Notebook: (1) Days of Arts and Letters, Two Southern Festivals
Keeping it going: The Berry Center’s Kentucky Arts and Letters Day and the Nashville’s Southern Festival of Books
Arriving on Saturday at The Locker in New Castle, Kentucky, for Kentucky Arts and Letters Day, sponsored by The Berry Center, whose bookstore is Book Post’s Autumn 2025 partner bookseller
Our Book Post Notebook this month is a little late, because we wanted to scoop in Kentucky Arts and Letters Day last weekend. This week’s book review will appear a little later in the week.
On Saturday, at Kentucky Arts and Letters Day in New Castle, Kentucky, Robert Gipe, who wrote for Book Post about Chris Hamby’s book about fighting black lung disease among coal workers, read a short story called “World of Waters.” In the story an older man, rattled by heavy rains in the night, remembers visiting North Carolina after Hurricane Helene and hearing accounts of young fishing guides who had risked their lives to rescue people in terrifying conditions. “They named a bunch more people in their thirties and forties from that community who’d either come back from off or rose up to jump in and help and that one boy said he’d never been prouder in his life to be from a place than he had been after the hurricane,” he writes. Later, a man who had been a teacher asked the guides, “do you think in a generation, that the young people here will have the skills to do what you have done here?” and the boys said, “yeah, I think they’ll be enough of us. First one said, I want to live here more than I ever have in my life. But I don’t know that I could tell people it’s safe here.”
The story appeared in the literary magazine Untelling, of the Hindman Settlement School. The Hindman Settlement School was founded in 1902 on the banks of Troublesome Creek in southeastern Kentucky by social reforming women to provide educational opportunities to “children of the mountains” and until the arrival of public schools in the 1920s and 30s (which the Settlement movement supported) was their main source of education. From the start it was dedicated to preserving traditional culture along with academic study, including sewing, cooking, weaving, farming, furniture-making, forestry, and regional music and folklore. After public education became widespread, the school adapted to providing tutoring and adult education, community gardening, and local arts and culture. The school was at the center of the disastrous Kentucky floods of 2022, and its staff and volunteers created a base of rescue operations. After Robert Gipe’s story, Untelling offered a sampling from the school’s archive, which volunteers are laboring to restore from flood damage. “The archive is not just a collection of paper and photographs,” the caption says. “It is the soul of the school, and the voice of Appalachia.” The Hindman Settlement School is currently struggling to raise $250,000 in AmeriCorps funding for reading and math intervention for children, one third of their annual budget, that was cancelled by the Department of Government Efficiency in April.
This year’s Kentucky Arts and Letters Day was dedicated to the memory of novelist Gurney Norman, a friend and mentor to nearly every writer there, who died last month at eighty-eight. Gurney Norman overlapped with many strains of American writing. He was at Stanford on a Stegner Fellowship with Malcolm Cowley and Frank O’Connor; like the Gary Snyder character in Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums he was a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains; his first novel was serialized in the Whole Earth Catalog. He returned to his native Kentucky in the sixties and became senior-writer-in-residence at the Hindman Settlement School’s annual Appalachian Writer’s Workshop, which had nurtured nearly every writer on the stage at Kentucky Arts and Letters Day.
Read more about our Autumn Bookselling 2025 partner, The Berry Center Agrarian Culture Center and Bookstore
Earlier this month I went to Nashville’s Southern Festival of Books, which was also rescued, in its way, by a hardy band of locals. When the Festival’s National Endowment for the Humanities grant was cancelled in April, Nashville novelist and bookseller Ann Patchett thought: “It’s like you’re sitting in a bar, and there are all of these fights going on all around you. You look over, and you think, ‘Not my fight.’ And you look down the bar, and you think, ‘Not my fight either.’ And then someone comes into the bar, and this horrible fight ensues, and you think, ‘Oh, God, that’s my fight.’” She put out a request to her bookstore’s followers to pitch in $20 each to help save the festival, and that got the ball rolling. Vanderbilt University eventually stepped in to host it.
I attended the festival with the owners and staff of the nonprofit Plenty bookshop in Cookeville, Tennessee. Lisa and Dave Uhrik founded Plenty after buying Franklin Fixtures, a small company that makes custom shelving for bookstores, and moving it to Lisa’s hometown of Cookeville. Their goal was to help create a sustainable small business to provide good manufacturing jobs and skills-building in a depressed place, while also advancing literacy through independent bookselling. By opening the bookstore Lisa wanted to extend the message about the social value of local economies, and to illustrate how bookselling and main street retail can bring communities together under the banner of reading. She thinks of shelving and furnishing like she thinks of in-store book groups and author appearances and the store’s “Wine and Words” adult book fair: ways to bring people in off the street and gather them as a group around reading. With a local a middle school teacher she provided books for a county-wide effort to grapple with the implications of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. The enthusiastic young women who staff Plenty and volunteer for Lisa’s events found many kindred spirits among the thronging visitors to Plenty’s booth at Southern Festival of Books. One young woman was overheard saying, as she gazed at a postcard of Plenty’s welcoming front windows, “I’m from a small town, a place of low literacy, we didn’t have anything like this …”
Read about Book Post’s past southern bookselling partners Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, and Page and Palette in Fairhope, Alabama
Booths representing southern literary life at the Festival featured, by my rough count, nine independent bookstores, seven small publishers, four university presses, three newspaper/magazines, two libraries, and eight literary organizations, including two that give away books to underserved readers (as Plenty also does). There were twenty self-published authors and ten author-service providers as well; many visitors to Plenty’s booth came to the festival as both readers and writers. Out of a hundred-plus panels on adult books over two days, twenty-one featured books from southern university presses and thirteen from southern small presses; twenty-five featured Nashville authors and sixty-two featured authors from elsewhere in the South. Six authors presented books on the local product, country music. Seventeen were dedicated to Black experience and history, five were on southern poetry, five on southern cooking, one on a Memphis Chocolate factory, one by the host of the ESPN show TrueSouth, one on the posthumous memoir of an Atlanta drag queen, cowritten with the Atlanta journalist who had covered her during her life. There was a follow-up to a May Deep South Convening on “the state of literary life in the South,” noting that “the Deep South has historically lagged other regions in terms of literary infrastructure, including access to publishing houses, agents, journals, and residency programs” and considering “what are the strengths and needs of the community, and how can authors, publications and funders be better connected.” There were also writers from elsewhere in the country with a national profile, like Tracy K. Smith and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as locals like Lorrie Moore, Adam Moss, and Major Jackson, and Virginian chronicler of southern ills, Beth Macy. The former poet laureate of Kentucky, Silas House, spoke with local notable Ashley Judd about his new book, which includes his inaugural poem for Kentucky governor Andy Beshear.
One feature I noticed was how much university presses seemed to be representing regional and literary work, alongside their traditional scholarly books, that might once have had a major national publisher. The University of Georgia Press presented a biographer of Chet Atkins; Mercer University Press brought two poets, a novelist, a pair of memoirists, and a book of Jimmy Carter’s Sunday school lessons; the University of Tennessee Press presented a project on the historic photobooks of Farm Service Administration photographers Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, and partnered with a panel on contemporary photobooks with seven Nashville photographers; they also brought a full-color study of the nineteenth-century sampler from the executive director of the Tennessee Historical Society and cofounder of the “Tennessee Sampler Survey,” an example of “female education and the domestic arts.” All the university press booths held abundant regional fiction and poetry and other literary work.
Although university presses like everyone else struggle with formidable headwinds in bookselling, they at least have the ballast of a durable institution, and they band together and help each other. The oldest university press in the South, the University of North Carolina Press, sponsors a distribution system serving a consortium university presses; the cost of distribution is one of the major challenges of publishing outside the conglomerates. They benefit from institutional connections to local bookstores, museums, and cultural institutions. Regional authors bolster them by participating in promoting their books and finding audiences. Marc Jolley of Mercer University Press told me that many of his readers walk in off the street to buy their books. He has noticed that the press’s growing ability to find compelling work for a general audience being ignored by the blockbuster-focused major houses—well established authors more and more often seek them out—has corresponded with a decline in sales of academic books to libraries and scholars. He saw a place for the university press to explore what he called “creative intelligence.” (His own scholarly work is in philosophy, ethics, religion, and literature.) He says public-facing festivals like the Southern Festival of Books have become more fruitful for them than academic conferences. Katie Hannah of the University of Tennessee Press pointed out to me that as a land-grant institution, they have a charge to engage with the public and continuing education. Vanderbilt’s own well-represented university press identifies itself as publishing, in addition to scholarly work, “books of substance and significance that are of interest to the general public, including regional books,” to support “Vanderbilt’s service and outreach to the larger local and national community.”
Remembering that Vanderbilt had, in part to “bring the university more visibly into the local literary community,” stepped up when federal funding was withdrawn for the Southern Festival of Books, I reflected on whether universities may be being called to provide some of the civic and intellectual infrastructure that the federal government has helped to maintain since the New Deal, even as their own resources are existentially threatened. The Monday after the Southern Festival of Books, its rescuer Vanderbilt, at the last possible moment, gave the most equivocal answer to the Trump administration’s proposed “compact” with nine universities, though they did not agree to it. Joseph R Millichap, author of the University of Tennessee press book on Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, pointed out that political opponents of the New Deal resisted the Farm Security Administration’s photography project for stirring up the nation’s compassion for starving farmers, and Dorothea Lange’s photographs of Japanese internment were impounded for being insufficiently upbeat. Maybe developing more durable local cultural supports for art and culture is a good idea in the long run.
At the Southern Festival of Books, and Kentucky Arts and Letters Day, one can see local people, both authors and their audience, wrestling with hard questions where they live, and books and culture are the means for doing it. At Kentucky Arts and Letters Day Jamaican-born Kentucky poet Shauna Morgan read work invoking the experience of enslaved people, both in her native Jamaica and right there in Henry County; Frank X. Walker, Kentucky’s first Black poet laureate and coiner of the term “Affrilachian,” read poems about how the traditional local crop, tobacco, kills people; Mandi Fugate Sheffel’s memoir described taking joy as a child in swimming in ponds left behind by mountain-top removal mining; Ashley Judd’s interlocutor Silas House read a long poem describing the nearly fatal assault on Kevin Pennington by bigots in Harlan County, Kentucky, the first crime to be charged under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Gray Zeitz, whose lovely Larkspur Press editions were being sold by the door, read a poem from his new book that recalled Wendell Berry’s writings about how sustainable systems assimilate their outputs: in the poem recent elections disabuse the speaker of his belief that people who make bad political decisions “don’t know where their waste goes”: “But these folks were / raised on septic systems. / Many had laid their own lines.” The Kentuckian wife of the traveller in Robert Gipe’s story says of him: “He aint geared to futility and chaos the way we are, he’s from Tennessee.” As the editor Melissa Helton writes her opening to Untelling: “we can write a beautiful poem about snapping beans on mamaw’s porch, because that is one truth of Appalachia. And also, we must show other truths as well. There is joy and suffering. There is prosperity and poverty. There is building and tearing down. There is acceptance and rejection. There is health and sickness. There is growth and rotting.” Attending to the local brings out resistance to cliché and stereotype. As Ann Patchett says in her video appealing for funds for the humanities in Tennessee amidst so many other needs: “Humanities represents our culture: our past, who we were, who we are right now, and also our future.”
Read Part Two of this post here
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. Read her other Notebooks for Book Post here.
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Another Southern institution that supports all the arts, including literary arts, is Hambidge Creative Residency Center in north Georgia. I was surprised not to see it mentioned here.