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, and then have made it every year since then except for 2023, when I had gastric bypass surgery. I have been accepted two years that I had to ultimately pass on weeks before the workshop began, once when Sarah’s father died and once for the abovementioned surgery. So, this marked my eleventh year at the workshop but over the course of seventeen years. It’s all pretty surreal when I break it down into numbers like that.
This year, I took creative nonfiction with Charles Dodd White. Charles teaches at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville. I’ve known him for several years. He has always impressed me as a no-nonsense, strait-laced, highbrow academic. We all know I’m none of the above, personally or in my writing, so I wasn’t sure how the week would play out. I knew I would learn, because he is very knowledgeable. I’ve had him at January Jumpstart once and really enjoyed him. That was actually the first time I felt like I came up with “real” fiction, and I still have that story somewhere. It was about a soldier coming home from World War II with a glass eye, but he wouldn’t talk about what happened to lose the eye; he wouldn’t talk about the war at all. And all the complications that situation created with his young wife and large family of siblings left back home. The character’s name was Joe. This was in January 2020, if memory serves me correctly. It was the last writing I did before covid, the last writing I did for about two years. So, all of that to say, I knew Charles was a great teacher; I just wasn’t sure how much I could be “Chrissie” in class.
The first day, he gave us one rule for nonfiction, which turned out to be two rules (I could already see I was going to like the class — faulty math led the way! “Don’t be boring.” And “Complicate wherever you can.” That day, we talked about epistolary nonfiction, and we even wrote a letter to someone, and in it, we were to “engage, confront, and digress.” I wrote my letter to Jon Bon Jovi. It opened, “Dear Jon — I always think it’s funny to start a letter that way because of the old stereotype ‘Dear John’ letters calling off a relationship. However, I suppose there’s nothing to worry about here, since we’ve never met. Although, I did, for a period in the mid-90s, have one of your Visa card numbers memorized after accessing it at work one day while I was bored…” It went on to be engaging, confrontational, and, as you can see, it digressed a lot. It was also, in my estimation, kinda humorous. But that’s the “Chrissie spin.” I love to make things funny if I can work it in. My friend and cohort in trouble, James Turner, audited the class all week, which was also a great deal of fun. That afternoon, James and I were part of the participant readings, too. I read an excerpt from one of the stories in my short story collection, and he read a flash piece about a young man and his sweetheart that wasn’t so sweet. It was a good day for readings. (But I thought all four days of readings went really well.)
Day two, we talked about the craft essay. I didn’t do as well at this one. Charles’ opinion before leaving us to our own devices, was that parentheticals are used for comical points in writing. I tend to use em dashes. Which Charles informed us have recently been associated with AI writing! Bastards! Em dashes have been my mode of operation forever! Who do AI’s evil geniuses think they are, ripping off my schtick?!? It made me dread my 3 p.m. one-on-one with him about my manuscript I submitted to get in even more. Because, let’s face it — I’m the Queen of Em Dashes! So, rather than try to defend my stance on em dashes, I tried to promote the semicolon, another grammatical favorite of mine. I got about three paragraphs, but I’m not sure it worked like it was meant to. If I ever get around to entering it into my laptop, I need to try to refine it.
For my manuscript to get into Hindman, I had used two segments of my Duran Duran manuscript, aka, “the Duran Duran memoir,” the parts about Paris and Nice. Charles didn’t strike me as a Duran Duran fan, although he had done a cool workshop at the Mountain Heritage Lit Festival about Songs as starting places for writing earlier in the summer. So I went in, prepared for the worst. He liked it! There were a few comments on the manuscript and a really helpful, thought-provoking full-page+ of comments on the pieces. After we discussed that, he asked me to tell him more about the travel memoir. That’s when I ripped it wide open, lol! For the past few months, ever since I finished the version of the manuscript I worked on with Tres Macdonald last November, I’ve realized that Denton has been right all along. My resistance has been futile and time-consuming. This book isn’t really about the trip to the UK and Europe. Some of that needs to be in there — parts of it definitely belong in there. But other parts (including my beloved Nice), probably need to be chopped. Dammit! There are so many other experiences with members of the fandom, with the music itself, that are stronger, richer, that truly belong in this book. And I told him that the travelogue was really just a part of it, that it’s really a memoir about being in the fandom. His eyes kinda lit up. He said, “Well that changes all of my comments!” But we talked about how those differences could play out in the book. He turned me onto a series called 33 1/3 (I think my exact words were, “Duuuude! Like a vinyl record!”), that examines various albums; he was pretty sure there was even a Duran Duran album in there. But he gave me some great ideas and didn’t think my ideas were stupid at all. He warned me to be prepared for lots of rejections by agents, because that’s the nature of the business. I told him I was used to rejection, that I shoot for at least 50 rejections a year and figured this would just be a whole new level of that. He smiled as if to say, “Yes, Grasshopper, you are correct!” But I was so glad I’d finally accepted and embraced the changes that need to be made in the memoir during the pre-workshop workshop with Jim Minick (“From Prompt to Pitch,” see separate blog post), so I could have that discussion with Charles on Tuesday afternoon.
Wednesday. Ah, “the Wednesday’ness of things,” as my beloved George Ella Lyon would say. One minute, you’re unpacking and getting ready to soak it all in, and the next, it’s Wednesday and you’re wondering where in the world the week got off to! I think Wednesday was my favorite day of class. We were talking about nature writing, which is NOT my jam at all. If you know me at all, you know one of my favorite lines is, “I’m a nature freak: put me in nature and watch me freak!” Well, Charles gave us an assignment: “Get out of class and wander outside on our own with a notebook. For twenty minutes, don’t think about writing. Simply immerse yourself in your physical surroundings, letting the outer world announce itself to you on its own terms while making mental notes…” Well, I don’t know jack about nature. I was going to be lost on this one. So, I cheated. Right off the bat, I cheated and started walking with my buddy James. My buddy James who is a farmer, who would surely know more about nature than I would. And I tricked him into telling me things about nature. He knew a few things. We had different opinions on what red/purple clover was called. He looked up another plant on something called Google Lens (which I have since downloaded onto my phone). And, in the end, I told him a plant was Queen Anne’s Lace. He wasn’t so sure about that, so he Google Lens’d it, and lo and behold, I got one right. So we went back into the class. My “nature writing” piece started out, “I’m not into nature. If left to my own devices, I’d go outside only to get in my SUV and drive…” Then I described being allergic to poison ivy, but still not being able to identify it, despite the whole “leaves of three, leave them be” thing. I told about how I duped James and hornswaggled him into helping me by telling him I didn’t know what kind of bird that was that flew in front of us because the only birds I knew were cardinals, blue jays, and woodpeckers. “A barn swallow,” he’d informed me. And I knew my plan was going to work. The class howled with laughter. Poor James’ face turned blood-red. Charles rolled his eyes and smiled. No one else’s nature piece was anything like mine. I think I may work on refining it and try to submit it somewhere. Where, though, is the question?
On Thursday, we wrote about food. Something near and dear to my heart. I wrote about fried chicken and was moving into the time I bought twenty pounds of chicken quarters when I moved out on my own, not really appreciating how much chicken that was and how long I’d be eating it, being on my own. Yep, another humor piece in the midst of something semi-serious.
On Friday, some of us read our introductions to our favorite books. I was proud of mine, even taking a morning off from the class I was auditing that week (creative nonfiction with Neema Avashia) to go down to the library and use their copy of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders to remind myself of why it was my favorite book. One person dominated a lot of the time we had, so not many of us got to read. But I did the assignment and I’m glad Charles gave it to us. It made me think about the book in a whole new light. It is already on my laptop. And it was straight from the heart. No humor. Straight-up my thoughts and dreams and wishes from when I first read it in eighth grade. Those feelings for it never went away. It truly changed my life. Both in content and because it kept me on the path to become a writer. If S.E. Hinton could make it happen at 16, I thought, I could make it happen, too; I was 13 at the time.
Neema, although teaching the same genre as Charles, took an entirely different approach. It was interesting to sit in on her class immediately after his class, in the same classroom. The one exercise that stood out to me in her class was after the essay: “All Or Nothing: Self-Portrait at 27” that appeared in Brevity. I didn’t catch the author’s name. I tried to create a self-portrait at 21.
On Thursday, she gave a lot of great advice. When writing about relationships, she said, “how you feel about it now will change/evolve over time.” She also said, “Good writing requires you to live, process… etc.” What does it mean to come to the page with grace? I loved that question, because I know I haven’t always done it. “We’re all a mess. How are we together in the brokenness?” We owe people respect and grace whether they open the book or not. No one besides you is going to protect you/the people in your book. People will try to push you towards harm-causing — it sells more copies.” That day, I wrote about Granddaddy Vance, as I find myself do a lot. Maybe because he is one of the most conflicted figures from my life I know of. Maybe someday, I will figure out how to write about him without making him seem sensationalized. Maybe… I’d definitely like to follow-up and refine this piece to finish it.
My week was spent with Michelle Russell Barger, who was kind enough to drive us to and from the place we stayed at in Hazard after I got lost on both Saturday and Sunday nights. We also hung out with James, who was in our Short Story Class with Monic Ductan in 2024, which was when I met both of them. And this year, I had the pleasure of getting to know two TMW folks better — KB Ballentine and Chris Wood. We also spent a lot of time with Andy Keaton, an orthodontist from Pikeville. All of them were in Jesse Graves’ Poetry Class. James was in Christopher Rowe’s Novel Class. Michelle was in Carter Sickle’s Novel Class. Together, they helped me have one of the best Hindman experiences yet.
Silas House delivered the Keynote Address this year, which was really quite good. I loved seeing the old pictures of familiar faces he used in his slide show. I cried when it got to Ron Houchins and Mike Mullins. Giants, gone well before their time. And the crowd reading The Brier Sermon was bigger than ever. We had 130 participants this year at the workshop. Biggest group ever. Over 180 applied. Next year’s competition will be fierce, I’m sure, with it being the 50th Anniversary. But the Brier Sermon still moves me beyond words. And this year, I got the final line. Which was even more special. Then we sang, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” which just makes me break down into sobbing every year we do that at the end of the Brier Sermon. That has become such a meaningful part of the ceremony to me.
Here’s hoping I get in next year. Those banks of Troublesome sure are a balm. Hindman is the home of my heart. Forever
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