On Wednesday at 5:30 p.m., the Poetry Society of New Hampshire will meet at Gibson’s Bookstore for a poetry performance and an open mic. The headliners this month are the husband and wife team of Maggie Dietz and Todd Hearon, with guitar accompaniment. An open mic follows their performance.
The Poetry Society meetings are free and open to the public. All are welcome, and newcomers are encouraged. Come to listen, or come to participate.
Todd Hearon is the author of several poetry collections, including Strange Land (2010), which was selected by poet Natasha Trethewey as a winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Series in Poetry Open Competition Award. Hearon is the recipient of a PEN New England Discovery Award and a Friends of Literature Prize from Poetry magazine.
Poet and editor Maggie Dietz earned a bachelor’s degree at Northwestern University and an master’s in creative writing at Boston University. Dietz’s debut collection of poems, Perennial Fall (2006), won a Jane Kenyon Award and a Wisconsin Library Association Literary Award. From 2004 to 2012, Dietz served as assistant poetry editor for Slate. She has also served as director of the Favorite Poem Project, founded by Robert Pinsky during his terms as U.S. poet laureate. With Pinsky, she coedited the anthologies Americans’ Favorite Poems (1999), Poems to Read (2002), and An Invitation to Poetry (2004).
On Thursday at 6 p.m., Linda Powers will discuss parenting techniques as ways to nurture current and future generations as she presents Parenting Across the Life Span.
Parenting takes many twists and turns as we invest our energy into nurturing others. There will be wonderful surprises and proud moments interspersed with times of intense worry, sadness, frustration, and disappointment. Linda E. Powers, who raised three daughters and is a child and adolescent psychotherapist, educator, and former pediatric nurse, helps parents make sense of it all in this guide for helping children of all ages-from infancy into adulthood.
Next Tuesday at 6 p.m., Pam Houston (Contents May Have Shifted) will come to Gibson’s to share her new memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, as she talks about finding herself and her place in the world after literary success.
At 31 years old, fresh off a tour promoting her first collection, Cowboys Are My Weakness, Pam Houston had “no job, no place to live except my North Face VE 24 tent.” On an impulse and a good instinct, she spent her royalties on a 120-acre ranch near Creede, Colo. It was more than she could afford, and required more maintenance than she could manage. And yet, 25 years later, it’s the piece of land that’s defined the largest part of her life. Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country tells the remarkable story of “that girl who dared herself to buy a ranch, dared herself to dig in and care for it, to work hard enough to pay for it, to figure out what other people meant when they used the word ‘home.’ ”
Pam Houston is the author of the novels Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, the short story collections Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and A Little More About Me, a collection of essays.
Gibson’s Bookstore
