Table Rock 2026 Registration opens Sunday, March 1
Most photos by Donna Campbell
Dear friends—If you are receiving this publication, you probably already know about Table Rock Writers Workshop. We’ve been around since 2010 and before that, as the Duke University Writers Workshop for some 20 years plus. We have now been in the Blue Ridge Mountains at Wildacres Retreat for many seasons, and the weather there is generally favorable, unlike the brutal end of August in the flatlands. Because of our location near Asheville, we are able to draw from west, east, north and south. Last year, we had representatives from more than 20 states, including Maine and Hawaii. Ours is a great network to join and share, especially at publication time.
But at Table Rock, we don’t focus on publication. We focus on craft—on polishing your work-in-progress and on generating new work to carry home and polish. Our approach is to give you some juice to take with you down the mountain—new ideas, new concepts, new appreciation for the talents of your peers and yourself. We are open to writers at all levels, because every new piece of writing means you are a beginner, again!
Our website tells the tale for 2026: tablerockwriters.com. We begin on Monday, August 31, this year at 4 pm, with a rollicking orientation session. Then dinner. Then you meet your classmates and instructor for the first session, which is an hour or so the first evening. We should also note that a group of songwriters who go by the group name SoLaTiDo will be in residence with guest artist and cellist Shana Tucker. These folks remind us that music and words go together well. They will share their writing with us, too.
To register for 2026, you need to pick one of our eight faculty members (shown below.) Their classes are detailed on our website. One of these seasoned veterans will serve as your primary instructor for a 3-hour class each day, Tuesday to Thursday. (We finish with a shorter class on Friday, and you can get on the road home before noon.) In the afternoons and evenings we have chances for you to read a short excerpt from your own work in progress, and we have faculty talks and readings throughout the week. The fee includes room and all meals. Single rooms are discouraged. You’ll learn more with a roommate!
This year we also have North Carolina-born Robert Gipe as our guest-writer-in-residence, which means he gets to write all day while the rest of us do the workshop. Robert has promised to give us a reading from one of his incisively funny books, which include Trampoline, Weedeater, and Pop. As usual, we will also have a group of writers among us who are associated with our partner, EastOver Press, and we’ll enjoy the company of our own writer/publisher in residence, Nora Gaskin Esthimer.
Scholarships are limited, but please check out the parameters and know that classes fill fast. If you apply for a scholarship, you should still register without down payment up front. Our committee will review your request quickly.
And now here’s a sample of the results of a writing exercise from one of our teachers, Darnell Arnoult.
One Word + Twenty Minutes: Darnell Arnoult’s Prompt-Writing Class
By Laurel Ferejohn
What can you do with one word and twenty (timed) minutes? So much!
I’ve been in several of Darnell Arnoult’s monthly “Mining the Motherlode” prompt-writing sessions on Zoom, and I’ve been astonished and impressed by the writing that pours out of participants from prompts of a single word. I asked Darnell what makes it so effective.
“One concrete word,” she explained, “noun or verb or some aspect of the concrete—say, pitch or faucet or purple (what’s purple?)—used in the first, second, or third sentence: that is a key that gets you past the gatekeeper, that self-defeating voice in your head. Then, if you write fast without stopping or correcting and keep going until the timer goes off—even if you think you’re done before then—you can outrun your internal editor.” Oh yeah, I know that voice. “You can outrun that nasty voice,” she said, “that wants to close the gate before you get past. It comes in with thoughts like That’s just bad writing, or No one is gonna like that!, or What kind of boring mess is this?! Once you’re past the gate, though, you discover a whole world spinning in the words, and you can follow the words wherever they choose to take you.” Aha—the motherlode.
“You discover a whole world spinning in the words.”
In class, each writer gets the opportunity to choose one of their pieces out of the three twenty-minute timed sessions and read it aloud. Following are three such pieces from a recent session, each with its inspiring prompt word in the title. They may now contain some corrections, but I can tell you, having been in class that day—they are the product of a single word and twenty minutes.
For details and to join Darnell’s “Mining the Motherlode” email list, contact Darnell at darndarn@gmail.com . Hope to see you in class!
Stretch
Katlin Brock
He was stretched for cash, but when wasn’t he? It’d always been this way to his memory, even in childhood he could recall his mama counting every quarter and dime to find money enough to go trading down on Boney Lick.
But them was different times. Poor thirty-five years ago was rich in comparison to now with all them drones and delivery cars with no men inside and the Wave taking people’s minds. He knew people would rather nickel and dime a crumb of the Wave to stick up their snout than buy food for their kid’s belly and he did take advantage of that from time to time.
Still, even he knew it was getting harder to find Wave out on the streets. What the government made to be free and legal narcotics had gone way sour after folks started to crash. He reckoned it was just how things was. You ride the Wave and eventually you crash.
No telling when it’ll happen either, that’s why he kept clean. He didn’t want to swim. Didn’t know how. Didn’t want to. He’d stay on dry land and watch the whole world drown. That’s how it felt sometimes, like he was the only one who wasn’t soaked down to the bone.
He thought about the $12 in his pocket. Not enough for a pack of gum these days. If he wanted to eat he’d have to find some half-emptied fool to buy the Wave he stashed in his left shoe but even sales were getting dangerous–never knew when some cotton headed so and so might pull a knife on you or worse.
No, he thought, he’d much rather go back to the poor that raised him. It was a rich, safe sort of poor. A warm poor. He would handle that just fine.
Late
Laurel Ferejohn
My clock radio clicks on with a Doors song. Instantly awake, I again send my mental scanner into my belly for signs of cramps. Nothing. I feel around—nothing. Today I’m officially a month late. “Girl we couldn’t get no higher”—oh shut up, Jim Morrison. I slap the off button.
I know I have to tell someone . . . just a factual status report. Mom wouldn’t be mad—but she would want me to have a plan.
Marlene? My belly gives a sweeter lurch. She wants me “to herself” and hates that I’ve even gone out with a boy. Guess this will be the end of that.
I’ll start with Mike. But his plan will be to solve it by getting married. He’ll be glad. He already told my big sister he was going to plan a way to get me to marry him. Cherie got married a year younger than I am now, and she wasn’t even in this situation. She was like an adult at 16. At 17, I’m like—I don’t know.
My Spanish teacher and my world history teacher want me to go to college. And my literature teacher. So they’ll be disappointed. I wish I could go back to thinking about that—figuring out how to talk to Mom about that even though I’ve got no plan.
I pull myself from the covers. Stand. Hope I’m just imagining the nausea.
Darnell Arnoult is a prize-winning author, former writer-in-residence at Lincoln Memorial University, and a Table Rock Writers Workshop teacher since its days as the Duke Writers Workshop. Today she offers a slate of classes and other services for writers as she continues her own writing. With a novel and three books of poetry out, her most recent is Incantations (Madville Publishing, 2024).
Laurel Ferejohn has been involved with Table Rock Writers Workshop for a long time—since the Duke Writers Workshop of the 1990s from which it emerged. Back then she was staff as the Duke Short Courses program director; but she always participated as a writing student as well, as she does still. Her forthcoming novel Crossings, is due out December 2026 from Silent Clamor Press.