Fragments From Floyd

It has begun. Two stackable bins wait empty on the made beds upstairs. Over the next week, they will fill, one book, one pair of shorts, one coffee cup at a time. And next Sunday, I'll chose a route to Hindman, Kentucky. All are equally indirect. You can barely get there from here, or from anywhere else. But you can get there, to the forks of Troublesome Creek.

The workshop in Kentucky will be the closest I've ever come to accepting a blind date for a week. I've been amazed with how little information has come of the details of getting there, being there or writing there. Come to think of it, I've not even received the bill for the week's room and board and the workshops. Hindman, especially compared to the carefully structured program at the J C Campbell Folk Center, seems shockingly unstructured. This isn't altogether a bad thing, but it does leave a featureless expanse on my calendar. All I know is I will be in a very remote place, and by some accounts, it is a very beautiful place. And it is inhabited by the ghosts of some of the best and most beloved of the Appalachian literary giants--Jim Wayne Miller, James Still and others. These patrons of Appalachian rootedness and language still brood over a gathering family of writers who come each year, each spinning writer's thoughts--at meals, on front porches, in classrooms, on solitary walks--in the same way that I will be in such a place, among such hills and history, ghosts and spirits.

For many of my unmet companions and future friends there, the week at Hindman will be an annual pilgrimage. I have the sense that the place serves as a spiritual retreat center for a few of Kentucky's and the southern Appalachian's prominent writers and poets--a place to which they return to tap into the energy of group mind--there, apart from obligations, away from cell phones, and out of the presence of the sorts of folk who don't understand the writing temperament. Upon entering the settlement school boundaries, they are on familiar terrain, linked to known faces and shared histories--a kind of family reunion, bound not by blood but by the bonds of place.

For me, both a novice camper and a novice writer, I will be a lost and reticent outsider for an hour, or a day. And by the time I've made connections to the place, the pace and the people, and know who I am away from my desk at home, it will be Friday afternoon, and time to follow the breadcrumbs back toward Goose Creek.

So much will happen between the time I first step out of my car onto an unknown landscape and get back in it, filled to the bursting point with faces, memories, voices and inspiration. I have no doubt that, in ways I cannot yet anticipate, the week will seem like both a day and a month. I will thereafter never be quite the same, and in this there is a kind of wonderful dread to the prospect of going and to coming home.

While there hasn't been much in the way of official communication about the program or the school, I could have done more to educate myself about both. Had I been aware of it, I would have ordered and read Crossing Troublesome--a commemorative of Hindman's 100 year anniversary and an anthology of work arising from the authors and events from the first 25 years of the Writers Workshop there. It will be wonderful to have the opportunity to be a part of such a rich tradition, and who knows: maybe I'll become one of those folk who goes back time and again to this unknown place I can now only imagine.