March 6, 2008 issue
Visiting Writers Series Presents Jo Carson March 20
Story by Anna Oakes
Playwright, poet and fiction author Jo Carson of Johnson City, Tenn., is the next featured speaker in the Visiting Writers Series at Appalachian State University. She will present a reading of her work on Thursday, March 20, in the Plemmons Student Union’s Table Rock Room at 7:30 p.m.
Additionally, Carson will present a craft talk for aspiring and experienced writers, titled A Physics and Biophysics of Storytelling, at 2:00 p.m. that day in the Table Rock Room. Both events are free and open to the public.
Carson has spent the last 15 years helping more than 30 communities write plays from oral histories. Swamp Gravy, a play created in Colquitt, Ga., traveled to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Other communities she has assisted with playwriting include Belle Grade, Fla.; Lancaster, Penn.; and the Mennonite community in Newport News, Va. Her most recent play, Higher Ground, was created and produced in Harlan, Ky.
“She’s the only writer I know who’s figured out how to make a living by being hired by a community to listen to the stories there and give them back in the form of a play,” said Sandra Ballard, an ASU English professor and editor of Appalachian Journal. Ballard recommended Carson for the Visiting Writers Series.
“She has worked … to teach local citizens how to collect oral histories—often painful, uplifting, life-changing stories—which become the basis for a play about the community that is produced in the place where it originated,” Ballard said. “These plays become fundraisers and tremendous community-building activities. It’s an amazing gift she has to approach community development this way.”
Her award-winning plays include Whispering to Horses, recipient of an AT&T Onstage Award; Preacher with a Horse to Ride, winner of the Roger L. Stevens Award; The Bear Facts, winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; and Daytrips, recipient of the Kesselering Award for best new American play.
Carson currently performs Liars, Thieves, and Other Sinners on the Bench, a one-woman play made up of selected stories from her oral history plays. She is also the author of short stories, books for children, essays and poems. Her books include Stories I Ain’t Told Nobody Yet, The Last of the “The Waltz Across Texas” and Other Stories, Pulling My Leg, You Hold Me and I'll Hold You, The Great Shaking and Spider Speculations. She has performed a number of pieces on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. She holds degrees in theatre and speech from East Tennessee State University.
Ballard said, “When my co-editor and I were trying to select an excerpt from Jo Carson’s writing for our anthology, Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia, it was difficult to choose a ‘representative’ sample—partly because she’s always branching out into something new. Like a number of writers in this region, she doesn’t confine herself to one genre.”
For more information, call 828-262-2337.
Want To Go?
Date: Thursday, March 20
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Plemmons Student Union’s Table Rock Room, ASU
Cost: Free
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