From Lunch with Books: Alan Fitzpatrick Provides Glimpse of Native American Life

Idigenous Culture Explored

At this week's Lunch with Books, author and artist Alan Fitzpatrick  provided a glimpse into the lives of Native Americans in the Upper Ohio Valley in the centuries prior to 1750, when they came into contact with European settlers and explorers - changing everything.

The Lunch with Books program was an interactive discussion filled with items from this time period, that are normally only found behind museum glass. Audience members were introduced to Native American clothing, housing, hunting techniques, weaponry, food, fire starting techniques, music, culture and more. Alan Fitzpatrick, an accompished author and artist, had his many books including Place of the Skull, Captives and Kin in the Ohio Valley, Wilderness War on the Ohio, and many more available for sale. Additionally, prints of paintings and jewelry were available for sale.

Having been born and raised in Canada, Alan Fitzpatrick has been a native of West Virginia since 1973 when he graduated from Kent State University in psychology and became employed at the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville as a Classifications Counselor. Since then, he has made the Wheeling area his home and ran a retail carpet business for thirty-three years before retiring. Alan has always been fascinated by the early frontier history of the Upper Ohio Valley, and in 1997, he was a founding member of “Fort Henry Days,” a yearly living-history commemoration and re-enactment of the 1782 last battle of the American Revolution. The event is held at Wheeling’s Oglebay Park every Labor Day weekend. Alan has written four non-fiction early-American history books dealing with the conflict between Native-Americans and colonials during the tumultuous period of the late 1700’s.

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May 10, 2022:  Wheeling Symphony
Festival of Ideas: Shostakovich

Prior to its May concert, the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra  will present a Festival of Ideas - Music as History: From West to East, to honor the life of Bill Hogan. For the LWB component, WSO music director John Devlin will be discussing composer and pianist Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, his life and work during the reign of Stalin and how Shostakovich kept his artistic integrity in spite of fears of angering the regime.

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May 17, 2022:  Norwegians in Wheeling

Wheeling is a city of immigrants -- Italians, Germans, Greek, Lebanese, Scots-Irish, Irish-Irish, Polish. We know these populations well from their distinct festivals, churches, and fraternal organizations -- but what's not well known is the history (or non-history) of the Norse in Wheeling. To celebrate Syttende Mai (the 17th of May), Norwegian Constitution Day, Erin Rothenbuehler, the Director of the Bellaire Public Library, will present a comprehensive history of Norwegians in the Upper Ohio Valley, from the Viking age to the modern day. 

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May 19: Thursday Evening at 7 (reception starts at 6) Wheeling in the 1970s - Photography Exhibit Opening with Bill Burke

Reception with light refreshments starts at 6. Talk followed by exhibit opening starts at 7.

Bio: A Maryland native, Bill Burke graduated from Wheeling College in 1971. He became focused on photography during his senior year. During that time, the Miners For Democracy, a union reform group, held a meeting at the college. Burke got involved with the group’s struggle. After graduation, he moved to Wheeling and photographed for the UMWA at mine sites in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Between assignments he photographed in downtown Wheeling and in the Woodsdale neighborhood where he lived. It is the photographs from these days that comprise the exhibit.

Bill moved to the Washington DC area in 1975 and photographed primarily for international labor unions. Upon his retirement in 2016, his archive was acquired by the University Of Maryland. He lives in Silver Spring MD with his wife Jonni. 

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May 24, 2022:  Wheeling Poetry Series featuring Amy M. Alvarez

Amy M. Alvarez is a Black Latina poet, educator, and scholar. Her work focuses on race, ethnicity, gender, regionality, nationality, systemic injustice, and social justice. She has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo and the Furious Flower Poetry Center. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in literary journals including Ploughshares, New Ohio Review, River Styx, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, PRISM international, and elsewhere. Amy was born in New York City to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents. She has taught English and Humanities courses at public high schools in the Bronx, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts. She now lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, and teaches at WVU. Series Host: West Virginia Poet Laureate, Marc Harshman.

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May 31, 2022:  Not Sonnets: Observations from an Ordinary Life.

For years Bonnie Thurston has written short poems that focus on a single image or one revelatory idea. They were not sonnets, but were all fourteen lines long. The great sonneteers wrote sequences, often several on one topic, and in this Bonnie Thurston follows in their footsteps. The poems lead the reader on a gentle journey from home as they move through seasons in a sequence focusing on daily experiences that, in the words of Wordsworth, are “reflected in tranquility.” In these insightful, honed, and precise poems you will discover the extraordinariness of the ordinary life and, mirabile dictu, wisdom. This is a collection to savour.

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