Michel Stone

Mon., March 26th, 2012 from 12-2pm
@ The Lazy Goat, $25 per person
Purchase Tickets & Books / View menu
Event status: Minimum not yet met — order your tickets today to help us confirm event.

Spartanburg author Michel Stone’s debut novel, The Iguana Tree (Hub City, hardcover, $24.95, on sale 3/12/12), gives readers a glimpse at illegal immigration from a viewpoint not seen in the news.

Set amid the perils of illegal border crossings, The Iguana Tree is the suspenseful saga of Lilia and Hector, who separately make their way from Mexico into the United States, seeking work in the Carolinas and a home for their infant daughter.

This harrowing novel meticulously examines the obstacles each faces in pursuing a new life: manipulation, rape, and murder in the perilous commerce of border crossings; betrayal by family and friends; exploitation by corrupt officials and rapacious landowners on the U.S. side; and, finally, the inexorable workings of the U.S. justice system.

Hector and Lilia meet Americans willing to help them with legal assistance and offers of responsible employment, but their illegal entry seems certain to prove their undoing. The consequences of their decisions are devastating. In the end, The Iguana Tree is a universal story of loss, grief, and human dignity.

About the author:
Michel Stone has published over a dozen stories and essays, including the title story in Expecting Goodness and Other Stories, edited by C. Michael Curtis, the runner-up in the Independent Publishers IPPY Awards for the top collection of short fiction in North America, 2009. Her work has appeared numerous times in the Raleigh News and Observer‘s emerging Southern writers series. Michel is a winner of SC Magazine‘s Very Short Fiction Contest, as well as the Hub City Fiction Prize. Her short story, “Bobby Knight’s Nu-Way of Thinking,” was included in Hub City’s publication When Stars Fell on Spartanburg. For the past five years, her short story “Relative” has been used by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction for its English I Public School Testing booklet. Her essay “Danny Ford: The Man, the God” was included in the Novello Festival anthology Sports in the Carolinas. Michel was the editor of Outdoor Adventures in the Upcountry, a collection of essays about outdoor pursuits. She is a 2011 recipient of the South Carolina Fiction Project Award, given by the S.C. Arts Commission, and her flash fiction was a finalist in Undefined Magazine‘s 2011 Creative Writing Contest. The Iguana Tree is her first novel.

Michel is an alumna of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A 10th generation South Carolina Lowcountry native, Michel now lives in Spartanburg with her husband and their three children. She is at work on her second novel.

Rose Senehi

Thurs., March 8th, 2012 from 12-2pm
@ The Lazy Goat, $25 per person
Purchase Tickets & Books / View menu
Event status: Minimum not yet met — order your tickets today to help us confirm event.

South Carolina author Rose Senehi brings us the third “standalone” novel in her Blue Ridge moutain series, Render Unto the Valley (KIM Publishing, paperback, $15.95, on sale 3/1/12). The novel tells the story of Karen Godwell, a curator for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, who must make peace with her past when her family’s Blue Ridge farm is threatened.

Rose Senehi’s latest romantic thriller, Render Unto the Valley, is a contemporary novel cloaked in the rich history of the southern Blue Ridge Mountains, and tells of a woman’s struggle to bridge the divide between the staunchly independent mountain culture she comes from and the sophisticated world she has become a part of—all while concealing the ugly secret that drove her away.  

Karen Godwell reinvents herself at college and doesn’t look back till her clan’s historic farm is threatened. The gutsy curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum returns to the mountains only to come face to face with who she was and what she did.

Descendants of the early settlers still have a grip on the farmlands deep in the folds of the southern Blue Ridge Mountains, but the ground is shifting beneath their feet. Cousin Bruce, the town historian, sees life through the family’s colorful two-hundred-year past; Tom Gibbons, a local conservationist, keeps one eye on the mountains and the other on Karen; and Karen’s nine-year-old daughter, Hali, is in the throes of the mission her dying father sent her on.

Render Unto the Valley is the third “stand alone” novel in Senehi’s Blue Ridge series, and takes place in the mountain farming community of Fairview, North Carolina, just outside Asheville. Senehi, who is noted for weaving environmental issues into her historically accurate thrillers, has successfully imbued the characters in her story with the independent nature and indelible sense of place that the early settlers of this mountain valley passed on to the generations that followed them.

About the author:
Rose Senehi is originally from Michigan, but landed in Syracuse, New York, after attending Syracuse University. She worked as a reporter for several years before becoming the corporate marketing director of The Pyramid Companies for whom she opened shopping malls
throughout the Northeast. She drew from this highly charged environment to write her 2nd novel, WINDFALL.

The whole time she was racing from town to town opening malls, she lived on a hundred-acre farm outside the small village of Cazenovia, NY, where she raised her two children, Jessica and David. She tried to inject the unique and wonderful flavor of the people of this small farming community into the characters in SHADOWS IN THE GRASS, her first novel.

One cold, hard winter’s day in 1996, a headhunter called Rose. It was ten degrees in Upstate, NY, and she was overspent on her mall snow removal budget and it was only January. She glanced at the USA Today map and saw it was seventy degrees in Myrtle Beach and jumped at the offer to manage the Myrtle Beach Factory Stores. Her third novel, Pelican Watch, reflects her warm feelings for the South and the wonderful people she’s come to know in Pawleys Island and Murrells Inlet. She is a very active real estate agent specializing in oceanfront condominiums and homes, which is a profession that goes well with writing. She wakes every morning at four and writes until eight when she heads for the office.

Rose has owned a place in the mountains since 2004 and has centered my fourth, fifth and sixth
novels: IN THE SHADOWS OF CHIMNEY ROCK, THE WIND IN THE WOODS and RENDER UNTO THE VALLEY around Western North Carolina’s Hickory Nut Gorge and the Southern Blue Ridge
Mountains. They are the first in her Blue Ridge Series. She has tried to write with empathy about the universal desire to hold onto one’s land and heritage against the forces that are changing the places we love. It is her hope that this series will not only entertain people and create a fascinating mosaic of the history of  the area, but paint a broad picture of the pressures on the Southern Blue Ridge and those who are working to preserve it.