SUMMER UPDATE 2022

Charlie Read  

From the family custodian and co-founder of bowershouse.org. The Bowers House Retreat
Late last year we reopened our doors on limited occupancy to vaccinated guests and alumni. We began a production company, Bowers Hour, filming and recoding programming material focusing on resident work product to maintain the facility and fund house sponsored residencies. We expanded our scope from writing and literature to multidisciplinary and music arts, and started the long term restoration of the several acres and buildings at the facility. We began taking in occasional guest and b&b lodgers, and small event venue rentals to subsidize our expansion and reentry after shutting down during the health crisis.

With ambassadors representing The Georgia Review, poetry and arts organizations, well know author alumni and music figures, and most importantly, The Writers Guild, helmed by Charles Prier bhwriters.org for 12 years, we unabashedly solicit new support and ventures from writers/ workshop professionals/ established musicians/ performers with honorariums and often in exchange for exclusive usage of the facility and dining for their personal or professional retreat purposes.

We continue to provide a place for artists to grow and create. Our goal is to keep The Guild running as the crux of the mission we have established in this 100 year old historic family hotel in NE Georgia.

Paige Prier Art Gallery Show at The Bowers House

Display of work by Paige Prier Art

The Bowers Hours episode featuring Bleace and Kolorful Media is also the opening of our second inaugural visual artist and Bowers House Ambassador, Paige Prier, (paigeprier.com) whose work replaces and sends to the upstairs hallways our first Bowers House Art Gallery spotlight artist, Faye Behar Mitchell. The artwork that covers the walls of the old hotel building interiors is available for purchase, often including a stay at The Bowers house or other perks, and we consider guest purchases of these works another form or fundraising and sponsorship support of the facility and our mission. 5PM-7PM gallery.

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Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers.

South Carolina short-story writer and novelist George Singleton is one of the finest and hottest fiction writers in the country at this time – “a big-hearted evil genius who writes as if he were the love child of Alice Munro and Strom Thurmond,” writes Tony Earley.

A Georgia Review discovery some 20 years ago, Singleton has since published four collections of short stories, two novels, and an irreverent how-to book titled Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers. His other titles, which in themselves provide an intriguing introduction to his worldview, include The Half-Mammals of Dixie, Why Dogs Chase Cars, Drowning in Gruel, and Work Shirts for Madmen. A recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Singleton has had work published and reprinted in such magazines as the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s, and in anthologies like New Stories from the South and Surreal South. He lives in Easley, South Carolina.

Playwright Cedric Liqueur wrote his one-man show

Playwright Cedric Liqueur wrote his one-man show, “Satchel” during a recent writer’s retreat at the Bowers House. The play is based on Satchel Paige, considered the greatest pitcher in the history of the Negro Leagues. Paige went on to play in the Major Leagues and in 1971, was the first player from the Negro leagues to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Liqueur, a member of London’s Royal Shakespeare Company, writes and performs theatre-stage plays, prose, narratives, poetry, and sonnets.

Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry.

Alice-Friman

Georgia-based poet Alice Friman’s The Book of the Rotten Daughter contains “astonishing poems which fearlessly jump into hell and out again, that resent or forgive,” writes poet Marianne Boruch, “poems which wryly, exactly and so richly honor the world of the living.” Her poetry collections include The Book of the Rotten Daughter, Zoo, and Inverted Fire. For her fifth full-length collection of poetry, Vinculum, (LSU Press), she won the 2012 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry.

Professor Emerita at the University of Indianapolis, Friman has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies, and the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest. A frequent contributor to The Georgia Review, Friman is currently poet-in-residence at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville.

Rope: Science and Other Poems

Deming is author of four poetry books including Rope: Science and Other Poems, winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; The Monarchs:A Poem Sequence; and Genius Loci. She has published three nonfiction books:Temporary Homelands, The Edges of the Civilized World, and Writing the Sacred Into the Real. She has completed a new nonfiction book titled Zoologies: on Animals and the Human Spirit. With Laurent Savoy, she co-edited The Colors of
Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, reissued in 2011 in a new expanded edition. Her work has been widely published and anthologized, including in The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and Best American Science and Nature Writing. Deming is Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona.

Corey, editor of The Georgia Review since 2006

poet-stephen-coreyCorey, editor of The Georgia Review since 2006, has published nine volumes of poetry including The Last Magician and There is No Finished World. A prolific writer, essayist and reviewer, Corey has also published more than 150 poems in the country’s leading periodicals and journals. The New Georgia Encyclopedia describes him as one of the “influential” literary figures in the state of Georgia.

What a blessing this visit was

featured-alum“What a blessing this visit was. I worked on the replenishment of the wellspring from which the writing come. — prayer, long conversations and musings, remembering, making new connections with the past. This place is full of benign energy.” – writer Ann Holmes Redding, author of Out of Darkness, Into Light: Spiritual Guidance in the Quran with Reflections from Jewish and Christian Sources.