(Left) Brit Washburn. (Right) Lockie Hunter and Alli Marshall
By Gina Malone
Asheville’s long-running Juniper Bends Reading Series will present an evening of shared words and music by local artists on Friday, September 19, at 7:30 p.m. at Story Parlor. Writers Ann Harris, Jasmine Pittman Morrell, Tony Robles and Brit Washburn are among those reading, and music will be provided by Belly Full of Stars.
“Juniper Bends provides a wonderful opportunity to connect with fellow readers and writers in an intimate setting,” says Washburn, who first participated in the readings in 2019. “I love that this series brings together established and emerging writers of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, as well as musicians.” She will read from her recent collection of poems, What Is Given. “The new book, like most of my work, draws heavily on observations of the natural world over the course of the year, and years,” she says. “The cycles of the seasons serve as a metronome of sorts by which we can orient ourselves in time and space.”
The series, launched in 2009 by UNC Asheville students, is held quarterly, and the theme for September’s readings will be Autumn Equinox. In 2014, Lockie Hunter, who was teaching creative writing at Warren Wilson College at the time, inherited the series and today she co-curates it alongside Alli Marshall.
“We are very thankful for our community of listeners,” Hunter says. “I hope that Juniper has something for every sensibility. Some of our performers bring a quiet energy to the stage, and some bring more of a buoyancy. We task our writers to explore the world in all its oddness and beauty, to shine a spotlight on injustice or…just read poems about a favorite tree. Our job is to illuminate the world. And our creatives push against a mediated version of reality and tell their own story with authority and passion.”
Washburn likens the series’ readings to a harvest “at which we get to come together to break bread and give thanks for our sustenance and survival, and to acknowledge our interdependence—on one another as readers and writers and human beings, and on the earth. They’re a way of affirming the relevance of art at a time when capitalism, consumerism and corporate profiteering would have us believe otherwise.”
Story Parlor is located at 227 Haywood Road, in Asheville. Doors open at 7 p.m. General admission tickets are $18. Students can attend for free with proof of current student ID, but must RSVP at the ticketing link at StoryParlorAVL.com/events.
