The 18th annual Mountain Heritage Lit Festival took place at Lincoln Memorial University Friday, June 21-Saturday, June 22. Numerous sessions were offered by a talented staff of writers this year, covering general fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as horror/crime writing, screenwriting, and more.
I took two classes with Larry Thacker (The Stuff of Poetry: A Wealth of Matter and Larry’s Block Buster Grab Bag of Eternal Randomness), and two classes with Minda Honey (Solving the Formula at the Heart of Most Essays and Nonfiction: How to Root Your Reader in Time, Place, and Your Emotional Landscape). I also took How to Write Crime Fiction with Gabino Iglesias and Writing From Life with Sarah Strickley. There was also a helpful Publishing Panel on Saturday afternoon open to everyone.
After dinner, Robert Gipe delivered a rousing keynote speech on the importance of building community and sanctuary for writers in Appalachia. One of my big takeaways from his speech was about the way people pronounce Appalachia. I’ve always been hung up on saying it as “Apple-atcha.” Robert suggested maybe we ought to judge “less by how [people] say it, and more by how they see it.” Saying it correctly and treating it badly is surely worse than pronouncing it differently but showing it the respect its people and culture are due.
I placed in two contests at the Mountain Heritage Lit Festival. My short story, “Genevieve,” which is in my current short story collection project, received first place in the James Still Prize for Fiction Short Story, and my YA piece, “Making the Grades,” placed second in the Jesse Stuart Prize for Young Adult Fiction. I was beyond thrilled with these results, especially “Genevieve,” which had taken first place in the Wytheville Chautauqua Festival the same weekend, and which was the short story I will be workshopping in Monic Ductan’s Short Story class at Hindman’s Appalachian Writers Workshop in just a few weeks. “Genevieve” makes me hopeful for my short story collection’s future.
I’m already looking forward to next year’s festival, and the community-building that will hopefully come out of these events.
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