$25 GENERAL ADMISSION
Story Parlor Members: Enter your code at checkout for discounted tickets, or become a Member for discounts up to 30%!
Alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages available for purchase. Ages 16+.
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Join writers and storytellers from Western North Carolina to celebrate, cry, and connect through stories about bodily autonomy. Think stories of birth, abortion, miscarriage, transition, gender identity, race, and all their intersections—stories that center the essential nature of bodily autonomy to our humanity.
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Maura Lin (she/her)
Maura Lin is a recently retired psychiatric nurse, and author of the novels, An Offering (2023) and ANY JOE (2022). Her experiences working with patients and their families have helped to inform her writing, and to gain perspective on life’s many challenges. Her essays on numerous subjects can be found on her website/blog: https://closertoreal.com.
Older published writings under a different name include an article in The Journal of Psychosocial Nursing (August 2001) and stories in the nursing-related publications, Beveled Edges: A Portrait of Caring, Nurses’ Reflections and Ordinary Miracles in Nursing (Jones and Bartlett, 2006).
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Lindsay Tigar (she/her)
Lindsay Tigar is an award-winning journalist, editor, and founder with more than a decade of experience telling women’s stories. Her work has appeared in USA Today, CNN, National Geographic, Travel + Leisure, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, and dozens of other national publications. With a strong background in travel, lifestyle, and wellness journalism, Lindsay has explored everything from luxury hotels and global destinations to career pivots and personal reinvention. Her narrative nonfiction and service work often delves into the intersection of identity, autonomy, motherhood, ambition, and the invisible labor women carry.
After becoming a mother in 2022, Lindsay’s perspective—and purpose—shifted. Confronted by the identity rupture that often accompanies early motherhood, she co-founded Mila & Jo Media, a storytelling agency that helps mother-focused and editorial lifestyle brands speak with nuance, authority, and heart. In 2023, she launched The Mother Chapter, a digital media platform and community that re-centers mothers in the postpartum experience—not as caretakers or clichés, but as complex individuals reshaping their lives in real time. Through raw essays, intimate interviews, and cultural commentary, Lindsay’s work now aims to give voice to the parts of motherhood still whispered about, making space for the messy, funny, painful, and powerful truths that too often go unspoken.Through interviews, essays, and social commentary, the platform explores maternal identity, caregiving inequality, mental load, postpartum body autonomy, and the cultural narratives that shape our experience as mothers.
Lindsay lives in Asheville, North Carolina with her husband and two daughters. Her family travels frequently—especially to Copenhagen, Denmark, where her husband is originally from. She’s an avid runner, a coffee enthusiast, and always planning their next adventure. Most days, you’ll find her juggling motherhood and writing with a bold lipstick on, sneakers laced, and a to-do list that never quite ends.
*Delicia Daniels (she/her)
Delicia Daniels is a poet, activist, and person who stutters. Her first publication, The Language We Cry In, was selected as the Discovery Prize winner for the 2017 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards. Her second poetry collection, Abolition Chronicles, was selected as a finalist for the 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Book Prize and The Poetic Justice Institute Prize.
*Johanna Courtleigh (she/her)
Johanna Courtleigh is a writer, solo performance artist, Licensed Professional Counselor and Hypnotherapist in private practice. She has performed her original work both in person and online. Her prize-winning solo performance piece, Olding, won her recognition at the International Solo Performance Festival though the Marsh Theater in the Bay Area, as well as in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Her writing has been published in various anthologies, and her book, Prayers For A New World, is available on Amazon.
Her therapy work seeks to help people heal from the mistruths they were taught, and to come to a core of deeper reverence, self-love, awareness, ease and integrity—internally, and in their relationships with others. Her hypnotherapy work assists people in delving into deeper levels of heart and mind through transpersonal regression work. She can be contacted at www.jcourtleigh.com.
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Brit Washburn (she/her)
Brit Washburn is the author of the essay collection Homing In: Attempts on a Life of Poetry and Purpose (Alexandria Quarterly Press, 2023), and the poetry collections Notwithstanding (Wet Cement Press, 2019) and What Is Given (Wet Cement Press, 2025). She is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at Interlochen Arts Academy in Northern Michigan, where she was born and raised, and of Goddard College in Vermont. Brit has been awarded an artist's grant by the Vermont Studio Center and for many years served on the boards of the Poetry Society of South Carolina and the Low Country Initiative on the Literary Arts (LILA). She co-directed the salon Poets House South and has worked as a freelance writer, editor, and indexer, a Montessori teacher, and instructor in the Great Smokies Writing Program at University of North Carolina Asheville. Her work can be found in print and online via www.britwashburn.com.
https://venmo.com/u/LisaBritain-Washburn
*Graham Wesley (she/they)
Graham Wesley is a writer, herbalist, and forest tender in the Hominy Valley of Western North Carolina. I’m curious about the ways we weave our lives into the world around us, entangling ourselves thoughtfully, people, plants, and place. I look to writing, movement, and practices in presence to guide my every day and envision what meaningful paths to choose from here.
*L. Danzis (they/them)
L. Danzis is the author of the essay chapbook "The Heretic's Bestiary" (Bull City Press 2024). A "genre-fluid" writer, their essays often explore the intersection of gender, faith, and the natural world. L. has had the joy of working in various capacities with local literary arts organizations including the Great Smokies Writing Program, Story Parlor, and the NC Writers' Network. They live in Asheville with their wife, where you can often find the two of them in a coffee shop, working on their co-written novel.