April 2025
April 1st through 25th
Poetry Contest
Each week in April, beginning April 1st, Jean will post a prompt for you to write or find a poem as we celebrate National Poetry Month!
Those who complete all 4 prompts will be entered into a drawing to read their poems at the Open Mic on April 26th, and have their poem featured in May’s newsletter!
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To Participate:
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Sign up at this link
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Make sure you are following us on Instagram or Facebook. If your account is private, accept our follow request (you can remove us after if you want to!)
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Check for the prompt on Sundays (the first week will be on Tuesday)
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Write or find a poem that responds to the prompt, take a picture of the poem, and post it to Instagram or Facebook by 5pm Friday of the same week.
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In your post, be sure to tag the Narrow Gauge Book Cooperative on Facebook, or @narrowgaugebooks on Instagram. Include the hashtag #NGBCpoetrycontest
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April All month long
Featured Artist:
Evelyn Sprouse-Rowe
Evelyn Sprouse-Rowe is the April Artist of the Month at the Narrow Gauge Book Cooperative!
Join us for a come-and-go reception on April 4th from 4pm to 6pm to chat with Evelyn and see her art.
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Internal and external energies influence and give rise to her art. The abstract qualities of her art come from intuition and a personal interpretation of beauty.
In many of her acrylic paintings, she exploits color, shape, form, and the subject matter. That, she feels, makes a statement about expression, freedom, and joy in art making, while still staying aware of concrete realities in design and structural elements.
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Part of that statement is about beauty. Finding beauty in many things, expressed in various ways, yet not neglecting the importance of the structure and design elements that she feels should be present in every successful art piece.
She hopes to show the importance of structure in liberated artistic forms, and that both are considerations and foundational to the departure point from which an artist creates. The result: different styles of beautiful art with personal expression.
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The Narrow Gauge hopes you will join them for the artist reception on April 4th, and that you will enjoy Evelyn’s art all throughout April.
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April 5th 6pm
An Evening with Margaret Loewen, MD
Margaret Loewen, MD, will be at the Narrow Gauge Book Cooperative on Saturday, April 5th at 6pm for a reading, Q&A, and signing for her book The Picture of Addiction: It Can Happen to Anyone.
Margaret J. Loewen MD has been working at Hope in the Valley, 1317 17th Street, Alamosa, Colorado since December of 2024. She is one of the medical providers caring for people with addictions at this residential facility. The model of care utilized is based on outcomes-based research, reflecting the local community’s commitment to its population.
Once the director of medical services for Maple City Health Care Center in Goshen, Indiana, Loewen retired from that position at the end of May, 2024. Prior to her position in Indiana, she was the medical director of the Emergency Department for Prowers Medical Center in Lamar, Colorado. Currently, she and her family have started a company called So Long Overdue LLC (solongoverdue.com) to inform the public regarding the disease of opioid use disorder.
About the Book: In this book, Loewen writes as a physician and a mother to share her experience learning about opioids in a rural community as she began her medical practice. This class of medications, highly desired for pain, resulted in addiction for many. Over-prescribing, fueled an opioid epidemic. Once prescriptions were given less liberally, limiting legal opioid availability in her town, heroin arrived to fill the gap. The market that legal opioids created led to many more people developing opioid use disorder with illegal heroin.
Later, Loewen’s own son made a single bad decision and was exposed to heroin. As a result of her experiences doing everything a mother can to keep her son alive, she was shocked by the stigma and lack of effective and affordable care for people with this disease.
Through helping her son, she discovered that the treatment with the best track record in helping people achieve recovery is a medication called buprenorphine. When emergency departments provide the first dose when a person with opioid use disorder is in withdrawal, then refer to out-patient clinics plus community programs to provide jobs and housing, people with this disease can recover. She initiated inductions with buprenorphine in her ER and demonstrates how easily this can be done in every hospital.
Loewen and her son worked on writing this book together, as they both believe it is an important topic and that education about substance use disorder and effective treatments will have a major impact on recovery rates and will reduce the suffering caused by substance use disorders.
The Narrow Gauge Book Cooperative, and Dr. Loewen, look forward to seeing you at the reading!
April 26th 6pm
Poetry Night: Reading and Open MIc
Celebrate poetry month with us with readings from local poets followed by an open mic night!
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Details to come!