Our monthly virtual Open Mic Night is presented in partnership between the Pat Conroy Literary Center and the South Carolina Writers Association. Our featured writer for July is Robert J. Dreseen, author of the poetry collection I Don’t Smoke Enough to Quit. Join us live on the Conroy Center’s Facebook page for readings by a pantheon of participating writers from in and beyond our South Carolina lowcountry.
When: Thursday, July 13, 2023 at 6 PM – 7:30 PM EDT
Price: Free · Duration: 1 hr 30 min
Where: Facebook Live
Interested in reading as part of Open Mic? Let us know at contact@patconroyliterarycenter.org
We want to build our community of writers and an appreciation for the art and talent of new, emerging, and long-time writers. Thank you for supporting this partnership!
About our featured writer:
Robert J. Dreesen is a publisher of scholarly books in New York City, where he has lived for the past thirty years. He is the author of 20th Century Tool Shed, a poetry collection. Dreesen returns to Nebraska every fall for an annual trip up the Missouri River with his brothers-in-bottle called “I Ain’t Lewis and You Ain’t Clark.”
“The poems in Robert Dreesen’s I Don’t Smoke Enough to Quit may be set in a truck stop bar but its ‘cricks’ are deep, concealing the poet’s family’s loving reticence—‘for anything declared might be taken away’—with raucous living. Dreesen, for whom two pianos in the room resembled ‘two horses in the pasture resting heads on one another’s rumps,’ carries this blank verse tribute to his father from ‘engine whisperers’ to ‘a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.’ I Don’t Smoke Enough to Quit tells a sad, sure story with a wallop of an ending.”—Terese Svoboda, author of Black Glasses Like Clark Kent
