The Wilma Dykeman Legacy, in partnership with the West Asheville Public Library, presents its annual fall lecture and book discussion series running September through December. This year’s selections are four memoirs by Western North Carolina authors that address the theme Writing Out of Pain. Author talks will be held on the second Thursdays of each month, with book discussions following on the third Wednesdays. All events happen at 7 p.m. and will be held in the West Asheville Public Library meeting room, except for the December author talk, which will be presented via Zoom.
September’s selection is Marked for Life: A Prison Chaplain’s Story. Author Nancy Sehested appears for a talk on Thursday, September 8. An ordained Baptist minister and retired pastor, Sehested also worked for 13 years as a NC state prison chaplain. “I felt like I had a story to tell from my unique vantage point as a woman chaplain in a men’s prison,” she says. “I was a witness to the daily struggles of people living and working within a flawed and difficult system.”
Weekly writing groups with prisoners brought out much of the sadness and pain experienced by the inmates, she says. “In my writing of the book, I was able to name some of the pain I witnessed and experienced in prison life, as well as in my own life,” she adds. “It was cathartic, marking my own way with healing.” She hopes that her stories shed light on this world most don’t see as well as open up conversations about the prison system. “Prison is a vivid place to see our human capacity for both cruelty and kindness,” she says.
Additional books that will be read and discussed during the series are Brothers Like These: Vietnam War Veterans, an anthology of poems and prose (October); Womaning: A Memoir, by Meta Commerse, CEO of Story Medicine Worldwide (November); and Forgetting the Former Things: Brain Injury’s Invitation to Vulnerability and Faith by Tamara Puffer (December).
To learn more, visit WilmaDykemanLegacy.org. The West Asheville Public Library is located at 942 Haywood Road.
