Courage - a wonderful and inspiring word, yet often misunderstood. Elusive as the wind, it is a label given through legend and story, but is sometimes remembered only by those who witnessed its defining effect.
The Path to Courage is a portrayal of many facets of Courage as told through a collection of stories, articles, and poems from the Coffee Tree Writers Group of Huntsville, Alabama. Hopefully, the sum total of the anthology is a sobering and sometimes humorous reflection on the trials of the heroes in each of our lives, both seen and unseen, as they walk the long path to becoming their own embodiment of Courage.
In February of 2005, Kitty Lawson and Tom Crain opened a small coffee shop and bookstore on Bailey Cove Road in Huntsville, Alabama. It immediately became a community asset. The Coffee Tree Books and Brew offered a place where customers could chat over a brew or relax with the daily news. Evenings were dedicated to music, arts & crafts, and literature as musicians and artisans gathered to practice their arts and make new friends. High school students, moms with tots, retirees and police officers from the station down the block communed over great coffee, food and above all books.
Today, the little shop has yielded to progress and the passing of time, but its memory, and to some small extent, its goal, still lives in a writers' group that originated from Kitty and Tom's dream.
One of the evening musicians, a pick and grinner named James Frost, realized he was unlikely to 'make it' in the music field and switched to writing. With the help of a Huntsville Times newspaper ad and Kitty's word of mouth, The Coffee Tree Writers' Group was born. For a budding author, the Coffee Tree was both a horrible and wonderful place to meet. The horror was trying be heard over a banjo, the grating grind of the coffee machine, or the repeated chiming of the doorbell. However, the amazing ambience and the wonderful people offset many negatives.
When our beloved Coffee Tree closed, The Coffee Tree Writers' Group moved to a conference room in the Star Market, just down the street. That venue was short lived when Wal-Mart purchased the property and Star Market was no more. Joe Connaughton was able to secure a temporary meeting room for us at Trinity United Methodist Church on Airport Road. Other sites have been considered, but it appears temporary has become permanent, or at least what passes for permanent under the circumstances. During those moves, the question of changing the group name arose a number of times. After lengthy discussions, we realized that no one wanted to part from those early memories. Today we remain The Coffee Tree Writers Group. We still meet the 2nd Tuesday and 4th Thursday each month at 7:00 pm, and we welcome writers of every skill level.
This anthology, The Path to Courage, is the second such group project since our inception. The first, Petals and Thorns-Literary Works of the Coffee Tree Books and Brew Writers, was published in the Fall of 2009.
Our purpose is to improve our writing skills through discussion, information sharing, and critiquing of each other's work. It is a loosely organized and informal group with no elected officers or stringent rules. In the beginning, we were simply meeting as friends with one purpose--to assist each other in our endeavors. That changed when Steve Gierhart joined the group. After self-publishing his first novel, he realized he enjoyed the publishing aspects as much as the writing, and opened The Ardent Writer Press. It's an independent publishing company located in Huntsville, Alabama. Since then, The Ardent Writer Press has published both fiction and nonfiction works for members and non-members.
