Notebook: (2) Days of Arts and Letters, Two Southern Festivals

Fruits of literature-in-place

Hanging with Lisa Uhrik and friends in the Plenty Bookshop booth at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville

Read Part One of this post here!

Education and culture, for many of the writers I heard from during my days at Kentucky Arts and Letters Day and the Southern Festival of Books, opened the door to another way to be. Current Kentucky poet laureate Kathleen Driskell told the audience at Kentucky Arts and Letters Day that it took her ten years to get a BA because no one in her family could imagine that a poet was something one could become. The poet Wesley Houp said of his thrill at receiving the James Baker Hall award for his 2025 book Strung Out Along The Endless Branch that it was encountering James Baker Hall’s own work that taught him, a tobacco farmer, that it was possible to find art in tobacco farming. (James Baker Hall shared a Stegner fellowship with Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey.) Meredith McCarroll in Untelling writes of an older brother who had gone to Appalachian State University, “his kindness had found room to stretch out. His curiosity was developed. I never asked him about it, but it seemed to me that college had done for him what it was meant to do.”