This event has sold out. If you would like to join the waitlist please contact Willard Watson, BRAHM programs director at Programs@blowingrockmuseum.org or 828-295-9099 ext. 3006.

Join us for an intimate evening with New-York Times best-selling author Frances Mayes. She'll be talking about her life and her newest novel, “A Great Marriage.”

Tickets include a copy of the book, a glass of wine and light refreshments. 

About the Book:
A Great Marriage
When a perfect wedding is called off just days before the big event, it sends two people—and their families—reeling, in this poignant novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Under the Tuscan Sun and Women in Sunlight

A great marriage is an elusive thing, and only a few know the secret to making one.

Dara Willcox, in New York for a weekend, meets Austin Clarke at an art gallery. If love at first sight can happen, it happens to them. These two vivid, ambitious people are on different courses—he’s British, working temporarily in New York. She’s from North Carolina, set on law school. They don’t care. They will make their lives together happen. At their April engagement dinner at Dara’s family home, her mother, Lee, sets a beautiful table, and the family and close friends gather to celebrate. Rich, Dara’s father, raises a toast. Suddenly, Lee spills the wine, a brilliant red stain splashing onto the tablecloth and onto Austin.

Days later, Austin hears unsettling news from London that wrecks their plans. Dara abruptly cancels the wedding. She refuses to reveal the reason, not even to her best friends or her parents or grandmother, disrupting their family tradition of openness. As everyone knows, Lee and Rich have a great marriage, and Charlotte, her grandmother, had a colossal one, to the late Senator Mann.  Charlotte literally wrote the book on the subject: She’s the author of international bestsellers on what makes a good or possibly a great marriage.

While Dara escapes to California and Indigo Island, South Carolina, Austin, back in London, faces a major tragedy, the consequences of which are life-altering. But it’s Lee, Dara’s mother, whose impulsive visit to London alters their fate.

With her signature warmth, humor, and incisive style, beloved author Frances Mayes creates a multigenerational probe into the complexity of love and the great mystery ride of marriage. A novel of casual choices and fateful consequences, A Great Marriage introduces two unforgettable families and the arrival of a stranger who rearranges their futures.

This event has been postponed to a later date. All existing registrations will be honored for the new date.

Ashlee Lanier, guest curator of the Blowing Rock History Exhibit will discuss the process involved in reimagining the history exhibit. A multi-year collaboration between BRAHM and the Blowing Rock Historical Society has produced a wonderful new experience for the museum's patrons. This talk will cover the ins and outs of working as a public historian in Appalachia, as well as their favorite tidbits from the new exhibition.

About the Speaker:

Ashlee Lanier was born and raised in Wilmington, North Carolina. She's had a love of history from a young age and after receiving a BA in Osteoarchaeology from North Carolina State University in 2014 she decided to focus on museums and collections work. Lanier received her Master's in Public History from Appalachian State University and immediately delved into the museum world professionally.

She has worked for a variety of museums and historic sites up and down the east coast from an underwater archaeology center, a historic mill museum, a bluegrass museum, and a handful of other unique institutions.

Ashlee has been the Exhibits Curator for The North Carolina Arboretum located in Asheville, NC since 2018. She is particularly passionate about film history, film preservation, and the history of World War I. Lanier and her husband, Graham reside in Asheville.

Free and open to the public. Online registration requested.

Join us for a screening of Facing the White Canvas: Maud Gatewood followed by an opportunity for a guided tour of the exhibit.

Audience members over the age of 21 will get a chance to enjoy BRAHM’s signature Maud Gatewood Cocktail, our variation on a Sea Breeze.

About the film:

In this revealing documentary, Maud Gatewood gives us insight into the determination and creative process that have led to her becoming one of the most admired painters to emerge from the American South.  For over 50 years Maud Gatewood has been an inspired laborer, producing an extraordinary body of work.  Honors have come to her as a painter, an advocate of the arts, and an active citizen.

Gatewood is known for being tough and demanding, yet in her paintings, reverence and tenderness seep into every rendering of landscape and people. Through her eyes we become acquainted with the passion for landscape and the human condition which powers her works.  Looking at her paintings, we get a feeling for the woman behind them.  She is revealed as empathetic and complex.  From her roots in the small town of Yanceyville in the North Carolina Piedmont to her excursions around the globe, Maud Gatewood has explored subjects and techniques as a painter, a teacher, and a traveler.  She has not only an observant eye but the extraordinary talent required to select and interpret the interaction between nature’s forces and mankind.

The subject of this film is a woman both uniquely gifted and ordinary, a woman who has faced the white canvas of her paintings and her life with vision and fortitude.

It’s when you see a big mass of Maud’s work and really start reflecting on it that you do feel it’s very centered in this sense of the land and of what’s enduring behind the whole human enterprise.

--Reynolds Price (North Carolina poet and novelist)