Mode of Program Participation
Performances and Arts
Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
OF SHADOWS, HAINTS, AND FAIRIES: SURVIVING THE UNBRIDLED MIND PAGE BY PAGE
Session Abstract or Summary
Four Appalachian women read from their works and discuss the ghosts in their bones—the fear and creative potential of growing up with mothers who experienced some form of mental illness, be it schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive or bi-polar disorder. With mothers distanced by these illnesses, and more recently by Alzheimer’s, dementia, or death, these writers have not processed the world in an easy way. They write across genres and borders, discovering and rediscovering their stories and their mothers in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and plays rooted in illness, magic, fear, and fairy tales— work fueled by identities as daughters of the unearthly. Observers of the unbridled mind and caretakers from an early age, they have negotiated, and continue to negotiate, the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, between what is real and visionary, and confront their daughterhood and their mothers’ social exile though stories and stanzas artfully anchored in a rich and extreme landscape. Fearing inheritance and long-standing stigma of diseases of the mind, they are compelled to harness the urgent nature of a limitless imagination and consequently summon to the page shadows and ghosts—with or without intention.
Presentation #1 Title
OF SHADOWS, HAINTS, AND FAIRIES: SURVIVING THE UNBRIDLED MIND PAGE BY PAGE
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Four Appalachian women read from their works and discuss the ghosts in their bones—the fear and creative potential of growing up with mothers who experienced some form of mental illness, be it schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive or bi-polar disorder. With mothers distanced by these illnesses, and more recently by Alzheimer’s, dementia, or death, these writers have not processed the world in an easy way. They write across genres and borders, discovering and rediscovering their stories and their mothers in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and plays rooted in illness, magic, fear, and fairy tales— work fueled by identities as daughters of the unearthly. Observers of the unbridled mind and caretakers from an early age, they have negotiated, and continue to negotiate, the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, between what is real and visionary, and confront their daughterhood and their mothers’ social exile though stories and stanzas artfully anchored in a rich and extreme landscape. Fearing inheritance and long-standing stigma of diseases of the mind, they are compelled to harness the urgent nature of a limitless imagination and consequently summon to the page shadows and ghosts—with or without intention.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Originally from East Tennessee, Wendy Dinwiddie is a MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. She is assistant editor of the Black Warrior Review. Her work has most recently appeared in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, 2nd and Church, and Kudzu. She lives in Tuscaloosa and misses the mountains.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Darnell Arnoult, Writer-in-Residence at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, TN, is the author of the novel Sufficient Grace, and two poetry collections, What Travels With Us, winner of the Weatherford Award and SIBA Poetry Book of the Year, and her latest collection, Galaxie Wagon. She codirects the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival, Appalachian Young Writers Workshop, and Cumberland Gap Writers Studio, and is a founding editor of drafthorse: a literary journal of work and no work.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Karen Salyer McElmurray’s memoir, Surrendered Child, won an AWP award for Creative Nonfiction. Her novels are The Motel of the Stars, a Lit Life Book of the Year, and Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, a Chaffin Award Winner for Appalachian Writing. Stories and essays have recently appeared in The South Dakota Review and Riverteeth, while “Elixir,” was a 2016 Best American Notable Essay. She teaches at Gettysburg College and West Virginia Wesleyan’s Low Residency MFA and is Nonfiction Editor for Still: The Journal.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
Crystal Wilkinson is the author of Blackberries, Blackberries, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature, and Water Street, finalist for both UK's Orange Prize for Fiction and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Winner of the 2008 Denny Plattner Award in Poetry from Appalachian Heritage magazine and the Sallie Bingham Award from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, she serves as Appalachian Writer-in-Residence at Berea College and teaches in the Spalding low residency MFA in Creative Writing Program.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #5
Linda Parsons is a poet, playwright, and an editor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She served as poetry editor of Now & Then magazine for many years and is the author of four poetry collections, most recently This Shaky Earth. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Shenandoah, in Ted Kooser’s syndicated column American Life in Poetry, and in numerous anthologies
OF SHADOWS, HAINTS, AND FAIRIES: SURVIVING THE UNBRIDLED MIND PAGE BY PAGE
Four Appalachian women read from their works and discuss the ghosts in their bones—the fear and creative potential of growing up with mothers who experienced some form of mental illness, be it schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive or bi-polar disorder. With mothers distanced by these illnesses, and more recently by Alzheimer’s, dementia, or death, these writers have not processed the world in an easy way. They write across genres and borders, discovering and rediscovering their stories and their mothers in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and plays rooted in illness, magic, fear, and fairy tales— work fueled by identities as daughters of the unearthly. Observers of the unbridled mind and caretakers from an early age, they have negotiated, and continue to negotiate, the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, between what is real and visionary, and confront their daughterhood and their mothers’ social exile though stories and stanzas artfully anchored in a rich and extreme landscape. Fearing inheritance and long-standing stigma of diseases of the mind, they are compelled to harness the urgent nature of a limitless imagination and consequently summon to the page shadows and ghosts—with or without intention.
