowering anxiety and deepening the meditation experience with the help of others. The Erie Wire visited the center on February 2 and interviewed Lou & Jan Young and Larry & Ann Smith about the center’s origins. While the center does not encourage any specific religion, it has hosted a series of Wisdom Talks. Alongside the regularly scheduled guided meditation, Tuesday night included a showing of Bill Moyers interview of Pema Chödrön, an American Buddhist nun and author whose teachings and writings on meditation have helped make Buddhism accessible to a broad Western audience. For more information about the Converging Paths Meditation Center, click here.

Rm. 405 of The Feick Building, 158 Market Street, Sandusky, OH 44870

The center has been in operation for two years now offering group meditation every Tuesday evening at 7-8:30 pm. No fee required.

(Note: this recording may take a minute to load: please be patient. Also, some recordings do not play well on built-in computer speakers; and would require headphones or a strong set of speakers attached to your computer.)

Subscribe to our free Podcast “On The Wire” to receive weekly audio trimmings of recordings in Erie County, OH.

House of Yin & Yoga Studio

Monday ———- 5:30-6:30 pm  — Healthy Back with Ann

Tuesday ———- 6-7:30 pm — Normal class with Patrick

Thursday ——— 6-7:30 pm  —  Normal class with Patrick

Saturday ——— 9:30-11:00 am   — Normal class with Patrick

Saturday ——— 2:00-3:00 pm  — Vinyasa Flow with Lisa

Location: 607 Main St., 3rd. Floor Huron, OH

——————————————————

Cost for classes is $50 for monthly membership or $10 per class. Walk-ins are always welcome.

• Please arrive 10 minutes prior to class to get signed in and situated. You will need to bring your own mat. It is advisable for a better yoga experience that you not eat a full meal at least an two hours prior to class.

• All ages and levels of practice are welcome. Beginners please feel free to attend any class at anytime.

The House of Yin is for those seeking yoga classes in Huron, Sandusky, Milan, Norwalk, Vermilion and surrounding areas.

Winter Publication

Bottom Dog Press, Inc., an independent Ohio publisher, has announced the release of a new book of poetry set in Appalachia by author Chris Green of Marshall University. The poems are set in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Indiana, and deal with themes of place and family. The book is part of the press’s Appalachian and Working Lives Series.

Gurney Norman, Kentucky Poet Laureate and author of Kinfolks describes the book: “Chris Green’s Rushlight is a powerful new book of poems. Rushlights were made from rushes growing in marshy ground by old-time working people as substitutes for candles, to push against the darkness of the night. For me, Chris Green’s poems light the world in a similar way. I see better in my own dark through these brilliant poems, for which I thank this very necessary writer.”

Chris Green lives in Huntington, West Virginia, where he teaches, writes about, and crusades for Appalachian literature and social justice at Marshall University. He was born and raised in Lexington, a city of some 300,000 in central Kentucky. He recalls, “When I was a high school senior, I asked the AP English teacher, ‘Why don’t we read anyone from Kentucky?’ She leaned over her podium and proclaimed, ‘There are no great writers from Kentucky.’ Thus, I began my quest to discover Kentucky and meet other writers.” He is co-editor of Coal: A Poetry Anthology, has most recently authored The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism, and is working on a history of Appalachian literature.

During the 1990s his quest then took him to the mountains in Boone, North Carolina, on to Bloomington, Indiana, and (after marriage) to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “All the while, I sought to understand how poetry lived in the world and the world lived in poetry.” He taught poetry writing to college students, to elders in community centers, to special education students in rural Indiana, to kids in juvenile correctional facilities, and to poets in the community. Along the way, he staged community readings and celebrations of the world and the word.

In 1999, Green returned to Lexington, Kentucky, where he took over editorship of Wind publications and taught as a poet-in-the-schools around the state. He also became a father, completed his PhD, and rediscovered his connection to the mountains. He states, “My passions for poetry, people, justice, and community are now united in my work at Marshall University, where I help students to tell their stories, and thus touch, value, and fight for their worlds.” The author is a member of the Appalachian Studies Association.

The book which is 104 pages long is available in soft cover ($15) and may be ordered directly from Bottom Dog Press (PO Box 425, Huron, Ohio 44839) at http://smithdocs.net, or at area and on-line bookstores. A series of readings and book signings is planned.

[Chris Green may be reached at: <greenc@marshall.edu>

Or Contact Larry Smith, editor of the press at: 419-433-5560, ext. 20784]

PO Box 425, Huron, OH 44839

419-433-3573 / Lsmithdog@smithdocs.net

http:/smithdocs.net

(Nov. 30, 2009)

Bottom Dog Press, Inc., an independent Ohio publisher, has announced the release of a new novel set in Ohio’s Appalachia by author, Larry Smith. The Long River Home is a family saga set in rural Vinton County and industrial Jefferson County covering four generations of the McCall family. Smith is a native of Mingo Junction, Ohio, in the Panhandle region of Ohio River Valley. The author states of the book, “My family history provided the backbone of the book, yet it is a work of fiction. Things I didn’t and couldn’t know were imagined, and I hope make the story whole.”

The author is a graduate of Mingo Central High School, Muskingum College, and Kent State University, he is the author of three books of fiction, seven books of poetry, a book of memoirs, and two biographies of American authors Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Patchen. Smith has worked as a cook, steel mill laborer, high school teacher, college professor, and as a writer and editor.

Now a professor emeritus of Bowling Green State University’s Firelands College, Smith is the director of the Firelands Writing Center. He has received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, and a Fulbright Lectureship in American Literature to Italy. He is a requested speaker on creative writing, publishing, American Romantic writers, Zen Buddhist writings, and Ohio and working-class literature. He and his wife Ann, a counselor and professor emerita of Nursing at Toledo University of Ohio, are the parents of three adult children and live along the shores of Lake Erie in Huron, Ohio.

Novelist Annabel Thomas describes The Long River Home: “In this fine Appalachian novel, Larry Smith chronicles four generations of McCalls, their joys and sorrows, their sins and their nobility….Such regional fiction has always been about people: their connections with one another, their home place, their struggles to survive and to prosper. It’s all here, set, in the grand tradition of Wendell Berry and Conrad Richter, against the Ohio landscape: its hills and its rivers, its frontier beginnings and its later industrial development. We care about the place and its people.”

Michigan author Jeff Vande Zande states, “The Long River Hometraces the growth of the McCall family tree from rural Southern Ohio to the industrial Ohio River Valley. . Wild and conflicted, Andrew McCall brings sons into the world who bring sons into the world….each as trapped by the McCall ancestry as he is buoyed by it. This novel is untamed at times, tender at times, and at all times, truthful and deeply human.”

The book which is 240 pages long is available in hard or soft cover, ($22 and $16) and may be ordered directly from Bottom Dog Press at http://smithdocs.net, and at area and on-line bookstores.

[Smith may be reached at Lsmithdog@aol.com. Review copies available on request.]