Returning writers anticipate ‘open doors’ at Tremont

Crystal Wilkinson has always known she was a writer. But it wasn’t until well into adulthood that she realized she could make a living at it.

“I was always writing,” she said, “and at some point I remember saying to myself, ‘Well, the literal definition of being published is ‘to be made public.’ So what does that mean?’”

The question sent Wilkinson on a journey that has led her to a successful career as a writer of poetry, fiction, and memoir. A former Kentucky poet laureate, Wilkinson published her culinary memoir Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts in 2024 and joined the faculty of the third annual Tremont Writers Conference in 2025. This year, she’ll once again mentor nonfiction writers when the conference returns to the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont October 21–25, co-organized by Smokies Life.

“There are lots of worthwhile writers’ conferences out there, and no doubt each one has something to offer,” said Jeremy Lloyd, Tremont’s manager of field and college programs and co-organizer of the conference. “What sets ours apart is the intimacy of the experience. We’re not very big, so it’s impossible to ever feel lost in the crowd. Only seven or so writers are in each cohort, plus the writing leader. And open mic night gives everyone in the conference the chance to hear everyone else’s work, regardless of writing genre.”

The term “conference” can sound “a little stuffy,” Lloyd said. But that’s not Tremont. Participants spend their first night gathered around a campfire. An old whiskey barrel serves as a podium for readings. Participants and faculty eat their meals together in a cafeteria-style dining room, the wilderness of the Great Smoky Mountains right outside the door—all making for “a pretty soulful combination.”

Ron Rash, Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University and author of 20 books of poetry and fiction, will serve as guest writer for the 2026 conference. Award-winning Cherokee novelist Kelli Jo Ford will lead the fiction cohort, and Wilkinson will lead the non-fiction cohort. Linda Parsons, a celebrated playwright and Knoxville’s current poet laureate, attended the 2024 conference as a member of the poetry cohort—and this year she will lead it.

“We’re living in a lot of chaos right now,” Parsons said, “so I feel that a conference like Tremont is a way to breathe in a whole different way, to breathe in this bracing, fresh air that you have in the mountains, that’s clean and pure, and to take that into ourselves and to refresh and renew in a way that I’m sure everyone needs, desperately.”

Tremont is a place where the cares of the present can be eclipsed by the beauty of nature and the richness of the past, the palpable feeling that “we’re surrounded by other lives and other generations and other struggles and strivings and sorrows and joys,” Parsons said. Then there’s the camaraderie and buzz of energy that comes from community with other writers. Participants spend the conference week living together within the national park, sleeping in the dormitories on Tremont’s campus. That experience was “very interesting and very connecting,” Parsons said, imparting a feeling of unity.

For Wilkinson, the conference offered a unique mix of fast-paced intensity and reflective slowness—coupled with a natural beauty that enticed her back for 2026.

“Being able to walk out every morning and stand on top of that hill at Tremont, up where we had breakfast and had our courses, and looking out, reminded me of my childhood and reminded me of the meadows and valleys and trees that know me,” she said.

That childhood took place on her grandparents’ farm in rural Kentucky, where Wilkinson developed a love of the natural world and a comfort with expressing herself through the written word. But when it came to her career, Wilkinson said, “I never had lofty goals. I think I had practical goals.”

Much of her work explores the stories of Black people in Appalachia, a culture that was Wilkinson’s whole world growing up but that she rarely saw represented in books or movies. She became “highly interested” in making those stories public and sought opportunities to read her poems aloud—a painful exercise for someone as shy as she was—and then began to pursue her next goal: getting a piece published “in a magazine that I’ve heard of.” Wilkinson recast many of the rejections she received as “love notes,” responses from editors who declined to publish her piece but offered complimentary feedback on a character or plotline.

“There was something for me that felt as if I was communicating with a larger world, even if it was one editor at a time, without being published,” she said.

Both as a teacher at the University of Kentucky and a cohort leader at Tremont, she seeks to instill that kind of attitude in her students: be persistent, write from the heart, cultivate connection.

“Writing for me is not just a profession,” she said. “It’s a way of communicating, and this idea of shaping my own experience into something artful that can lead to some greater level of understanding. Shaping it in a way that the reader has some understanding not just of me or my characters, but of themselves.”

Perhaps the best example of this is her newest title, the 2024 culinary memoir Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts. The book weaves together stories of food and family spanning five generations of Black country cooks. It’s about specific recipes, memories, and traditions—but, at a higher level, about the human desire for grounding and identity. In one chapter, Wilkinson writes about the love for blackberries she shared with her mother, and how later in life she realized her affinity for the fruit was mostly about its ability to transport her back to her childhood on Indian Creek, “where me, my cousins, Mama and her siblings, Granny and Grandaddy, and all those who came before would don boots, long sleeves, pants, rags soaked in coal oil in the sweltering heat of summer to stave off the stinging bite of chiggers while we picked wild blackberries that grew abundantly on our land.”

They’re specific details, unique to Wilkinson’s memory, but with a ubiquitous yearning underneath. Parsons shares that approach.

“I always feel that through the specific comes the universal,” Parsons said, “and that’s what I try to do. I may be grounded, say at the beginning of the poem, in a particular place, but then I want it to lift off from that place or that experience into a more human, universal observation or experience.”

An eighth-generation Tennessean, Parsons has been writing seriously since the early ’80s, creating poems and plays while also serving as an editor at the University of Tennessee for 30 years until her retirement in 2018. Her work explores the complexities of place, family, and the natural world.

“It’s very much my identity,” she said. “It’s how I both give to the world and see the world.”

Her garden is her most frequent source of inspiration. It’s a place of light and darkness, competition and cooperation: themes that are simultaneously ancient and contemporary, grounding her poetry in place while also allowing it to stretch toward the core of human experience.

“Resurrection, life, death—everything happens there,” she said. “Over the last 20 years or so, I’ve been using the garden very heavily in my work. I always say, I feed it, and it feeds me.”

She found similar inspiration while attending the 2024 conference. Being at Tremont “opened a door for me that surprised the heck out of me,” she said, allowing her to put herself in the “head and the eyes and the heart of a ranger” as she wrote. That perspective culminated in the creation of a poem, titled, “Beyond,” that led the fall 2025 cover feature for Smokies Life Journal.

“The back of beyond, people say/ of the Great Smokies, but there’s no distance/ or depth hereabouts, only forever and amen,” she wrote. “It’s not mine, even though my boots mark/ its shadowy trails, the canopy beyond godhead. . . . I see beyond what cannot be/ timbered or counted for lost, what cannot top/ the pockets of earthly greed.”

“I’m still amazed by that poem,” Parsons said. “It was like it was in there living already, and it just needed to come out and greet the world.”

The 2026 Tremont Writers Conference, jointly produced by Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont and Smokies Life, will take place October 21–25 in Townsend, Tennessee, on the Tremont campus within Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Applications will be accepted through May 15. Visit writers.gsmit.org for more information.