Thomas More College’s New Writer-in-Residence Dick Hague and Author-Editor Michael Henson shared from their latest publications in a relaxed interchange at Joseph Beth Booksellers last evening. The poetry, fiction and music performance were inspired by Hague’s Where Drunk Men Go (Dos Madres Press, 2015) and Henson’s The Way the Word Is: The Maggie Boylan Stories (Brighthorse Books, 2015).
Hague looks forward to publicly sharing Where Drunk Men Go, a piece that took more than a year to complete. “It is the one single poem to which the most of my education has contributed; and I think it is a poem in which I encounter the subconscious most electrically,” says Hague. “And Michael Henson’s musical accompaniment is equally in tune with the poem’s varying emotional tones and registers of diction. It is a hard poem to experience, I think, because of the emotional and spiritual places it visits; there are deserts and infernos and a few oases of Eden here and there, but mostly, it is a difficult way.”
Creative Writing Vision Director and TMC English Professor Sherry Cook Stanforth developed the Visiting Authors Series in order to feature the talents of regional writers in an intimate setting.
“Our collaboration with Joseph Beth reflects our key mission of expanding literary arts exploration for diverse groups of people. These bookstore gatherings offer community members of all kinds an opportunity to interact directly with local and regional authors. We hope to inspire productive, ongoing relationships among writing people and provide them with practical resources for appreciating as well as creating literature.”
TMC’s Creative Writing Vision Program includes a Writer-in-Residence in the English Department, a Visiting Authors program series, a “Draft to Craft” evening course for local people who are interested in meeting authors and workshopping their manuscripts, and a bi-annual Community of Creative Writers Retreat along the Ohio River at TMC’s Biology Field Station. The Creative Writing Vision mission also features various literacy outreach programs designed to meet the needs of area K-12 schools and non-profit organizations
For more information about the Thomas More College Creative Writing Vision Program, contact 859-341-5800 or visit THOMASMORE.EDU