Wed 11/8 – 7-9 PM – We are co-hosting with the NC Writers Network to present Meagan Lucas as our next author in our ongoing series, “In the Company of Writers.” The program offers a series of personal and conversational dialogues featuring guest writers/poets followed by an open mic forum. These inspirational gatherings will elucidate and entertain those attending. The guest author speaks from 7-8 PM with an open mic from 8 -9 PM. The Chicago blues music of “Hollywood Johnny Cosgrove” welcomes you, continues during intermission, and closes the evening. Sign-ups for the open mic visit: https://thebrandybar.com/writers-open-mic Author of the award-winning novel, Songbirds and Stray Dogs and the collection, Here in the Dark, Meagan Lucas is also Editor-in-Chief of Reckon Review. Her short stories are Pushcart, Best of the Net, Derringer, and Canadian Crime Writers’ Award of Excellence nominated, and she won the 2017 Scythe Prize for Fiction. Her short story “The MonstMeer Beneath” was noted as Distinguished in 2023 Best American Mystery and Suspense. Songbirds and Stray Dogs was North Carolina’s selection for the Library of Congress Center for the Book’s 2022 Route 1 Reads program. Meagan teaches Creative Writing at Robert Morris University and in the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC-A. Born and raised on a small island in Northern Ontario, she now lives in Flat Rock, NC.
Thurs 11/9 – 4-9 PM – Ghostly Cocktails – Halloween is over, Day of the Dead, All Saints Day – all over for this year but how did this madness get started? Casper the Friendly Ghost, Danny Phantom, and Scooby-Doo, Ghost Whisperer, Medium Supernatural, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Ghostbusters, A Haunting, Ghost Adventures, Ghost Hunters, Ghost Hunters International, Ghost Lab, and Ghost Haunter – to name a few. Ghosts have fascinated us for centuries. From ghost tours to paranormal investigations, people always seek a way to encounter the supernatural. Even in early texts, excerpts about apparitions and spirits can be found. But throughout all the reports of ghosts, one thing remains the same: for most adults, there is an inability to see them with the naked eye (except perhaps for mediums and children). The first ghost story account was written in the First Century A. D. by the Roman author Pliny the Younger, who wrote his story after experiencing a horrifying haunting wherein an elderly man with a long beard, with chains hanging from his arms and ankles, haunted his home, Hundreds of years later, in 856 A.D. a report in Germany detailed the first known poltergeist activity that took place in a farmhouse where a family experienced torment at the hand of an unseen force that threw rocks, started fires and caused endless chaos – is the earliest account of a violent spirit. While ghost stories are explicitly meant to be scary, they have been written to serve all sorts of purposes from comedy to morality tales. Ghosts often appear in the narrative as sentinels or prophets of things to come. Belief in ghosts is found in all cultures around the world, thus ghost stories may be passed down orally or in written form. In the Christian faith (and in the Western World and although the belief that the dead could return to earth on All Soul’s Day persisted), it changed as the Christian vision of the afterlife became increasingly popular and ghosts came to be linked with demons and the devil. Ghosts are mentioned in the Bible in passages of Matthew 14:25-27, Mark 6:48-50, and Luke 24:37-39. Among the most famous passages referring to a ghost is 1 Samuel 28:7-20 in which King Saul goes to the Witch of Endor and asks her to conjure the ghost of Samuel, his former advisor, and a prophet of God. Saul is afterward cut off from God’s favor for choosing to consult a spirit about what he should do instead of trusting in God for his future.
Ghostly cocktails – Meuknow vanilla cognac, cream, Mozart white chocolate; Graveyard Ghost – Courvoisier, Kahlua, Ice cream; White Cosmopolitan Ghost – CB Frost, Cointreau, white cranberry juice, lime juice; 1/2 price on Fruit/infused flight;
Reminder Songwriter Sessions returns Nov 11/15 – 7-9 PM with Peter Berglund, Mare Carmody, and Nikki Talley.