Chrissie’s Blog
Miles Away from Nowhere: Welcome to Langston, Virginia
Welcome to Langston, Virginia, a small town in deep southwestern Virginia, somewhere near the West Virginia state border. Don’t bother looking for it on a map in the real world, though; you won’t find it there. Langston is a fictitious town, as are its neighboring...
Hindman 2026
Once again this year, I made it back to Hindman, along the banks of Troublesome Creek, for the 49th Annual Appalachian Writers Workshop. I started Hindman in 2009, went through 2013, took a seven-year hiatus, started back in 2020 when it was online because of covid,...
From Prompt to Pitch
Jim Minick can write any genre. I mean anything. Poetry. Fiction. Nonfiction. Memoir. And he writes every bit of it well. I was excited, then, to see him leading a pre-workshop workshop at Hindman this year called, “From Prompt to Pitch.” The concept was to take a...
Highland Summer Conference 2026
This year’s Highland Summer Conference in Radford, Virginia, was another stunning adventure! Held July 20-24, and organized by April Asbury, it met all my expectations of the prior years and went further. This year’s workshop leader was poet Marianne Worthington, with...
Three Years and Counting
It’s the third anniversary of my gastric bypass surgery. I’ll be honest: I’d love to celebrate it with a hot dog and a milkshake. I splurge sometimes and have milkshakes, but my lack of a stomach can no longer process hot dogs so well. If I strip off the casing and...
Poetry Half-Marathon
I clocked in at 9:03 p.m. on Saturday night for the Poetry Half-Marathon, June 13, after a day that could only be described as chaotic. My hairdresser was out of town unexpectedly, and her first suggestion for getting my hair fixed the day before hadn’t panned out at...