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If you weathered Hurricane Helene in western NC, you probably experienced outages of power, water, and internet and celebrated when those were (at least partially) restored. The storm may also have “knocked out” your writing practice. In our winter 2025 first Quarter Office Hours with Heather and Maggie, we’ll commiserate about storm experiences (the hurricane or other life challenges if you live outside of WNC) and share ideas about how to get our writing practices back on track. Who knows, we might even do a tiny writing prompt so that we can say we wrote something!

Maggie Marshall moved to Asheville from Los Angeles in 2006. Her first career was as a professional actress, which she spent performing on regional stages throughout the U.S., as well as Broadway, Los Angeles, and Dublin, Ireland. She then shifted into screenwriting, eventually landing in television and writing for numerous cable and syndicated one-hour drama series. She is the recipient of the Carl Sautter Memorial Screenwriting Award and a Scriptapalooza Award, both for One-Hour Drama. She has been a fiction contributor at the Tin House Writer's Workshop, a fellow at the Hambidge Creative Residency Program, a Writer-in-Residence at the Weymouth Center for the Arts, and a proud member of the Flatiron Writers group. She recently completed work on a novel which is currently being shopped to publishers, and has had fiction and nonfiction pieces published in The Great Smokies Review. 

Heather Newton’s novel The Puppeteer's Daughters (Turner Publishing 2022) won the NC Indie Author Project book award for adult fiction, was a finalist for the Forword INDIES Book of the Year and has been optioned for television. Her short story collection McMullen Circle (Regal House 2022), was a finalist for both the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award and the W.S. Porter prize. Her novel Under The Mercy Trees (HarperCollins 2011) won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, was chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads Selection and by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance as an Okra Pick (“great southern fiction fresh off the vine”). She teaches creative writing for UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program and Charlotte Lit as well as the Flatiron Writers Room.