New Lunch With Books Programs for October 2024!
Oct. 1: Matthew Ferrence: I Hate It Here, Please Vote For Me
When a progressive college professor runs for the PA House of Representatives in a deeply conservative rural district, he loses. No surprise. But the story of how Ferrence loses and, more importantly, how American political narratives refuse to recognize the existence and value of nonconservative rural Americans offers insight into the political morass of our nation. In these essays Ferrence offers a counter-narrative to stereotypes of monolithic rural-American voters and emphasizes the way stories told about rural-America are a source for the bitter divide between Red America and Blue America. Matthew Ferrence teaches creative writing at Allegheny College.
Oct. 8: Pulling the Thread: Untangling Wheeling History
This is a new collection of thirty-three essays by Dr. Christina Fisanick, an English prof. with a passion for historical storytelling. From her childhood in Moundsville to her return to Wheeling after earning a PhD, Fisanick’s journey through local, state, and national archives unfolds a tapestry of Wheeling’s rich past. Each essay is a thread pulled, leading to unexpected revelations. From indigenous peoples to Mark Twain’s Wheeling connections, Fisanick weaves a narrative that transcends time, bringing to light forgotten stories and hidden ties.
Oct. 15: The Upper Ohio Valley Responds to John Brown’s Raid
John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry is considered a cataclysmic event that catapulted the United States towards civil war. Though situated more than 200 miles from Harpers Ferry, Brown’s raid reverberated deeply across the Upper Ohio Valley, where Brown and several of his raiders were personally known, and their cause championed or condemned. Jon-Erik Gilot, author of John Brown’s Raid: Harpers Ferry and the Coming of the Civil War, October 16-18, 1859 (Emerging Civil War Series), will examine local connections to the raid, as well as reactions and fallout on both sides of the Ohio River, from the Wheeling militia companies who were present at Brown’s execution to the arms race along Virginia’s western border.
Oct. 22: Wheeling Poetry Series Presents: Raechel Peckham & Sara Henning
Rachael Peckham is the author of Alight: Flights of Prose (UnCollected Press) and Muck Fire: Prose Poems (Spring Garden Press). Her essays and prose poems appeared most recently in Blood Tree Literature, Cloudbank, Club Plum, and Still: The Journal. Rachael is a professor of English at Marshall Univ. in Huntington, where she lives and teaches alongside her husband, poet and essayist Joel Peckham. Sara Henning is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois U. Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio U. Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois U. Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall Univ., where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series. The Wheeling Poetry Series is curated and hosted by WV Poet Laureate Marc
Harshman.
Oct. 29: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner- a Shadow Play
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a 1798 poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In it, the Mariner delays a young man on his way to a wedding in order to share a bizarre story of a long sea voyage. The Wedding Guest is mesmerized, then terrified by what he hears. But what is the meaning of Coleridge's potent and perplexing poem, with its archaic language, judgmental Christianity, hellish scenery, and deranged but irresistible narrative drive? In this re-telling, the Mariner’s Rime will be interpreted through shadow play--an Asian style of storytelling, wherein flat images are manipulated by puppeteers between a bright light and a translucent screen, on the other side of which sits the audience. The poem has been adapted for shadow play by Jamie Hamilton.
Oct. 31: (Thurs. at noon) Ghastly GHOST STORIES!
For Halloween, join the OCPL Players as we share some of Wheeling’s most infamously spine-tingling, bloodcurdling classic Ghost Stories, as well as a few we totally made up ourselves! Festivities will commence with the world-premier of “America’s Most Haunted Library!” a found-footage, ghost-hunting nightmare.
