Dear Table Rockers,
There is nothing trivial about all that is happening in this world right now. We hope you are well and strong and finding time to write. We wanted to close out 2023 by giving you a few items to ponder, most especially the extraordinary lineup of writers coming to Table Rock, August 26-30, 2024. The dates are confirmed.
Table Rock Journal is our quarterly effort to stay connected with the generous community that you all have become. You will find an essay here by Darnell Arnoult on what she’s been reading, a poem by Duncan Smith, some wisdom from Annie Dillard, and some opportunities to support your fellow writers/musicians. We welcome other news from any of you, especially about readings, publications, or challenges you are facing.
MORE FOR ‘24
First, the big announcement. The North Carolina novelist Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle of Cherokee, NC, and the novelist and short story writer Jill McCorkle of Hillsborough, NC, will come to Table Rock for the first time as faculty in 2024. Jill will teach a SHORT STORY MASTER CLASS and Annette will be offering a workshop she is calling FINDING THE LINE: REIN IN YOUR NOVEL FROM WORD ONE TO “THE END.” We are thrilled to have these two stellar friends share their gifts with us.
Meanwhile, Robin Hemley has been invited to serve as visiting professor for the semester at The University of Iceland this fall, which means he can’t join us at Table Rock, but we will invite him to teach FAMILY STORIES again in 2025.
John Bemis will be with us and plans to broaden his palette to teach SPECULATIVE FICTION, which, as he says, “captures a wide range of storytelling, including alternate history, science fiction, horror, magical realism, and fantasy.”
Darnell Arnoult is going to offer a class called THE POWER OF THE TINY NARRATIVE and will be addressing flash, sudden, and micro stories—250 words or less—whether fiction or nonfiction.
The ever-popular Abigail DeWitt will continue her generative workshop in FREEWRITING.
On the poetry front, Phillip Shabazz will be offering a MASTER CLASS IN POETRY for participants who will come to the mountain having completed some reading and writing assignments in advance. The group will explore various verse forms and hone their skills in giving and receiving constructive feedback.
Denton Loving returns this year to offer BEGINNING POETRY for writers wanting to explore poetry as a discipline or who are suffering from genre envy. More details to follow.
You can read about these classes on the Table Rock website after the first of the year. Registration opens February 1st. Please, no bribes or advanced solicitations for a spot in these fantastic workshops. Our maximum class size will remain at 12, though Shabazz will limit his group to 8 participants.
SHARING ROOMS
Wildacres Retreat could double their prices and still be a bargain compared to commercial conference centers, and for 2024 they have raised the single room rates significantly in an effort to encourage us to share rooms. The double rate has also gone up a bit to reflect the price of food, the upkeep of aging facilities, and to continue improving the services provided. Though we don’t usually talk about it, every year we also include a tip for the dining and housekeeping staff so that you all do not have to worry about that. We will continue to have some scholarships available to participants who need help. More details about how to apply for a scholarship are on the website.
NEWS OF OUR ROCKERS
Those of you who have shared poetry and memoir classes with Stephanie C. Smith are familiar with the extraordinary memoir she’s written, set in New Orleans and recounting her teen years. EVERYWHERE THE UNDROWNED is finally coming, the first release from Great Circle Books, a new imprint for literary nonfiction at UNC Press. Book launch for Everywhere the Undrowned will be Feb 13, 2024, at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. Stephanie has invited Phillip Shabazz and Mary Rocap to be part of the occasion and hopes to see you there, too. Registration is required at this link.
Richard Putnam is the heart of SoLaTiDo, the workshop that is designed for singer/songwriters. Richard is a master musician and audio producer. He has worked with us for more than 20 years. Richard goes in for a heart valve replacement procedure on January 12. Cards and letters and songs can be sent to cheer Richard on at 213 Country Club Rd. Shelby NC 28150 or via email: joedokes@icloud.com
A POEM
Duncan Smith is working on a new chapbook. Here’s a poem he shared at our last gathering.
Table Rock
The last time I saw Table Rock
it felt like a friend I had never left.
Strange how a place becomes a presence.
Sometimes when it is least expected
I find it has slipped back into
the world I call real.
It returns, emanates,
as fire, steps out of the mountain
as autumn blazes red, orange, yellow
around the hills.
Strange how Table Rock was where
I staggered into a mesmerizing muse
when I thought I had nothing to say.
Here’s to Table Rock! Whose muse’s
inspiration like water floods the bed
wherever I lay my head.
—Duncan Smith
From Darnell Arnoult: BABY STEPS
What am I reading at the moment? Everything I’m currently reading is part of a plan to rebuild stamina and imagination. While becoming the parent of a little boy again as an older woman (a wonderful occupation), during and after nursing my husband through a terminal illness, through the onset of widowhood, during and after slogging through a trying political melodrama, and during and in the wake of what surely was the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, my concentration for reading has been abysmal. YouTube, HULU, and Britbox, etc. have become my library.
While I love and take comfort in the distraction of YouTube, Britbox, AcornTV, as well as countless other streaming services, not to mention Masterpeice Theater and other PBS programming, I still miss reading and miss writing fiction. Poetry has continued to sustain me as a writer through these times of transition, and a book of new poems comes out in March (Incantations, from Madville Publishing). But fiction requires something different from the writer than poetry. Not more, just different. And when my creative well is empty, only reading can fill it. So, I’m putting myself on a weight lifting program, beginning with two-pound weights. I’ve started in a host of “small” ways, working up to a big challenge. Perhaps the better analogy is going from couch potato to marathon runner, beginning with baby steps.
Not long ago, thanks to YouTube, I watched “An Evening with Ray Bradbury 2001.”
If you’ve never listened to Ray Bradbury talk about writing, go to YouTube and watch every such video you can find. He was an amazing and prolific writer and a delightful and inspiring speaker. Thanks to Ray, I’m working on my reading muscle. His recipe for a would-be writer is simple but time consuming, so I’ve adapted it and will ease in.
He suggests before bed reading classics: one poem, one short story, and one essay, and then write a short story every week. It can be a bad story, but write a short story of some caliber every week. So far, I’m reading more contemporary works than classics, and I’m working my way from toddling to sprinting rather than all out running.
I read a poem a day from Dirt Songs, poems by Kari Gunter-Seymour. I love each and every poem and reread them several times. Here’s a stanza from “Because My Ancestors” (page 14).
I taught myself who I was
by sounding out my name,
heard the word for wanting
comingling my veins, a salty pulse,
letters disguised as life.
For fiction, I’ve read a micro story a day from Jerome Stern’s Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories, work by writers such as Amy Hempel, George Garett, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Vigil Suarez, and others. These are stunning stories in 250 words or less. It’s amazing how much you can learn about fiction by reading such short, well-crafted capsules. Kercheval’s story “Titanic” will break your heart.
For essays, I’m reading from one of Judith Kitchen’s anthologies of short short essays, in this case, In Short Takes on the Personal, coedited with Mary Paumier Jones. Here I’ve read brief essays by the likes of John McPhee, Patricia Hempl, Cynthia Ozick, Jamaica Kincaid, Mary Oliver, N. Scott Momaday, John Rosenthal, Rebecca McClanahan, Rick Bass, Yusef Komunyakka, and more. And I’m rereading and rereading Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly. What an amazing experiment exploring the short essay form and the relationship of one essay to another, building one another..
This rigorous reading plan has been hard to keep up with—even with it weighted toward flash—and sometimes I don’t make it through my daily list, but I try. And I return and return, as with Heating & Cooling, to make sure I didn’t miss anything when my mind strays. Because of the effort, it has been healing and amazingly nourishing. So many rich voices at their most intense.
On top of these three categories, I’ve also been reading short essays or chapters on craft, from sources such as Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonizio, The Making of a Story by Alice LaPlante, Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Fast Fiction by Roberta Allen.
Clearly my reading mind is still fragmented. I am like a gnat among words. Tiny pieces in several directions daily, but as fragmented as my mind is, it is moving along a path where the next book of fiction I read will be a collection of linked, full-length stories by Joseph Bathanti, The Act of Contrition & Other Stories, from Eastover Press. Joseph’s collection is a follow-up to one of my all-time favorite short story collections, The High Heart. I’m already wondering about what novel I choose after that. And perhaps soon I’ll pick up the last ingredient in Ray’s recipe, and write a story a week. Who knows what’s coming next. But that doesn’t mean I’m giving up Britbox.
“Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.
--Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Read the whole essay at this link.
ONE LAST NOTE: BE SURE TO READ
JILL McCORKLE’S SHORT STORY,
A SIMPLE QUESTION
in the latest issue of CUTLEAF JOURNAL!And join us on FACEBOOK
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