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Fred First
Workshop: Local Voices of Roanoke Valley
Time: 3:45 - 4:30pm
Place: Auditorium |
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http://fragmentsfromfloyd.com/
http://goosecreekpress.pbwiki.com/
Slow Road Home: With a naturalist's curiosity, a photographer's eye, and the heart of one who knows that he is living at last where he belongs, Fred First, in Slow Road Home, invites the reader to join him on a field trip through time and place.
Following the sudden realization at fifty-four that his working life had left him unfulfilled in those needs that mattered most, First leaves that world behind. Tracking the quiet turns of solitude's seasons, these short essays capture the daily miracles of an extraordinary time in a beautiful place.
First finds himself home at last in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, and most especially, in one narrow valley along Goose Creek in Floyd County. Why, he wonders do some places call to us so strongly that we cannot ignore their pull? What does belonging to place mean? Can it be felt fully apart from a reverence for and deep connection with the ordinary just outside the back door?
It is that connection you will find in the particulars here, in a book best read the way it was lived: slowly, a day, a moment at a time.
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Since his earliest years in Birmingham, Alabama, Fred First has called several places in the southern Appalachians home. An Auburn graduate with a MS in Zoology and an avid naturalist, he first moved to Virginia in 1975 to teach at Wytheville Community College. In a mid-life career change, he earned a masters degree in Physical Therapy and practiced in that field in North Carolina for six years before moving—permanently, he says—to Floyd County in 1997.
In 2002, his personal focus shifted from what he did for a living to where it was that he lived. He continues to explore the beauties and perplexities of his rural Blue Ridge valley in words and images, including a daily photo-journal called "Fragments from Floyd." Much of his writing and pondering turns to sense of place and belonging, especially as they relate to the Southern Mountains. His “memoir of place”, Slow Road Home: a Blue Ridge Book of Days was released by Goose Creek Press in April, 2006.
Fred is a regular essayist on Roanoke's NPR station (WVTF). His works are published in various places including Blue Ridge Country Magazine, Petlife, Greenprints, Birmingham Arts Journal, Flow and Nantahala Review. He contributes a regular column, "A Road Less Traveled", to the Floyd Press. Fred teaches biology at Radford University as adjunct faculty while he pursues his interests in writing and nature/rural landscape photography. He has also re-entered clinical work, part-time, as a physical therapist at an outpatient clinic not far from home.
Fred, and his wife Ann, live in a remote Blue Ridge valley where they enjoy what he calls “progressive life in the slow lane” in Floyd County, Virginia. |
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Mason Adams
Leonard Adkins
Nancy Wright Beasley
Ellen Byerrum
Susann Cokal
HelenKay Dimon
A. Roger Ekrich
Fred First
Jon Harris
Gary Jackson
Mary McManaway
James W. Morrison
Becky Mushko
Colleen Redman
Sally Roseveare
Michael Shoulders
Matthew Warner
Jack Zell
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