Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
Session 7.12 Literature
Session Abstract or Summary
This panel of women writers will read from their original prose and will discuss the choir of voices--personal, historical, literary, cultural--that shaped their work. Their voices are made of hymns and recipes, of silences, of lines from Adrienne Rich read aloud again and again. Their narrations contain varied vocal pitches and multiple registers, a range of choices regarding dialogue, dialects, language, and style. The authors will engage each other and the audience in a conversation about how each of them negotiates expectations about what mountain writers are "supposed to sound like," resisting and wrestling as they have come to their own voices.
Presentation #1 Title
Voice Lessons
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
This panel of women writers will read from their original prose and will discuss the choir of voices--personal, historical, literary, cultural--that shaped their work. Their voices are made of hymns and recipes, of silences, of lines from Adrienne Rich read aloud again and again. Their narrations contain varied vocal pitches and multiple registers, a range of choices regarding dialogue, dialects, language, and style. The authors will engage each other and the audience in a conversation about how each of them negotiates expectations about what mountain writers are "supposed to sound like," resisting and wrestling as they have come to their own voices.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Amanda Jo Runyon is a mother, writer, and instructor in Pike County, Kentucky. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in journals such as The Louisville Review, Still: The Journal,Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, and Kudzu as well as Seeking Its Own Level, volume 4 of the Motif Anthology. She is co-editor of the literary journal The Pikeville Review.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
DARNELL ARNOULT was born and raised in Henry County, Virginia. She lived for twenty years in Chapel Hill and Durham, North Carolina, where she received a BA in American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA in English and Creative Writing from North Carolina State University and worked at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She is also the author of What Travels With Us: Poems, published by Louisiana State University Press and winner of the Appalachian Studies Association's Weatherford Award. Her fiction and poetry have been published in a variety of journals, and she has taught creative writing to adults for over fifteen years. - See more at: http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Darnell-Arnoult/33987168#sthash.KpioWslq.dpuf
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Karen Salyer McElmurray’s Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, was an AWP Award Winner for Creative Nonfiction. Her novels are The Motel of the Stars, Editor’s Pick by Oxford American, and Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. Other stories and essays have appeared in Iron Horse, Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Riverteeth, and in the anthologies An Angle of Vision; To Tell the Truth; Fearless Confessions; Listen Here; Dirt; Family Trouble; and Red Holler. Her writing has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Most recently, her essay, “Strange Tongues,” was the recipient of the Annie Dillard Award from The Bellingham Review. In Spring 2014, she will be the Lewis Rubin Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
A West Virginia native, Jessie van Eerden holds a BA in English from West Virginia University and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in The Oxford American, River Teeth, Image, Bellingham Review, Rock & Sling, and other publications. Her essays have been selected for inclusion in Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers, Seventh Edition (Longman, 2010); Best American Spiritual Writing (Houghton Mifflin, 2006); and Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical (Cascade Books of Wipf and Stock, 2009). She was selected as the 2007-2008 Milton Fellow with Image and Seattle Pacific University for work on her first novel, Glorybound(WordFarm, 2012).Jessie has taught for over ten years in college classrooms and in adult literacy programs. She lives in West Virginia where she directs the low-residency MFA writing program of West Virginia Wesleyan College.
Voice Lessons
This panel of women writers will read from their original prose and will discuss the choir of voices--personal, historical, literary, cultural--that shaped their work. Their voices are made of hymns and recipes, of silences, of lines from Adrienne Rich read aloud again and again. Their narrations contain varied vocal pitches and multiple registers, a range of choices regarding dialogue, dialects, language, and style. The authors will engage each other and the audience in a conversation about how each of them negotiates expectations about what mountain writers are "supposed to sound like," resisting and wrestling as they have come to their own voices.
