Lights of St. Mary’s

The August Bella Book Club Review | The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo | Aiken Bella Magazine

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires – by Grady Hendrix

Bella Book Club Monthly Selection by Nichole Miller The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, by Grady Hendrix, provides an unusual combination of classic horror and old Southern charm. Patricia Campbell is a stay-at-home mom who is trying her best to raise her teenage children and care for her senile mother-in-law. Her husband, a psychiatrist, is never home and is little help, and Patricia’s sanity is starting to run thin. After embarrassing herself at the snooty local ladies’ book club, she walks out to find some of the other members forming a new book group where she is introduced to true crime stories and a group of amazing women

I Create Beautiful Things

If there was a job called Professional Creator, I could be THAT. I love to create stuff, all kinds of stuff. I like to find forgotten yarn and watch it become something new and beautiful. I glean from thrift stores or estate sales or garages or attics and find old balls of tangled messes and watch them unfurl, and then I create anew. I enjoy taking pieces of fabric, once serving their past-life purposes, and then cut and craft them into a new blanket or quilt. I am entertained by taking wood and screws and building stuff. Sometimes it’s bird atriums for my farm animals. Or functional things like a

Artist Spotlight | An Artist In Any Medium: From Fashion To Water Color

In 2006, a determined Barbara Beach walked into a Charleston boutique with children’s dresses that she had designed and sewn together. The owner quickly added them to the inventory, and eventually shops from West Ashley to King Street were carrying Barbara Beach Designs for the poshest tots. Women would stare at the carefully crafted dresses and secretly wish the apparel were in adult sizes (this writer is guilty as charged). The demand for these classic with a modern twist creations was gaining traction across Charleston when Beach was named a Charleston Fashion Week (CFW) Emerging Designer in 2010. This accolade included a fashion show where her small models took the

Pocket Poetry

Changing the World – One Poem at a Time Having been graciously selected by the members of The Aiken Poets to serve as Poet Laureate, I wondered what I could do to make people more excited about poetry and to make poetry better appreciated, noticed, read, memorized, written, and shared. Then I came up with this idea I call Pocket Poetry — a few lines in rhyme or free verse, written in calligraphy on white or colored cards, and distributed at random to people I meet. They go to people I know, people who provide a service, like the cashiers at the supermarket, the teller at the bank, the postal