The Checotah Art Guild will host their 4th Annual Holiday Art & Craft Holiday Show & Sale on Saturday, Nov. 23 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m at the Heartland Heritage Museum & Gallery located at 116 N. Broadway, Checotah. The seasonal show will feature an array of artistry with paintings, photography and sculptures, creating by local and regional artists like Agnes Morris and Don Kelly.
There will be live music by the Blues queen herself, Selby Minner, and the talented Don Kelly.
There will be cash prizes, ribbons awarded and even pictures with Santa for only $5.
Also patrons who purchase anything during the show will have a chance to win a meat gift basket from McCutchen’s Cattle Call Ranch-Oklahoma Raised Beef Cattle.
Author Herb Mc-Cutchen himself will autograph his books from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. and giving them away for free. Limit one set per person.
McCutchen started writing in 2009 when his dad was sick and he went back home to help care for him.
“In 2009 my dad got sick and I had to stay with him and my mother to take care of him for a while, but I wasn’t used to sitting still so long and I was bored to death,” McCutchen said. “My dad liked to read westerns so every week or so I would go to the library to get him some westerns to read. Like I said though, I was bored just sitting around so I started reading some of the westerns I brought to him and I thought to myself, ‘Well, I could write a better book than this.’ So I got me some bic pens and some tablets and sat down and wrote my first book, which was a western called The Indian Nations,” set in the old mapped territory right here.”
The Indian Nations is set in Post-Civil War Texas, where a young, 14-year-old Oliver Newton Clark (Newt) is forced from his home by an abusive stepfather. As he makes his way east to west across Texas he encounters and joins a cattle trail drive going through the Indian Nations to the railroad in Kansas. Just a teenage boy, Newt has to make a living in an environment where privation, hardship and poverty are the norm. This tale depicts the authentic way of life in the Indian Nations and of the hardships the people themselves endured.
“My next book I wrote was Okie. It’s a Dust Bowl saga about a family who started out in Oklahoma when the Dust Bowl hit and they ended up in California. I was honored when Jim Davis told me it was the best book he had ever read. So you may be surprised, you may be appalled, but you will not be disappointed with this book.”
Okie is about a sharecropper family forced from the parched hills of eastern Oklahoma by drought and depression and relocated in California as migrant, farm workers laboring endlessly in cotton fields around Bakersfield. An interesting character, TJ McClain turns out to be.
“My third book was Arlie McSpadden, Private Eye and its set in Tulsa and there’s never a dull moment.”
Arlie McSpadden, a happy-go-lucky veteran of 14 years has been dismissed from the Tulsa Police Force for indiscretions and he is forced to transition to a private investigator. Then he is commissioned to find a missing 19-year-old girl and her baby. You will feel like you are a detective as McSpadden unravels and weaves through obstacles that try to keep him from finding the girl and dismantling of slave ring.
“Finally my last published book is Eres, the Mortal, and it’s a primitive caveman story – most can relate to.”
For more information about the holiday show, call 405-570-3569.
