by Christina Fisanick
Now in its second year, WANA LIVE!, the reading series of the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia, continues to bring the region’s top writers, musicians, and book store owners to the world via a weekly livestream on Facebook and YouTube. The series, co-hosted by Damian Dressick and Christina Fisanick, began as a response to the pandemic.
According to Dressick, “I realized that writers needed an opportunity to read their work and readers desperately needed to hear from them.” Like many writers who have been featured on the show, Dressick and Fisanick both had new books launch during the pandemic and had few venues for introducing them to readers. WANA LIVE! helped fill that gap.
Featured writers have included four state poets laureate, a National Book Award Finalist, a PEN Faulkner Award winner, a Philip K. Dick Award winner, and winners of The Loyalhanna Review’s Children’s Poetry Contest among numerous others. The format is simple: writers read for just four to six minutes. Including introductions, readings and brief discussions with writers afterwards, the entire broadcast is over in twenty minutes or less.
Acclaimed writers such as Deesha Philyaw, Neema Avashia, Alison Stine, Bonnie Proudfoot, Ed McClanahan, Matt Ferrence, Marc Harshman, Jennifer Haigh, and nearly seventy others have read their work on Thursday nights at 8 PM. Writers as young as ten and as old as 88 have appeared on WANA LIVE!, episodes of which have been by as many as 2,300 viewers. Typical broadcast viewer numbers generally come in between 200-500.
On April 29, 2021 WANA LIVE! will begin its next adventure when Dressick and Fisanick broadcast live on location at Watershed Books in Brookville, Pennsylvania. David Drayer, author of the story collection Strip Cuts is that night’s featured writer.
The night will start at 6:30 with a book signing and a chance to interact with Drayer. Then Drayer, Fisanick, and Dressick will begin their broadcast with a reading and interview. To watch the livestream on Thursday night at 7 PM tune in on the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia’s Facebook page or on their YouTube channel, where you can catch archived episodes.
In addition, listeners can now find WANA LIVE!’s episodes on our podcast, available on Spotify, Apple’s iTunes, Amazon, iHeartRadio, and wherever you listen to podcasts.
Learn more about the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia, including information on their upcoming writers conference to be held at Oglebay Resort and Conference Center in Wheeling, West Virginia in September 2021, by visiting their website at https://writersassociationofnorthernappalachia.org/.
Born and raised in Pennsylvania’s coal country, Damian Dressick is the author of the novel 40 Patchtown (Bottom Dog Press 2020) and the flash fiction collection, Fables of the Deconstruction (CLASH 2021). His creative work has appeared in more than fifty literary journals and anthologies, including W.W. Norton’s New Micro, Post Road, New Orleans Review, Cutbank, failbetter.com, Hippocampus, Smokelong Quarterly, HeartWood, and New World Writing. A Blue Mountain Residency Fellow, Dressick is the winner of the Harriette Arnow Award and the Jesse Stuart Prize. Dressick teaches writing at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. Discover more of Damian’s work at https://damiandressick.com/.
Christina Fisanick is an associate professor of English at California University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches expository writing, creative nonfiction, and digital storytelling. She is the author of more than thirty books, including memoirs, such as The Optimistic Food Addict (MSI Press, 2016), and a textbook, Digital Storytelling as Public History (Routledge, 2020), co-authored with Robert Stakeley. In addition, her essays and poetry have appeared in dozens of publications, including Survivor Lit, The Awakenings Review, Still, and the Journal of Appalachian Studies. Learn more about Christina’s work at https://christinafisanick.com/.
