NOTE: THIS SESSION IS FREE FOR FWR ANNUAL MEMBERS, $25 for Non-Members

In our 2026 First Quarter Office Hours with Heather and Maggie, we’ll be joined by novelist, playwright and screenwriter Catherine Butterfield to discuss the current literary scams running rampant - con artists posing as everything from book club leaders to film producers to agents in an attempt to separate writers from their money. Don’t miss this discussion and Q & A and be sure to bring your burning questions and tales of your own experiences - we’d love to hear them!

Catherine Butterfield is a novelist, playwright, director and actress born in Manhattan and raised primarily in Minnesota and Massachusetts. Her plays have been produced Off Broadway, regionally and abroad. Catherine has also worked extensively in television and film. Her YouTube channel features over sixty short films, two of which recently won Telly awards. Her first novel The Serpent and the Rose is a historical novel about Marguerite de Valois and her lifelong battle with her mother, the infamous Catherine de Medici. Her new novel, Manhattan Triptych, was published in October 2026. She holds a BFA from Southern Methodist University and, with her husband, Ron West, divides her time between California and Ireland. 

Maggie Marshall moved to Asheville from Los Angeles in 2006. Her first career was as a professional actress, which she spent performing on regional stages throughout the U.S., as well as Broadway, Los Angeles, and Dublin, Ireland. She then shifted into screenwriting, eventually landing in television and writing for numerous cable and syndicated one-hour drama series. She is the recipient of the Carl Sautter Memorial Screenwriting Award and a Scriptapalooza Award, both for One-Hour Drama. She has been a fiction contributor at the Tin House Writer's Workshop, a fellow at the Hambidge Creative Residency Program, a Writer-in-Residence at the Weymouth Center for the Arts, and a proud member of the Flatiron Writers group. She recently completed work on a novel which is currently being shopped to publishers, and has had fiction and nonfiction pieces published in The Great Smokies Review. 

Heather Newton’s novel The Puppeteer's Daughters (Turner Publishing 2022) won the NC Indie Author Project book award for adult fiction, was a finalist for the Forword INDIES Book of the Year and has been optioned for television. Her short story collection McMullen Circle (Regal House 2022), was a finalist for both the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award and the W.S. Porter prize. Her novel Under The Mercy Trees (HarperCollins 2011) won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, was chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads Selection and by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance as an Okra Pick (“great southern fiction fresh off the vine”). She teaches creative writing for UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program and Charlotte Lit as well as the Flatiron Writers Room.