Pope Francis referred to human trafficking as an “open wound on the body of contemporary society.” It is a serious affront to human dignity, preying upon the most vulnerable and further dehumanizing them through exploitation. Join Bon Secours St. Francis Health System for a half-day of presentations by internationally recognized experts on human trafficking to learn what role you can play in our community’s response to this humanitarian crisis.

This seminar is a multidisciplinary event open to all who seek to make our community and world a better place for God’s people. It is intended to educate and increase awareness of human trafficking, highlight the necessity of community collaboration, and give hope to those being victimized and exploited.

The event is free to attend, but registration is required.

Free CME/CEU/CLE credit available

Free micro-festival
Musical Acts: The Get Down Junkies, Natti Love Joys, and BEMI Music.
Stilt-walking Gulf fritillary butterfly, attend a solar tour or
homesteading workshop, visit local vendors, and unwind in the health &
wellness zone. All ages are welcome.
Meet the team and learn how to get involved for our Solar Festival in
August at the local Music Camp.

Get Off The Grid Fest Charrette
Free micro-festival
Musical Acts: The Get Down Junkies, Natti Love Joys, and BEMI Music.
Stilt-walking Gulf fritillary butterfly, attend a solar tour or
homesteading workshop, visit local vendors, and unwind in the health &
wellness zone. All ages are welcome.
Meet the team and learn how to get involved for our Solar Festival in
August at the local Music Camp.

You want to get into horror but you don’t know where to start. This is your sign. This is an intensive, boot campy, crash course 4 week program that will throw you head first into reading, writing, talking, screaming, digesting, sweating, and bleeding horror content. It’s going to be a blast!

We will meet on the following Thursdays: May 4, 11, 18, 25 from 7-9PM EST. Over those 4 weeks, participants will read a number of stories from various subgenres with the intent to identify tools and techniques used by the author. Implementing lessons and notes from class, students will workshop one story they’re passionate about over the duration of the course. At the end you’re going to have a story you’re proud of, but also you will have had a little tapas of what horror can be. Welcome to the fold!!

Week One: Building the Scary Premise and Your Scared Characters

After introductions we’ll talk about what brought us to this class and what stories (if any) are something we want to pursue. Through a series of generative exercises we’ll make your protagonist and the scary thing for them to encounter.

Reading: TBD

Writing: The first draft of your story!

Week Two: Setting, Secondary Characters, and the Talking about the Monster

We’ll workshop our pieces. Then we’ll go over the role of setting, the importance of characters for your protagonist to interact with, and how information can build suspense about the monster.

Readings after Class: “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood, “Bulldozer” by Laird Barron

Write: The second draft of your story!

Week Three: The Villain’s Perspective and Your Character’s Agency

We’ll workshop your pieces again. We’ll discuss the importance of the villain’s perspective and how nailing it down can make the conflict clearer. We’ll also go over agency and what it means for your character being agentic vs. passive.

Readings: “The Cabbit” by Maria Dong, “No Matter Which Way They Turned” by Brian Evenson, and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates.

Write: The third draft of your story!

Week Four: One More Workshop

This is the last class! What a doozy! We’ll workshop everyone’s pieces and talk about what techniques and tools we enjoyed, utilized, didn’t quite mesh with.

Should You Have the Time…

Read: “The Jaunt” by Stephen King, “The Boogeyman” by Stephen King, “Rainy Season” by Stephen King, “Hairy Legs and All” by Stephen Graham Jones, “The Moths” by Elina Hawkinsons, “The Coward II” by M. Gira, with more to come.

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Alex Gonzalez is a WGA screenwriter, author, and instructor. He teaches fiction writing at various platforms and teaches MFA level screenwriting at Long Island University. He is one of the creators of PoC satire site Flexx Magazine, horror-zine youarenotalone, and has been published in various magazines and anthologies, with his novel Land Shark debuting in 2020. He has been a consultant on novels, treatments, and screenplays. His feature script Negative Space is currently in development with Extra A Productions (The Giant, Little Woods) and his second novel is on submission through FinePrint Lit.

Make plans to attend this Power Up Spartanburg Workshop on How to Start Your Business and How to Access Capital. Offered every month in partnership with the SC Small Business Development Center, join Jay Jenkins, Director of Small and Minority Business Development, to learn about the topics below.

Training Topics: Business Start-up/Preplanning; Accounting/Budgeting; Business Financing
Description:

Make plans to attend this Power Up Spartanburg Workshop – Access to Capital. Offered every month in partnership with the SC Small Business Development Center, join Katrina Meeks to learn about the topics below.

Training Topics: Accounting/Budget, Business Financing, Cash Flow Management
Description:

You will find Tom Tenbrunsel a delightfully refreshing poet with a wide variety of subject matter and a style somewhere between Sandburg, Frost and the late Appalachian poet James Wright. Tom challenges one’s whit with a refreshing array of non-conforming rhyme, structure, rhythm and oft made-up words and hidden meanings. Uniquely Tom includes a photo and Author’s Notes with each poem. Join us in May to engage the spirit and myth of poetry with Tom’s “Poetry on my Mind”

Casual Poetry/Poetry on my Mind. Tom will read a couple poems for fun. He will ask guests to write a
short poem from a prompt with feedback from the group. Tom would like guests to feel free to bring short
poems to read and discuss. He encourages questions about writing poetry, about a poem of his or his
journey as a poet or his Self Help Series. So familiarize yourself with his works by scanning his website,
tenbrunsel.com Comments or questions are welcomed. Or feel free to email him in advance at
[email protected].  Check out his website tenbrunsel.com before the workshop. Send in one of your
poems to be commented on by Tom.

This workshop is open to writers of all skill levels and is a fun way to find inspiration from a new prompt or revise current work. It is hosted by the Friends of Carl Sandburg at Connemara and will use Microsoft Teams for the virtual connection. Sign up to attend the workshop here!

A writer and a poet, Dr. Tenbrunsel enjoyed a long successful career in Clinical Psychology. Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Tom graduated from Bellarmine University, obtained his doctorate from St Louis University in 1969. He taught, published and was in administration at Michigan State University and was VP for Advancement at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. He and his wife reside in the Appalachians of Western North Carolina. They have three successful children and eight grand grandchildren. Dr T. enjoys photography, gardening, cycling, hiking, camping and stalking the elusive trout. His writings and publications speak for themselves. He has published numerous books including:  Casual Gardening,  Poetry on My Mind, The Fund Raising Resource Manual,  The Fund Raising Handbook, Fund-Raising and Grantsmanship:  Getting Money from the Community for the Community, The Lansing Area Doctors Directory, 1&2,   Dissertation “A Group Coupon Economy Program in Treating Mental Illness:  An Experiment in Social Innovation”,   A Wrinkle in My Time: My Memoirs (a work in progress)

All the best resources for homeschooling in the Upstate in one place,
on one night! And, this year we have more space, and more time!

Gather resources for your homeschool. Get answers. Find your tribe!

Co-ops, associations, sports, community groups, field trips, arts, & more all in one fun place for the whole family.

NEW THIS YEAR: Learn about homeschooling in breakout sessions, & experience educational, & fun, mini-field trips as a family.

COST
$6.75 per adult.
Children are free.

Expo admission includes breakout sessions, & one tote bag per family.

Dinner, drinks, & snacks, are available for purchase in the cafe downstairs,
& snow cones will be just outside.

Join Hub City Bookshop for a writing workshop with author Mickey Dubrow! Perfect for budding writers and those with experience. Open to all ages.

Please bring your own writing materials.

About the Workshop

Time travel doesn’t exist…yet. Until it does, it’s up to writers to explore how and why people travel through time. In this 90 minute hands-on workshop, participants will explore the elements of writing compelling time travel fiction for young adults.

Participants will:

-Learn the basic rules of time travel (there really are some)

-Generate new material

-Craft engaging scenes

-Engage in teamwork exercises

No prior writing experience required.

About the Author

Mickey Dubrow is the author of Always Agnes and American Judas. For over thirty years, he wrote television promos, marketing presentations, and scripts for various clients including Cartoon Network, TNT Latin America, and HGTV. His short stories and essays have appeared in Prime Number Magazine, The Good Men Project, The Signal Mountain Review, Full Grown People, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. His first novel, American Judas, was a Finalist for the 2020 Georgia Author of the Year Award in the category of First Novel. He lives in Atlanta with his wife, author Jessica Handler.

I’m excited to announce the first meeting for this group.
For this meeting I’d like to hike a simple trail at Paris mountain and just talk, hangout and get to know each other. Afterwards I would like to invite anyone who wants to join to come to the swamp rabbit cafe for a light lunch/brunch.

The oldest and most common advice poets hear is “show don’t tell.” But what does that mean, exactly? What is the difference between showing and telling? Why is “showing” better? Most of us write poems to tell readers something, to share our ideas. Many poets—from as far back as John Donne to as recent as Stephen Dunn–do a lot of telling in their poems. So why are we always advised not to tell? In this workshop we will discuss these questions. In the process, we will look at a few well-known poems to see how–or if—they show rather than tell, and we will do some writing exercises that may help us arrive at some conclusions about this persistent advice.

This workshop is open to writers of all skill levels and is a fun way to find inspiration from a new prompt or revise current work. It is hosted by the Friends of Carl Sandburg at Connemara and will use Microsoft Teams for the virtual connection. Sign up to attend the workshop at workshop link

Eric Nelson’s most recent poetry collection, Horse Not Zebra, won both a Da Vinci Eye Award for cover art and an Honorable Mention in Poetry from the 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Awarda. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The Sun, The Oxford American, and The Missouri Review. Among his awards are the 2014 Gival Press Poetry Book Award for Some Wonder; the 2004 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Award for Terrestrials, chosen by Maxine Kumin; the Arkansas Poetry Award for The Interpretation of Waking Life (1991); the Split Oak Press Chapbook Award for The Twins (2009); the Georgia Author of the Year Award (2005), and fellowships to the Hambidge Center for the Arts and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. He taught writing and literature courses at Georgia Southern University for twenty-six years before retiring in 2015 and moving to Asheville, where he lives with his wife, Stephanie Tames, and teaches in the Great Smokies Writing Program. www.ericnelsonpoet.com.

Part of the event series: Small Business Development Center Training

Many programs say that they’ll help you lose weight but how many really teach you how to live healthier?

Healing Head To Toe isn’t about making you a lifetime client but instead a walking testimony to what happens when you take your life back.

Learn To
– Eliminate chronic illnesses
– Increase energy
– Decrease pain
– Live longer

PLUS an exclusive opportunity for a consultation to join the Healing Head To Toe community.

Secure your spot at the next session by registering using the link below:
https://book.stripe.com/dR6aFq58Y32RemAeUY

FREE to attend. No shows will be charged $25. A card must be on file to register. HSA and FSA are both accepted.

Waters and light refreshments will be provided.