Calendar of Events

Every first and third Thursday from August 2020 until September 2020

Inspired by Walidah Imarisha’s visit to Firestorm, the Visionary Readers Group is designed to engage with “literature that helps us understand existing power dynamics, and helps us imagine paths to creating more just futures” The group is for anyone wanting to explore avenues of increased community engagement, relationship building, and collective visioning.

This round of the VRG will explore two exciting titles. For fiction, we’ll read and discuss Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic sci-fi anarchist utopia “The Dispossessed.” For nonfiction, we’ll check out Cindy Milstein’s “Deciding For Ourselves,” an exciting new anthology detailing contemporary projects in direct democracy across the world.

We’ll meet over Zoom on a bi-weekly basis starting Thursday, August 6th. The full schedule for the reading group can be found below.

August 6th: Meet & Greet, Overview, and Intention Setting
August 20th: This Dispossessed Discussion
September 3rd: Deciding For Ourselves Discussion Part I
September 17th: Deciding For Ourselves Part II

To register, please email [email protected] with the subject title “Visionary Readers Group.”

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The Dispossessed
By Ursula K. Le Guin

A bleak moon settled by utopian anarchists, Anarres has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras—a civilization of warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to reunite the two planets, which have been divided by centuries of distrust. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart.

To visit Urras—to learn, to teach, to share—will require great sacrifice and risks, which Shevek willingly accepts. But the ambitious scientist’s gift is soon seen as a threat, and in the profound conflict that ensues, he must reexamine his beliefs even as he ignites the fires of change.

https://www.firestorm.coop/products/761-the-dispossessed.html

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Deciding for Ourselves: The Promise of Direct Democracy
By Cindy Milstein

In a time of social and ecological crises, people everywhere are looking for solutions. States and capitalism, rather than providing them, only make matters worse. There’s a growing sense that we’ll have to fix this mess on our own. But how? Deciding for Ourselves, in the spirit of the Zapatistas, demonstrates that “the impossible is possible.” A better world through self-determination and self-governance is not only achievable. It is already happening in urban and rural communities around the world–from Mexico to Rojava, Denmark to Greece–as an implicit or explicit replacement for nations, police, and other forms of hierarchical social control. This anthology explores this “sense of freedom in the air,” as one piece puts it, by looking at contemporary examples of autonomous, directly democratic spaces and the real-world dilemmas they experience, all the while underscoring the egalitarian ways of life that are collectively generated in them.

https://www.firestorm.coop/products/14685-deciding-for-ourselves.html

The YMI and Buncombe County Public Libraries present the Black Experience Book Club, an online book club focusing on modern Black writers and readers. This month’s title is Year of Yes, by Shonda Rhimes.

Click “sign up” to receive the Zoom meeting link.

Ready for a change of scene, but not ready to travel in the age of COVID-19? The library has just what you need. Check out Passport Around the World. Call BCPL’s Ask a Librarian line (828) 250-4700, email [email protected], or call or email your local library, and tell us where you would like to virtually visit. Your librarian will select 5-10 items about your destination of choice, anything from documentaries, folktales, and cookbooks to travel guides, poetry, and children’s books. We will notify you when your items are ready. Pick up your Passport bundle at the curbside pickup location of your choice. Bon Voyage!

Ready for a change of scene, but not ready to travel in the age of COVID-19? The library has just what you need. Check out Passport Around the World. Call BCPL’s Ask a Librarian line (828) 250-4700, email [email protected], or call or email your local library, and tell us where you would like to virtually visit. Your librarian will select 5-10 items about your destination of choice, anything from documentaries, folktales, and cookbooks to travel guides, poetry, and children’s books. We will notify you when your items are ready. Pick up your Passport bundle at the curbside pickup location of your choice. Bon Voyage!

Ready for a change of scene, but not ready to travel in the age of COVID-19? The library has just what you need. Check out Passport Around the World. Call BCPL’s Ask a Librarian line (828) 250-4700, email [email protected], or call or email your local library, and tell us where you would like to virtually visit. Your librarian will select 5-10 items about your destination of choice, anything from documentaries, folktales, and cookbooks to travel guides, poetry, and children’s books. We will notify you when your items are ready. Pick up your Passport bundle at the curbside pickup location of your choice. Bon Voyage!

Readings by Great Smokies Writing Program faculty. Registration required. Free.

Sebastian Matthews
Vicki Lane
Scott Branson
Luke Hankins
Annie Frazier Crandell
Rebecca Petruck

This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Click here to register. If you elect to attend, we will email you on the day of the event with the link and password required to attend on Zoom. If you decide to attend and to purchase the authors’ books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you are supporting our work and keeping more dollars in our community. If you would like to support us without purchasing a book, you may purchase a gift card or make a donation of any amount. Thank you!

This event is free but registration is required. Please click here to register. You will then receive an email on the day of the event with URL and password you’ll need to attend.

If you decide to attend and to purchase the authors’ books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you are supporting our work and keeping more dollars in our community. If you would like to support us without purchasing a book, you may purchase a gift card or make a donation of any amount. Thank you!

America is at war with itself over the right to vote, or, more precisely, over the question of who gets to exercise that right and under what circumstances. Conservatives speak in ominous tones of voter fraud so widespread that it threatens public trust in elected government. Progressives counter that fraud is rare and that calls for reforms such as voter ID are part of a campaign to shrink the electorate and exclude some citizens from the political life of the nation.

North Carolina is a battleground for this debate, and its history can help us understand why–a century and a half after ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment–we remain a nation divided over the right to vote. In Fragile Democracy, James L. Leloudis and Robert R. Korstad tell the story of race and voting rights, from the end of the Civil War until the present day. They show that battles over the franchise have played out through cycles of emancipatory politics and conservative retrenchment. When race has been used as an instrument of exclusion from political life, the result has been a society in which vast numbers of Americans are denied the elements of meaningful freedom: a good job, a good education, good health, and a good home. That history points to the need for a bold new vision of what democracy looks like.

James L. Leloudis is professor of history, Peter T. Grauer Associate Dean for Honors Carolina, and director of the James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also co-chair of the UNC Commission on History, Race, and a Way Forward.

Robert R. Korstad is professor emeritus of public policy and history at Duke University’s Terry Sanford School of Public Policy.

Ready for a change of scene, but not ready to travel in the age of COVID-19? The library has just what you need. Check out Passport Around the World. Call BCPL’s Ask a Librarian line (828) 250-4700, email [email protected], or call or email your local library, and tell us where you would like to virtually visit. Your librarian will select 5-10 items about your destination of choice, anything from documentaries, folktales, and cookbooks to travel guides, poetry, and children’s books. We will notify you when your items are ready. Pick up your Passport bundle at the curbside pickup location of your choice. Bon Voyage!

Come join us for a fun afternoon (most likely on Zoom) sampling some wine(s) and talking about books. As always, the book can be fiction or non-fiction ….. whatever……just so that it somehow involves whatever topic we’ve chosen for the month. For September we will be discussing Women Who Have Influenced or Changed Things. And if you just want to join us to hear about the books we’ve read but haven’t read any yet yourself, come along anyhow. You’ll have a chance then to suggest a topic for us to read books on next time.

Ready for a change of scene, but not ready to travel in the age of COVID-19? The library has just what you need. Check out Passport Around the World. Call BCPL’s Ask a Librarian line (828) 250-4700, email [email protected], or call or email your local library, and tell us where you would like to virtually visit. Your librarian will select 5-10 items about your destination of choice, anything from documentaries, folktales, and cookbooks to travel guides, poetry, and children’s books. We will notify you when your items are ready. Pick up your Passport bundle at the curbside pickup location of your choice. Bon Voyage!

Ready for a change of scene, but not ready to travel in the age of COVID-19? The library has just what you need. Check out Passport Around the World. Call BCPL’s Ask a Librarian line (828) 250-4700, email [email protected], or call or email your local library, and tell us where you would like to virtually visit. Your librarian will select 5-10 items about your destination of choice, anything from documentaries, folktales, and cookbooks to travel guides, poetry, and children’s books. We will notify you when your items are ready. Pick up your Passport bundle at the curbside pickup location of your choice. Bon Voyage!

We will discuss our feelings about the book, what we learned along with pre-made discussion questions.

Ready for a change of scene, but not ready to travel in the age of COVID-19? The library has just what you need. Check out Passport Around the World. Call BCPL’s Ask a Librarian line (828) 250-4700, email [email protected], or call or email your local library, and tell us where you would like to virtually visit. Your librarian will select 5-10 items about your destination of choice, anything from documentaries, folktales, and cookbooks to travel guides, poetry, and children’s books. We will notify you when your items are ready. Pick up your Passport bundle at the curbside pickup location of your choice. Bon Voyage!

Era of Ignition by Amber Tamblyn. Free.

Hello Queer Loves!

Welcome to our first queer book club with the book Belonging by Toko-pa Turner.

We’ll begin with introductions and shared group agreements, and then move into a discussion on on the first five chapters with a focus on chapters 4 (False Belonging) and 5 (The Inner Marriage).

The group will be facilitated by Stacia Thompson and Jodi McLaren. Stacia is a psychotherapist who loves spirituality and earth magick. Jodi McLaren is a singer-songwriter and music therapist who dance and express big feelings.

We welcome all queer-identified folks to join for a meaningful inviting conversation at Woodfin Riverside Park at the octagon tables. If it rains we will meet under the open shelter.

We will be spaced appropriately, please bring/wear masks and do not come if you’ve been exposed to covid-19.